DURING the first oil crisis in 1973, Saudi oil minister Ahmed Zaki Yamani famously (and possibly apocryphally) said that 鈥渢he Stone Age didn鈥檛 end because we ran out of stones鈥�. His point was that the oil age might come to a close not through resource depletion, but because a superior technology would supersede it 鈥� something he and his fellow petrostate officials were keen to head off.
They succeeded, and the oil age is still pumping strong. But in laboratories and start-ups across the world, the seeds of what could grow into a post-oil future are being sown. The identity of the superior technology may surprise you: wood (see 鈥�Our wooden future: making cars, skyscrapers and even lasers from wood鈥�).
Essentially everything that oil can do, wood can too. Handled smartly, it can be used as a biofuel and as an alternative to petrochemicals. It can also be processed into high-performance materials that are already replacing steel and concrete in buildings, and may do the same in planes and cars.
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In other words, wood could solve some of our biggest problems, from carbon emissions to plastic pollution. Of course, moving from the oil age to a wood age won鈥檛 be straightforward. There are unresolved issues about the economics and the supply of wood. The entrenched infrastructure and political power of the fossil fuel industry is another huge obstacle.
But we already know that we need 鈥渇ar-reaching and unprecedented changes in all aspects of society鈥� to avert climate disaster, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. That means radically rethinking how we obtain energy, move ourselves around, build cities and use land. Wood has plausible answers for all of these.
