Consciousness of Sheep
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When I was young, I remember being told about the Cutty Sark, a now preserved Victorian tea clipper. It was a story bound up in an empire that was coming to an end as I was growing up. And, less obviously, it was a story about the limits of renewable energy in a world that was rapidly turning to fossil fuels.
Tea was initially the preserve of the wealthy. Imported from China in the seventeenth century, demand for this slightly bitter leaf grew rapidly alongside the sugar that provided the additional calories behind the European Enlightenment. For centuries before that, Europeans had lived in a permanent state of mild inebriation resulting from the consumption of small beer (in the north) and mild wine (in the south) as the only alternative to bacteria and virus infected stream and river water. Boiling water for tea (and coffee) overcame the toxins without the attendant alcohol, allowing consumers to hydrate without getting drunk.
It didn’t take long for tea drinking to filter down the class hierarchy. So that, by the nineteenth century, tea had become the staple drink of the British. And since the wealthy needed some means of maintaining their status, they chose to emphasise their importance by consuming the first new tea to be imported into London.
In its way, this was a mania on a par with the Dutch fashion for tulip bulbs 200 years earlier. Demand for fresh tea was so great that the tea races began as shipping lines competed to race the 16,000 miles through the Strait of Malacca, across the Indian Ocean, around the Cape of Good Hope, along the West Coast of Africa and across the Bay of Biscay, along the English Channel to London. The route taking some 100 days, beginning in late May and ending in early September.
On the back of the mania, tea clippers like the Cutty Sark took renewable energy past previous engineering limits. Their long, thin hulls, coated in a copper-zinc alloy, were designed to eliminate drag even as their 32,000 square feet of sail on 150-foot masts and 11 miles of rigging was designed to fully harness every last breath of wind to propel them at average speeds of 17 knots (20mph) and more (in 1854, the Sovereign of the Seas recorded a burst at 22 knots, but it was average speed that mattered in the tea races).
While the tea mania continued into the late nineteenth century, the era of the tea clippers peaked in the 1860s. The Suez Canal opened in 1869, dramatically shortening the route, but negating the engineering advantages of the clippers because of the poor wind and gyre conditions in the Red Sea and the Mediterranean. The tea trade was quickly taken over by coal-powered steam ships while the clippers were forced to earn their keep on the more dangerous route around Cape Horn to ferry wool from Australia and New Zealand.
The UK is still the biggest tea importer in Europe, importing some 108,000 tons in 2025. But just two percent of this comes from China, the majority now grown in Kenya… and none of it transported with renewable energy. Indeed, Kenya has only been able to emerge as a major tea producer thanks to the advent of artificial (fossil fuel-based) fertilisers – larger estates using 250 to 400kg per hectare of nitrogen, while smaller farmers use 75-100kg per hectare annually. In addition, cultivation, tillage and harvesting consumes 145 litres of diesel for every kilogram of tea produced. Add to that the bunker fuel consumed on the 14,200-mile voyage from Mombasa to the London Gateway, and you get a picture of a trade which is entirely dependent upon fossil fuels (and one which allows the British to hide most of the excessive carbon footprint of their tea habit).
We – tea consumers – only witness the final stage in making a cup of tea. Boiling a kettle, most of us will drop a teabag into a cup and cover it with boiling water. Leaving it to stew for a few minutes, we might then add milk and sugar or – God help you – a slice of lemon, before sitting down to drink it. We think nothing of the fossil fuel-enabled supply chain which allowed farmers in Kenya to plant tea safe (thanks to an intricate futures market) in the knowledge that there will be a buyer come harvest time. That buyer, in turn, will have simply assumed the presence of a fuelled and crewed container ship onto which to load the tea, even as the shipping line anticipates a functioning container port in London to unload the cargo. After which, the tea will be collected by a wholesaler who will blend it to produce one or other of the branded tea products sourced by the supermarkets where you and I will purchase it.
That is just the tea leaves, of course. Similarly complex supply chains exist for the sugar, the milk, the clean water and the cup we drink it out of. All of it highly dependent upon fossil fuels at every stage. Indeed, even the luxury of using “green” electricity to boil the kettle on a windy day is only really possible due to a national grid backed up by nuclear baseload and gas-fired load balancing… without which there would be no boiled kettles at all on days without wind and sunlight.
And in one last twist to the story, unlike in the 1860s when tea made up the entire cargo of a ship like the Cutty Sark, today cargoes are loaded onto enormous ships carrying multiple different cargoes… a practice that makes shipping profitable at an end price that consumers can still afford, but at the cost of even greater complexity and thus vulnerability, since any interruption of the flow of any goods can disrupt the entire supply chain.
So, what, you might ask, would disrupt the supply chain? A labour dispute or the imposition of excessive tariffs can have some impact, as can the imposition of sanctions. But not on the scale of something as imbecilic as imposing two years of lockdowns across the global economy… the disruptions from which were still impacting us when the Trump administration chose to do something far more cretinous – embarking on a war of choice which everyone else could see would result in the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, where 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas, along with a third of the world’s artificial fertiliser and helium transits.
So what? You might say. My oil and gas comes from Norway… and we can always turn to organic agriculture. In any case, just last week the entire of the UK was being run on renewable energy. Indeed, surely an oil and gas crisis should be the catalyst for ending our fossil fuel use entirely.
Ah, if only it were that simple. But as the war drags on, and as the infrastructure of the Gulf States is degraded, so the absolute supply of the oil and gas that is essential to the global economy falls and shortages appear. Moreover, the cost of the oil and gas that remains rises beyond the point at which consumption can continue. And that breaks supply chains just as easily as a series of lockdowns. Ships stop sailing and aeroplanes stop flying. Refineries wind down as the supply of oil dries up. Less diesel is available, causing agricultural and extractive machinery to fall idle. Even the trucks that ferry goods – including essential food and fuel – are laid up as fuel becomes too expensive.
And what of your ‘net zero’ transition? Well, the UK no longer produces the steel or enough of the concrete even to construct the foundations for wind turbines. And the steel towers themselves have to be made in China, using coal and iron ore shipped from Australia… a country which is already running out of fuel. And as the ships stop sailing, China is unlikely to want to make steel for export. And even if it did, there may no longer be enough ships to bring the wind turbine towers to these islands. And we haven’t talked about the electronics yet. Copper supply alone was already struggling with the fallout from the lockdowns. And in recent months the cost of diesel has been too high to operate the massive South American open cast mines. At the same time, China is limiting the supply of rare earth metals to the USA and its western allies precisely because of the USA’s tendency to start wars. Importing and deploying wind turbines was costly enough before the attack on Iran began – despite claims that wind is free, the turbines are anything but. And the latest strike price of £90.91 per MWh for UK offshore wind (which is likely far too low now) means that even if the UK could somehow wean itself off gas generation, energy bills would remain at or around current prices at best.
Not that the political right fantasy of new drilling in the mendaciously named ‘North Sea’ (they are actually talking about the UK continental shelf, which includes the Irish Sea, the Western Approaches and the Northeast Atlantic) will fare any better. As with the turbine towers, the steel required for new rigs and drill pipes will have to be made in China. And it should go without saying that the damaged Gulf states – which are currently awash with US dollars – are going to have first pick on those pipes for rebuilding their own (far more strategically important) oil and gas infrastructure.
The UK region of the North Sea itself has no more large deposits to be drilled (although enhanced oil recovery techniques may keep the remaining deposits flowing for a while. What the political right are actually talking about are deposits like Cambo and Rosebank way off in the Northeast Atlantic where weather and sea conditions make drilling near impossible, even assuming the infrastructure and equipment could be made available (it won’t be). It is only at times when the global oil price threatens to rise toward $200-per-barrel that anyone gets interested in these fields. But as we have seen time and again, no economy can survive oil prices above $80-per-barrel for any length of time. And the inevitable depression that follows such oil spikes destroys so much demand that prices quickly fall back far below the price needed for any serious corporation to consider the multi-billion dollar, multi decade investment that would be required.
For now, you can still make your cup of tea. And if the attacks on Iran were to end immediately, you might continue to do so. But those long and complex supply chains that keep tea from Kenya (and a little bit from China) appearing in your local supermarket are already creaking. And if the war drags on for months, not only is the tea going to disappear from the shelves (along with much else besides) but the electricity that you have been taking for granted is going to go away for long periods too. By then, however, you will have a lot more to worry about than not being able to enjoy your morning cuppa.
As you made it to the end…
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