Xerosphere

By Bill McKibben, posted Sep 7, 2010:

An activist caravan to bring one of Jimmy Carter’s solar panels back to the White House symbolizes not only the time the U.S. has lost in developing new energy technologies – but also the urgent need for taking action on climate.

As I write this piece, we’re in the midst of a (biodiesel) road trip to Washington, D.C., towing behind us an unwieldy piece of history: a solar panel off the roof of the Carter White House. It’s decades old, though it still makes hot water just fine. In a sense, we’re traveling backward—which in another sense is what I think we’re going to have to do for a while in the U.S. climate movement.

The bad news everyone knows. The strongest attempt ever to pass climate legislation through the U.S. Congress came up short earlier this summer. The inside-the-Beltway green groups took what seemed to be the route of least resistance: a very tame piece of climate legislation larded with special prizes for special interests. They worked it as hard as it could have been worked—and in the end it didn’t even come close. The fossil fuel industry and their allies in D.C. barely had to break a sweat shooting it down.

So—barring some unforeseen development—we’re not going to see significant action on the federal level about climate for at least the next two years.

The solar panels need to be up on the roof, as visible as the White House garden.

And that means we’re far less likely to see significant international action on climate, since it’s hard for other governments to muster the political will to make tough choices when the U.S. is punting.

So what do we do with those two years? I think we use them to build a movement, which explains the solar panel we’re hauling south from Maine.

The story is painful even to consider. This panel went up on the White House roof in 1979, with then-president Jimmy Carter (in a wide tie, and with a bushy haircut) promising that it would still be there in the year 2000, producing hot water from the sun for whoever was then president. In fact, it didn’t make it through the next decade—it came down in the Reagan years, a symbol of our decision to turn away from the idea of limits and veer sharply down the path we’ve trod ever since.

But not everyone went along. Frugal folks at Unity College in Maine salvaged the panels, and put them up on the cafeteria, where they continued to produce hot water for the next three decades. Meanwhile, around the world other nations took the technology and went to work. Germany and Japan took over the lead in photovoltaic panels, but solar thermal technology like this became the special province of the Chinese.

I sat not long ago with Huang Ming, China’s leading solar entrepreneur, in his space-age Sun Moon Mansion in Shandong Province looking over the stats: his HiMin Solar Energy Group has put up 60 million such systems across China—he estimated that when 250 million Chinese take a shower, the hot water is coming off their roofs. In a biting symbol of that passed torch, he keeps one of the Carter panels in his private museum.

There’s no question what we should have spent the last few decades doing. But there’s no point now in crying about why we didn’t: the only job is to try to get back in the game, to start catching up.

Some of that means spending the money so that we can make the next technological discoveries. Many, including the Breakthrough Institute and Bill Gates, are calling for big increases in R and D funding, which might help us somehow claw our way back toward the front of the parade.

But catching up also means making use of the technology we already have, in ways both practical and symbolic.

President Obama is up against tough odds in Congress. But they can’t filibuster his roof.

We’re headed for the White House with this old panel, and with a promise from the U.S. company Sungevity that it will supply all the brand-new panels the president could ever want—as long as he puts them up on his roof where everyone can see them. George W. Bush, amazingly enough, actually put some solar back in the White House grounds—on the roof of a maintenance shed, and on, who knew, the Presidental Spa and Cabana. But since he didn’t tell anyone, they didn’t do much good. We want them up there on the roof, as visible as the White House garden, which helped boost seed sales 30 percent across the nation the year Michelle planted it.

So far, we haven’t heard a word from the White House about whether they’ll accept the gift and make the promise or not—which, frankly, surprises me. I can’t think of a clearer win for the president, a better reminder to the legions of young people who worked on his campaign that he is still focused on the future. He owes environmentalists more than he’s given them—by all accounts he decided not to push for the Senate legislation. He’s up against tough odds in Congress, of course, given the obstructionist GOP. But they can’t filibuster his roof.

What’s especially poignant is that we have gotten promises from other, much less likely, world leaders—Mohammed Nasheed, for instance, president of the entirely Muslim and quite poor Maldive Islands, the low-lying Indian Ocean nation that faces inundation from rising seas.

The point of the solar panels is to help build the movement that we allowed to wither away.

He took the Sungevity offer, and he’ll be putting solar panels on his roof on October 10 (10-10-10), the same day that thousands of groups around the world will be participating in a massive Global Work Party, putting up wind turbines and laying out bike paths. The same day we want Barack Obama, sleeves rolled up, out on his roof with a wrench.

The point of all these panels, of course, is not that we’re going to solve climate change one roof at a time. (Obama is doing lots of good practical things already—his “greening the government” effort is retrofitting federal buildings across the country with insulation, for instance). The point is that they help build the movement that we allowed to wither away.

Environmentalists lost sight of just how big a movement that would need to be. Too many groups convinced themselves that they could slide some legislation through Congress, make deals with industry, get things going without a fight. It was worth a try, but it didn’t work—the fossil fuel industry, the most profitable enterprise known to man, beat us. And they will beat us again and again until there’s a real, broad-based, popular, noisy movement underway in this country, a movement that can provide a currency (bodies, passion) equal to the currency the billionaire Koch Brothers can pony up to defeat climate legislation.

Some of that movement will go on at the local level, as we transform cities and towns and show what can be done. Some will be done on college campuses like Unity College, or Middlebury where I teach, which are showing the way forward. Some of it will be done in jails—I’d be very surprised if civil disobedience doesn’t become a bigger part of this battle in the years ahead, if only because it’s the tool we use to show our society how urgent, morally and practically, this crisis really is.

But some of it must be done symbolically. And there’s no more symbolic piece of real estate on this continent than the White House. Let’s hope that on the 10th of October it, at least, is transformed. It’s been a long, hot summer, in the capitol as in much of the northern hemisphere. Let’s make sure that next year that heat is put to some purpose—heating the Obamas’ bathtub, and helping power up a movement.

Photo credit: Mark Tardif - The Carter-era solar panel in Maine, being readied for the trip back to the White House.

Originally published at Yale Environment 360

By Rob Hopkins, posted Sep 7, 2010:

Last weekend I was at Embercombe, about 20 minutes drive from Totnes, for the West Country Storytelling Festival. Embercombe is a fascinating evolving project, describing itself as “a charity and social enterprise established to champion a way of living that celebrates the opportunities inherent in this challenging time and that inspires people to energetically contribute towards the emergence of a socially just, environmentally sustainable and spiritually fulfilling human presence on earth”. It is also a stunning place, a mix of woodlands and fields. Food production is becoming a key part of its work, and it now has a wonderful vegetable garden, orchards, field scale veg and, of particular interest to me, some small scale cereals production. The day I was there, they were threshing (or attempting to thresh) some of what they had grown, and I thought I would share some of the conversations that took place by the threshing machine. So, this year, the land team at Embercombe experimented with growing cereals, planting blocks of oats, rye, wheat and spelt. The previous year they had grown a traditional variety of wheat, which was a long-strawed type, but in the wet and windy summer we had much of it fell over (‘lodged’). This year’s wheat variety was a shorter stemmed one, and, like all the other grains grown, grew well. The field was rotavated with a tractor, and then the seeds were hand-broadcast. A few months later, they were harvested by hand, using scythes, and stacked up, waiting for the thresher.

The threshing machine that came is one of only a handful of such machines left in operation. Powered from a tractor, it is a beautiful piece of equipment, lovingly maintained by enthusiasts, and fascinating to observe in operation. The harvested crop is fed into the top of the machine, which separates the grain from the chaff, and both of those from the straw. Only the wheat and the spelt were going through the thresher, the oats and the rye were going to be dealt with differently.

Oats are tricky old things. When we buy porridge oats we think of them as an unprocessed, natural product, but actually to get from what you harvest in the field to something you can make porridge from takes a few different processes, dehusking, steaming, rolling… as friends in West Cork found out when they had harvested the West Cork CSA oats they had organised. Without access to machines that can get the husk off them, oats are really only usable as animal feed. At Embercombe, however, they are planning to try an imaginative alternative, rather than feeding their prcious crop to the chickens, they are going to experiment with making oat milk from them (currently bought from wholefood shops in tetrapacks…). I’ll be fascinated to hear how that goes….

I don’t remember the plans for the rye, but what was focusing minds when I was there was the difference between wheat and spelt. The wheat was going through the machine fine, coming out as clean grains, but the thresher was unable to take the husks off the spelt (see left for the picture, the top hand is the wheat, the bottom hand is the spelt). The guys working the machine adjusted the settings, tried various things, but every time the spelt emerged with its husks on.

Spelt is a fascinating crop. In this part of the UK, and as we head on down into Cornwall, less wheat is grown, as the soils become less and less suitable for the high gluten varieties that large bakeries favour. Spelt, however, grows well down here, and is a grain that can be eaten by people with an intolerance for gluten. Not much use though if no-one can get the husks off!

There is something fascinating to me about experiments such as those being conducted at Embercombe. The now seminal Hirsch Report argued that it would take at least 10 years, ideally 20, ahead of peak oil in order to be ready for it, to have successfully managed a ‘crash course’ of breaking our oil addiction. In terms of local food, it seems to me that the process of dismantling the infrastructure that local food production needs has been underway for some time. As I often say in talks, it was easy to turn Totnes’s last working flour mill (see right) into a Tourist Information Office, much harder to turn a Tourist Information Office back into a working mill again.

The conversations taking place as different grains spilled from the thresher were about rediscovering something just about still within reach, but only just. Even if you get the husks off, how do you store grain so it doesn’t go musty, how do you keep the rats away from it, how do you mill it… a whole chain of knowledge, sophisticated knowledge acquired over thousands of years, rendered obsolete by cheap energy and the “biggering and biggering” of agriculture. One of the nuggets I gleaned was that if you harvest wheat and just pile the crop in a heap, and it gets rained on, it is ruined. If you ’stook’ it, make it into bundles which stand up, you can leave them out in the rain and they are fine. At Embercombe they couldn’t find anyone who knew how to do that…

We often use the term ‘The Great Reskilling’. As I stood by the thresher at Embercombe, I realised that as well as the passing on of skills, we also need “The Great Practicing”, trying things out. We can learn a certain amount from books and from courses, but the best way to learn, the way that has you thinking around problems and solving them on the hoof, is by having a go. Even the small patches of grain that had been grown had been hugely instructive. It also gives you a sense of the infrastructure you need to create, the infrastructure that a local food economy needs. As Aldo Leopold put it, “who but a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering”. I found it very inspiring, in the sunshine, listening to whirring and clacking of the thresher, to watch some dedicated people who have picked up some of those seemingly useless parts and are trying to work out how to make them work again.

Originally published at Transition Culture

By Tom Whipple, posted Sep 1, 2010:

Headlines were made recently when it was announced that in July China's GDP surpassed that of Japan to become the world's second largest economy. This was immediately followed by a passel of stories speculating on how long it would take China's domestic output to surpass that of the U.S. and thus become the world's largest and by inference most influential economy. The mean estimate of the prognosticators seems to be about 20 years so that by 2030 China could be #1. This estimate is derived, of course, by assuming that China's economy will continue to grow at circa 10 percent each year and that the U.S. in turn will suffer from decades of stagnation.

If only it were so simple.   There is no question that China has had 40 good years. Once the Chinese got over celebrating their revolution, the cult of the personality (Mao worship), and the more onerous features of Marxism-Maoism (such as shooting capitalists), they came up with a political-economic system, which while not democratic, served well to harness the country's strengths and set it on the way to rapid economic growth. Blessed with a good endowment of natural resources, a long tradition of selecting and educating the best and the brightest for leadership, a reasonably homogeneous population, and the developed world as an example of where they would like to go, China has assembled a mixture of capitalism and socialism that undeniably yielded decades of impressive economic growth.   By moving tens of millions of peasant farmers into industrial enterprises where they worked long hours, under harsh discipline, for poor wages, China soon became the world's preeminent factory producing an inordinate share of the globe's manufactured goods. The question of the day is "How much longer can this last?" Rapid economic growth requires every increasing quantities of fossil fuels and other minerals. After forty years of hyper-exploitation of its domestic mineral deposits, China is now in a position where it must import half of its daily oil demand and is starting to import coal and other minerals as domestic sources become thinner and more difficult to produce.   The key question in all this is how much longer China's economic miracle can continue before the realities of finite mineral resources force a slowdown? Another five years of 10 percent annual economic growth will result in Beijing increasing its oil consumption by another 2.5-3 million barrels per day. This alone would likely mop up much of the world's spare capacity to produce oil and result in very large price increases. When China's ever growing demand is added to that of India, Brazil and the oil exporting states, the likelihood that we will see a substantial increase in oil prices within the next five years becomes very high.   Although China still has large reserves of coal, they have now begun importing which suggests they are having trouble producing it fast enough from deeper, aging mines to keep up with demand. Some believe that Beijing will only be able to keep increasing production for another 15 or 20 years before peak coal production is reached.   Recent events suggest that China may suffer disproportionally from the effects of global warming. This year the country was ravished by droughts, dust storms, and floods as increasing global temperatures worked their way on the weather patterns affecting China. If these changed patterns prove to be permanent feature of China's weather, droughts, floods, tropical storms, falling water tables and the melting of the Himalayan glaciers may force China into a survival mode where the struggle for food and water will trump industrial growth.   Although climate change, decreasing exports, and depleting mineral resources will all eventually impact China's ability to grow economically, the availability and affordability of oil is still likely to impact first. Despite the current oil glut, all indicators suggest that global oil supplies are likely to start running short in the next three to five years. Although China Incorporated may be in better shape to weather the initial stages of a price spike than the average American consumer, it is doubtful if China can grow its economy at 10 percent annually without increasing supplies of oil.   Beijing clearly recognizes all this and is moving to build a more efficient, less energy-intensive economy that can grow with less fossil fuel. Moreover, China's leaders are catching onto the notion that the costs of ignoring air and water pollution may eventually be prohibitive. The precept that China can keep growing its emissions until they reach the per capita level of the industrial nations may eventually fall as climate aberrations start to take an unacceptable toll on economic growth.   There are many unknowns and variables in all this, but it is a good bet that China's miracle of 10 percent annual economic growth has a half-life far shorter than many suspect.   Originally published August 31, 2010 at Falls Church News-Press

By Sandra Postel, posted Aug 30, 2010:

[Excerpt] It's getting harder and harder to blame Mother Nature for the disasters that befall humanity. While hurricanes, floods, droughts and storm surges are natural events, to be sure, the degree of disaster that unfolds when such events strike is often now heavily influenced by human activities.

When Hurricane Katrina smacked the Gulf Coast in August 2005, the protection from powerful storm surges provided by coastal wetlands and barrier islands had gradually been whittled away. Since the 1930s, Louisiana had lost 1.2 million acres of coastal wetlands. More than two dozen dams and thousands of miles of levees on the Mississippi River had trapped sediment that otherwise would have replenished them. At the same time, wetlands were drained and filled to enable oil and commercial development in the Gulf region. Even as the Army Corps of Engineers failed to adequately maintain levees to keep the floodwaters at bay, this loss of natural protection worsened the catastrophe.   Read full article   Originally posted August 20, 2010 at National Geographic as part of their Freshwater Initiative.

By Asher, posted Aug 28, 2010:

There's a lot to digest in Michael Lewis' The Big Short: Inside the Doomsday Machine but I was particularly struck by a passage at the very end of the book, which I think aptly describes one of the major obstacles to properly understanding the costs and consequences of our globalized, industrial way of life — distance.

The monster was exploding. Yet on the streets of Manhattan there was no sign anything important had just happened. The force that would affect all of their lives was hidden from their view. That was the problem with money. What people did with it had consequences but they were so remote from the original action that the mind never connected the one with the other. The teaser rate loans you make to people who will never be able to repay them will go bad not immediately but in two years when their interest rates rise. The various bonds you make from those loans will go bad not as the loans go bad but months later, after a lot of tedious foreclosures and bankruptcies and forced sales. The various CDOs you make from the bonds will go bad not right then but after some trustee sorts out whether there will ever be enough cash to pay them off, whereupon the end owner of the CDO receives a little note: "Dear Sir, We regret to inform you that your bond no longer exists." But the biggest lag of all was right here, on the streets. How long would it take before the people walking back and forth in front of St. Patrick's Cathedral figured out what had just happened to them. The Veil

This veil of time and distance is not just true for the consequences of the subprime mortgage scam, of course. It's true for many of the outcomes of our consumer-driven, globalized, and industrial way of life (those of us in North America, in particular). The obvious ones are climate change and the food system.

The specific qualities of the greenhouse effect make it incredibly hard to feel the causal links. The climate impacts of turning on the dryer, for example, couldn't be further removed from the place and moment you turn that dial; the four pounds or so of carbon dioxide produced are invisible and likely to spew from some coal stack hundreds of miles away, where they eventually dissipate to mix in with billions of other pounds of CO2 throughout the atmosphere for a period of 50-100 years.

Now if the result of turning that dial was, instead, to immediately spread an inch of sea water across the floor of the laundry room or raise the temperature in the room a degree or two, you probably wouldn't turn it on quite so often. But that's just the nature of fossil fuel addiction... The road trips my grandmother used to take to Vegas in the 1950s are now raising sea levels in Bangladesh while the coal being burned in China today is going to make my grand kids' August weather very different than my own.

The industrial food system, of course, has been intentionally designed to leave consumers as disconnected from the source of their food as possible. It's a lot easier to chow down that fast food burger when you don't realize that it contains meat from hundreds of different cows, let alone have to butcher them all yourself! And if you saw the conditions in which those cows were raised, well, you'd literally lose your appetite.

Thankfully it's easier to lift the veil when it comes to where our food comes from. For one, a lot of powerful documentaries and books have come out in recent years that bring the reality of the industrial food system to light. (And just wait for the forthcoming CAFO book by Watershed Media. I've had the, er, honor to see some of the images included in the photo book... If a picture is worth a thousand words, these pictures are worth a million livestock lives.)

That's not to say it's easy to change where our food comes from. Not everyone has access to fresh produce or can afford organic food. But the veil can be lifted. (It doesn't hurt when efficiency-oriented industrial food systems break down like here and here enough for the media to notice.)

The Boomerang

The veil of time and distance makes it that much more challenging to change the behaviors that cause or reinforce the energy, economic, and environmental crises we face. But that's only part of the story. Another is how we react as the dues for our long, fossil fueled, industrial growth binge actually come due. Because the causal links are so complex and global, when these consequences do finally boomerang and hit us smack in the ass a lot of people won't understand how and why they happened. One result is that we're more likely to continue doing the things that got us in trouble in the first place, without ever connecting the dots. But there's also the psychological impacts that come from confusion and dissonance, which can lead to anger or a sense of victimization.

History is littered with horrific examples of when widespread fear and uncertainty are channeled into organized rage. I'll confess a deep concern about the near- and long-term results from the collision of four realities here in the US:

1. The confluence of incredibly complex, interrelated economic, energy, and environmental crises whose particular impacts are impossible to predict.
2. An American culture — politically divided and ethnically diverse, with a long history of xenophobia and racial tensions — that is ripe for conflict.
3. A political system so corrupted by moneyed special interests and inertia that, while still ostensibly "democratic," is viewed with suspicion and cynicism by Americans of all political persuasions.
4. A fourth estate that is in the process of massive contraction and is, for the most part, utterly failing to provide the populace with the reasoned, fact-based analysis people need to make sound decisions.

And so I worry about the kind of collective response we might see when the boomerangs really start hitting people.

Goldilocks

Richard Heinberg wrote a fantastic op-ed for Reuters entitled "Goldilocks and the Three Fuels" that explored the possibility of a "just right" price range for oil, natural gas, and coal.

By mid-2009 the oil price had settled within a Goldilocks range—not too high (so as to kill the economy and, with it, fuel demand), and not too low (so as to scare away investment in future energy projects and thus reduce supply). That just-right price band appeared to be between $60 and $80 a barrel. How long prices can stay in the Goldilocks range is anybody’s guess, but production declines in the world’s old super-giant oilfields continue to accelerate and exploration costs continue to mount, which means that the lower boundary of that just-right range will inevitably continue to migrate upward. Meanwhile the world economy remains frail, so that even $80 oil could strain the recovery. When discussing the increasing perils of the current oil supply-demand-price balancing act, some commentators opine that the world supply of oil has peaked; others say it is demand that has peaked. It is a distinction without a difference.

Ever since, I've wondered if there's such a thing as a Goldilocks moment for the kind large-scale, collective action we need to avert collapse. If the metaphor is that we're on a runaway train, heading speedily towards a brick wall at the end of the tracks, then is there a "just right" moment to slam on the brakes?

Like a real train, there's an incredible weight and inertia in the system. This train will not stop on a dime. It's going to take a lot of force and enough track to stop the train before it hits the wall.

While there's a growing number of people who sense that the wall is looming — even before they can physically see it — there are not nearly enough of us to put sufficient weight on the brakes to slow the train down, let alone stop it. The closer we get to the wall, the more of us will see what's coming, but at what point will there be a critical mass to really punch the brakes, and will there be enough track at that point to avoid the collision?

I don't have an answer to this question. I'm not sure anyone does. What I can say, however, is three things:

1. Whether from the wall or the brakes, a lot of us are going to get whiplash. There's no scenario I see to avoid some measure of hardship. But I'll take whiplash over broken bones. How about you?
2. I know we're on a train here, but if you haven't already, you might want to think about putting on a seat belt. The seat belt in this case is personal resilience and community resilience.
3. We increase our odds of stopping the train in time (and reducing casualties) if we help more and more people understand there's a wall up ahead.

One way or the other, it's going to be an interesting ride.

By Bill McKibben, posted Aug 26, 2010:

[Excerpt] On May 6, a little more than two weeks after the explosion of the Deepwater Horizon drilling rig, the first oil washed ashore. It was found on the beaches of the Chandeleur Islands off the coast of Louisiana -- one of America’s first wildlife refuges, established by Teddy Roosevelt in 1904 after a decade-long struggle with the plume trade, which was killing off our seabirds. We don’t normally think of hydrocarbons as possessing a strong sense of irony, but there you go.

In fact, the BP spill and its aftermath were a slap in the face of the environmental movement in so many ways. You would have thought the most visible ecological tragedy of our time might have led our government to take real action against our worst problems. Instead, the same week that the well was finally capped the Senate punted on doing anything -- anything -- about climate change.   So, for those of us on the green side of things, there’s never been a better moment to sit back and say: Are we doing something wrong? We seem not to be as good at this as our forebears, who turned the 1969 Santa Barbara oil spill and the Cuyahoga River into Earth Day 1 and the Clean Air Act, or even those ancient proto-greens who turned the fancy hat trade into the wildlife refuge system. Yale pollster Anthony Leiserowitz told The Washington Post that the difference between this summer and the awakenings after past disasters is as stark as “on versus off.” Why? Or, if you want to think more positively, what’s the recipe for doing better next time?...   Read full article   Originally published August 23, 2010 at onearth.org

By Jason Bradford, posted Aug 24, 2010:

I have been visiting A2R Farms outside of Corvallis Oregon all year. They are a former conventional grass seed farm transitioning to organic seed crops, primarily for local distribution. I watched as they planted the fields and as the crops grew--flax, chick peas, sunflowers and wheat. And as harvest season approached I looked over at the combines and asked my friend Clinton Lindsey, “Which one am I driving?”

So I was delighted to get a call the other morning. Over the hum of a motor Clint told me, “Hey Jason, I’m harvesting the field north of our office today if you want to visit.” Heck yeah! And I could bring the whole family. It was Saturday and we all would get a turn in the cab.

 

 

It is the middle of August and time to harvest wheat in the Willamette Valley of Oregon. Clint lets my 11 year old son Curtis steer a John Deere combine. Clint says newer equipment is faster, but more difficult to repair, so they stick with this model from the late 1980s.

 

Being aware of peak oil for several years now has given me time to consider what energy dense liquid fuels are extremely useful for. In an energy scarce world we will be resetting priorities. The question for the future is what do we need to do with energy rather than what do we want to do with energy.

In this post I will nominate my top pick. If I could wave a magic wand and reserve ample future supplies of petroleum (or some precious substitute such as a biofuel with high net energy) for just one use it would be the combine.

What it Does

The combine performs tasks that replace an enormous amount of labor in a reliable and timely fashion. It cuts the stalks of seed crops, threshes the heads to dislodge the seeds, and then separates the seeds from the straw and chaff. Without the combine (and a series of intermediate technologies), harvesting grains involves manually cutting stalks, bundling them, transporting the bundle to storage, threshing and winnowing.

The labor efficiency of the combine is extreme. Over the course of a long and somewhat boring 12 hour day in his air conditioned cab (made a little better by listening to audio books on an iPod), Clint can harvest about 25 acres of wheat. We visited while he was in a field with a hard red variety that yields about 2400 lbs per acre (soft white yields are 2-3 times higher). In one day, Clint and his machine will collect 60,000 lbs of hard red wheat, or 1000 bushels.

Each pound of wheat contains about 1500 food calories (i.e., kilo calories), and a person needs about 2500 calories per day. A year’s supply of calories for a person is in the neighborhood of 900,000, which in wheat units is 600 lbs. In simple terms, during a day of work Clint can supply the annual food needs of 100 people. Of course he and his dad Mike also spent days prepping and sowing the field, and there are hours planning, maintaining equipment, and marketing, etc., but in total the amount of time actually spent with machines on that 25 acres is probably only a week or so. And since Clint and his family manage to farm several hundred acres it all works out to about 100 people fed by one guy like Clint, which is typical for the US food system.

I propose that the main enabler of a demographic shift away from rural-agrarian populations to an urban-industrial one is the combine. The combine removes most labor from agriculture for the most critical crops: edible grains, legumes and oil seeds. Seeds are a highly portable, storable and versatile class of food, allowing civilizations to trade and buffer against shortages. Most calories now consumed derive directly or indirectly from seeds.

 

 

The percent agriculture population is plotted in relation to per capita energy use. Nations with abundant use of exosomatic energy tend to have less of their population involved in agricultural production, presumably either because they can afford to import much of their food or employ labor saving devices in food production. For example, only about 1% of the US labor force is involved in farming. Data comes from the Energy Information Administration (EIA) and the United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO). Original article containing figure is here.

 

The Hybrid Future

Looking at the above figure, it seems plausible that in the US we could do away with ¾ of our per capita energy and, if we allocate smartly, keep the combines running and continue to feed everybody with little extra labor (and assuming climate change doesn’t bite too sharply into yields).

I do have mixed feelings about how the historical shift into cities and away from farms has impacted our culture. On the one hand, surplus food has permitted our society to specialize greatly, developing technologies, arts and forms of entertainment that I truly enjoy. Material abundance may also have led to cultural openness and flexibility, or what may be called liberalism, as opposed to the rigidity, isolation and xenophobia common to many pre-industrial societies.

On the other hand, I am certainly no fan of the over-consumptive lifestyles and the disconnection from nature endemic to highly industrialized cultures. However, one possible future entails a larger agrarian population as industrialized countries lose access to abundant fossil fuels. For example, even if we manage to save fuel for the combines, more labor will still be needed for plenty of other tasks. While this is likely to be a painful process, what could emerge is greater ecological awareness—the understanding that our livelihoods are deeply connected and dependent upon natural processes. Such a path is described in some detail by David Holmgren in Future Scenarios.

If energy descent extends over the next few-several decades (as argued by John Michael Greer) our economy will have hybrid characteristics—leveraging the value of existing infrastructure and machinery as long as possible while learning how to adapt to natural rhythms. Keeping such a transition as benign as feasible requires food supply stability. Maintaining social cohesion gives the population time to adjust to the new normal. Combines, I would argue, are a fantastic tool for obtaining surplus food. We should keep them running during any potential phase of “scarcity industrialism.”

Energy Returned

Obviously, combines are entirely reliant on barrels and barrels of liquid fuel. Clint told me he uses about 50 gallons of fuel for every 8-9 hours harvesting wheat, which would cover about 17 acres. This means it takes around three gallons of diesel fuel per acre, just for the harvest. In standard energy terms three gallons of diesel contains 0.44 Giga Joules (GJ). For comparison, 2400 lbs of wheat contains just over 15 GJ of edible energy. Ignoring all the other energy needed to deliver the fuel to the farm, and get the crop to maturity, the harvest-only EROI is a highly profitable 34:1. (For a more thorough review of energy in the US food system see this post).

Liquid fuels are absolutely essential for industrial farming systems. I worry less about nitrogen fertilizer inputs, herbicides and pesticides, as these can be dramatically reduced using organic and agroecological methods. It is much more difficult to substantially decrease liquid fuel usage. Even with no-till methods, tractors make passes to sow seeds, and they make passes to harvest.

 

 

This is a picture of me scything grass between young orchard trees. I enjoy using the scythe and believe it is a valuable tool even on highly mechanized farms. I just wouldn’t want to rely on it to harvest food for dozens of families. If we ever need scythes again to cut down our grain crops then most families will be feeding themselves.

 

Unless you relish the idea of your descendants living a life akin to Little House on the Prairie, it may be prudent to cut back a bit on oil consumption today and extend the reserves of fossil fuels as long as possible. Time is second to oil on my list of most precious resources. A slowing down today, when we have so much excess, potentially buys a lot of time for tomorrow. I don’t know if we will use this time to develop liquid fuel substitutes for fossil fuels to run combines, or manufacture millions of scythes and train a whole generation to use them.

Originally published at The Oil Drum

By Richard Heinberg, posted Aug 23, 2010:

As America adjusts to the New Reality of tight credit, chronically less-affordable energy, high unemployment rates, rising levels of homelessness, and steeply declining tax revenues, new strategies will be needed to help swelling ranks of low-income people adjust and adapt. National policies designed to ease credit, lower mortgage rates, or provide basic financial assistance (including extended unemployment benefits) may help over the short term, but over the longer term many needs will be better met locally by largely volunteer-driven non-profit organizations, co-ops, and hybrid public-private agencies and programs.

One strategy worth exploring is the seeding of a loosely coordinated national network of locally-based Community Economic Laboratories (CELs).

The term “laboratory” is suggested because the sorts of efforts and enterprises that will best serve communities under rapidly evolving economic circumstances may not be apparent or even knowable at the outset—we will have to experiment. However, it is by no means essential or even important that the entities envisioned adopt this suggested title. Some communities may prefer slightly different names for political reasons: a Local Enterprise Laboratory, for example, might fare better in red states.

In any case, the mission of each CEL would be to increase personal and community resilience.

While for most citizens goods and services have traditionally been delivered by way of market relationships based on jobs and commercial interactions between individuals and for-profit businesses, even in good times some individuals occasionally (others chronically) require special assistance, which is usually provided by non-profit service agencies or government programs. In especially hard times—such as the nation has begun experiencing—large numbers of individuals and families lose jobs and incomes, and therefore access to the goods and services that the market economy formerly provided them. At the same time, tax-starved governments are hard pressed to step in to make services available to rapidly expanding rolls of unemployed. At such a time, it could be helpful to explore new and innovative ways of fostering self-sufficiency through the coordination of a variety of cooperative, non-profit, market-based, and government-led ventures that spring from, and are adapted to, unique local conditions.

The basic notion is simple: the CEL would be a local multi-function center that helps people impacted by hard times. It would do this by offering a variety of services, as well as opportunities for self-improvement, learning, enterprise incubation, and community involvement. Some possible examples:

• A food co-op
• A soup kitchen
• A commercial food-processing, food-preserving, and food-storage center available at low cost (or on labor-barter basis) to small-scale local growers
• A community garden with individual beds available for seasonal rental, as well as communal beds growing produce for the soup kitchen
• A health center offering free or inexpensive wellness classes in nutrition, cooking, and yoga
• A free (and/or barter) health clinic
• Counseling and mental health services
• A tool library
• A work center that connects people who have currently unused skills with needs in the community—work can be compensated monetarily or through barter
• A legal clinic
• A recycling/re-use center that turns waste into resources of various kinds—including compost and scrap—and into re-manufactured or re-usable products
• A credit union offering low-interest or even no-interest loans (on the model of the JAK bank in Sweden)
• A co-op incubator
• A local-currency headquarters and clearinghouse
• A local-transport enterprise incubator, possibly including car-share, ride-share, and bicycle co-ops as well as a public transit hub
• A shelter clearinghouse connecting available housing with people who need a roof—including rentals and opportunities for legal organized squatting in foreclosed properties, as well as various forms of space sharing
• A community education center offering free or low-cost classes in skills useful for getting by in the new economy—including gardening, health maintenance, making do with less, energy conservation, weather-stripping, etc.

While it is not essential that a CEL have a single physical location within the community, there would be an obvious advantage to its occupying an accessible, prominent place: Individuals and families who have recently become jobless or homeless may be disoriented, less mobile, and unable otherwise to access a variety of geographically scattered services and opportunity centers. Commercial space in the downtown areas of many cities is already abundantly available due to the recession; if a CEL were able to obtain use of an iconic vacant building formerly housing a bank or department store, such physical presence would lend architectural validity to the efforts of community members to come together in providing for their neighbors. Other possibilities include an abandoned indoor shopping mall or empty big-box store.

Like a shopping mall, the CEL would be most successful if “anchored” by two or three substantial enterprises—of which a food co-op and/or soup kitchen, community service organization, credit union, or transport co-op is likely to be one. Smaller spaces could be rented, or offered for in-kind contributions of labor or services, to non-profit organizations and nascent co-ops of various sorts.

The project as a whole would need to be spearheaded by a local non-profit organization, co-op, or service agency of some kind. Community Action Partnerships (CAPs) are ideally placed to do this, but other local organizations could partner or take the lead. Uniform national “branding” of CELs will be much less important than each community’s sense of ownership of its unique, successful co-laboratory. Nevertheless, a national network could help quickly disseminate best practices, success stories, challenges, and other relevant information.

Existing models or partial models should be identified as an initial step, followed by the fostering of one or more pilot projects.

Experiment!

By Sandra Postel, posted Aug 18, 2010:

[Excerpt] If there's going to be sufficient water to meet everyone's needs--and those of rivers and fish and birds and mussels, too--we're going to need to shrink our footprints and share Earth's finite water more equitably.

  By now, most of us probably turn off the tap while brushing our teeth. If we've lived through a drought maybe we've shaved a couple minutes off our showers, and even ripped out some thirsty turf grass and planted drought-tolerant shrubs.   What more can we do to conserve water?   As it turns out, quite a lot.   The stuff of life is just plain thirsty. Embedded in that hamburger is perhaps 630 gallons of water--most of it going to grow the corn to feed the cow. And that cotton T-shirt probably gulped some 760 gallons between field and factory. The mobility of our lives takes water, too--about 13 gallons of H2O for every gallon of gasoline at the pump.   Added all up, the average American lifestyle demands nearly 2,000 gallons a day--about twice the global average. If there's going to be sufficient water to meet everyone's needs--and those of rivers and fish and birds and mussels, too--we're going to need to shrink our footprints and share Earth's finite water more equitably...   Read full article and link to National Geographic water footprint calculating tool

By Richard Heinberg, posted Aug 18, 2010: Note: Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines will be released in paperback this month (September) by New Society Publishers.   In titling this book “Peak Everything,” I was suggesting that humanity has achieved an unsustainable pinnacle of population size and consumption rates, and that the road ahead will be mostly downhill—at least for the next few decades, until our species has learned to live within Earth’s resource limits. I argued that the industrial expansion of the past century or two was mainly due to our accelerating use of the concentrated energies of cheap fossil fuels; and that as oil, coal, and natural gas cease to be cheap and abundant, economic growth will phase into contraction. I further pointed out that world oil production was at, or very nearly at its peak, and that the imminent decline in extraction rates will be decisive, because global transport is nearly all oil-dependent, and there is currently no adequate substitute for petroleum. Finally, I noted that the shift from growth to contraction will impact every aspect of human existence—financial systems, food systems, global trade—at both the macro and micro levels, threatening even our personal psychological coping mechanisms.   Nothing has happened in the past three years to change that outlook—but much has transpired to confirm it.   A good case can now be made that the year 2007, when this book originally appeared, was indeed the year, if not of “peak everything,” then at least of “peak many things.” Since then we have begun a scary descent from the giddy heights of consumption achieved in the early years of this century.  

• Worldwide economic activity began to decline in 2008 and does not appear set to return to 2007 levels any time soon.
• Global energy consumption likewise achieved its zenith in the years 2005 through 2007; since then, consumption growth has been confined to the Asian economies and a few oil and gas exporting nations.
• Personal income in the U.S. (excluding government benefits) is still far below total and per capita levels registered in 2007.
• Worldwide shipping, a good index of global trade and manufacturing, peaked in 2007.

  Of course it is simplistic to argue that everything has peaked (though Peak Everything makes for a better book title than “Some Things Peaking Now, Most Others Soon”). Perhaps the most glaring exception is human population, which continues to grow and is virtually certain to pass the seven billion mark within the next couple of years.   Here’s another non-peak: China’s economy is still growing rapidly, at the astonishing rate of 8 to 10 percent per year. That means it is more than doubling in size every ten years. Indeed, China consumes more than twice as much coal as it did a decade ago—the same with iron ore and oil. That nation now has four times as many highways as it did, and almost five times as many cars. How long this can go on is anyone’s guess. But surely not many more doublings in consumption rates can occur before China has used up its key resources.   For what it’s worth, my forecast is for China’s continuing boom to be very short-lived. As I argued in my recent book Blackout, there are hard limits to China’s coal supplies (the world as a whole will experience peak coal consumption within the next two decades, but China will get there sooner than most other countries because of its extraordinary consumption rate—currently three times that of the U.S.). Since China has no viable short-term alternatives to coal to fuel its industrial machine, by 2020 or so (and possibly much sooner) that country will have joined the rest of the world in a process of economic contraction that will continue until levels of consumption can be maintained by renewable resources harvested at sustainable rates.   World population growth may likewise continue for a shorter period than is commonly believed, if global food production and economic activity peak soon in response to declining energy availability.   In short, the world has changed in a fundamental way in the past three years, and the reverberations will continue for decades to come. Indeed, we have just seen the beginning of an overwhelming transformation of life as we’ve known it.   Let’s look at a few specific factors driving this transformation, starting with limits to world supplies of petroleum.   Oil Spike Triggers Economic Crisis   It is still unclear whether world oil extraction rates have reached their absolute maximum level. As of this writing, the record year for world crude oil production was 2005, and the record month was July 2008. The 2005 to 2008 leveling-off of extraction rates occurred in the context of steadily rising oil prices; indeed, in July 2008 oil prices spiked 50 percent higher than the previous inflation-adjusted record, set in the 1970s. As a result of that price spike, the global airline industry went into a tailspin and the auto industry crashed and burned.   The only serious argument that world oil production could theoretically continue to grow for more than a very few years is put forward by parties who explain away the evidence of declining discoveries, depleting oilfields, and stagnating total production by claiming that it is demand for oil that has peaked, not supply—a distinction that hinges on the fact that oil prices these days are so high as to discourage demand. But since high prices for a commodity are usually a sign of scarcity, the “peak demand” argument really amounts to a distinction without a difference.   The oil situation is dire enough that one might assume it would be dominating headlines daily. Yet in fact it garners little attention. That’s because the world’s ongoing and worsening oil crisis has been obscured by a more dramatic and obvious financial catastrophe. As we all know only too well, Wall Street banks—which had spent the past couple of decades giddily building themselves a quadrillion-dollar house of cards—went into a free-fall swoon in the latter half of 2008 (right after the oil price spike), only to be temporarily rescued with trillions of dollars of government bailouts and guarantees. It was a spine-tingling show—and would have amounted to months of fine entertainment, had it not been for the fact that millions of jobs, thousands of small businesses, and the economies of several sovereign nations also came tumbling down, and there just weren’t enough trillions available to rescue all of them (it obviously pays to be “too big to fail” and to have friends in high places).   The financial aspects of the crisis were so Byzantine, and the cast of players so opulently and impudently villainous, that it was easy to forget the simple truism that all money is, in the end, merely a claim on resources, energy, and labor. A financial system built on staggering amounts of debt and the anticipation of both unending economic growth and absurdly high returns on investments can only work if labor is always getting cheaper, and supplies of energy and resources are always growing—and even then occasional hiccups are to be expected.   But that set of conditions is so last century.   While the oil price run-up was hardly the sole cause of the ongoing world economic crisis, it has effectively imposed a limit to any possibility of “recovery”: as soon as economic activity advances, oil prices will again spike, causing yet another financial crunch.   Thus Peak Oil likely represents the first of the limits to growth that will turn a century of economic expansion into decades of contraction. But more constraints are lining up in the stage wings, ready to make their entrance.   Evidence of Peak Non-Renewable Resources   In the original edition of this book, increasing scarcity of non-energy minerals was barely mentioned. In the three years since, the subject has received increasing attention from researchers and journalists. One report, “Increasing Global Nonrenewable Natural Resource Scarcity,” by Chris Clugston (a former corporate executive), deserves a couple of quotes here. Clugston analyzed 57 non-renewable natural resources (NNRs) in terms of production levels and price. He begins his report by pointing out that   During the 20th century, global production levels associated with 56 of the 57 analyzed NNRs (98%) increased annually, while global price levels associated with 45 of the 57 analyzed NNRs (79%) decreased annually. Generally increasing global NNR production levels in conjunction with generally decreasing global NNR price levels indicate relative global NNR abundance during the 20th century. On the whole, global NNR supplies kept pace with ever-increasing global demand during the 20th century.   So far, so good. But that’s changing.   Generally slowing or declining global NNR production growth in conjunction with generally increasing global NNR prices indicate increasing NNR scarcity during the early years of the 21st century. . . . Annual global production levels increased during the 20th century, then decreased during the 21st century; while annual price levels decreased during the 20th century, then increased during the 21st century. . . .   Clugston’s conclusion: “We are not about to ‘run out’ of any NNR; we are about to run ‘critically short’ of many.”

 

The same message appeared in a prominent article in New Scientist magazine on May 23, 2007, “Earth’s Natural Wealth: An Audit.” Here’s a useful tidbit from that article:   Take the metal gallium, which along with indium is used to make indium gallium arsenide. This is the semiconducting material at the heart of a new generation of solar cells that promise to be up to twice as efficient as conventional designs. Reserves of both metals are disputed, but in a recent report René Kleijn, a chemist at Leiden University in the Netherlands, concludes that current reserves “would not allow a substantial contribution of these cells” to the future supply of solar electricity. He estimates gallium and indium will probably contribute to less than 1 per cent of all future solar cells—a limitation imposed purely by a lack of raw material.    The specifics with regard to supplies of a host of nonrenewable resources can be examined easily with a few mouse clicks using the U.S. Minerals Databrowser, which features data from the U.S. Geological Survey.   The Resource Pyramid   When presented with evidence of depleting stores of fossil fuels and minerals, some still object: New technology will enable us to continue increasing the amount of energy available to us. And if we have enough energy, we can solve our other supply problems: We can desalinate ocean water, grow crops in multi-storey greenhouses, and breed limitless supplies of fish in captivity. We can capture mineral resources from very low-grade ores. We can even mine gold and uranium from ocean water. We can harvest minerals on other planets and ferry them back to Earth. With enough energy, anything is possible!   As an example of what can be done with technology, just consider what has happened in the natural gas industry in the past couple of years: horizontal drilling and “fracking” (fracturing dense gas-bearing rocks with water and chemicals) have expanded U.S. gas reserves and production rates, at a time when energy pessimists had been forecasting a supply collapse. This “unconventional” gas is more than making up for declines in conventional natural gas.   In fact, however, the natural gas situation offers an instructive example of what depletion looks like. Depletion of oil, gas, coal, and other nonrenewable resources is often wrongly portrayed as “running out,” as though it indicated the complete exhaustion of the substance. What we are really talking about are the inevitable consequences of the tendency of resource extractors to take the low-hanging fruit first, and to leave difficult, expensive, low-quality, and environmentally ruinous resources to be extracted later. Unconventional gas is more expensive to produce than conventional gas, and extracting it has worse environmental impacts (due to the need to inject a toxic brew of chemicals underground to break up the rock). The result: “fracking” technology may have enabled the industry to gain access to new sources of gas, but natural gas prices will have to rise significantly to make the business of producing this new gas profitable over the long run—and no one knows how long that “long run” is likely to be, given the rapid depletion rates of most unconventional gas wells.   Geologists and others who routinely deal with mineral ores and fossil fuels commonly speak of a “resource pyramid”: the capstone represents the easily and cheaply extracted portion of the resource; the next layer is the portion of the resource base that can be extracted with more difficulty and expense, and with worse environmental impacts; while the remaining bulk of the pyramid represents resources unlikely to be extracted under any realistic pricing scenario. The optimist may assume that the entire pyramid will eventually be usable, but this is simply not realistic. We have built a society on the basis of cheap energy and materials. At some point, as we move down the layers of the resource pyramid, rising commodity prices and increasing environmental cleanup costs (think Deepwater Horizon) will undercut both demand for resources and economic activity in general. As that happens, we see not just higher prices, but more volatile prices.   This is exactly what happened with the oil price spike of 2008. Many commentators who understand the essence of the Peak Oil dilemma have tended to assume that, as petroleum and other resources become scarcer, commodity prices will simply escalate in a linear fashion. What we saw instead was a rapid rise in prices (driven by rising demand and falling supply, and then exacerbated by speculation) precipitating an economic crash, followed by collapsing oil prices and curtailed investment in oil exploration—which, in due course, will provoke another rapid price rise. The cycle begins again. Each time the cycle churns, it will likely have an even more devastating economic impact.   The same will happen with natural gas as conventional gas grows scarce and the industry is forced to rely on quickly depleting and expensive-to-produce shale gas; and the same will happen with copper, uranium, indium, and rare-earth elements. Meanwhile, we will puzzle over the fact that the economy just doesn’t seem to work the way it once did. Instead of having plenty of energy with which to mine gold from seawater, we will find we don’t have enough cheap fuel to keep the airline industry aloft. Alternative non-fossil energy sources will come on line, but not quickly enough to keep up with the depletion of oil, coal, and gas. Prices of energy and raw materials will gyrate giddily, but the actual amounts consumed will be dropping. In general, labor costs will be falling and raw materials prices rising—the exact reverse of what occurred during the 20th century; but the adjustments will be anything but gradual.   It will take most folks a while to realize the simple fact that conventional economic growth is over. Done. Dead. Extinct.   The End of Growth—and What Comes After   The economic crash of 2008 is commonly perceived as another in a long series of recessions, from which a recovery will inevitably ensue. Recessions always end with recovery; of course this one will as well—or so we are told.   Yet now the situation is different. With oil production peaking, climate changing, and fresh water, soil, fish, and minerals depleting at alarming rates, the computer-based scenarios of the 1972 Limits to Growth study seem thoroughly and frighteningly confirmed. Decades of expansion fueled by consumption and debt are ending; the time has come to pay bills, tighten belts, and prepare for a future of economic downsizing.   Now and again we may see a year that boasts higher economic activity than the previous one. But we will probably never see aggregate activity higher than that in 2007. The Asian economies of China and India will be brief hold-outs from this general trend; but, as coal supplies in that part of the world tighten, even the “Asian tigers” will soon be forced to confront limits to growth.   Contemplating the end of growth—not as a theoretical possibility, but as a fait accompli, forced upon us by circumstances largely of our own making—is of course a bit depressing. The 20th century was one long expansionary surge interrupted by a couple of nasty World Wars and a Depression. At the beginning of that century world population stood at a little over 1.5 billion; by century’s end, it was 6 billion. In the industrialized West, per capita GDP grew from an average of $5000 to nearly $30,000 (in inflation-adjusted terms). We all came to believe that “progress” would go on like this more or less forever. We would build colonies on the Moon, other planets, maybe even in other solar systems; we would conquer disease and hunger—it was only a matter of time.   But while we were planning for utopia, we were in fact setting the stage for collapse. We were depleting our planet’s usable resources and altering the composition of Earth’s atmosphere. And we were building a global financial regime built on the expectation of perpetually expanding consumption and debt, a regime that could not function in a condition of stasis or contraction without generating billowing crises of default, insolvency, and foreclosure.   So, instead of being characterized by a continuation of the upward trajectory we have all grown accustomed to, the 21st century is destined to be one long downward glide punctuated by moments of financial, political, and geopolitical panic. And in retrospect, we’ll all probably eventually agree that our descent began in 2008.   We really have reached Peak Everything . . . but we’ve barely had a chance to enjoy the view; how brief was our moment at the apex! From here on, it’s going to be a bumpy downward roller-coaster ride.   What’s the Point?   Why bother to mention any of this? Is it just to wallow in cynicism? Clearly, the only useful purpose would be to somehow improve our collective prospects. Further economic growth may not be an option for global society, but that doesn’t necessarily signify the end of the world. Indeed, the range of possible futures arrayed ahead of us is still wide, encompassing everything from (at one end of the scale) graceful industrial decline leading to a mature, sustainable world community of re-localized cultures, to (at the other end) human extinction, or something very close to it.   It’s not hard to see what could lead to the latter outcome. If we are all still planning for expansion and it doesn’t ensue, many people will likely become furious and look for someone to blame. Politicians, seeking to avoid that blame and channel citizens’ anger for purposes of their own aggrandizement, will offer scapegoats. Some of those will be domestic, some foreign. Scapegoating of nations, religions, and ethnicities will lead to global violence. Meanwhile very little attention will go toward addressing the underlying problems of resource depletion and environmental degradation (the death of the oceans, collapsing agricultural production due to climate change and desertification, etc.)—problems that warfare will only exacerbate. Add nuclear weapons, stir vigorously, and voila: a recipe for utter and complete destruction.   It doesn’t have to end that way.   If we understand the nature of the limits we are confronting, it is still possible to back our way out of the population-resources cul de sac humanity has entered. In other words, if we plan for contraction, we are likely to do a much better job of transitioning to a sustainable level of population and consumption than if we are still planning for growth and are continually finding our plans frustrated.   The first thing we must do to plan successfully for contraction is to set achievable goals, using sensible indicators. We must cease aiming for increases in scale, amplitude, and speed with regard to nearly every material parameter of the economy. We must aim instead to increase society’s resilience—its ability to absorb shocks while continuing to function. That means re-localizing much economic activity. We must aim also to shore up basic support services, education, and cultural benefits, while de-emphasizing economic activity that entails non-essential consumption of resources.   Attainment of these goals will be greatly facilitated by the adoption of appropriate indicators. Currently, nearly all nations use Gross Domestic Product (GDP) as their primary economic indicator. GDP represents the total market value of all final goods and services produced in a country in a given year, and a rising GDP is generally taken as a sign of progress. If GDP is set to decline relentlessly in a post-growth world, then we need a way to focus our collective attention on non-consumptive aspects of economic and civic life so as to motivate useful action in directions where progress is still possible.   Fortunately, alternative economic indicators are beginning to garner attention in cities and nations around the world. I discuss the Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) on page 17 of the Introduction of this book, but it’s also important to mention Gross National Happiness (GNH). That term was coined in 1972 by Bhutan’s former King Jigme Singye Wangchuck to signal his commitment to building an economy that would preserve Bhutan’s Buddhist culture as the nation opened trade with the West. Canadian health epidemiologist Michael Pennock helped design GNH, and has advocated the adoption of a “de-Bhutanized” version of it in his home city of Victoria, British Columbia. Recently, Seattle has also expressed interest in adopting GNH.   Med Jones, President of International Institute of Management, has elaborated on GNH, measuring socioeconomic development across seven areas, including the nation’s mental and emotional health:

1. Economic Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of consumer debt, average income to consumer price index ratio, and income distribution;
2. Environmental Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of environmental metrics such as pollution, noise, and traffic;
3. Physical Wellness: Indicated via statistical measurement of physical health metrics such as severe illnesses;
4. Mental Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of mental health metrics such as usage of antidepressants and rise or decline in number of psychotherapy patients;
5. Workplace Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of labor metrics such as jobless claims, job change, workplace complaints, and lawsuits;
6. Social Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of social metrics such as discrimination, safety, divorce rates, complaints of domestic conflicts and family lawsuits, public lawsuits, and crime rates; and
7. Political Wellness: Indicated via direct survey and statistical measurement of political metrics such as the quality of local democracy, individual freedom, and foreign conflicts.

 Contraction in population levels and consumption rates doesn’t sound like much fun, but a few decades of improvement in Gross National Happiness—potentially achievable at least in five or six of the above metrics—should be an attractive notion to most people.   The related idea that life can be better without fossil fuels is a core tenet of the Transition Town movement, which started in England in 2005 (I quote its founder, Rob Hopkins, on pages 135-136). Transition Initiatives are grassroots efforts to wean communities off dependence on oil and other carbon fuels by promoting local resilience (through development of things like local food systems and ride-share programs). Transitioners realize that it is probably futile to wait for elected officials to take the lead in planning for the great energy shift, given that very few politicians understand our predicament—and given also that, even if they did, the measures they would likely propose would be deeply unpopular unless the populace were educated about constraints on fossil-fueled growth. The genius of the movement lies in its engagement of the citizenry first. The Transition Initiatives appear to be taking off virally, with nearly 300 official sites around the world and over 70 in North America (as of mid-2010).   During the past two years, car sales in North America have declined while bicycle sales have soared; the number of young people taking up farming has increased for the first time in decades; and organic seed companies have had a tough time keeping up with mushrooming demand from home gardeners. These trends show that higher fuel prices and public awareness will indeed motivate behavior change. But we have a very long way to go before we, the people of the world, have broken our dependency on fossil fuels, scaled back our use of other resources, and sufficiently reduced our impact on natural systems. Meanwhile, public education and citizen-led efforts (like the Transition Initiatives) are essential now to build community resilience so as to absorb the economic and environmental shocks that at on their way, and to help us all adjust to life after growth.  

The peak has happened. Get over it—and get to work. 

By David Fridley, posted Aug 12, 2010:

Everyone knows that it takes energy to produce anything. The energy used in mining, transport, processing, manufacturing, delivery, and disposal is “embodied” in every product we consume, from food to diapers to televisions and insurance policies. Our traditional way of looking at energy, however, highlights only current consumption, traditionally disaggregated into agricultural, industrial, transportation, commercial, and residential sectors. As a result, the energy embodied in the food we eat, for example, is reported as energy consumption across all these sectors, making it difficult to assess the full energy impact of our consumption choices. Looking at urban energy consumption from this traditional framework diminishes the role of people in driving urban energy consumption.

Because cities are the source of the majority of energy consumption in many industrial and high population countries, much research is underway to promote development of “Low Carbon Cities,” a concept that to date has primarily focused on ways to reduce the impacts of current energy consumption in transportation and buildings. This is especially true in China, where urbanization has yet to reach 50% and the government is projecting the urbanization of an additional 350 million people—greater than the population of the United States—over the next 15 years. All of these new urban residents will need accommodation, schooling, health care, appliances, energy supply, transportation, food, clothing, water, sewerage, and other services, and the potential energy impact is enormous.

A typical Chinese urban resident consumes 3 times as much commercial energy as a rural resident (in total energy terms, rural residents consume more, but the majority is inefficiently combusted biomass, which is often ignored in energy reporting). Consequently, the Chinese government is looking to require cities to develop low-carbon action plans to respond to growing urban energy needs. For the most part, these low-carbon action plans focus on ways to reduce the growth of current energy consumption and to supplant some portion of it with non-fossil energy sources.

But is a focus on current energy consumption enough? Analyzing the current energy consumption of a city alone can lead to conclusions that urban areas, particularly dense urban areas, are relatively efficient, largely because per-capita current energy consumption is lower than in dispersed urban or suburban arrangements. This is indeed often the case. But what is not measured as part of the energy impact of urban areas is the built space itself—the streets, pavement, buildings, utilities, tunnels, etc.—that are required to maintain such a dense arrangement of humans, nor does it take into account the energy used to manufacture, transport, and sell the array of consumption goods and services that urban residents purchase. Since urban areas exist for people, looking at the urban energy footprint from the point of view of its inhabitants’ impact can provide additional insight into the nature of urban energy use.

The model used to make these calculations was built in support of an ongoing series of training workshops for city officials in China. The goal was to minimize data input requirements in order to make it user-friendly for city planners. Basic data on the city’s location, population and households, income and expenditures, building floorspace and building types, infrastructure (road, rail, subway length), and vehicle fleet are the basic input parameters. Calculations of current energy consumption and embodied energy use were based on intensity data in the China End-Use Energy Model at LBNL for the appropriate climate zone. In order to compare results on an annual basis, embodied energy calculations were (where relevant) divided by lifetime (e.g. 30 years for buildings, China’s current average).

The test city for the model was Suzhou (Figure 1), a large city of 6 million population located west of Shanghai in Jiangsu province. Suzhou is a prosperous city with an economy dominated by heavy industry, which accounts for 80% of the city’s energy consumption. It is home to Shagang, the 7th largest steel producer in the world with an output in 2009 of 26 million tonnes, equivalent to 45% of total US production in that year.

Much of this steel, however, is not consumed by Suzhou residents, and thus this large industrial component falls out of the model; instead Suzhou steel consumption is captured in the infrastructure and building use of steel and in the steel used to make products consumed by the residents, such as automobiles and refrigerators. Similarly, Suzhou residents eat food that is in part not locally grown, but the energy used to produce and transport this food to Suzhou is included in the calculation. In this way, the model creates a picture of Suzhou energy consumption oriented towards the people who are responsible for its consumption, and excludes energy consumption of those goods and services produced in Suzhou and consumed elsewhere.

 

 

Figure 1 Suzhou skyline

 

Overall Findings

The results for Suzhou are shown in Table 1, indicating that the city’s energy footprint, in both current and embodied terms, totals about 111 billion MJ per year, equivalent in energy to about 18 million barrels of oil.

 

Table 1. Annual Energy and Emissions Footprint

 

 

Of that amount, however, nearly three-quarters is energy that is embodied in the infrastructure and in the consumption of goods and services in the city (Figure 2), while only 26% is operational energy (current consumption)—the energy used to light, cool, heat, run equipment such as water pumps and televisions, and to run vehicles.

 

 

Figure 2. Structure of Energy Footprint

 

Not unsurprisingly, nearly 60% of the operational energy comes from transportation, with another 26% from the energy used in residential buildings, including heating, cooling, water heating, lighting, appliances, and miscellaneous plug loads (Figure 3). Suzhou is located in an area of China that did not formerly allow heating in buildings in winter, so heating today is supplied largely by mini-split heat pump air conditioners running on electricity. In Suzhou, nearly every household, urban and agricultural, owns a refrigerator, TV, clothes washer, and AC. Commercial building account for a lower share than residential buildings because of China’s overall lower building energy intensity and the higher share of the agricultural and industrial workforce.

 

 

Figure 3. Structure of Operational Energy Use

 

Even though commercial buildings are generally more materially intensive (i.e., use more concrete, steel, aluminum and other building materials per square meter) than residential buildings, the dominance of residential floorspace in the total building stock (54 million square meters vs 23 million square meters for commercial) results in a larger embodied energy footprint for residential buildings (Figure 4). Even then, the embodied energy of all buildings along with the 63 million square meters of pavement in the city accounts for only about 20% of the total annual embodied energy calculation; the rest is contributed from the embodied energy in the products and services that the residents of the city consume each year.

 

 

Figure 4. Structure of Embodied Energy

 

Transporting People

The transportation infrastructure in a city serves to supports the movement of vehicles carrying both passengers and freight (including non-commercial freight such as mail). Owing to a lack of data from which to estimate freight turnover and vehicle use in Suzhou, it has been omitted from this version; the results here focus on the impact of moving people. As shown in Figure 5, transportation energy use is completely dominated by private transportation choices, with the public transportation system contributing only about 1% of the total.

 

 

Figure 5. Structure of Transportation Operational Energy Use

 

Suzhou has a car ownership rate of 29 per 100 households, so it is not surprising that among private transportation choices, car energy use accounts for over 70% of the total (Figure 6). Suzhou is also known as China’s “E-Bike Heaven” with over 2.5 million e-bikes in use, the highest density in China. Even so, the greater efficiency of this mode of passenger transport results in the entire fleet consuming just 2% of total passenger transport energy consumption.

 

 

Figure 6. Structure of Private Transportation Operational Energy

 

What People Buy

As shown in Table 1, the energy used to heat, cool, light, and operate appliances in Suzhou households totals about 11 billion MJ, accounting for about a quarter of total operational energy use. Of much greater consequence is the contribution from the embodied energy of the goods and services that these households consume on an annual basis. To determine this, we looked at the distribution of expenditures by income level, and used input-output calculations based on China’s 2005 input-output tables to calculate the energy use for each expenditure category.

 

Table 2. Income Distribution and Expenditures of Suzhou Households

 

 

Note: ¥6.8 = US$1

What is apparent in Table 2 is that even at the highest income categories, food still accounts for the largest portion of household expenditures, in contrast to the US where food expenditures (as a share of disposable income) has steadily declined since 1947, reaching 9.5% in 2009. Consequently, food dominates the share of embodied energy as well (Figure 7), accounting for nearly half of the energy footprint of household consumption.

 

 

Figure 7. Structure of Residential Consumption Embodied Energy

 

Clothing purchases, accounting for about 10% of monetary expenditures, translated into nearly a quarter of total embodied energy consumption, in part owing to the high proportion of coal-based electricity in China’s textile industry fuel mix.

On a per-capita basis, however, the embodied energy of food remains fairly low in comparison to countries with advanced industrial agriculture such as the US or the EU. The embodied energy in the food supply totalled nearly 41 billion MJ, or about 18 MJ/person/day (Table 3). Assuming each person consumes about 9 MJ of food energy per day, this suggests that 2 MJ of energy were required to supply 1 MJ of food energy to each urban resident. In the US, the equivalent figure for input energy would be about 10 MJ.

 

Table 3. Residential Consumption Embodied Energy Consumption

 

 

Buildings for People to Work, Buy, Learn, Reside Temporarily, and Be Sick

The commercial sector of a city provides accommodation for the variety of activities that its inhabitants do on a daily basis. In this model, the commercial sector is divided into six types of buildings: retail, hotels, schools, hospitals, office buildings, and other. Different building types employ different construction methods and materials, and thus the embodied energy of each type differs. Similarly, the nature of the activity in each building type differs, and thus the operational energy use of each type varies. For example, hospitals tend to be low-rise buildings with high demands for hot water; as seen in Figure 8, the operational energy of hospitals is more than twice that of the embodied component. Similarly, in retail buildings, the extensive use of lighting, air conditioning and heating also keeps operational energy high. Office buildings constitute many of the high-rise structures of the city, with more intensive use of materials and have high embodied energy intensities but have fewer hours of operations each week than other building types.

 

 

Figure 8. Operational and Embodied Energy in Commercial Buildings

 

Implications

This approach to looking at the energy footprint of a city based on the impacts of the city’s inhabitants shows, in the case of Suzhou, that personal consumption of goods and services accounts for the largest (59%) contribution to energy footprint of the city, and this figure would likely remain above 50% even with inclusion of details omitted in this version of the model (mainly freight transport, water treatment, and embodied energy of vehicles). For a policy-maker, this suggests that supply-chain issues need to be considered, and of these supply chains, food appears to be dominant. Developing long-distance or international food supply chains as in the US would dramatically raise the energy demand of each resident and further decrease the food energy return on investment to less than the 0.5 it is today. It also makes apparent the impact of increasing wealth as rising household income is translated into higher consumption. In addition, this approach highlights the impact of building lifetime: design and code requirements that would raise the lifetime of buildings from the current 30 years to a US average of about 75 years (or a UK average of over 100 years) would further decrease the contribution of the embodied energy in buildings to even a lower proportion than found here. Similarly, it suggests that “green buildings” with low or net-zero operational energy may not be “green” at all if the embodied energy of the materials used in the building are considered in the calculation. This exercise also adds a different perspective to the impact of such popular programs such as encouraging CFL use or buying more fuel efficient cars: though important in their own right as a matter of waste reduction, the contribution to changing the overall energy picture is quite small.

Originally posted at The Oil Drum

By Richard Heinberg, posted Aug 11, 2010: This is an updated version of an article which was originally published in August 2009.   Everyone agrees: our economy is sick. The inescapable symptoms include declines in consumer spending and consumer confidence, together with a contraction of international trade and available credit. Add a collapse in real estate values and carnage in the automotive and airline industries and the picture looks grim indeed.   But why are both the U.S. economy and the larger global economy ailing? Among the mainstream media, world leaders, and America’s economists-in-chief (Treasury Secretary Geithner and Federal Reserve Chairman Bernanke) there is near-unanimity of opinion: these recent troubles are primarily due to a combination of bad real estate loans and poor regulation of financial markets.   This is the Conventional Diagnosis. If it is correct, then the treatment for our economic malady logically includes heavy doses of bailout money for beleaguered financial institutions, mortgage lenders, and car companies; better regulation of derivatives and futures markets; and stimulus programs to jumpstart consumer spending. All of these measures have been tried—and found wanting.   Is the diagnosis therefore fundamentally flawed? The metaphor needs no belaboring: we all know that tragedy can result from a doctor’s misreading of symptoms, mistaking one disease for another.   Something similar holds for our national and global economic infirmity. If we don’t understand why the world’s industrial and financial metabolism has seized up, we are unlikely to apply the right medicine and could end up making matters much worse than they would otherwise be.   To be sure: the Conventional Diagnosis is clearly at least partly right. The causal connections between subprime mortgage loans and the crises at Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac, and Lehman Brothers have been thoroughly explored and are well known. Clearly, over the past few years, speculative bubbles in real estate and the financial industry were blown up to colossal dimensions, and their bursting was inevitable. It is hard to disagree with the words of Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd, in his July 25, 2009 essay in the Sydney Morning Herald: “The roots of the crisis lie in the preceding decade of excess. In it the world enjoyed an extraordinary boom…. However, as we later learnt, the global boom was built in large part on a … house of cards. First, in many Western countries the boom was created on a pile of debt held by consumers, corporations and some governments. As the global financier George Soros put it: ‘For 25 years [the West] has been consuming more than we have been producing … living beyond our means.’” (1)   But is this as far as we need look to get to the root of the continuing global economic meltdown?   A case can be made that dire events having to do with real estate, the derivatives markets, and the auto and airline industries were themselves merely symptoms of an even deeper, systemic dysfunction that spells the end of economic growth as we have known it.   In short, I am suggesting an Alternative Diagnosis. This explanation for the economic crisis is not for the faint of heart because, if correct, it implies that the patient is far sicker than even the most pessimistic economists are telling us. But if it is correct, then by ignoring it we risk even greater peril.   Economic Growth, The Financial Crisis, and Peak Oil   For several years, a swelling subculture of commentators (which includes the present author) has been forecasting a financial crash, basing this prognosis on the assessment that global oil production was about to peak. (2) Our reasoning went like this:   Continual increases in population and consumption cannot continue forever on a finite planet. This is an axiomatic observation with which everyone familiar with the mathematics of compounded arithmetic growth must agree, even if they hedge their agreement with vague references to “substitutability” and “demographic transitions.” (3)   This axiomatic limit to growth means that the rapid expansion in both population and per-capita consumption of resources that has occurred over the past century or two must cease at some particular time. But when is this likely to occur?   The unfairly maligned Limits to Growth studies, published first in 1972 with periodic updates since, have attempted to answer the question with analysis of resource availability and depletion, and multiple scenarios for future population growth and consumption rates. The most pessimistic scenario in 1972 suggested an end of world economic growth around 2015. (4)   But there may be a simpler way of forecasting growth’s demise.   Energy is the ultimate enabler of growth (again, this is axiomatic: physics and biology both tell us that without energy nothing happens—certainly not growth). Industrial expansion throughout the past two centuries has in every instance been based on increased energy consumption. (5) More specifically, industrialism has been inextricably tied to the availability and consumption of cheap energy from coal and oil (and more recently, natural gas). However, fossil fuels are by their very nature depleting, non-renewable resources. Therefore (according to the Peak Oil thesis), the eventual inability to continue increasing supplies of cheap fossil energy will lead to a cessation of economic growth in general, unless alternative energy sources and efficiency of energy use can be deployed rapidly and to a sufficient degree. (6)   Of the three conventional fossil fuels, oil is arguably the most economically vital, since it supplies 95 percent of all transport energy. Further, petroleum is the fuel with which we are likely to encounter supply problems soonest, because global petroleum discoveries have been declining for decades, and most oil producing countries are already seeing production declines. (7)   So, by this logic, the end of economic growth (as conventionally defined) is inevitable, and Peak Oil is the likely trigger.   Why would Peak Oil lead not just to problems for the transport industry, but a more general economic and financial crisis? During the past century growth has become institutionalized in the very sinews of our economic system. Every city and business wants to grow. This is understandable merely in terms of human nature: nearly everyone wants a competitive advantage over someone else, and growth provides the opportunity to achieve it. But there is also a financial survival motive at work: without growth, businesses and governments are unable to service their debt. And debt has become endemic to the industrial system. During the past couple of decades, the financial services industry has grown faster than any other sector of the American economy, even outpacing the rise in health care expenditures, accounting for a third of all growth in the U.S. economy. From 1990 to the present, the ratio of debt-to-GDP expanded from 165 percent to over 350 percent. In essence, the present welfare of the economy rests on debt, and the collateral for that debt consists of a wager that next year’s levels of production and consumption will be higher than this year’s.   Given that growth cannot continue on a finite planet, this wager, and its embeddedness in the institutions of finance, can be said to constitute history’s greatest Ponzi scheme. We have justified present borrowing with the irrational belief that perpetual growth is possible, necessary, and inevitable. In effect we have borrowed from future generations so that we could gamble away their capital today.   Until recently, the Peak Oil argument has been framed as a forecast: the inevitable decline in world petroleum production, whenever it occurs, will kill growth. But here is where forecast becomes diagnosis: during the period from 2005 to 2008, production stopped growing and oil prices rose to record levels. By July of 2008, the price of a barrel of oil was nudging close to $150—half again higher than any previous petroleum price in inflation-adjusted terms—and the global economy was beginning to topple. The auto and airline industries shuddered; ordinary consumers had trouble buying gasoline for their commute to work while still paying their mortgages. Consumer spending began to decline. By September the economic crisis was also a financial crisis, as banks trembled and imploded. (8) Given how much is at stake, it is important to evaluate the two diagnoses (Conventional and Peak Oil) on the basis of facts, not preconceptions.   It is unnecessary to examine evidence supporting or refuting the Conventional Diagnosis, because its validity is not in doubt—as a partial explanation for what is occurring. The question is whether it is a sufficient explanation, and hence an adequate basis for designing a successful response.   What’s the evidence favoring the Alternative? A good place to begin is with a recent paper by economist James Hamilton of the University of California, San Diego, titled “Causes and Consequences of the Oil Shock of 2007-08,” which discusses oil prices and economic impacts, explaining how and why the economic crash is related to the oil price shock of 2008. (9)   Hamilton starts by citing previous studies showing a tight correlation between oil price spikes and recessions. On the basis of this correlation, every attentive economist should have forecast a steep recession for 2008. “Indeed,” writes Hamilton, “the relation could account for the entire downturn of 2007-08…. If one could have known in advance what happened to oil prices during 2007-08, and if one had used the historically estimated relation [between price rise and economic impact]… one would have been able to predict the level of real GDP for both of 2008:Q3 and 2008:Q4 quite accurately.”   Again, this is not to ignore the role of the financial and real estate sectors in the ongoing global economic meltdown. But in the Alternative Diagnosis the collapse of the housing and derivatives markets is seen as amplifying a signal ultimately emanating from a failure to increase the rate of supply of depleting resources. Hamilton again: “At a minimum it is clear that something other than housing deteriorated to turn slow growth into a recession. That something, in my mind, includes the collapse in automobile purchases, slowdown in overall consumption spending, and deteriorating consumer sentiment, in which the oil shock was indisputably a contributing factor.”   Moreover, Hamilton notes that there was “an interaction effect between the oil shock and the problems in housing.” That is, in many metropolitan areas, house prices in 2007 were still rising in the zip codes closest to urban centers but already falling fast in zip codes where commutes were long. (10)   Why Did the Oil Price Spike?   Those who espouse the Conventional Diagnosis for our ongoing economic collapse might agree that there was some element of causal correlation between the oil price spike and the recession, but they would deny that the price spike itself had anything to do with resource limits, because (they say) it was caused mostly by speculation in the oil futures market, and had little to do with fundamentals of supply and demand.   In this, the Conventional Diagnosis once again has some basis in reality. Speculation in oil futures during the period in question almost certainly helped drive oil prices higher than was justified by fundamentals. But why were investors buying oil futures? Was the mania for oil contracts just another bubble, like the dot-com stock frenzy of the late ’90s or the real estate boom of 2003 to 2006?   During the period from 2005 to mid-2008, demand for oil was growing, especially in China (which went from being self-sufficient in oil in 1995 to being the world’s second-foremost importer, after the U.S., by 2006). But the global supply of oil was essentially stagnant: monthly production figures for crude oil bounced around within a fairly narrow band between 72 and 75 million barrels per day. As prices rose, production figures barely budged in response. There was every indication that all oil producers were pumping flat-out: even the Saudis appeared to be rushing to capitalize on the price bonanza.   Thus a good argument can be made that speculation in oil futures was merely magnifying price moves that were inevitable on the basis of the fundamentals of supply and demand. James Hamilton (in his publication previously cited) puts it this way: “With hindsight, it is hard to deny that the price rose too high in July 2008, and that this miscalculation was influenced in part by the flow of investment dollars into commodity futures contracts. It is worth emphasizing, however, that the two key ingredients needed to make such a story coherent—a low price elasticity of demand, and the failure of physical production to increase—are the same key elements of a fundamentals-based explanation of the same phenomenon. I therefore conclude that these two factors, rather than speculation per se, should be construed as the primary cause of the oil shock of 2007-08.”   Aftermath of the Peak   There is also controversy over to what degree troubles in the automobile, trucking, and airline industries should be attributed to the oil price spike or the economic crash. Of course, if the Alternative Diagnosis is correct, the latter two events are causally related in any case. However, it may be helpful to review the situation. Everyone knows that GM and Chrysler went bankrupt in 2009 because U.S. car sales cratered. Sales of light trucks, the most profitable vehicles, took the biggest hit during 2008, as fuel prices soared and car buyers avoided gas-guzzlers. It was at this point that the auto companies really began feeling the pain.   The airline industry’s ills are summarized in a recent GAO document: “After 2 years of profits, the U.S. passenger airline industry lost $4.3 billion in the first 3 quarters of 2008 [as jet fuel prices climbed]. Collectively, U.S. airlines reduced domestic capacity, as measured by the number of seats flown, by about 9 percent from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008…. To reduce capacity, airlines reduced the overall number of active aircraft in their fleets by 18 percent…. Airlines also collectively reduced their workforces by about 28,000, or nearly 7 percent, from the end of 2007 to the end of 2008…. The contraction of the U.S. airline industry in 2008 reduced airport revenues, passengers’ access to the national aviation system, and revenues for the Trust Fund.” (11)   For the trucking industry, fuel accounts for nearly 40 percent of total operational costs. In 2007, as diesel prices rose, carriers began losing money and added fuel price surcharges; meanwhile the volume of freight began falling. After July 2008, as oil prices crashed, tonnage continued to decline. Overall, the cumulative decrease in loads for flatbed, tanker, and dry vans ranged between 15 percent and 20 percent just in the period from June to December 2008. (12)   This last set of statistics raises a couple of questions crucial to understanding the Alternative Diagnosis: Why, if global oil production had just peaked, did petroleum prices fall in the last five months of 2008? And, if oil prices were a major factor in the economic crisis, why didn’t the economy begin to turn around after the prices softened?   Why Did Oil Prices Fall? And Why Didn’t Lower Oil Prices Lead to a Quick Recovery?   The Peak Oil thesis predicts that, as world oil production reaches its maximum level and begins to decline, the price of oil will rise dramatically. But it also forecasts a dramatic increase in the volatility of prices.   The argument goes as follows. As oil becomes scarce, its price will rise until it begins to undermine economic activity in general. Economic contraction will then result in substantially reduced demand for oil, which will in turn cause its price to fall temporarily. Then one of two things will happen: either (a) the economy will begin to recover, stoking renewed oil demand, leading again to high prices which will again undermine economic activity; or (b), if the economy does not quickly recover, petroleum production will gradually fall due to depletion until spare production capacity (created by lower demand) is wiped out, leading again to higher prices and even more economic contraction. In both cases, oil prices remain volatile and the economy contracts. (13)   This scenario corresponds very closely with the reality that is unfolding, though it remains to be seen whether situation (a) or (b) will ensue over the somewhat longer term (2011-2015).   Over the past five years, oil prices rose and fell more dramatically than would have been the case if it had not been for widespread speculation in oil futures. Nevertheless, the general direction of prices—way up, then way down, then part-way back up—is entirely consistent with the Peak Oil thesis and the Alternative Diagnosis.   Why has the economy not quickly recovered, given that oil prices are now only half what they were in July 2008? Again, Peak Oil is not the only cause of the current economic crisis. Enormous bubbles in the real estate and finance sectors constituted accidents waiting to happen, and the implosion of those bubbles has created a serious credit crisis (as well as solvency and eventual currency crises) that will take years to resolve even if energy supplies don’t pose a problem.   But now the potential for renewed high oil prices acts as a ceiling for economic recovery. Whenever the economy does appear to show renewed signs of life (as happened in late 2009 and early 2010, with stock values rebounding and economic activity increasing somewhat), oil prices will take off again as oil speculators anticipate a recovery of demand. Indeed, oil prices have rebounded from $30 in January 2009 to roughly $80 currently, provoking concern that high energy prices could nip recovery in the bud. (14)   A barrel of oil from newly developed sources costs in the neighborhood of $60 to produce, now that all of the cheaper prospects have been exploited: finding new oilfields today usually means drilling under miles of ocean water, or in politically unstable nations where equipment and personnel are at high risk. (15) So as soon as consumers demand more oil, the price will have to stay noticeably above that figure in order to provide the incentive for producers to drill.   Volatile oil prices hurt on the upside, but they also hurt on the downside. The oil price collapse of August-December 2008, plus the worsening credit crisis, caused a dramatic contraction in oil industry investment, leading to the cancellation of about $150 billion worth of new oil production projects—whose potential productive capacity will be required to offset declines in existing oilfields if world oil production is to remain stable. (16) This means that even if demand remains low, production capacity will almost certainly decline even below those depressed demand levels, causing oil prices to rise again in real terms at some point, perhaps two to four years from now. Volatile petroleum prices also hurt the development of alternative energy, as was shown during late 2008 and early 2009 when falling oil prices led to financial troubles for ethanol manufacturers. (17)   One way or another, growth will be highly problematic if not unachievable.   Big Picture Diagnosis: Continuing the Trail of Logic   At this point in the discussion many readers will be wondering why alternative energy sources and efficiency measures cannot be deployed to solve the Peak Oil crisis. After all, as petroleum becomes more expensive, ethanol, biodiesel, and electric cars all start to look more attractive both to producers and consumers. Won’t the magic of the market intervene to render oil shortages irrelevant to future growth?   It is impossible in the context of this discussion to provide a detailed explanation of why the market probably cannot solve the Peak Oil problem. Such an explanation requires a discussion of energy evaluation criteria, and an analysis of many individual energy alternatives on the basis of those criteria. I have offered an overview of this subject elsewhere. (18)   My summary conclusions in this regard are as follows.   About 85 percent of our current energy is derived from three primary sources—oil, natural gas, and coal—that are non-renewable, whose production is likely to peak and decline in the next two decades leading to severe shortages, and whose environmental impacts are unacceptable. While these sources historically have had very high economic value, we cannot rely on them in the future; indeed, the longer the transition to alternative energy sources is delayed, the more difficult that transition will be unless some practical mix of alternative energy systems can be identified that will have superior economic and environmental characteristics.   But identifying such a mix is harder than one might initially think. Each energy source has highly specific characteristics. In fact, it was the characteristics of our present energy sources (principally oil, coal, and natural gas) that enabled the building of an urbanized society with high mobility, large population, and high economic growth rates. Surveying the available alternative energy sources for criteria such as energy density, environmental impacts, reliance on depleting raw materials, intermittency versus constancy of supply, and the percentage of energy returned on the energy invested in energy production, none currently appears capable of perpetuating this kind of society.   Moreover, national energy systems are expensive and slow to develop. Energy efficiency likewise requires investment, and further incremental investments in efficiency tend to yield diminishing returns over time, since it is impossible to perform work with zero energy input. Where is there the will or ability to muster sufficient investment capital for deployment of alternative energy sources and efficiency measures on the scale needed?   While there are many successful alternative energy production installations around the world (ranging from small home-scale photovoltaic systems to large “farms” of three-megawatt wind turbines), there are very few modern industrial nations that now get the bulk of their energy from sources other than oil, coal, and natural gas. One example is Sweden, which obtains most of its energy from nuclear and hydropower. Another is Iceland, which benefits from unusually large domestic geothermal resources not found in most other countries. Even for these two nations, the situation is complex: the construction of the infrastructure for their power plants mostly relied on fossil fuels for the mining of the ores and raw materials, for materials processing, for transportation, for the manufacturing of components, for the mining of uranium, for construction energy, and so on. Thus a meaningful energy transition away from fossil fuels is still a matter of theory and wishful thinking, not reality.   My conclusion from a careful survey of energy alternatives, then, is that there is little likelihood that either conventional fossil fuels or alternative energy sources can be counted on to provide the amount and quality of energy that will be needed to sustain economic growth—or even current levels of economic activity—during the remainder of this century. (19)   But the problem extends beyond oil and other fossil fuels: the world’s fresh water resources are strained to the point that billions of people may soon find themselves with only precarious access to water for drinking and irrigation. Biodiversity is declining rapidly. We lose 24 billion tons of topsoil each year to erosion. And many economically significant minerals—from antimony to zinc—are depleting quickly, requiring the mining of ever lower-grade ores in ever more remote locations. Thus the Peak Oil crisis is really just the leading edge of a broader Peak Everything dilemma.   In essence, humanity faces an entirely predictable peril: our population has been growing dramatically for the past 200 years (expanding from under one billion to nearly seven billion today), while our per-capita consumption of resources has also grown. For any species, this is virtually the definition of biological success. And yet all of this has taken place in the context of a finite planet with fixed stores of non-renewable resources (fossil fuels and minerals), a limited ability to regenerate renewable resources (forests, fish, fresh water, and topsoil), and a limited ability to absorb industrial wastes (including carbon dioxide). If we step back and look at the industrial period from a broad historical perspective that is informed by an appreciation of ecological limits, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that we are today living at the end of a relatively brief pulse—a 200-year rapid expansionary phase enabled by a temporary energy subsidy (in the form of cheap fossil fuels) that will inevitably be followed by an even more rapid and dramatic contraction as those fuels deplete.   The winding down of this historic growth-contraction pulse doesn’t necessarily mean the end of the world, but it does mean the end of a certain kind of economy. One way or another, humanity must return to a more normal pattern of existence characterized by reliance on immediate solar income (via crops, wind, or the direct conversion of sunlight to electricity) rather than stored ancient sunlight.   This is not to say that the remainder of the 21st century must consist of a collapse of industrialism, a die-off of most of the human population, and a return by the survivors to a way of life essentially identical to that of 16th century peasants or indigenous hunter-gatherers. It is possible instead to imagine acceptable and even inviting ways in which humanity could adapt to ecological limits while further developing cultural richness, scientific understanding, and quality of life (more of this below).   But however it is negotiated, the transition will spell an end to economic growth in the conventional sense. And that transition appears to have begun.   How Do We Know Which Diagnosis Is Correct?   If the patient is an individual human and the cause of distress is uncertain, more diagnostic tests can be prescribed. But to what sorts of blood tests, x-rays, and CAT scans can we subject the national or global economy?   In a sense, the tests have already been done. During the past few decades thousands of scientific surveys of natural resources, biodiversity, and ecosystems have shown increasing rates of depletion and decline. (20) The continuing increase in human population, pollution, and consumption are likewise well documented. This information formed the basis for the well known Limits to Growth studies, which have used computer modeling to show how existing trends are likely to play out—with most resulting scenarios showing them leading to an end of economic growth and a collapse of industrial output some time in the early 21st century.   Why are the results of such diagnostic tests not universally accepted as a challenge to expectations of continued growth? Primarily because their conclusion runs counter to the beliefs and proclamations of most economists, who maintain that there are no practical limits to growth. They deny that resource constraints provide an eventual cap on production and consumption. And so their diagnostic efforts tend to ignore environmental factors in favor of easily measured internal features of the human economy such as money supply, consumer confidence, interest rates, and price indices.   Ecologist Charles Hall, among many others, has argued that the discipline of economics, as currently practiced, does not constitute a science, since it proceeds primarily on the basis of correlative logic rather than through the building of knowledge by a continuous, rigorous process of proposing and testing hypotheses. (21) While economics uses complex mathematics, as science does, its basic assertions about the world—such as the principle of infinite substitutability, which holds that for any resource that becomes scarce, the market will find a substitute—are not subjected to careful experimental examination. (It is worth noting that Hall and others have made the effort to lay the conceptual foundations for a new economics based on scientific principles and methods, which they call “biophysical economics.” (22))   Moreover, mainstream economists failed on the whole to foresee the current crash. There was no consistent or concerted effort on the part of Secretaries of the Treasury, Federal Reserve Chairmen, or “Nobel” prize-winning economists to warn policy makers or the general public that, sometime in the early 21st century, the global economy would begin to come apart at the seams. (23) One might think that this predictive failure—the inability to foresee so historically significant an event as the rapid contraction of nearly the entire global economy, entailing the failure of some of the world’s largest banks and manufacturing companies—would cause mainstream economists to stop and re-examine their fundamental premises. But there is little evidence to suggest that this is occurring.   At the risk of repetition: physical scientists from several disciplines have indeed foreseen an end to economic growth in the early 21st century, and have warned policy makers and the general public on many occasions.   Whom should we believe?   The specifics of the Alternative Diagnosis are falsifiable. If economic activity were to rebound above 2007 levels, or if oil production were to rise significantly above the July 2008 high-water mark, then the attribution of the current economic crisis to resource-tied limits to growth may be considered at least partly disproven. However, even if these things were to occur, the underlying reasoning behind the Alternative Diagnosis might still be correct. If the world oil production peak is delayed until, let us say, 2015 or 2020, and if another—this time bottomless—global economic crash results then, the ultimate outcome will be essentially the same. But if, meanwhile, the Alternative Diagnosis were to be taken seriously and acted upon, the consequences of doing so would be beneficial: a decade would have been spent preparing for the event.   Could the Alternative Diagnosis be altogether wrong? That is, might conventional economists be right in thinking that growth can continue forever? It is often said that anything is possible, but some things are clearly much more possible than others. The perpetual growth of human population and consumption within the confines of a finite planet seems like a very long shot indeed, especially since warning signs are everywhere apparent that ecological limits are already being reached and surpassed. (24)   What Not to Do: Prescribe Punishingly Expensive Placebos   If the physical scientists who warn about limits to growth are right, confronting the global economic meltdown implies far more than merely getting the banks and mortgage lenders back on their feet. Indeed, in that case we face a fundamental change in our economy as significant as the advent of the industrial revolution. We are at a historic inflection point—the ending of decades of expansion and the beginning of an inevitable period of contraction that will continue until humanity is once again living within the limits of Earth’s regenerative systems.   But there are few signs that policy makers understand any of this. Their thinking appears to be shaped primarily by mainstream economists’ assurances that growth can and must continue into the indefinite future, and that the economic contraction the world has recently experienced is only temporary—a problem that can and must be solved.   Still, the problem is not a minor one in the eyes of economists and policy makers. Consider the gargantuan size of the Treasury and Federal Reserve bailouts and stimulus packages that were deployed in the so-far futile attempt to restart growth. According to the special inspector general of the U.S. government’s Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP), in remarks submitted to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on July 21, 2009, $23.7 trillion were committed in “total potential federal government support.” This is expensive medicine indeed. It takes a moment to even begin to comprehend the enormity of the figure. It represents about half of annual world GDP, and is over three times the total amount spent by the U.S. government, in inflation-adjusted dollars, on all wars combined, from 1776 to the present. It is nearly fifty times the cost of the New Deal.   Other nations, including Britain, China, and Germany have committed to paying for stimulus packages and bailouts that, while much smaller in absolute terms, represent an impressive (or should we say frightful?) share of national GDP.   If the Alternative Diagnosis is valid, none of this will work in the end, because existing financial institutions—with their basis in debt and interest and their requirements for constant expansion—cannot be made to function in a context where energy and resource constraints impose effective caps on manufacturing and transport.   Are the bailouts and stimulus packages working? Much evidence suggests that they are not, except in limited ways. While during several months in 2010 U.S. economic data showed the economy growing, most of that expansion was directly or indirectly attributable to government stimulus payments. Meanwhile, tax revenues declined, leading to severe shortfalls for state and local governments. Unemployment remains high, with little prospect of improvement. (25) President Obama has made the argument that the bailouts of banks and businesses were justified to stabilize the system long enough so that leaders can make fundamental changes to institutions and regulations, enabling the economy to then go forward healthier and more immune to similar crises in the future. But there is little to suggest that the kinds of systemic changes that are actually needed (ones that would enable the economy to function during a prolonged period of contraction) are under way or even contemplated. Meanwhile, as growth-based institutions are temporarily propped up, the ultimate scale of the damage is likely only to increase: when the inevitable collapse of those institutions does come, the consequences will likely be even worse because so much capital will have been squandered in attempting to salvage them.   In using up non-renewable resources like metals, minerals, and fossil fuels, we have stolen from future generations. Now in effect we are stealing from those generations the financial wherewithal that could have been used to build a bridge to a sustainable economy. The construction of a renewable energy infrastructure (including not only generating capacity, but distribution and storage systems, as well as post-petroleum transport and agriculture systems) will require enormous investments and decades of work. Where will the investment capital come from if governments are already buried in debt? If we have committed nearly $24 trillion to propping up an old economy with no real survival prospects, what’s left with which to finance the new one?   If the current prescription for our economic malady is wrong-headed, the same is true of many proposed cures for our energy problems. According to the Conventional Diagnosis, today’s high oil prices are due to speculation; the cure must therefore lie in the tighter regulation of oil futures trading (which may be a good idea, though it doesn’t get to the heart of the problem), while providing more opportunities to oil companies to explore for U.S. domestic oil (even though the likely production rates from currently off-limits reserves would be relatively paltry, and would have a negligible effect on oil prices). In fact, though, investing further in fossil fuel energy systems (including “clean coal” technology) will yield declining returns, given that the highest quality resources have already been used up; meanwhile, doing so takes investment capital away from the development of renewable energy, which we will have to rely on increasingly as fossil fuels deplete. (26)   What is required but is still utterly lacking is a fundamental recognition that circumstances have changed: what worked decades ago will not work now.   What To Do: Adapt to the New Reality   If the Alternative Diagnosis is correct, there will be no easy fix for the current economic breakdown. Some illnesses are not curable; they require that we simply adapt and make the best of our new situation.   If humanity has indeed embarked upon the contraction phase of the industrial pulse, we should assume that ahead of us lie much lower average income levels (for nearly everyone in the wealthy nations, and for high wage earners in poorer nations); different employment opportunities (fewer jobs in sales, marketing, and finance; more in basic production); and more costly energy, transport, and food. Further, we should assume that key aspects of our economic system that are inextricably tied to the need for future growth will cease to work in this new context.   What can we do to adapt most rapidly and successfully?   Rather than attempting to prop up banks and insurance companies with trillions in bailouts, it would probably be better simply to let them fail, however nasty the short-term consequences, since they will fail anyway sooner or later. The sooner they are replaced with institutions that serve essential functions within a contracting economy, the better off we all will be. (27)   Meanwhile the thought-leaders in society, especially the President, must begin breaking the news—in understandable and measured ways—that growth isn’t returning and that the world has entered a new and unprecedented economic phase, but that we can all survive and thrive in this challenging transitional period if we apply ourselves and work together. At the heart of this general re-education must be a public and institutional acknowledgment of three basic rules of sustainability: growth in population cannot be sustained; the ongoing extraction of non-renewable resources cannot be sustained; and the use of renewable resources is sustainable only if it proceeds at rates below those of natural replenishment.   Without cheap energy, global trade cannot increase. This doesn’t mean that trade will disappear, only that economic incentives will inexorably shift as transport costs rise, favoring local production for local consumption. But this may be a nice way of putting it: if and when fuel shortages arise, fragile globe-spanning systems of provisioning could be disrupted, with dire effects for consumers cut off from sources of necessary products. Thus a high priority must be placed on the building of community resilience through the preferential local sourcing of necessities and the maintenance of larger regional inventories—especially of food and fuel. (28) It currently takes an average of 8.5 calories of energy from oil and natural gas to produce each calorie of food energy in industrial food systems. Without cheap fuel for agriculture, farm production will plummet and farmers will go bankrupt—unless proactive efforts are undertaken to reform agriculture to reduce its reliance on fossil fuels. (29)   Obviously, alternative energy sources and energy efficiency strategies must be high priorities, and must be subjects of intensive research using a carefully chosen spectrum of criteria. The best candidates will have to be funded robustly even while fossil fuels are still relatively cheap: the build-out time for the renewable energy infrastructure will inevitably be measured in decades and so we must begin the process now rather than waiting for market forces to lead the way.   In the face of credit and (potential) currency crises, new ways of financing such projects will be needed. Given that our current monetary and financial systems are founded on the need for growth, we will require new ways of creating money and new ways of issuing credit. Considerable thought has gone into finding solutions to this problem, and some communities are already experimenting with local capital co-ops, alternative currencies, and no-interest banks. (30)   With oil becoming increasingly expensive in real terms, we will need more efficient ways of getting people and goods around. Our first priority in this regard must be to reduce the need for transport with better urban planning and re-localized production systems. But where transport is needed, rail and light rail will probably be preferable to cars and trucks. (31)   We will also need a revolution in the built environment to minimize the requirement for heating, cooling, and artificial lighting in all our homes and public buildings. This revolution is already under way, but is currently moving far too slowly due to the inertia of established interests in the construction industry. (32)   These projects will need more than local credit and money; they will also require skilled workers. There will be a call not just for installers of solar panels and home insulation: millions of new food producers and builders of low-energy infrastructure will be needed as well. A broad range of new opportunities could open up to replace vanishing jobs in marketing and finance—if there is cheap training available at local community colleges.   It is worth noting that the $23.7 trillion recently committed for U.S. bailouts and loan guarantees represents about $80,000 for each man, woman, and child in America. A level of investment even a substantial fraction that size could pay for all needed job training while ensuring universal provision of basic necessities during the transition. What would we be getting for our money? A collective sense that, in a time of crisis, no one is being left behind. Without the feeling of cooperative buy-in that such a safety net would help engender, similar to what was achieved with the New Deal but on an even larger scale, economic contraction could devolve into a horrific fight over the scraps of the waning industrial period.   However contentious, the population question must be addressed. All problems that have to do with resources are harder to solve when there are more people needing those resources. The U.S. must encourage smaller families and must establish an immigration policy consistent with a no-growth population target. This has foreign policy implications: we must help other nations succeed with their own economic transitions so that their citizens do not have to emigrate to survive. (33)   If economic growth ceases to be an achievable goal, society will have to find better ways of measuring success. Economists must shift from assessing well-being with the blunt instrument of GDP, and begin paying more attention to indices of human and social capital in areas such as education, health, and cultural achievements. This redefinition of growth and progress has already begun in some quarters, but for the most part has yet to be taken up by governments. (34)   A case can be made that after all this is done the end result will be a more satisfying way of life for the vast majority of citizens—offering more of a sense of community, more of a connection with the natural world, more satisfying work, and a healthier environment. Studies have repeatedly shown that higher levels of consumption do not translate to elevated levels of satisfaction with life. (35) This means that if “progress” can be thought of in terms of happiness, rather than a constantly accelerating process of extracting raw materials and turning them into products that themselves quickly become waste, then progress can certainly continue. In any case, “selling” this enormous and unprecedented project to the general public will require emphasizing its benefits. Several organizations are already exploring the messaging and public relations aspects of the transition. (36) But those in charge need to understand that looking on the bright side doesn’t mean promising what can’t be delivered—such as a return to the days of growth and thoughtless consumption.   Can We? Will We?   It is important to state the implications of all this as plainly as possible. If the Alternative Diagnosis is correct, there will be no full economic “recovery”—not this year, or the next, or five or ten years from now. There may be temporary rebounds that take us back to some fraction of peak economic activity, but these will be only brief respites.   We have entered a new economic era in which the former rules no longer apply. Low interest rates and government spending no longer translate to incentives for borrowing and job production. Cheap energy won’t appear just because there is demand for it. Substitutes for essential resources will in most cases not be found. Over all, the economy will continue to shrink in fits and starts until it can be maintained by the energy and material resources that Earth can supply on an ongoing basis.   This is of course very difficult news. It is analogous to being told by your physician that you have contracted a systemic, potentially fatal disease that cannot be cured, but only managed; and managing it means you must make profound lifestyle changes.   Some readers may note that climate change has not figured prominently in this discussion. It is clearly, after all, the worst environmental catastrophe in human history. Indeed, its consequences could be far worse than the mere destruction of national economies: hundreds of millions of people and millions of other species could be imperiled. The reason for the relatively limited discussion of climate here is that (assuming the Alternative Diagnosis is correct) it is not climate change that has proven to be the most immediate limit to economic growth, but resource depletion. However, while there is not as yet general agreement on the point, climate change itself, and the needed steps to minimize it, both constitute limits to growth, just as resource depletion does. Moreover, if we fail successfully to manage the inevitable process of economic contraction that will characterize the coming decades, there will be no hope of mounting an organized and coherent response to climate change—a response consisting of efforts both to reduce climate impacts and to adapt to them. It is important to note, though, that the measures advocated here (including the development of renewable energy sources and energy efficiency, a rapid reduction of reliance on fossil fuels in transport and agriculture, and the stabilization of population levels) are among the steps that will help most to reduce carbon emissions.   Is this essay likely to change the thinking and actions of policy makers? Unfortunately, that is unlikely. Their belief in the possibility and necessity of continued growth is pervasive, and the notion that growth may no longer be possible is unthinkable. But the Alternative Diagnosis must be a matter of record. This essay, composed by a mere journalist, in many ways represents the thinking of thousands of physical scientists working over the past several decades on issues having to do with population, resources, pollution, and biodiversity. Ignoring the diagnosis itself—whether as articulated here or as implied in thousands of scientific papers—may waste our last chance to avert a complete collapse, not just of the economy, but of civility and organized human existence. It may risk a historic discontinuity with qualitative antecedents in the fall of the Roman and Mayan civilizations. (37) But there is no true precedent for what may be in store, because those earlier examples of collapse affected geographically bounded societies whose influence on their environments was also bounded. Today’s civilization is global, and its fate, Earth’s fate, and humanity’s fate are inextricably tied.   But even if policy makers continue to ignore warnings such as this, individuals and communities can take heed and begin the process of building resilience, and of detaching themselves from reliance on fossil fuels and institutions that are inextricably tied to the perpetual growth machine. We cannot sit passively by as world leaders squander opportunities to awaken and adapt to growth limits. We can make changes in our own lives, and we can join with our neighbors. We can let policy makers know we disapprove of their allegiance to the status quo, and that there are other options.   Is it too late to begin a managed transition to a post-fossil fuel society? Perhaps. But we will not know unless we try. And if we are to make that effort, we must begin by acknowledging one simple, stark reality: growth as we have known it can no longer be our goal. That party is over.   Notes   1. “Pain on the Road to Recovery” (http://www.smh.com.au/national/pain-on-the-road-to-recovery-20090724-dw6q.html?page=-1). 2. Here, for example, are a few relevant excerpts from the present author’s book The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2003): “Our current financial system was designed during a period of consistent growth in available energy, with its designers operating under the assumption that continued economic growth was both inevitable and desirable. This ideology of growth has become embodied in systemic financial structures requiring growth…. Until now, this loose linkage between a financial system predicated upon the perpetual growth of the money supply, and an economy growing year by year because of an increasing availability of energy and other resources, has worked reasonably well—with a few notable exceptions, such as the Great Depression…. However, [when global oil production peaks] the financial system may not respond so rationally…. This might predictably trigger a financial crisis….” 3. See Albert Bartlett, “Arithmetic, Population and Energy” (lecture transcript), (http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/transcripts/645). 4. Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, Limits to Growth (New York: Universe Books, 1972); Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, Beyond the Limits (Post Mills, VT: Chelsea Green, 1992); Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, and Jorgen Randers, Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green, 2003). See also the recent CSIRO study, “A Comparison of the Limits to Growth with Thirty Years of Reality” (2009) (www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf). 5. See, for example, Robert U. Ayers and Benjamin Warr, The Economic Growth Engine: How Energy and Work Drive Material Prosperity (Cambridge, UK: Edward Elgar Publishing, 2005); and Robert Barro and Xavier Sala-i-Martin, Economic Growth (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003) (http://www.bookrags.com/research/economic-growth-and-energy-consumpt-mee-01/). 6. See Richard Heinberg, The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (2003, 2005); Powerdown: Options and Actions for a PostCarbon World (2004); and The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism, and Economic Collapse (2006); as well as books by Kenneth Deffeyes, Colin Campbell, and Matthew Simmons; and websites www.theoildrum.com and www.energybulletin.net. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil organizes international conferences to study issues related to oil and gas depletion (www.peakoil.net and www.aspo-usa.com), and the U.S. chapter of ASPO publishes a weekly survey of relevant news, “Peak Oil Review,” compiled by former CIA analyst Tom Whipple. At the annual Association for the Study of Peak Oil conference in Cork, Ireland, in September 2007, former U.S. Energy Secretary, James Schlesinger, said: “Conceptually the battle is over. The peakists have won. We’re all peakists now.” See also Steve Connor, “Warning: Oil supplies are running out fast,” The Independent, August 3, 2009 (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/warning-oil-supplies-are-running-out-fast-1766585.html). 7. The declining rate of discovery of new oilfields, and the list of past-peak oil producing countries, are widely documented; e.g.: Roger D. Blanchard, The Future of Global Oil Production: Facts, Figures, Trends and Projections by Region (Jefferson, NC: McFarlane and Co., 2005). 8. A May 4, 2009 report from Raymond James Associates (“Stat of the Week”) argued that world oil production peaked in July 2008 (http://blogs.wsj.com/environmentalcapital/2009/05/04/peak-oil-global-oil-productions-peaked-analyst-says/). In a subsequent interview, Marshall Adkins, author of the report, suggested that most knowledgeable players within the petroleum industry now accept the Peak Oil thesis in some form, whether or not they acknowledge it publicly (www.aspousa.org/index.php/2009/07/interview-with-marshall-adkins/). 9. Brookings Papers on Economic Activity, March 2009. 10. See Joe Cortright, “Driven to the Brink: How the Gas Price Spike Popped the Housing Bubble and Devalued the Suburbs,” Discussion paper, CEOs for Cities, 2008 (http://www.ceosforcities.org).  11. U.S. Government Accountability Office, “Commercial Aviation: Airline Industry Contraction Due to Volatile Fuel Prices and Falling Demand Affects Airports, Passengers, and Federal Government Revenues ,” April 21, 2009 (www.gao.gov/products/GAO-09-393). For a detailed discussion of the likely future impacts of high oil prices and oil shortages on the airline industry, see Charles Schlumberger, “The Oil Price Spike of 2008: The Result of Speculation or an Early Indicator of a Major and Growing Future Challenge to the Airline Industry?” Annals of Air and Space Law, Vol. XXXIV, [2009], McGill University (http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/the_oil_price_spike_of_2008). 12. American Trucking Association (www.truckline.com/Pages/Home.aspx). 13. This scenario is implied in Robert L. Hirsch, Roger Bezdek, and Robert Wendling, “Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigatin and Risk Management” (U.S. Department of Energy: 2005): “As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically….” (http://www.netl.doe.gov/publications/others/pdf/Oil_Peaking_NETL.pdf). 14. See, for example, “Troubling Signs That Oil Prices Could Hamper Recovery,” Wall Street 24/7, May 8, 2009 (http://247wallst.com/2009/05/08/troubling-signs-that-oil-prices-could-hamper-recovery/)  15. See, for example, James Herron, “Low Oil Prices, Credit Woes Could Spell Trouble for UK North Sea,” Rigzone, November 14, 2008 (www.rigzone.com/news/article.asp?a_id=69507). 16. Jad Mouawad, “Big Oil Projects Put in Jeopardy by Fall in Prices,” New York Times, December 15, 2008 (www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/business/16oil.html) 17. See David R. Baker, “Low oil prices take wind out of renewable fuels,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 27, 2008 (www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/10/26/MNSK13NNK4.DTL). 18. See Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Santa Rosa, CA: Post Carbon Institute and International Forum on Globalization, 2009 (http://www.postcarbon.org/report/44377-searching-for-a-miracle) . 19. This conclusion is echoed in, for example, Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain a Consumer Society (Dordrecht, The Netherlands: Springer, 2007); and (with some reservations), David J. C. McKay, Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air (Cambridge, UK: UIK Cambridge, 2008), (www.withouthotair.com). 20. Just one example, from a press release April 20, 1998 describing the results of a poll commissioned by the American Museum of Natural History: “The American Museum of Natural History announced today results of a nationwide survey titled Biodiversity in the Next Millennium, developed by the Museum in conjunction with Louis Harris and Associates, Inc. The survey reveals that seven out of ten biologists believe that we are in the midst of a mass extinction of living things, and that this loss of species will pose a major threat to human existence in the next century.” 21. Charles A. S. Hall and Kent A. Klitgaard, “The Need for a New, Bioplysical-Based Paradigm in Economics for the Second Half of the Age of Oil,” International Journal of Transdisciplinary Research, Vo. 1, NO. 1 (2006); Charles A. S. Hall, D. Lindenberger, R. Kummell, T. Kroeger and W. Eichorn, “The Need to Reintegrate the Natural Sciences with Economics.” Bioscience 51:663-673, 2001. 22. Cutler J. Cleveland, “Biophysical Economics,” The Encyclopedia of Earth (www.eoearth.org/article/Biophysical_economics). See also the related field of Ecological Economics, especially the books of Herman Daly, including Toward a Steady State Economy (New York: Freeman, 1973); and, with Joshua Farley, Ecological Economics: Principles and Applications (Washington: Island Press, 2004). 23. The quotation marks around the Nobel name are justified because the Nobel family has never acknowledged economics as a science: the so-called “Nobel prize in economics” is awarded by a Swedish Bank. 24. See The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (www.millenniumassessment.org/en/index.aspx). 25. See, for example, “John Williams: Times that Try Our Souls,” August 5, 2010 (http://www.theenergyreport.com/cs/user/print/na/7005). 26. See Richard Heinberg, Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis (Gabiola Island, BC: New Society, 2009), pages 137-143, 145-168. 27. The opinion that banks and insurance companies should be allowed to fail rather than being bailed out was voiced by many knowledgeable observers throughout late 2008 and early 2009. See for example Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, “Let banks fail, says Nobel economist Joseph Stiglitz,” London Daily Telegraph, Feb. 2, 2009 (www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/banksandfinance/4424418/Let-banks-fail-says-Nobel-economist-Joseph-Stiglitz.html). 28. See Jeff Rubin, Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization. (New York: Random House, 2009). 29. See Richard Heinberg and Michael Bomford, “The Food and Farming Transition” (Sebastopol, CA: Post Carbon Institute, 2009), (http://postcarbon.org/food). 30. See Bernard Lietaer, “White Paper on All the Options for Managing a Systemic Bank Crisis” (www.lietaer.com/images/White_Paper_on_Systemic_Banking_Crises_final.pdf). JAK in Sweden is a cooperative, member-owned bank that operates without interest (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JAK_members_bank). 31. See Richard Gilbert and Anthony Perl, Transport Revolutions: Moving People and Freight Without Oil (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2009). 32. The Passivhaus Institute pioneers construction methods that reduce energy input to buildings in many cases to zero (www.passivehouse.us). Roughly 20,000 Passivhauses have been built in Europe, only about 12 in the U.S. 33. See websites of Population Media Center (www.populationmedia.org/issues/), and SUSPS (www.susps.org/overview/immigration.html). 34. The organization Redefining Progress has developed a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI) that incorporates many such indices (www.rprogress.org/sustainability_indicators/genuine_progress_indicator.htm). 35. See, for example, “Understanding Human Happiness and Well-Being,” The Sustainable Scale Project. 36. The burgeoning Transition Town movement (www.transitiontowns.org) proceeds from the premise that “life can be better without fossil fuels.” YES! Magazine (www.yesmagazine.org) is a publication of the Positive Futures Network and highlights examples of low-impact ways of living that bring personal and social benefits. And the Simple Living Network (www.simpleliving.net) provides “resources, tools, examples and contacts for conscious, simple, healthy and restorative living.” 37. See Jared Diamond, Collapse How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (New York: Viking, 2005);Joseph Tainter, The Collapse of Complex Societies (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1988); and John Michael Greer, The Long Descent (Gabriola Island, BC: New Society, 2008).   Richard Heinberg is a Senior Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and author of five books on resource depletion and societal responses to the energy problem. www.richardheinberg.com, www.postcarbon.org. 

 

By Tom Whipple, posted Aug 10, 2010:

Every year the National Conference of State Legislators (NCSL) holds an annual conference where legislators from all over the US gather for updates on major public policy issues facing the nation. This year the organization found that issues surrounding our country’s future energy supply were becoming of such paramount importance to state governments that it set up a task force to study the issues; produced a report on meeting the energy challenges; and devoted a whole day prior to the annual meeting to an “Energy Policy Summit” where some 15 speakers gave presentations on various aspects of energy.

Now America’s 50 state governments represent a wide spread of interests and concerns. Some such as Alaska and Louisiana are deeply involved in some aspects of oil production. Others such as Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Kentucky, Illinois, and Wyoming are large coal producers. Still others are home to increasingly controversial shale gas production. The mid-west is fertile ground for wind farms, the southwest - solar collectors. A few produce little or no energy at all.   Some states have large numbers of citizens who are deeply concerned about the threat of global warming and believe it must be stopped, even if at substantial cost. In others, the majority of people, however, seem to be far more concerned about their economic well-being and are convinced that global warming is a fantasy dreamed up by liberal environmentalists.   Sorting a pathway through this thicket of special interests and concerns to reach a consensus for action on energy is not an easy task. The common ground shared by all is electricity. All states generate, distribute, use and regulate it. They are all connected to neighboring states through power pools. If they have neighbors to the east, then any emissions they produce become a regional problem. Much of America’s electrical production and distribution infrastructure is aging and is due for replacement. The possibility of federal emissions standards has the utility industry tied in knots as the most cost-effective way of producing electricity is becoming murky. Nuclear plants are becoming incredibly expensive as are the cleaner ways to burn coal and control emissions. The best wind and solar resources are not where most consumers live. The litany of complexities runs on and on.   In a general sense, the Conference did a good job in reviewing the pros and cons, costs and emissions, and geography of the various forms of electricity generation that are currently available. The obvious conclusion is that the approach will be different in each state. To its credit, the task force studying energy latched on to energy efficiency as a source of major savings that is common to all states. The studies show that nearly 25 percent of US energy demand could be met with energy efficiency by 2020, resulting in savings of over $1 trillion. While difficult to achieve, increasing efficiency is the most cost-effective way to gain increased capacity while foregoing construction of as many new plants as would be otherwise required.   State policy can play a pivotal role in increasing energy efficiency and reducing consumer and business costs. Such policies can include stronger energy codes, requiring utilities to meetannual energy efficiency targets, and the most important: decoupling utility profits from electricity sales. To many speakers, the latter policy is the most important because electric companies should be rewarded for how efficiently whatever resource is consumed to generate electricity and produce utility for consumers, not how much is sold. What the conference’s task force, report and speakers presented and considered was well done and provided useful information and insights. However, a key unstated issue was left untouched: that is the 800- or perhaps 8000-pound gorilla standing on the fringes of the energy world that was completely ignored - resource depletion.   The Energy Summit started with a briefing by a presenter from EIA on their current reference case - the one that foresees no shortages and cheap energy prices for the next 25 years. While the EIA does see current sources of oil depleting, they claim sufficient new supplies will be discovered and produced so that, when coupled with more efficient cars, oil prices will not reach $130 a barrel until 2035.   Anyone not familiar with the research, discussions, and controversies over imminent shortages of natural resources would come away with the impression that all is fine. According to the EIA, oil will not be a problem for at least the next 25 years; the US has 140 years of coal left; thanks to the hydraulic fracking of shale, we now have 100 years of natural gas; and to top it all, we have 25 percent of world’s uranium reserves.   For those of us following the peak oil story and who are also familiar with the possibility that readily producible supplies of coal, natural gas, and uranium may in reality be only a fraction of those cited by the NCSL study, something of overwhelming importance is missing. With world oil production on a plateau for the last five years and no obvious source of large quantities of new production in sight; with rapidly increasing oil consumption in Asia and domestic consumption growing within the oil exporting nations; and with increasing problems that may limit and inhibit deep water production, it is difficult to see how any serious study of future energy policy can avoid the probability, not just the possibility, of imminent energy shortages.   Expecting that the NCSL would take on and attempt to explicate an upheaval of the magnitude that will very likely be caused by resource depletion is simply asking too much. The NCSL is a political body made up of elected politicians who represent every stripe of America’s body politic today. They seek to compromise by recognizing that their members have been elected by and represent the entire spectrum of electable political thought in the US and that all must be accommodated. Strident climate change deniers have just as much right to their beliefs as strident environmentalists. The millions whose livings depend on mining coal, drilling offshore oil wells, or building gas-guzzlers are not going to melt away on a forecast, no matter how soundly based, of catastrophes such as runaway climate change or oil shortages ahead.   Did the NCSL task force, report, and policy summit say the right things? Of course! Maintaining adequate and affordable electricity supplies will be an important function of state government in coming years no matter what the pace of resource depletion or climate change. Is energy efficiency the quickest and most cost effective way to start protecting and enhancing our electricity supplies? Again the answer is a whole-hearted yes. To move beyond these simple and understandable issues detracts from what is a practical goal.   For the NCSL to sound the alarm about the imminence of economy-threatening oil price spikes without unambiguous evidence that is clear to everyone would set off a storm of controversy in advance of its time. Such controversy would detract from their well-meaning efforts to get important policies into place. Apparently they believe it is better to let peak oil come of its own accord, unannounced and in its own time - which will be soon enough.   Tom Whipple, in addition to editing this publication, recently attended the recent NCSL Legislative Summit in Louisville, KY in the company of his wife, a member of the Virginia State Senate.   Originally published August 9, 2010 at ASPO-USA.

By Warren Karlenzig, posted Aug 9, 2010:

Urban sustainability is the challenge of the century as more of the world's population becomes urbanized (50 percent in 2008, 60 percent by 2030), at an ever-faster rate. Global climate change has been caused in large part by the burning of fossil fuels to generate energy, materials and food for metro areas. Yet urban culture also constitutes a powerful response capability by which to cope with the diminishing socio-economic options forced by climate change, especially in megacities, metro areas of more than 10 million people.

Upon this tableau, I am collaborating with the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, in conjunction with other UN agencies (United Nations Environment Program, UN Development Program, UN Habitat and UN Center for Regional Development) and the Shanghai World Expo Bureau on a sourcebook for sustainable urban management in developing nation megacities.

The sourcebook will consider sustainability advantages to urbanization along with disadvantages. It will cover broad topics including greening the urban economy, effective management, as well as solution sectors (land use and planning, water, buildings, transportation, information and communications technologies). Case studies will be provided to illustrate how solutions have already overcome a host of urgent challenges, or how they may soon be able to help do so.

With the acute rise of urbanization in developing nations, megacities will increase in both number and economic-environmental influence. As of late 2010, there were between 12 and 15 developing nation megacities (cities of 10 million population in their metropolitan areas), with 19 developing nation cities in total expected to reach megacity status by 2025.

During the next ten years, according to the McKinsey Global Institute (pdf), 90 percent of urban population growth will take place in developing countries. In India, for example, cities are forecast to garner 85 percent or the nation's total tax revenue (up from current level of 80 percent), which will be the primary source for financing economic development on a national scale. Seventy percent of all new jobs will be created in the cities of India by 2030, though cities are expected by that date to represent only 40 percent of the nation's total population.

In terms of impacting climate change, consider that the cities of Asia alone are expected to contribute more than half the global greenhouse gas emissions between now and 2027.

Besides the threats and risks that megacity growth poses to global humanity and regional resources, trends in developing nation megacities will also strongly define emerging economic opportunities for large-scale low-carbon and resource-efficient technologies, services and strategic approaches. Whether in Delhi or Mexico City, megacities are devising more effective methods of integrated sustainability management using everything from social networks and crowdsourcing, to paticipatory budgeting and comprehensive green planning.

Cities are the most powerful economic engines in the world for advances in information and communications technologies, health care, education and energy systems. These combined capacities have provided urban areas with anywhere from 55 percent (developing nations) to 85 percent (developed nations) of total national income, significantly surpassing per-capita income averages, and trending even more upward during the next two decades of hyper-urban growth.

Megacities and urbanization, in other words, should be the cause for global concern that needs to be tempered with concerted strategy, actions and ultimately, hope for humanity.

The complete United Nations study is expected to be released on 1 May 2011, the first anniversary of the opening of the 2010 Shanghai World Expo-which has a theme of "Better city, Better life."

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active consultancy based in San Anselmo, California. He is a Fellow at the Post-Carbon Institute and author of How Green is Your City?: The SustainLane US City Rankings.

Originally published August 9, 2010 on the Green Flow blog of Common Currents.

By Tom Whipple, posted Aug 5, 2010:

With BP's oil well close to being permanently sealed, we are beginning to gain more insight into the effects the blowout will have on oil production in the years ahead.

Government scientists are now saying that the leaking well started out spewing some 62,000 barrels a day (b/d) of oil soon after the explosion but that number fell to about 53,000 b/d just before the well was capped 87 days later. This tells us that not only were some five million barrels of oil released into the Gulf, but gives some credit to the concerns of those who believe that deepwater wells will only produce some 10 to 20 percent of the hoped-for lifetime production. I have no idea what a normal rate of decline for a deepwater well should be, but a 14 percent drop after just three months "production" would have left the well spewing only some 20,000 b/d after a year, were it not stopped first.

As U.S. law requires that BP pay a fine of $1,100 for each barrel spilled if there was no negligence and $4,300 a barrel if the government finds BP grossly negligent. This means that BP could have to pay a fine of anywhere from $5.4 billion to $21 billion depending on how negotiations with the government go. Needless to say fines of this size would do bad things to BP's future. Most believe the fine will be negotiated down to a level that will keep the company afloat. BP has already announced that it is setting aside $32 billion to pay for the spill and is busy selling off assets around the world to pay for its liabilities. By selling assets rather than paying for the spill from earnings, BP retains the hope that it can continue to pay dividends, thus keeping thousands of pension funds solvent.

BP's troubles do not stop with money, however, for the U.S. House of Representatives has already passed a bill to ban bad, oil-spilling, companies from continuing to drill in U.S. waters. Passage of similar legislation by the Senate is seen as unlikely, so BP may be safe for a while.

BP of course is not alone in liability for the oil spill. Mitsui and Andarko that owned shares in the run-away well, and Transocean that owned the ill-fated drilling rig, are saying the whole affair is BP's fault and are refusing to pay for the cleanup. All this will be litigated for many years - or decades.

The impact of Deepwater Horizon goes well beyond the fate of BP, as a highly controversial Obama administration ban on deepwater drilling in US waters has been in place since right after the explosion and is due to continue until November. Not only is this drilling ban costing the oil industry billions of dollars, it is inflicting severe damage to economies of the Gulf Coast states where it has left thousands unemployed. Pressures to rescind or modify the ban are building and some change is likely before November. In the meantime some Gulf oil production will be lost in the second half of this year and at least through 2011 due to delays in the completion of wells.

No matter how the arguments over the deepwater drilling bans come out, it is almost certain that major and costly changes will be made in the U.S. regulations governing offshore drilling.

Earlier this week, the new head of the U.S.'s offshore-drilling oversight agency vowed to undertake "aggressive investigations of oil and gas companies." The upshot of all this is that the offshore-drilling is going to be much more strictly regulated than before which means slowdowns in exploratory drilling and likely much higher costs for the industry. Legislation making its way through Congress would require offshore drilling rigs to use much more elaborate and redundant blowout preventers that would not be compatible with existing drilling rigs. Currently only half the rigs working in the Gulf have modern blowout preventers. Some of the older drilling rigs would have to be replaced to accommodate the new safety devices. While the oil companies can handle the expenses involved, sorting all this out will take time and could delay the return of Gulf drilling activity to levels seen before the explosion for quite some time.

In the Gulf of Mexico, there is so much drilling activity that help is readily at hand to cope with an emergency. If industry plans to maintain a set of standby equipment to deal with a future Deepwater Horizon type blowout come to fruition, then any future blowouts in the Gulf could in theory be contained in days rather than months. More remote drilling sites are another story. In the U.S., Canadian, and European Arctic, help is likely to be a long-time in coming. The U.S. and Canada already have a hold on most Arctic drilling and the EU is talking about following suit.

If stringent and expensive rules are eventually promulgated for drilling in U.S., Canadian, and EU waters, there will be pressure to take the same measures in other areas, particularly off the coasts of Africa and Brazil. Should the global offshore drilling industry eventually become subject to the new and stricter rules and procedures mandated by the U.S. government, costs are likely to increase and there will be delays in bringing in future offshore production.

From the perspective of peak oil production all this suggests that in a few years global oil production is almost certain to fall faster than if the Deepwater disaster had never taken place. While it is too early to quantify just how much slower, more costly offshore drilling will contribute to pace of the decline, the quantities of oil that will not be produced in the next decade are likely to be significant.

Originally published August 4, 2010 at Falls Church News-Press

Photo credit: Brennan Cavanaugh/flickr

By Bill McKibben, posted Aug 4, 2010:

Try to fit these facts together:

• According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the planet has just come through the warmest decade, the warmest 12 months, the warmest six months, and the warmest April, May, and June on record. 

• A “staggering” new study from Canadian researchers has shown that warmer seawater has reduced phytoplankton, the base of the marine food chain, by 40% since 1950.

• Nine nations have so far set their all-time temperature records in 2010, including Russia (111 degrees), Niger (118), Sudan (121), Saudi Arabia and Iraq (126 apiece), and Pakistan, which also set the new all-time Asia record in May: a hair under 130 degrees. I can turn my oven to 130 degrees.

• And then, in late July, the U.S. Senate decided to do exactly nothing about climate change. They didn’t do less than they could have -- they did nothing, preserving a perfect two-decade bipartisan record of no action. Senate majority leader Harry Reid decided not even to schedule a vote on legislation that would have capped carbon emissions.

I wrote the first book for a general audience on global warming back in 1989, and I’ve spent the subsequent 21 years working on the issue. I’m a mild-mannered guy, a Methodist Sunday School teacher. Not quick to anger. So what I want to say is: this is fucked up. The time has come to get mad, and then to get busy.

For many years, the lobbying fight for climate legislation on Capitol Hill has been led by a collection of the most corporate and moderate environmental groups, outfits like the Environmental Defense Fund. We owe them a great debt, and not just for their hard work. We owe them a debt because they did everything the way you’re supposed to: they wore nice clothes, lobbied tirelessly, and compromised at every turn.

By the time they were done, they had a bill that only capped carbon emissions from electric utilities (not factories or cars) and was so laden with gifts for industry that if you listened closely you could actually hear the oinking. They bent over backwards like Soviet gymnasts.  Senator John Kerry, the legislator they worked most closely with, issued this rallying cry as the final negotiations began: "We believe we have compromised significantly, and we're prepared to compromise further.”

And even that was not enough.  They were left out to dry by everyone -- not just Reid, not just the Republicans. Even President Obama wouldn’t lend a hand, investing not a penny of his political capital in the fight.

The result: total defeat, no moral victories.

Now What?

So now we know what we didn’t before: making nice doesn’t work. It was worth a try, and I’m completely serious when I say I’m grateful they made the effort, but it didn’t even come close to working. So we better try something else.

Step one involves actually talking about global warming.  For years now, the accepted wisdom in the best green circles was: talk about anything else -- energy independence, oil security, beating the Chinese to renewable technology. I was at a session convened by the White House early in the Obama administration where some polling guru solemnly explained that “green jobs” polled better than “cutting carbon.”

No, really?  In the end, though, all these focus-group favorites are secondary.  The task at hand is keeping the planet from melting. We need everyone -- beginning with the president -- to start explaining that basic fact at every turn.

It is the heat, and also the humidity.  Since warm air holds more water than cold, the atmosphere is about 5% moister than it was 40 years ago, which explains the freak downpours that seem to happen someplace on this continent every few days.

It is the carbon -- that’s why the seas are turning acid, a point Obama could have made with ease while standing on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico. “It’s bad that it’s black out there,” he might have said, “but even if that oil had made it safely ashore and been burned in our cars, it would still be wrecking the oceans.” Energy independence is nice, but you need a planet to be energy independent on.

Mysteriously enough, this seems to be a particularly hard point for smart people to grasp. Even in the wake of the disastrous Senate non-vote, the Nature Conservancy’s climate expert told New York Times columnist Tom Friedman, “We have to take climate change out of the atmosphere, bring it down to earth, and show how it matters in people’s everyday lives.” Translation: ordinary average people can’t possibly recognize the real stakes here, so let’s put it in language they can understand, which is about their most immediate interests. It’s both untrue, as I’ll show below, and incredibly patronizing. It is, however, exactly what we’ve been doing for a decade and clearly, It Does Not Work.

Step two, we have to ask for what we actually need, not what we calculate we might possibly be able to get. If we’re going to slow global warming in the very short time available to us, then we don’t actually need an incredibly complicated legislative scheme that gives door prizes to every interested industry and turns the whole operation over to Goldman Sachs to run.  We need a stiff price on carbon, set by the scientific understanding that we can’t still be burning black rocks a couple of decades hence. That undoubtedly means upending the future business plans of Exxon and BP, Peabody Coal and Duke Energy, not to speak of everyone else who’s made a fortune by treating the atmosphere as an open sewer for the byproducts of their main business.

Instead they should pay through the nose for that sewer, and here’s the crucial thing: most of the money raised in the process should be returned directly to American pockets. The monthly check sent to Americans would help fortify us against the rise in energy costs, and we’d still be getting the price signal at the pump to stop driving that SUV and start insulating the house. We also need to make real federal investments in energy research and development, to help drive down the price of alternatives -- the Breakthrough Institute points out, quite rightly, that we’re crazy to spend more of our tax dollars on research into new drone aircraft and Mars orbiters than we do on photovoltaics.

Yes, these things are politically hard, but they’re not impossible. A politician who really cared could certainly use, say, the platform offered by the White House to sell a plan that taxed BP and actually gave the money to ordinary Americans. (So far they haven’t even used the platform offered by the White House to reinstall the rooftop solar panels that Jimmy Carter put there in the 1970s and Ronald Reagan took down in his term.)

Asking for what you need doesn’t mean you’ll get all of it.  Compromise still happens. But as David Brower, the greatest environmentalist of the late twentieth century, explained amid the fight to save the Grand Canyon: “We are to hold fast to what we believe is right, fight for it, and find allies and adduce all possible arguments for our cause. If we cannot find enough vigor in us or them to win, then let someone else propose the compromise. We thereupon work hard to coax it our way. We become a nucleus around which the strongest force can build and function.”

Which leads to the third step in this process. If we’re going to get any of this done, we’re going to need a movement, the one thing we haven’t had. For 20 years environmentalists have operated on the notion that we’d get action if we simply had scientists explain to politicians and CEOs that our current ways were ending the Holocene, the current geological epoch. That turns out, quite conclusively, not to work. We need to be able to explain that their current ways will end something they actually care about, i.e. their careers. And since we’ll never have the cash to compete with Exxon, we better work in the currencies we can muster: bodies, spirit, passion.

Movement Time

As Tom Friedman put it in a strong column the day after the Senate punt, the problem was that the public “never got mobilized.” Is it possible to get people out in the streets demanding action about climate change? Last year, with almost no money, our scruffy little outfit, 350.org, managed to organize what Foreign Policy called  the “largest ever coordinated global rally of any kind” on any issue -- 5,200 demonstrations in 181 countries, 2,000 of them in the U.S.A.

People were rallying not just about climate change, but around a remarkably wonky scientific data point, 350 parts per million carbon dioxide, which NASA’s James Hansen and his colleagues have demonstrated is the most we can have in the atmosphere if we want a planet “similar to the one on which civilization developed and to which life on earth is adapted.” Which, come to think of it, we do. And the “we,” in this case, was not rich white folks. If you look at the 25,000 pictures in our Flickr account, you’ll see that most of them were poor, black, brown, Asian, and young -- because that’s what most of the world is. No need for vice-presidents of big conservation groups to patronize them: shrimpers in Louisiana and women in burqas and priests in Orthodox churches and slumdwellers in Mombasa turned out to be completely capable of understanding the threat to the future.

Those demonstrations were just a start (one we should have made long ago). We’re following up in October -- on 10-10-10 -- with a Global Work Party. All around the country and the world people will be putting up solar panels and digging community gardens and laying out bike paths. Not because we can stop climate change one bike path at a time, but because we need to make a sharp political point to our leaders: we’re getting to work, what about you?

We need to shame them, starting now. And we need everyone working together. This movement is starting to emerge on many fronts. In September, for instance, opponents of mountaintop removal are converging on DC to demand an end to the coal trade. That same month, Tim DeChristopher goes on trial in Salt Lake City for monkey-wrenching oil and gas auctions by submitting phony bids.  (Naomi Klein and Terry Tempest Williams have called for folks to gather at the courthouse.)

The big environmental groups are starting to wake up, too.  The Sierra Club has a dynamic new leader, Mike Brune, who’s working hard with stalwarts like Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth. (Note to enviro groups: working together is fun and useful). Churches are getting involved, as well as mosques and synagogues. Kids are leading the fight, all over the world -- they have to live on this planet for another 70 years or so, and they have every right to be pissed off.

But no one will come out to fight for watered down and weak legislation.  That’s not how it works. You don’t get a movement unless you take the other two steps I’ve described.

And in any event it won’t work overnight.  We’re not going to get the Senate to act next week, or maybe even next year. It took a decade after the Montgomery bus boycott to get the Voting Rights Act. But if there hadn’t been a movement, then the Voting Rights Act would have passed in… never. We may need to get arrested.  We definitely need art, and music, and disciplined, nonviolent, but very real anger.

Mostly, we need to tell the truth, resolutely and constantly. Fossil fuel is wrecking the one earth we’ve got. It’s not going to go away because we ask politely. If we want a world that works, we’re going to have to raise our voices.

 

Bill McKibben is founder of 350.org and the author, most recently, of Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet. Earlier this year the Boston Globe called him “probably the country’s leading environmentalist” and Time described him as “the planet’s best green journalist.” He’s a scholar in residence at Middlebury College. To hear him discuss why the public needs to lead the fight against global warming in Timothy MacBain's latest TomCast audio interview, click here or, to download it to your iPod, here.

Copyright 2010 Bill McKibben

Originally published at TomDispatch.  Versions of this also appears in the LA Times and the Huffington Post

By Asher, posted Jul 27, 2010:

Back in December in blisteringly cold Copenhagen, tens of thousands of activists, government workers, lobbyists, and world leaders came together for what many hoped would be a diplomatic breakthrough. Though the weather was cold, conditions seemed ripe: Environmental groups across the globe had worked hard to generate a strong display of public will, culminating in 350.org’s Day of Action earlier in October, which CNN called "the most widespread day of political action in the planet's history.” Bolstered by the announcement that President Obama would attend the talks personally, hopes were high for meaningful engagement on the part of the United States after more than a decade of inaction.

It seemed to many environmental organizations and their supporters that their international strategy might finally pay off. They were mistaken and left Copenhagen only with questions: What had gone wrong? Why did world leaders punt on the biggest crises facing our planet? And the most important of all: What now?

At Copenhagen, representatives from the Obama Administration told activists straight to their face: You’ll have to make us do this. And your movement is just not big enough.

Fast forward seven months, to blindingly hot Washington D.C., and we have the same result—though this time it was Congress’ turn to punt, despite a great deal of behind-the-scenes negotiations. Senator Kerry (D-MA) said, "We believe we have compromised significantly, but we're prepared to compromise further."

Despite that display of, um, generosity, Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) explained, this time they were just not big enough.  Unable to get the 60 votes needed to break a Republican filibuster, no climate legislation will move forward in the Senate this year. Since they’re likely to have even fewer votes after the midterms, this does not bode well for hopes of a national policy any time soon.

This is a double blow because the one outcome of COP 15—the Copenhagen Accord—is predicated on countries voluntarily setting and meeting domestic targets. So the lack of national climate legislation also means that our only hope for meeting our 2020 reduction targets is the EPA’s authority, which is likely going to be challenged in court for as long as the delayers can manage. That, or further steep declines in economic activity, like what has happened recently in the UK.

Gladly, I’m no Beltway insider, and my assumptions should be read as just that. But the way I see it, this result (or lack thereof), is not much of a surprise. Four of what are likely many reasons:

1. The Kerry-Lieberman bill was so badly flawed that not even the Big Green environmental groups could hold their noses enough to back it. Though they had staked their strategies, dollars, and reputations on getting something, anything passed before the likely loss of Democratic Party majorities in Congress, they saw that this bill could in fact be worse than no bill.

2. Our leaders’ allegiance to the mythical god of growth trumps their concern over the proven chemistry and physics of global climate change. The irony is rich, of course, considering that even after a veritable iceberg of evidence corroborating anthropogenic global warming, fabricated “scandals” like climate gate still somehow send the media into paroxysms of doubt and politicians diving for the nearest rock (likely to be underwater in about 30 years). In the meantime, there’s a wholly unsubstantiated belief shared by politicians, pundits, and plebeians of all stripes that without endless economic growth our entire universe would spontaneously implode.

And so, anything that could be viewed as putting our economic “recovery” at risk is simply a bridge too far, particularly in the run-up to mid-term elections.

3. Senate Republicans determination to block any bill that hit the floor. You’ve got to give Senate Republicans credit for their single-mindedness, and ability to wholly divorce their legislative positions from the love I’m sure they feel for their children and grandchildren. That takes a special level of determination and obstinacy.

4. The Obama Administration is simply not serious (enough) about our energy and climate crises. That was made abundantly clear in his oval office speech on June 15th when in the midst of the worst environmental disaster in our nation’s history, his tepid response was this:

So I am happy to look at other ideas and approaches from either party—as long they seriously tackle our addiction to fossil fuels. Some have suggested raising efficiency standards in our buildings like we did in our cars and trucks. Some believe we should set standards to ensure that more of our electricity comes from wind and solar power. Others wonder why the energy industry only spends a fraction of what the high-tech industry does on research and development—and want to rapidly boost our investments in such research and development. All of these approaches have merit, and deserve a fair hearing in the months ahead.

 

No specific call to action, no plan offered up. Just an invitation to explore ideas. It was clear in that moment that President Obama was not prepared to stick his neck out for substantive energy and climate policy. Not even when Americans were shaking with anger over the ongoing Deepwater Horizon Gulf spill.

And so here we are again, asking, “What Now?”

More and more in my conversations with environmental groups, activists, and funders, it seems their focus is shifting from the international to the national to, now, the state and local level. For several reasons, I think this is a smart strategy.

In my next post, I’ll touch on the politics and possibilities of local action. Then, I’ll toss out an idea for getting Sarah Palin to serve as the ultimate spokesperson for national climate legislation. Trust me, she won’t like it.

By Richard Heinberg, posted Jul 26, 2010:

 

YOU Can Be a BILLIONAIRE!!! Without Doing Anything! Five Ways to Profit BIG from Global Collapse   (Author’s note: This is the Introduction to an inspirational / financial-advice / environmental / diet / dating / self-help / survivalist / humor book that I started to write—and quickly decided should never be finished. Maybe I shouldn’t have taken it even this far. You be the judge.)   What can you do to optimize your chances in the case of hyperinflation, a deflationary economic Depression, an oil crisis, a famine, or a series of horrendous environmental disasters? If you don’t already know, you’d better wise up fast—because some or all of these exciting opportunities are on their way to a neighborhood near you! In fact, one or two may already be tapping you on the shoulder and asking to make your acquaintance.   Pointy-headed intellectuals have been warning us about this stuff for years. Decades. Who cares? Who’s had the time for depressing, worrisome, gloomy, hard-to-understand statistics and graphs? There’s been work to do, money to be made, kids to put through college, new episodes of American Idol to watch.   Until now. We have finally arrived at the fabulous convergence of two Earth-shattering developments: First, real environmental and economic catastrophes are starting to happen and are tugging on our Comfy Cushion of Consumer Complacency, requiring us to actually Do Something. Second, someone (guess who?) has figured out how to frame these mega-scary events in such inviting, entertaining, and potentially profitable terms that the irresistible win/win euphoria of it all can make you almost completely forget just how abysmally awful our situation actually is.   Welcome to my book, YOU can Be a BILLIONAIRE!!! Without Doing Anything. In it, you will learn why the U.S. economy is now the butt of jokes in Chad; why the stuff that makes your car go is about to become as rare and valuable as . . . as . . . as something actually rare and valuable; why the global food system is making more and more people watch their waistlines (as they shrivel); and why Mother Nature seems to be puzzlingly mean-tempered lately—almost as if we had done something to annoy her.   And, best of all, you will learn how to anticipate and cash in on the lucky breaks opened up by these seeming calamities. You will thrill to the sheer ease with which you and your family can surf the waves of change lapping at the thighs of a dazed and sadly un-opportunistic world. You will adopt as your new motto: A crisis is a terrible thing to waste!   With this book you just can’t lose: If you decide not to take my advice and not to do anything to save yourself from the smorgasbord of apocalyptica to which we are all about to be treated—well then, you might as well chortle in the face of certain destruction. You can still revel in the fresh, snarky prose with which your grisly fate will herein be detailed. You still win!   But you stand to win even BIGGER if you get with the program! Each of the following chapters will inform you of fun ways to profit from global collapse—so get ready to get ahead!   Chapter 1, “How to Become a Billionaire Without Even Trying!”, will prepare you to thrive in a period of hyperinflation. Remember Germany in the early 1920s? Well, I don’t either. But I’ve actually seen an old picture on the Internet of a German lady heating her home by tossing bricks of currency into her furnace. How could money become so worthless? Easy: If the government decided to print gazillions of Papiermarks, or Dollars, or Euros, Baht, Drachmas, Guilders, Nakfa, Pesos, Pounds, Rand, Rubles, Rupees, Shekels, or Yen in order to pay for obligations it otherwise could not meet. With more money chasing an equivalent quantity of goods and services, individual units of currency would lose value. Soon a loaf of bread that used to cost only two Tugrik could cost hundreds, then thousands, then millions, eventually billions of Tugrik!   Of course, this could never happen TODAY, in our enlightened modern world run by politicians and economists with their profound scientific understanding of how to keep monetary systems oiled, tanned, and buff. Nevertheless, there is always the theoretical possibility that, in a poor and corrupt backwater nation somewhere, a power-mad Prime Minister or President could decide to borrow colossal amounts of cash to pay for social programs and infrastructure projects (knowing these debts could never be repaid), which would eventually cause the national currency to lose nearly all of its value. If you were to find yourself in such a country then, you could become a billionaire without doing anything!

Think of the opportunities! Like the government, you could inflate your debts away! Your total mortgage of 1,000,000 Ringgit could easily be paid off with a single month’s salary . . . assuming, of course, that you still had a salary and that salaries were keeping up with prices. You see, there are some strings attached: when the waiter gives you a dirty look after you leave him what you thought was a generous 50,000,000 Dinar tip, you might start to think that being a billionaire isn’t all that you expected. Your savings would have been inflated away by this time and society might be shredding at the edges.   But . . . you’d be a billionaire!!!   As we’ll see in more detail later in the chapter, there are plenty of things you can do now to get ready for life under hyperinflation: Stop investing in Wall Street and start investing in your community! Stock up on things of real and enduring value that you can always trade or barter! And develop skills that will enable you to be useful to people in your community when the monetary system breaks down!   Naturally, you will only be able to benefit from hyperinflation if you haven’t already lost everything to deflation—which brings us to   Chapter 2, “How to Buy the House of Your Dreams for $1000!”   Deflation is in some ways the opposite of inflation: If lots of loans are being defaulted upon, if new loans aren’t being written, and if loads of people are losing their jobs, then money starts to disappear from the system. Money is worth more than it was before, but there is less of it to go around. This is what happened in the U.S.A. during the Great Depression of the 1930s, when 40 cents could buy a decent meal, a two-bedroom bungalow came with a monthly mortgage payment of $35, and a new Chevrolet could be had for $20 down and a series of $15 monthly installments. You could live well on $100 a month—but who had that kind of money?   Of course, this could never happen TODAY, in our enlightened modern world run by politicians and economists with their profound scientific understanding of how to keep monetary systems oiled, tanned, and buff. Nevertheless, there is always the theoretical possibility that, in a poor and corrupt backwater nation somewhere, a cabal of greedy bankers could create a set of bizarre investment instruments that appear to generate enormous amounts of wealth but in reality are nothing but an elaborate con game, so that at some point all these investments would lose their perceived value and several fantastigillion Taka’s worth of apparent wealth would just evaporate, causing the stock market to implode in a puff of smoke and leaving millions upon millions of people without jobs or income of any sort. If you were to find yourself in such a country at such a time, and you still had a few Taka in your pocket, you could buy yourself a Rolex, a car, a house, maybe even your own judge or police chief!   Naturally, that would only hold true if you did indeed still have those few Taka and hadn’t lost all your savings to hyperinflation (see Chapter 1). And, to be sure, there are some downsides to deflation: You might be out on the street, and society could splinter. But hey, does that Rolex look great or what?   As we’ll see in more detail later in Chapter 2, there are a few things you can do now to get ready to make the most of life under deflation. And some of them look a lot like ways to protect yourself from hyperinflation: Buy your support system ahead of time (hand tools, solar panels, and other items that will help move you toward self-sufficiency)! Develop and improve your tradable skills! However, in this case an additional strategy might be helpful: If your community starts a local currency now, then as your national currency collapses you’ll still have some basis for trade. Invent your own money—do it today!   In Chapter 3, “Pick Up Any Guy or Girl with Three Magic Words!”, you will learn that, in an inevitable future in which gasoline is unaffordable and oil shortages are commonplace, the words “I’ve got fuel” will make you instantly attractive.   You see, our entire transport system is petroleum-dependent: cars, trucks, trains, planes, ships—they all run on diesel, gasoline, or bunker oil (with the exception of about twenty Tesla Roadsters and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s hydrogen Hummer). But over the past century or so the petroleum industry has guzzled up all the cheap, easy-to-find Texas Tea and is now undertaking a Journey to the Center of the Earth to get those last few tasty slurps of light, sweet crude. Meanwhile, today’s remaining oil-exporting countries are using more and more of their precious petrol domestically, which means that oil-importing countries (like the U.S.) will soon be up a creek without a drill rig. How soon? We’re not talking centuries here, we’re talking a decade or so at best, maybe only a few years.   It would be sensible for towns and cities in the U.S. to ready themselves for that fast-approaching future by building robust, energy-efficient electric public transit systems that could potentially run on solar or wind power—but instead most are using Federal stimulus money to build or widen highways. Why? It’s because urban planners are required by law to assume that the future will look just like the 1960s, only more so. Smart! Well, that’s bad for cities, but good for you if you’re looking ahead!   People need to travel. If they have no alternative to cars but can no longer afford to own and operate their own vehicles, then ingenious new sorts of carpooling services might pick up the slack. Start now to plan how you’ll run your informal jitney business—gathering up carloads of passengers along semi-regular routes, dropping folks off one at a time close to where they need to go, while collecting nominal fares (a couple of eggs, a few potatoes) to make it all worthwhile. Form friendships now with the people most likely to have access to fuel (including home-made biodiesel) when the shortages hit. Figure out what kind of vehicle you intend to buy (don’t purchase it yet!—wait until nine-passenger vans and SUVs are virtually worthless due to deflation and fuel shortages). When the time comes, if you’ve followed these simple instructions, you’ll be picking up guys and gals on a regular basis!   Yes, there are some trade-offs and risks attached to the impending oil crisis. Forget that yearly vacation at Disney World—or anywhere else that requires air travel (sorry, there will be no electric 747s in our future). And you might have to deal with a bit of social upheaval from time to time. But why dwell on the downside? Just think of the bonuses! You will get to know your neighbors better and we’ll all get lots more exercise riding bicycles—as long as bike tires are available (too bad they’re made from oil).   Chapter 4, “How to Lose 40 Pounds Without Even Trying!”, offers advice on a sure-fire way to beat the obesity epidemic. It’s called global famine!   Now, I know this one sounds terrifying at first. But remember: the more enormous the crisis, the huger the opportunity!   A whopping big famine is a safe bet sometime in the first half of this century. That’s because we have a still-expanding human population (nearly seven billion of us now and counting) with growing appetites; but we’re eroding or salting our topsoil (losing 25 billion tons a year), we’re facing water scarcity (so much for increasing food production through irrigation), the amount of arable land available globally is starting to decline, we’re depleting world rock phosphate supplies (phosphorus is essential to modern industrial agriculture and there’s no substitute for it), bugs and weeds are becoming resistant to nearly all our pesticides and herbicides, and—to top it off—our entire food system is totally dependent on the use of depleting petroleum to fuel tractors and to transport farm inputs and outputs. Oh yes, I almost forgot to mention that we’re over-fishing the oceans, so that by mid-century most wild commercial fish species will be depleted, endangered, or extinct. It’s a food system that’s virtually designed to fail!   You think it’s going to be tough to find the bright side to this one? Think again! We’ll be swimming in silver linings!—those of us who are prepared, that is.   If you can figure out how to grow food sustainably, starting now, you are guaranteed to become a Very Popular Person. In fact, your biggest problem could be TOO MUCH popularity! Your whole neighborhood might want to start hanging out with you every day to share meals. Some neighbors might even want to visit you (or your garden) in the middle of the night. Cozy—maybe too cozy! But if you plan ahead for all of this popularity, you could find ways to put all your new friends to work weeding, planting, and harvesting. You could turn this into a system—a feudal system, to put a name to it—with you as the, um, facilitator!   And you thought global famine was going to be a big downer. Silly. There’s always an upside for those with a smile and a can-do attitude!   And that brings us to the concluding, inspirational   Chapter 5, “Ten Ways YOU Can Change the World!”   Not all profits are financial in nature; sometimes the best things in life come simply through knowing that we’ve made a difference. We all want to leave our mark; we want future generations to remember us. Often, this longing gets frustrated along the way: when we’re young, we have dreams of doing something great and being famous, but the requirements of making a living tend to mire us in mediocrity. After we’re dead, we might be remembered for a while by a few close relatives, but then it’s off to oblivion. Gone and forgotten. Meanwhile the world shambles on as before, not much different as a result of our having been here.   That all may have been true a few decades ago, but not anymore! Haven’t you heard? It’s the New Age of globally interconnective instantaneously hyperactive feedback loops! In other words, we’ve arrived at a point in our development as a species where we can change the world in truly dramatic ways, just by each of us doing our own little bit. No, it’s better than that: it has gotten to be so easy to change the world that today it’s actually much, much harder NOT to! What an amazing species we are! What a time to be alive! Yes we can!   Massive oil spills, climate change, species extinctions, resource depletion, deforestation, air pollution, water pollution, rapid population growth, widespread reproductive disruption among vertebrates due to environmental toxins, ocean acidification . . . the list could go on and on. These are BIG changes—so big that their traces would be obvious to alien geologists visiting our world millions of years from now. With global warming alone we are turning the Earth into a very different planet from the one on which civilization developed (author Bill McKibben says we should give the planet a new name, “Eaarth,” as a way of celebrating our collective achievement). And all we have to do to contribute to these great smacking big planetary changes is to continue doing exactly what we are doing right now! Fly and drive! Use plastic bags! Eat fast food! Turn up the air conditioner! Have lots of children! Buy stuff and throw it away! It’s so fun and easy to change the world!   Sure, those space-alien geologists may not credit you personally for making such a big difference to our world. But rest assured: You’ll have been part of a socio-economic phenomenon that future human generations, if there are any, will remember intensely. In fact, they will probably think about us every single day of their lives!   * * *   Okay, enough with the cynical sarcasm. It should be fairly clear by now why this book should never be finished. (My publisher: “Keep it to one category, please. Two, maybe. Three, absolute tops. This—this is ridiculous!”)   Of course, the main reason the book shouldn’t be written is that, rather than reveling in planetary collapse or trying to profit from it, we should be doing everything in our power to prevent or minimize it. That means not flying and driving, not using plastic bags, not eating fast food, not turning up the air conditioner, not having lots of children, not buying stuff and throwing it away.   Nevertheless, the tough truth is that hard times are on the way regardless of what we do at this point. Over the past century or so we humans have set processes in motion that cannot entirely be halted even if we change our ways dramatically and instantly. During the next few decades, humanity will (one way or another) make the transition from a mode in which it relies primarily on the extraction of non-renewable resources and giddily grows its population and per-capita consumption rates, to a mode in which non-renewable resources are mostly depleted and population size and per-capita consumption rates are constrained by the availability of the world’s remaining renewable resources. Along the way, we will reap the unintended ecological consequences of our Big Binge even as it passes into collective memory: climate change, habitat destruction, soil erosion, and aquifer depletion will be gifts that just keep on giving.   Our economic situation doesn’t look any cheerier. You see, during those last couple of centuries, while we were developing our ability to extract Earth’s fossil fuels and minerals on a grand scale and transform them as quickly as possible into carbon dioxide and landfill, we got the idea that this could go on forever. We developed economic dogmas that said growth is good and normal. And we created currency and finance systems that only work properly when the economy is expanding. Now that it’s getting harder to extract Earth’s remaining non-renewable resources, economic growth is no longer a given. Indeed, year-over-year world aggregate GDP growth may already be a thing of the past—over, done with, extinguished, extinct, kaput. Whether or not we’ve already reached that inevitable point, when we do our economic system is going to careen either into deflation or hyperinflation—there will be no middle ground to cling to.   All of this is fairly plain when you stand back and look at the trajectory of human history with the laws of thermodynamics in mind. Yet most people are so invested in business-as-usual that they simply can’t allow themselves to contemplate the possibility that time has run out on our current round of Wheel of Fortune. Some environmentalists are painfully aware that nasty impacts are in the pipeline, but don’t want to frighten away their potential audience. So they focus on easy, painless, little things that average people could do to reduce those impacts (even though hard, painful, big actions by governments and corporations are actually necessary), and they daydream about how abundant life will be in a promised eco-groovy future (while in fact the best way to describe what’s in store is austerity compounded with more austerity).   In short, we live in a state of denial. The mainstream media occasionally scare us into paralysis with CGI-laden disaster documentaries, but then proceed to label people who talk rationally about the coming challenges and how to prepare and adapt as “survivalists” and “prophets of doom”—that is, as individuals so far outside the mainstream as to be worthy objects of derision.   So it’s a challenge to get across to policy makers or the general public any sense of what’s ahead and how to respond.   Those of us in the business of trying to do so have to accomplish many things at once: Get real about the scale of the problems and the risks, and avoid freaking out. Be hopeful and deadly serious. Help people improve their own survival prospects and work for institutional change so as to minimize impacts.   It’s a difficult balancing act. In fact, it’s more than anyone can do. What are the natural human responses to situations that require us to stretch us far beyond our capacities? Often we either laugh or cry.   So here’s to laughter (we’ll do the crying thing another time, I’m sure). My final advice, offered in all seriousness: Adopt a cheerful and helpful attitude. And cultivate a sense of humor during this trying period—doing so will not only preserve your mental health, it could help you and your family survive.   Remember: When life hands you a lemon, don’t just make lemonade . . . make limoncello, and make enough for friends!     ABOUT THE AUTHOR   Richard “Sunnyside” Heinberg is the author of nine books including Blackout: Coal, Climate, and the Last Energy Crisis, and The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies. He is Senior Fellow-in-Residence at Post Carbon Institute and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost Peak Oil educators.  

 

By Tod Brilliant, posted Jul 22, 2010:

And so we have it. At noon today (PST), we saw the predictable collapse of Democrat resolve to address the most serious crisis of our times.

So what. Big surprise.

The most likely bills were horrifically flawed (don't get me started on the Kerry Lieberman joke, the one where the punchline was my childrens' future). The public demand for truly significant, timely progress on energy and climate simply isn't there. This was never going to happen in the first place.

We can point  fingers at Washington, DC, but we should be pointing them at ourselves. We allow our votes to be taken for granted. We equate online activism with real-world pressure. We talk smartly of responsible consumption and equitable resource distribution--while waiting in line to purchase new iPhones. We hold hands when we should be holding feet to fire. We self-identify as consumers, not citizens. We elect, time and time again, fellow citizens with no track record of caring about our issues. We believe that Tweeting counts as activism. We make excuses like, "Lesser of two evils" and "Incremental change is better than slipping backward." (To be crystal here, I am including ME in 'we'. I work on these issues every single day, and still I fail in my personal life to be a notable example of resilient living.) 

It's not that we don't care. Or don't believe that the earth is warming and action must be taken. We, as a nation, emphatically do.

It's that we haven't yet commited to making meaningful progress, as individuals or as a society. We must remember that every daily action has a reaction (somewhere, some time), and behave like informed citizens who give a damn. We know what to do. We even know how to do it. We know what the future can and should look like. We know how to get there. Everything is in place for a rapid and orderly transition to relocalized, resilient communities.

The 10-10-10 Global Work Party has the potential to be Day One of that transition. Beyond shovels in soil, we can use it to start the political transformations needed right now all over the world. New blood, new values, new determination to do right by this planet. Who knows, maybe even new parties who will leave the old guard behind in the dust of work boots and wheelbarrows.

---

P.S. Here's a great overview by Joseph Romm at Grist.

 

 

By Tom Whipple, posted Jul 22, 2010:

With 1.3 billion people, China is unlikely to reach current U.S. energy consumption per capita for some time, if ever, but to double energy consumption in the last ten years is still an impressive achievement. But keep in mind that the average American is still consuming five times as much energy each year as the average Chinese. China had not been expected to overtake the US for another five years, but the global recession reduced U.S. consumption and China's strong economic rebound in the last sent Beijing's consumption soaring.

Interestingly, Chinese officials immediately denied that the IEA's announcement was correct. This is not because the Chinese do not want to be the world's number one energy consumer, but because they do not want to be known as the number one polluter and contributor to global warming emissions. As global temperatures set new records, Beijing would rather be thought of as the leader in efficient use of energy and developer of renewable technologies, rather than as a giant pollutant-belching smokestack, which may be closer to the truth for much of China's energy comes from coal.

The key issue for the next few years is whether China can keep up its frenetic growth. Earlier this year, after a heavy dose of financial stimulus and much loose lending, China's GDP was growing at an annual rate close to 12 percent. Keep in mind that China's definition of GDP growth does not exactly square with what is used in other countries. So while China's economic growth may be spectacular by OECD standards, it may not be quite that spectacular. When inflationary pressures appeared last spring, Beijing tightened up on lending which seems to have cut inflation, taken a point or two off of GDP growth, and cut back on industrial production.

Whether Beijing's formula of mixed capitalism and state control of key enterprises will prove to be durable over the long run has yet to be seen. What we do know, however, is that a few more years of surging energy consumption will soon be playing havoc with energy prices around the world. Even with GDP growth down to 8 or 10 percent each year, China seems to be on course to import at least an additional 500,000 barrels a day (b/d) on top of the 5.4 million b/d imported in June. Beijing's oil imports have doubled in the last five years. Given that other Asian states are increasing imports and the Gulf oil exporters are consuming increasing amounts of oil, something has got to give. That of course will be prices.

There are a few dark clouds on Beijing's horizon, however. Labor unrest is growing and the realities of China's decades of neglect for the environment are closing in. Natural and man-made disasters -- droughts, floods, hurricanes, melting glaciers, polluted air and water, falling aquifers - are accumulating at an alarming pace. Someday these problems, especially when they cause persistent food shortages, are going to reach the point where they impact the nation's ability to sustain any kind of economic growth. However, the consequences of these problems do not seem imminent.

Like everyone else, Beijing is about to fall victim to rapidly increasing oil prices, and eventually, shortages brought about by peaking world oil production. The government clearly recognizes this and has embarked on multiple programs to increase the efficiency of its energy use, increase production of renewable energy, and to buy up at top dollar as much foreign coal, oil and natural gas production as anybody is willing to sell them. This will in turn prove to be a major problem for the oil importing OECD countries that will see their sources of foreign oil disappear more quickly than anticipated.

For now the Chinese economic juggernaut appears ready to keep moving along right into the age of oil depletion. While the country has social and environmental issues none appear to be a hindrance to continued rapid economic development for the immediate future. With massive reserves of foreign exchange, Beijing should be in best position of any major oil importers to weather at least the initial stages of much higher oil prices.

The next few years are likely to be critical for should China keep increasing its imports of oil and even coal at anywhere close to their current rates of increase, major price spikes in the world's oil markets seem inevitable. The U.S. and OECD may not do too well economically in the next few years, but their oil and coal consumption are unlikely to take more than minor dips. These dips in consumption are unlikely to be enough to offset increasing oil consumption in Asia and the oil exporting nations.

China's new status as the world's number one energy consumer may or may not last long, but it serves as a reminder that there are serious troubles ahead.

Originally published July 21 at Falls Church News-Press

Photo credit: Emily Wiltshire