Transcribed by Kristin Sponsler
One of the questions that one might ask oneself is, “Why do all this?” In my case, for instance, a couple of years ago, I wrote and published a book called High Noon for Natural Gas: The New Energy Crisis, and you have heard from the introduction that I do not have a Masters in natural gas, so why write a book about natural gas? It doesn’t really follow from being a classical musicologist, after all. The reason is really quite simple, it needed to be done, and that is one of the themes of this talk. I was doing a lot of work on the petroleum side of things, and I had heard, particularly from Matt Simmons, and also from others, that there was a brewing natural gas crisis, particularly in North America. It turns out it’s wider than just North America. And I couldn’t find enough written about it and I couldn’t find a book on it.
So, that’s why I wrote the book, and it was an extraordinary undertaking. And to this day, I am jolly pleased I did it, even though it was something that was actually very hard to do. And as yet, gas hasn’t got the attention that oil has, but I fear that may change quite soon. And one of the things that Matt Simmons said to me, Matt Simmons, who I am sure that everybody know here, who is the energy banker from Houston, who also wrote Twilight in the Desert, about the interesting situation of Saudi oil, he said, “Follow the data.” And that’s what he did, and that’s what led to his understandings of the situation, and I thought, that’s a pretty good idea. Of course, getting to the data is not necessarily so easy.
You’ve all seen this, the peak of discovery of oil in the U.S. lower 48, followed by a peak of extraction, about forty years later (referring to PowerPoint slides throughout the talk). The paradigm, well, it may be slightly different, what’s coming. I have been thinking about this a little lately. There was definitely a feeling in 2005 that we might be seeing the peak in 2005. It’s not absolutely impossible, it’s looking a little less likely, and one of the reasons is that I think we won’t see a peak like the U.S. peak because the oil industry, number one, has got the signal of high prices, and this morning the price had fallen now $8 to a mere $70. So it tells you the kind of world we live in when the price falls dramatically and it’s still $70 for a barrel of oil.
Of course, this signals to all the industry that it’s time to roll your sleeves up and start drilling more wells, but also some people in the oil industry really do know that there is a much deeper problem than just sort of access to places where they would like to go like Iran and a few other places which they can’t easily get into. So I think what we are going to see is much more of a plateau, a peak plateau, which has been talked about for a long time, than any kind of a sharp peak. A sharp peak is now very unlikely. I think that the peak happened in the U.S. in that relatively sharp way because no one realized it was happening, well except Marion King Hubbert, but nobody in the industry, aside from him, as far as one knows. So I think the 2005 incident of Katrina and Rita will most likely signal the onset of the peak plateau. Other matters, geopolitical, and technical, and economic, will I think have now a big shaping effect on what the actual plateau, and then into the decline, looks like.
Some of you may be less familiar with the natural gas situation in North America, which is becoming really quite serious. And this chart, which is by Jean Laherrere, a name known to many of you no doubt, and he has taken the discovery pattern of natural gas in North America, and moved it under the extraction or production pattern, and so that you can see how closely production or extraction and discovery are related. You can see that there was a discovery peak in about 1960 in North America, and here we are in this big red dot, with extraction surely about to go into a steeper decline. And it’s already in decline, how steep is another matter. There’s a huge amount of drilling and effort to arrest the decline. That will last for awhile, but let’s just see the seriousness of this situation and why do we know this decline is permanent this time. There was another peak in 1973 of natural gas, but there were recoveries from that. I do not believe that there will be any recovery from this. You can see, this is the production or extraction line in pink. In 2001 it peaked, and it’s been in slow decline since then. But look at the effort of drilling and completion of wells. You can see that these yellow bars mean that we are over 400,000 completed wells, and the point is that it has been rising for the last 4 or 5 years, and still can’t hold production even flat, it’s declining. A similar situation in Canada, where particularly in the last three years a dramatic increase in the number of completions, and yet unable to stop and arrest the decline. Canadian gas peaked around 2001, 2002. Mexico’s gas is still rising, but it is an importer of American natural gas, believe it or not, and it’s very small compared to Canada and America’s extraction.
So this is a very serious situation. Natural gas, as you probably all know, cannot easily be imported across the oceans. You require the huge machinery of the liquefied natural gas train to do it, it’s very expensive, and it’s certainly not something you can do quickly. So natural gas is something that one should be using with great care, and ever less of it, and if one doesn’t do that, it looks like nature will force that to happen, possibly much more severely than oil where you have the flexibility of being able to trade or move it easily across the oceans.
Another, I hope familiar diagram, shows in the last few years how both oil and gas are in a very poor discovery pattern, and gas recently joined oil in the dubious privilege that we no longer find enough gas to replace our reserves. That happened in 1981 for oil, when we started using oil faster than we were finding it, and it happened to natural gas just a few years ago. So I do think that this is the endgame for these importance resources. U.S. and Canada have about 4 percent for natural gas. Interestingly with natural gas in the world, not necessarily very well known, but the top 4 out of the top 5 producers or extractors of natural gas are all in decline. Whether Russia can reverse that, only the future will tell. The other three, the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom, have all peaked, and going down, the fastest in the case of the United Kingdom. And indeed in that top ten, you can also see that the Netherlands and Indonesia are also in serious decline. So the reason for mentioning this is that some people like Shell and others say we’ll just turn to natural gas if there’s any trouble with oil. I wouldn’t bet on it.
Now, let us turn closer to home, as it were. A very important matter in this regard of humans using so many resources is just how many of us there are, and how that number keeps on rising. And so we see the population for the last one hundred or so years, in Washington State, except for a small blip in WWII, there’s been a fairly relentless increase in the population here. This is a very important point to bear in mind. Here, meanwhile, is the consumption of energy, generally going a little faster than population, although with the recent economic downturns, you can see that the consumption of energy declined quite rapidly. Generally, this is a very important thing to notice, that when the economy heats up, so does energy consumption, and by and large, economic growth always means more energy consumption growth, usually just a percentage point or two behind.
This is the per capita consumption of energy for people in Washington, a general decline per capita. This is normal across the industrialized world; there is nothing dramatic about this. This is quite useful to know if you don’t, that about two-thirds of all the electricity which is consumed and produced in Washington State comes from big hydro, from hydroelectric dams, and that leaves the system very prone to environmental change, particularly climate change. And this has already been noted by the government in Washington State. Much less coal and natural gas is used.
This graph, this chart is important because it shows that nearly 40%, that number should actually be 39% for residential, but the wonders of Excel force it to add up to 100, so for some reason it says 38. Residential is nearly 40%, and commercial, which basically means shops and other things, is another 35%. So that means in this state, which has a much smaller industrial base than some other places, there is quite an extraordinary amount of power in the hands of individuals if only it could be harnessed and joined together. This is an important point.
This is coal production in Washington State, really the only major energy source apart from nuclear and big hydro in this state, and we don’t have numbers going for production as long as we would like, but you can see that by and large production of coal has not managed to keep up with consumption until very recently. But then again, production’s fallen away again, and what the reasons for the production pattern being this, I don’t have all those answers. Perhaps someone in the audience does. But I think it’s a very interesting thing to do, and the local 20/20 here may already be doing this, but it’s tremendously useful. Look at what you can get from the system, what energy you can get, and look at what you’re consuming. That gives you a pretty good idea of the kind of gaps you’re facing.
This is natural gas consumption, steadily rising over the years, the recent decline, that can be put down to economic problems. Petroleum consumption, another steady rise until just recently. Again, one assumes if the economy picks up, that will also grow. Nuclear consumption, a very distinct rising pattern there. And hydro, you can see just towards here on the right-hand side, around 2000, 2002, in fact for the last five or six years, hydro has been having some trouble, and that’s to do with droughts and other climactic effects.
This is not peculiar to Washington. The same thing can be seen across the world from South America to North America, Scandinavia, Spain. Everywhere you look big hydro is having trouble with the climate, and this is one of the interesting things, we’re starting to see some of the ricochet or unintended effects of our warming the climate. It’s affecting precipitation, and the melting of glaciers, and it’s having quite an effect in many places on hydro. So those who are exposed to hydro, as Washington State is, should keep a very careful eye on this.
But our mass consumption has also risen. This is just to remind us that we are using more than we find. Therefore, we need to find responses to energy descent, as surely all of you in this audience know. And we’re going to look at some of these responses, and the response networks that the Post-Carbon Institute has been putting together over the last few years. We’ll look at the Relocalization Network, the Energy Farm Network, and Global Public Media, and a few other things that are contained within those.
Why respond? There are some deeper reasons than just saying, “Well, yes the price of oil is getting rather expensive, we think.” All civilizations are built on surplus, food surplus, energy surplus. This is incredibly important. If that surplus reduces or even becomes a non-surplus, which is a polite way of saying it goes away, and we find ourselves in difficulties, what happens to civilization? The history books have about 25 examples of large-scale civilizations that found themselves in non-surplus, and I am afraid they became non-civilizations. So this is a very important lesson, that if we want to avoid becoming a non-civilization, we better pay very careful attention to the size of the surplus. And one way to get yourself out of trouble is to reduce consumption. Not a shocking notion in this hall, but you can imagine there are some corridors of power where this is not what they want to hear.
We must also pay more attention to thresholds. We have managed to give ourselves the idea that we live in a linear world. We have more or less invented this idea of linear growth; you know growth that just goes on forever. Whereas the growth that’s characterized nature for at least the last three and a half billion years is cyclic growth. And cyclic growth includes at least one particularly distasteful item, and I hardly dare mention it, but this thing is called death. Now death happens, I am afraid. It is not nice, and it is not very tasteful to talk about it, but mortality happens, and then nature is full of it. And the whole cycle of nature, the whole biosphere, and the whole ecological system, depends on some creatures and life forms flourishing and then dying, and then that material is recycled. We’ve managed to build this modern materialist system, be it capitalism or communism, which depends on endless industrial growth. James Howard Kunstler points out in his really startling and powerful book, The Long Emergency, that if we go on building houses at the rate we are now, that there will not be anywhere to build a single house left by the year 2100, not anywhere on the planet. So I assume he means the landmass, but frankly if you gave it a couple more years of exponential growth you could include the oceans too. It obviously means that somewhere between now and 2100, we’ve got to slow down and stop this endless growth.
And inside there we will find thresholds which will bite us in unpleasant ways. For instance, there was a port strike at the Port of Vancouver near where I live in Canada. And the Port of Vancouver is the largest export port in North America, it is no small affair. And there was a very long strike at this place which interrupted supplies from China in particular. And one of the main reasons was that the price of diesel had crossed a threshold, so that the truckers could no longer make a living out of driving these goods to and from the port, and they went on a long strike because of a threshold. So what I am saying to be careful of is that a cent or two rise, you may say that it is only another cent that it’s gone up, but if it’s a threshold, that extra cent or two can have a profound effect out of all proportion with the small change. So we must keep our eyes open for thresholds, and there are many of them, and many of them are starting to be crossed. And when thresholds get crossed, and you are not prepared for it, you can get some unwelcome surprises.
Transitions. We are going to see many transitions, I think. There is going to be a long transition through this century into the next century. I believe we must find humane and decent ways of reducing the human population from the six and a half billion down to something that the earth can find more manageable. That’s one transition. Transition from oil to something else much more limited. Transition from natural gas. Both of these we know, either in decline or soon be in decline. We must transition from coal, not because it is in decline, unfortunately, but because the outputs from coal to most eyes and ears and minds, are having such a profound effect on the climate. There will be many transitions, this will be a century of transitions, and transformations. And those of us that can embrace this and grasp this, and it will be difficult in places, will have a much much better time than those who resist all the way. And I am afraid there are some recent examples, such as the collapse of the Soviet Union which shows what happens when a big system gets into trouble for resources and the system itself starts to crumble. And there are plenty of recent examples which we can and should look at, and say to ourselves, “It would be a really good idea to avoid doing that, if we can.”
One of the things which I am sure dawns on anyone who starts looking at the oil and gas, and indeed the climate issues, after not very long is, gosh, this is not just an individual matter, it’s not just about switching from paper to plastic bags, which of course plastic is made out of natural gas and oil. And it’s not just about making any simple switch from one thing to another and keeping the same intake. This is going to require an infrastructural change of I think fairly stunning proportions. By which I mean the change from the private auto to something else, including a much more public transport. You can’t for instance, wake up in the morning (it would be nice if one could), and say “I think I'll have a 500-mile railroad, I think I’ll have one of those by tomorrow afternoon.” You can’t do that. It’s not like going and buying a sandwich. Putting in railways and canals, and changing your entire trucking fleet to something else, this takes billions and possibly trillions of dollars, and many many years, and an enormous amount of legal and political and government wrangling and effort, and no doubt lots of blocking too. And the same thing will go for district heating and many other things that we might like to consider very carefully. And zoning changes, and all these kinds of things which built our high-energy system and our high-energy infrastructure, and what we need is a low-energy one. And it’s going to require a great deal of effort and group effort, collective effort, community effort to do this, political effort.
Carrying capacity I will say another word about later, but carrying capacity on this planet is being severely challenged and to many of us who have studied this, we are clearly in overshoot. We are using more resources than the earth can replenish. And a little diagram here, we are out here, somewhere in overshoot land here. And this blue represents carrying capacity within the ecosystem limits, and this is where we have to head, inside this blue circle. But really it appears that this blue circle is shrinking, so what we really need to aim for is something I’ve called safe carrying capacity. Now I don’t know exactly what that is, but I would suggest if you made it a great deal less than what we think the ecosystem limits already are, then you’d be in much better territory than just trying to live on the very edge. Because if you’re living on the edge here, I’ve no doubt, never having done it, but I’ve no doubt that surfing is all very good fun. But you can’t do that all day and every day, and you can’t grow very much whilst you’re surfing. You can’t grow much food, that is. That’s a very very tricky thing to do; you don’t want to do that for long. So this is what we should be trying to do, and once again this will really come back to reducing consumption.
We need to move from this world of too much, while trying to avoid the too little, which could be very uncomfortable, to trying to discover something called enough. To satisfy ourselves without being absolutely overblown. Now this is not something that North America, and to some considerable extent Britain either, I mean Britain really started a lot of this stuff off, I am ashamed to say, with our unfortunately rather successful attempts at Empire which we exported over here, and then turned from a merely coal empire into an oil and gas empire, which it turns out you can do a lot more of it and a lot more quickly. Which is unfortunate in the medium term, even if it appears to be quite good for the sort of smaller number of people at the top in the short term. This looks like it is about to change. I could mention one or two little battlegrounds going on around the world which points to what happens. This is also another form of a kind of imperial overreach. But the energy one is much more profound. You just can’t play those kinds of games with nature.
So what we need to do via relocalizing is to move from overshoot to within carrying capacity. From surplus to sufficient, or at least from great surplus to sufficient. I believe that some of the techniques that we are going to need to apply will be to revivify public service, and to somehow put that before private good. There’s not a great history of that, especially in the last fifty years, unfortunately. But I really think that public service is a noble idea, and it’s very important, it’s linked of course to the common good, another idea which has not been frightfully popular in the last few decades. This will come and bite us if we don’t start considering public service as being very important.
And we must ask the question, “What we can we do, this idea of the group, other than what can I do?” We need to share, collaborate, cooperate, plan. There are many things that we are sometimes good at, and sometimes not so good at, and there is a lot more complexity to this than even one might imagine. I am not going to go into that tonight, but collaborating is not always easy. I am sure that everybody in this room knows that from one aspect or another of their lives, be it family or work, that collaboration has lots of bumps in it, and so does cooperating. It looks as if we unfortunately get some inheritances from our chimpanzee cousins, and early primates, that frankly we could do without. But we tend to be rather a fractious lot, and we’re not always very good at getting on with one another, and we’ll have to get better at getting on with one another, and be more forgiving and accommodating of one another.
And, as I said regarding my gas book, we are going to need to do this because it needs to be done. It won’t all necessarily all be fun, or enjoyable, or entertaining, and some of it’s going to be darned hard work, and some of it’s going to include sacrifice, if I dare say that word, which has been banned from the lexicon after Jimmy Carter lost the election for saying that single word, I think. Well, actually sacrifice is a really interesting word, if you do it, it can yield you an extraordinary freedom, because you don’t need certain things, and you are no longer bound to them. If you don’t watch the television, it doesn’t matter to you if the television is broken or if it’s broadcasting garbage, you don’t watch it anyway. So there are many many things, if you can reduce your dependence on certain things, by sacrifice, and by other techniques, then it can yield you an extraordinary amount of freedom, which can be very satisfying and which will be very useful in the coming years.
So let us move to the practical responses that the Post-Carbon Institute is working on. And I should say, not working on just on our own, but thankfully, with many of you and with many people in the world. This is very much a joint effort.
Our mantra, our rubric, is reduce/produce. Reduce consumption. Produce locally. And the extraordinary, wonderful, frightening thing is if we could only reduce our consumption to what we could produce locally, we’d be OK. We could actually use that rather difficult word, sustainable. We could actually use that word, because then we would be doing what all the other animals and life forms that have managed to persist until now are also doing. That’s exactly what they do, they match their consumption to what they can harvest, collect, kill, if you’re a beast of prey, in the locale. All the other animals, except humans, who think that they’re so clever, all the other animals and life forms have to either run, swim, fly, or walk, and just hang around if you’re a tree, and collect your nutrients that way. But we think it’s very clever that we don’t do that, that we have to drive things and fly things tens of thousands of miles, or many thousands of miles, and pump petroleum into our whole agricultural system. We think that’s really neat and clever and to trade things globally. I don’t think it’s so clever. I think that the less gas and oil and coal that we have around to fuel that system, the less clever we’ll find it. So one way or another, we are going to be forced to live within our means, basically what the soil and the sun and the sky can produce, one way or another, and I think that transition is going to happen this century, and the sooner we get on with it, and the sooner we start planning for it, the better.
The goal of society, one might say, is to provide and protect. Provisioning and protection. And if you think of those two words, that covers most of what we need. The method, when limits start to bite in, and we are starting to see, I think, the limits really start to bite now, is reduce consumption of energy and materials, and produce locally the vital goods and services that we need.
I am, like many people, perturbed by globalization. I think most aspects of it are very troubling. The aspect of global communications is clearly very interesting. We are, to a considerable extent, an Internet-based organization, and we wouldn’t be able to do what we do without the Internet. And that’s an aspect of global communications. But most of what we mean by globalization is the economic part, the furious amount of trading, the colossal amount of tourism, and all that, and unlimited free trade and letting the markets rip into everything. I think all of that is a remarkably bad idea. And we proposed an antidote, which is flatly the opposite of globalization, and that is global relocalization.
And global relocalization can be described in various ways, but let’s describe it this way.
It means working to rebuild (and retrofit) communities based on:
Local production of food, energy and other necessities.
Shortening supply chains.
Moving from a fuel to a foot economy.
Closing provisioning loops, making them shorter, and making them have less holes in them if you like, less leakage.
Relocalization of currency, governance, and culture, so all this is much more under your local control.
Integrating and coordinating on a wide scale, because we simply can’t grow, in most places anyway, we can’t grow all our needs in one particular locale, not even in most bioregions, there are parts of California with a great deal of irrigation which can, but most places can’t. We will need to keep coordinating, exchanging, and trading longer distances than would really be ideal for quite a long time, because we spread out to so many cold and difficult parts of the planet, so we have to face up to this and just be practical about it.
We need to build a low-energy infrastructure.
And with this, we can say that we have a firm commitment to reducing and eventually eliminating our dependence on fossil fuels for energy and frankly fossil fuels for much else besides, because petroleum and natural gas are such important feed stocks for so many other things in our lives.
Some of the benefits of relocalization are:
Decreased energy consumption.
Increased community energy security, and increased community itself. Community, after all, from the Latin means “sharing with,” and once you start sharing things with each other, number one, the fastest way to reduce energy and material use of anything is to share, and number two, when you start sharing with people, particularly through shared tasks, for instance, you build community by definition. It’s always been a wonder to me, I’ve been looking at this word for about twenty or thirty years, and it always seems to be rather vague and abstract somehow. But actually community is very concrete. It’s as I’ve suggested, once you start sharing things with each other, you build community. It’s just about as simple as that, and if you’re not sharing things with each other, I think that suggests that there isn’t very much community. And sharing can include conversation. I noted the warm conversations that were going on in this room before we started. That’s I would say characteristic of a community that has a lot more coherence than say a large area, say in London, England, you wouldn’t expect to find that normally. So I thought that was very good. Sharing conversation and sharing ideas is one of the things that human beings are very good at and we derive an enormous amount of pleasure from it, and if we can turn it to good things then we can go beyond pleasure and actually use it for the useful purpose of provisioning ourselves.
If you turn your efforts to the direct production of your local needs, many many good things can flow from this. One has to bear in mind that you may not be able to produce as much as you wish, but nonetheless, it’s very exciting and satisfying to do this. It also will strengthen your local economy. It will provide not only local employment but good jobs. As Jeremy Rifkin pointed out in his excellent book, I think it was 1995, The End of Work, that great age of automation, which many of you in this room may remember, that during the 60s, and I’m old enough to remember this too, there was a worry, as automation really came in in a blitz, that there would be unemployment resulting from this automation. Well, guess what? It happened, en masse, but it happened less to the middle classes who tooled up their brains and learned more, it happened to a vast extent to the manual workers of the First World, as machines took over their jobs and then outsourcing to the Far East and Mexico before that, took away most of the rest of the sort of assembly jobs. So it really happened, the vast unemployment that resulted from this happened, but it was mopped up by various ways, to some extent by the Social Security system, no matter how lame it might be in certain places. The great way that I think it was mopped up is by a brilliant brilliant warehousing system which goes under the name of the university. Absolutely marvelous. So you encourage students to spend four, five, seven, fifteen years getting their first degree, and then ten years to get your doctorate or fifteen, meanwhile racking up absolutely colossal debts, which makes you much easier to control by the system, because if you’ve got $100,000 hanging over your head to pay off, it means you can’t go off to do anything naughty, you have to sort of knuckle down and become part of the system. So this warehousing system is absolutely fantastic for hiding the enormous amount of unemployment that’s actually been generated by automation, and one has to say also by the enormously increased population as well. But one should be alive to the fact that lots of sleights of hand have gone on to hide certain things.
I also think that relocalization can, will and must, produce a tremendous renewal of local culture and businesses. It will have to, quite frankly; otherwise we won’t be able to provision and protect ourselves in a reasonable kind of way.
Now, I’ve said that this is a group effort, it’s a community thing, it’s a collective, to use a word that one has to be careful of. And so what one needs are networks, we all hopefully have various networks, and over the years we’ve created the Relocalization Network and earlier on this year it actually got its own website address, relocalize.net. So the Relocalization Network is there for you, if you are not already a member of it, do please join, either via Local 20/20 or by some other means if you are not from this area. You can either join directly or you can become an affiliate or an associate if you are already part of another organization, but you feel you would like to join. We’re in early talks with an organization which I have a lot of respect for, I won’t name them because we are in early stages of talks with them, but they’re an organization which is doing a great deal to help local businesses get much stronger, and we’re talking to them and we’re talking to any organization which is about helping local culture, local soil, local business, the list is almost endless. Come and join with us, we’ll find various ways of doing that. And as we grow this network, you’ll start to see, and we’re already starting to see the benefits of the network, just like the Internet. One of the glories of the Internet is now, after fifteen years since its inception by Tim Berners-Lee in 1991, is if anybody says anything to you, you say, “Umh, what’s that, I’ll check on the Internet.” If somebody mentions an organization, bang, you have found out, in less than ten seconds, thanks to the wonders of certain search engines, which is extraordinary. Normally you would have had to have rung them up, or you couldn’t get the phone number, or they’d have to send you a brochure, or not, and it wouldn’t come, and it was a very long-winded procedure, before this came along, to find out information. So that’s what you get for having a network, and the more people you have in the network, especially if they’re active, the more you get the benefits of the so-called network effect.
The Relocalization Network has two full-time coordinators, based in Vancouver, and they are there to help you, they are at the end of a phone, and also email, and at a burgeoning website and materials. A lot of the materials are put there by you as it were, you the people, as well as by us. And it’s our job to help communities relocalize as quickly and as deeply as possible.
Now there are a number of aspects of relocalization strategy. I am going to have to skip through them moderately quickly, again, this presentation will be available through post-carbon.org, and you can download it from there. But we see a number of important aspects, energy, transportation, food, manufacturing, currency, education, media, and culture. Those are some of the most important. We should have governance on there as well. And we can identify short-term projects and long-term goals, amongst other things.
Let’s look at the relocalization of energy. Energy is the foundation of life. Economists don’t know this, it’s one of those secrets that they’re not taught. But if you take the energy out of any living thing, it is what we term dead, to use that wretched word again. It’s quite true, we run on energy. It takes about two to two and a half thousand calories a day, somewhere on the order of 10 megajoules I believe, to run a human body, and that’s quite a lot of energy. You stop that, and after a while, we stop, too, so this is pretty basic. Energy is different from anything else, because everything else depends on energy. But energy is this fundamental thing; there is no substitute for it. I mean for us humans there’s no substitute for water, but that’s just us, you can imagine a life form based on alcohol, in fact you have probably come across them perhaps, but, well, I like a good drop of wine myself, too, but my life form isn’t based on it, at least I hope not. But we’re all based on energy, everything we can think of. These lights, this system, the chairs were made out of energy, and they were transported with energy. So it’s more fundamental than everything else, and even money itself, which I’ll come on to, is also based on energy.
So what we’re proposing is the rather dramatic idea of planned contraction. In private, certain quite well-known professors of ecological economics have suggested that the steady state of economics cannot quite be achieved just yet, and what we’ll really need to do is to contract. But if they’ve said it publicly, I haven’t heard it yet. If anybody knows if they have, I would really like to hear this. It’s not what everybody wants to hear, but the irony is that planned contraction, including contraction of the global economy, could be very very good for the local economy, for the local activity. Especially if we can reduce the material and the energy component of it, and increase the cultural and the community component. After all, I have a violin, which I’ve had for about forty years, and according to the label it was made in about 1780, although it was almost certainly a forgery, nonetheless, it’s probably more than a hundred years old. Violins nearly always have forged labels in them. When I play that violin or anybody else, it takes no more energy than my normal breathing, perhaps slightly heightened, and yet it could easily fill this theater, no P.A. required whatsoever. The same goes even more for the saxophone. I have a tenor saxophone, which is so loud I can’t play it near my little eighteen-month old baby, nothing but the lips and a column of air. It’s quite extraordinary, how we developed over hundreds and indeed thousands of years, ways of amplifying our muscle capabilities into something which can really do quite extraordinary things. So it is quite possible that planned contraction need not be a terrible thing, at least not for most of us, and it’s something that we should really start to look at seriously. Because the trouble is, if we don’t do it, and we’re right about this energy situation, and we don’t do planned contraction, what we will almost certainly get is collapse and chaos. And we really really don’t want that. There’s nothing nice, pleasant, or romantic about this. It will be really ugly, and if you ever get the chance to read about Kazakhstan, I advise you to look into that country and I can think of other ones, too. That’s a country that’s suffered a lot of low-level chaos for years, since the collapse of the Soviet Union. It’s something that we should by and large try to avoid.
And we should produce local, reliable, renewable energy. This will help us gain community self-reliance, self-sufficiency, and secure the continuation of public services. I spoke this morning to a group of elected officials. Those of us who are working on this get more and more of an opportunity to speak to people working at the municipal level; it is absolutely vital that at least local government begins to grasp this, and they are. I’ve got a few examples to show you. Fantastically important, otherwise our infrastructure and our local services that we rely on will be interrupted in uncomfortable ways.
We need also to recognize limits to growth. It’s now been 34 years since the publication of The Limits to Growth, the first version or edition in 1972. It was derided at the time, much, by the way, as Marion King Hubbert was derided in 1956 when he accurately predicted the peak of U.S. oil around 1970. Well, it’s been over thirty years now, and it looks like the more dire limits to growth scenarios are playing out. And recognizing limits to growth is something that we have to do inside our heads and with our decisions.
One of the things that will help us recognize limits to growth and actually contract our demand is the Oil Depletion Protocol. First drafted by Colin Campbell in around 2002, and now taken up by Richard Heinberg, who is a fellow of the Post-Carbon Institute, and we are helping to promulgate this Oil Depletion Protocol. The protocol is an international agreement to provide ways for nations to reduce their dependence on oil. It’s a global rationing system. This is not a word that market adherents like at all, the market is supposed to do all the rationing. In other words you get a dollar democracy, if you’ve got lots of dollars you get plenty of democracy and you can buy what you like, and if you haven’t got many dollars, then you are sort of stuffed. Rationing on the other hand, works much more on a per capita basis, and it appears to many of us to be a much fairer system of dealing with difficult issues. After all, when you have these unfortunate situations such as major wars, such as the Second World War, rationing was a very important way of making sure that we were reasonably well supplied in a reasonably fair way. So the book has just been published, it has just arrived in California, we are awaiting our copies, The Oil Depletion Protocol, and the Post-Carbon Institute is providing the organizational support to promulgate this in the world, and we’re trying to get it adopted at every level, from the local through to the national and international. So this is one of the reasons for mentioning it in a relocalization talk, it’s not just an international protocol; we’re hoping to get it adopted at many levels.
The Energy Farm Network. Why consider an idea of an energy farm and what is it anyway? Well, an Energy Farm addresses the need to extend food farms into fuel, feed stock and forest in order to produce local, reliable, and renewable energy at a community and commercial scale with the smallest possible input of fossil (or other big or non-local) energy, by which I mean big hydro and nuclear. If one considers, Europe, for instance, over the previous thousand years, until very recently, Europe was covered with a vast number of small family farms, and for a short while, so was North America, but it didn’t last all that long. This network, and they were integrated by friendship, and also by other organizations, and yes by trade and exchange, this is what supplied Europe reasonably well, they had a lot of bumps, I admit, reasonably well over a fairly long period of time. And one thing we can say for sure, no matter what the bumps were, and some of them were induced by very nasty deliberate government policy, including by the British government, it was pre-petroleum. It worked, to the extent that it worked, without petroleum, and therefore anything that works without petroleum is something that we should at least examine and say is there anything good about this, and I think there was quite a lot of good in the system of small farms that we had ranged across Europe. And so one of the ideas of the Energy Farm is to say to extend food into energy production, and to help save and revive and rebuild the family farm. That’s something I’m fairly passionately devoted to. I saw my great-uncle’s farm get sold when he died, and I don’t know what’s happened to it now, but it was a wonderful thing, a classic old-fashioned Old MacDonald’s farm, with all these different animals and arable, gone as far as I know, and perhaps the farmhouse itself erased. The manor farmhouse, which was about two hundred yards from where I was brought up as a boy, I watched that get bulldozed and turned into 350 chicken huts, called duplexes or something like that. It’s just horrible to watch this because we and the rest of nature depend on natural production. And we’re going to have to go back to it.
Some of the goals:
To experiment with different fuel crops. I won’t go into them all now, but if anyone wants to ask me questions afterward, I will be delighted to tell you about switchgrass and other things.
Demonstrate how we are going to have to integrate new and old ideas and higher and lower tech as well.
Develop the idea of Community Supported Energy, based on the idea of Community Supported Agriculture.
Zero petroleum and zero pollution are our aims.
We want to give back to nature, in the form particularly of compost and forest.
We want to spread the model, expand the network. We have one, and you can see the picture here, we have one first well-running demonstration in Vancouver, on the University of British Columbia farm, and we’re hoping to extend that far and wide.
In terms of land use, we’re using biointensive methods. We’re composting crops, both to build soil fertility and to produce biogas. We have grown a range of crops for biofuels, including for the production of biodiesel and bioethanol, and we now have the devices, they’re not in place yet, but we have built in desperation, I would say, we have built our own vertical access wind turbine, because we found it so difficult to buy one out on the open market. And we have also had donated three of the world’s most efficient solar panels, made by a local company, not ten or fifteen miles away, as luck would have it. And for food crops, we’ve actually grown a full food garden, or as full as we could manage, and in order to show how we extend that and integrate it with energy crop production.
And these are some of the graphs, which you can see on the Web, from our so-called ambient energy monitor, which is just a couple of hundred yards from the main site, which shows just how much sun and in other places, rain and wind and so forth we’re getting. And one of the surprises was that the wind was so incredibly regular. It comes basically all the time during the day, in the winter it’s stronger and lasts a bit longer, and is actually generally a bit more reliable than the sun, at least in the part of the world where we are in Vancouver, which is not exactly a million miles different from here in many respects.
Energy vulnerability is a term which has been taken up and finds favor with municipalities, where one has to sometimes be careful with using phrases such as peak oil or peak gas. And we’re currently conducting a survey of government strategies and solutions and responses being pursued at various governmental levels, but especially at the local level. And we’ve commissioned a report, based on the latest municipal responses in North America, and that report is due to be published in the fall, it may be as soon as October, anybody who has experience with publishing things knows that it’s full of pitfalls, but that’s what we’re aiming for, and I think that it’ll be an absolutely fascinating document. It’s being written, researched, compiled, by Daniel Lurch, who has ten years of experience in Portland, a place very well known for its bold and pioneering efforts in doing cities better, and it will address the energy vulnerability in terms of the challenges it provides to municipalities, and it’s a guidebook initially targeted to officials and municipal staff. But we know that this kind of book is very avidly read by citizen activists as well, and we’re aware of this because Daniel himself was a citizen activist before he became part of the municipality itself.
We’re producing in tandem with this, a citizen’s toolkit designed for citizens and groups such as relocalization groups, post-carbon groups, to approach and have the best possible relationships with their municipalities. In other words to interreact with and to give useful information in ways in which municipalities can manage, because they are overstretched too, they often have very difficult budget constraints, and if things are handed to them in a way which is helpful and if you can find other ways of assisting them, more and more of them are aware of these kinds of tools, they will be very grateful and it will make life much easier. So this is what’s going to be in the citizen’s toolkit, and it will also be published around about the same time, in the fall or in the autumn, as I would say, being British.
Now one of the things that these documents will help people do is to do more of these Peak Oil Resolutions, which some of you may know about. The idea of a Peak Oil Resolution is to acknowledge the problem, first, then assess vulnerabilities, review policies, and envision means to enact change.
And these Peak Oil Resolutions have been passed in San Francisco, Bloomington, Portland, Oregon, Franklin, New York, and an increasing number of places. In Portland, Oregon, they established a Peak Oil Task Force, there’s a picture of the Peak Oil Task Force briefing book.
On a wider scale, Sweden has pledged itself to be fossil fuel free by 2020, an extraordinary task. Sweden is a heavily industrialized country, it is not a Third World country, it is very much a First World country, so it’s absolutely incredible, and we will be following Sweden’s example very closely.
Kinsale in Ireland has developed the Energy Descent Action Plan.
Willits, and we have the pleasure of having Brian Weller in the audience, who knows a great deal more about Willits than I do, even though I have had the pleasure of spending some time there. They are doing some extraordinary things down there in Willits with the Willits Economic Localization Group.
Hamilton, Ontario. Richard Gilbert was commissioned to write a report on Peak Oil vulnerability. Hamilton is a very heavily industrialized place in Canada’s most industrialized area of Ontario. Ontario is the economic engine of Canada, and my goodness, is it ever energy vulnerable, probably one of the most energy vulnerable places in North America.
In Australia, Queensland’s Oil Vulnerability Task Force was created.
Sebastopol has an Advisory Group on Energy Vulnerability.
And back in British Columbia, Burnaby in Canada, next door to Vancouver, the Transport Committee commissioned a report on Peak Oil vulnerability.
This all kind of shows that this is being picked up at various levels. There’s more information about all these things which you will be able to find on the Web in this presentation, so I won’t go into too much detail, but here you see some more about the Swedish program.
Now on to food and the relocalization of food.
In terms of reduction, and indeed, downright elimination, we need to reduce clearly the nitrogen fertilizers, which are all made from natural gas, and cause so many problems of runoff and other kinds of toxification.
Reduce pesticides and herbicides. Not only are they generally all made from oil or oil and gas, but of course they produce such catastrophic effects on the rest of the ecosystems, including dramatic reductions in the bird populations, and insects as well, the two being linked.
In my opinion, the introduction of genetically modified organisms anywhere for any reason is a disastrous mistake. I won’t go into all the whys and wherefores of that, but certainly in relocalized food you should consider not using these at all.
The pointless and destructive trading of food. In other words, you growing apples here, you grow apples in British Columbia, there’s no point in trading between the two, you might as well just eat them locally. Which often is not what happens, I am afraid.
We shall have to reduce our heavy dependence on a flesh-based diet. I was pleased to see, anyway, that in the book of Al Gore’s film, An Inconvenient Truth, towards the back, they actually make the point that we need to reduce the meat-based part of our diet, because it’s so heavily energy-intensive. And I am afraid that we will also have to throw in fish, because it is often said, that a pound of fish takes about a half pound of diesel to catch these days, and that is of course, because we have so heavily over fished the seas, that we have to make a vast effort with diesel fishing boats to try and catch what’s left. So we are going to have to reduce that too, and there’s also the minor matter that so much of the fish in the seas is also toxic, which is entirely what we’ve done.
We need to produce local food in season.
Organic food, preferably with low or no petroleum inputs. Many organic farms, despite their best efforts, still use a lot of petroleum inputs. And having been part of trying to prepare a hundred thousand square feet of soil, I know why tractors are used now. When you are in a tractor, you count the acres. When you’ve got a spade, you count the square feet, because that’s all your spade will deal with. You’re jolly lucky if you can do a square foot with one spade or a shovel. So this is how the world looks, and I remember standing in one of our fields, and it was an acre, and it just looked vast. The Sahara could have looked no bigger than this acre as we surveyed it, thinking “Oh my goodness, we’ve got to prepare this?” And in the end, we had to get some help from the tractor; we just couldn’t get enough help in. So one of the things when you are doing an energy farm and doing your own local production, especially at some scale is, you will need help, and it is a very good idea to prepare that in advance, and if you need to do some favors first, and call them in later, now is the time to start doing it. Don’t start waking up on May the lst, thinking, “Oh, shoot, I’ve only prepared 1 percent out of my 99 percent of my land. I need some help!” So this is one of the many things when you are dealing with farming and soil, you need to think in terms of the long term.
Doing this will increase personal and community health, food security, and local small farmers will be supported, food, and I hope fuel as well.
Some examples which will be familiar to many of you are community supported agriculture, food co-ops, farmer’s markets. These all need to be supported and extended as much as we can.
Some local post-carbon groups are undertaking food assessments in terms of security, resource use, and the local production potential. Sometimes it’s better than you think and sometimes it’s not so good.
One of the things that I am extremely keen on and where you could say that we started doing this with the production of our vertical axis wind turbine, which has been made entirely locally, is community supported manufacturing, again along the lines of community supported agriculture. How on earth can we start making things again locally? We know that if we do it under the ordinary model, the thing will cost ten times what the Far Eastern import is, and so of course, we will immediately go bankrupt. Somehow or other, we are going to need some community support, and some people even whisper dread words like tariffs. I’m very keen also on using community currency to help buffer local production against the scourge of globalized inputs, globalized trade.
Some of the things that we will need to turn our attention to include food, preserving it, drying it, pickling it. In most parts of North America, you can’t grow so much in the winter, and yet we still need to eat.
Fiber, clothing, fabric, paper, rope. We on the Energy Farm are growing kenaf and flax. Kenaf is reputed to be one of the best sources for making paper, much better than using trees, and of course, the destruction of our forests can be to a great extent laid at the foot of our use of paper and its unfortunate tendency to make paper out of trees. There’s much better things to make paper out of. And things which can be produced as field crops, renewably, more renewably. Fabric, linen, for instance, was made out of flax for hundreds of years, and so for instance, can sail cloth can be made out of flax. The flax seeds themselves make a highly nutritious food for human beings, but also an oil which can also be used as an energy source.
Fire, we are creatures of fire, we have been using fire for a very long time, and unfortunately, we have been burning down forests for instance, for at least sixty thousand years using fire. However, we have got ourselves into this progress trap, into this difficult situation, and we are going to go on needing fire for a very long time. One of the things we need it for is heat for pottery and glass.
We’ll also need foundries to forge metals. Let’s try not to dig so much out of the ground; I think we’ve done enough of that. Others, of course, in the industry disagree with me. But we should be looking to try to recover and recycle the metals which we’ve already got. This is going to be a tricky process with the more high-tech metal combinations. It would be much easier if we just had a lump of iron so there’s going to be some care required there.
Fuels, well…this is the situation we are facing on the Energy Farm. We have a pretty good crop of canola, and rapeseed, and quite a nice crop of flax. Some sorghum, but also the Jerusalem artichokes which we grow have gone very well. Now we face the interesting problem of what to do with it, so we’ll have to process it, and we’re just starting to confront that right now. One of the things I’ve discovered, and if anyone in the audience can tell me differently or put me on to somewhere more locally, is it turns out that places like India have a much better idea of how to process these things at the small scale. So if I can avoid having to spend a lot of jet fuel going to India, I would really like to do that, and I have nothing against India, but I’d really rather do this locally.
We’re going to need to fix things again, start to repair and maintain things. And obviously, if an object has cost you thirty dollars, and labor costs are twenty dollars an hour, and somebody looks at it and says it will take me two hours to fix this, you’re not going to do it, you’ll just buy another one. And that’s one of the problems that we’ve got into in the last thirty, forty, fifty years, is that it’s generally more expensive to fix something, especially smaller items, than it is to simply replace it. So this is one of the reasons why we’ll need to community support various techniques, monetary techniques and other techniques, to buffer against this problem. Otherwise we’re just going to go on throwing everything away, where is what we should be trying to do is make things which last a very long time and are repairable, and we know how they work, as well. Which is another problem, things being locked up in patents, and so forth; we don’t know how any thing works anymore.
Transportation is obviously a huge huge problem.
We are going to have to move from what I call a fuel to a foot economy whether we like it or not, and it’s going to be pretty awkward in North America for some pretty obvious reasons.
We’ll have to reduce the distance that people and goods travel. We are going to have to reduce our mobility. And this means less tourism, and for a place like British Columbia, and possibly for Port Townsend, this is a serious matter. Our economies are heavily dependent on tourism now, and it was never a good idea, and quite a considerable amount of it is going to go away.
Without transportation we will also need to reduce these pollutants that we have from all our transportation systems.
We will need to produce, to create public transportation systems, especially rail, and also waterways where we can.
Moving to slower and lighter vehicles, such as our feet, bikes, car share, and electric vehicles. I am hoping soon that we will get an opportunity to promote into existence what may be the first bioelectric car share, if it’s not, then tell me, I’d be delighted to hear, basically using biodiesel and bioethanol and electric vehicles, rather than just straight gasoline vehicles. But that’s just a glimmer in my eye at the moment.
We will be looking for the production of human scale villages, towns and cities. When you take the private car right out of the equation, then you have the chance of building some much more human-friendly places and indeed, there’s towns and cities of Europe, and I’ve lived in quite a lot of them in the 1990s, that are much more friendly to the human being and they feature much less dominance of the car.
It will help us meet our Kyoto commitments if we can reduce our petroleum use.
And it will allow us more time with family and community, which is very important towards rebuilding community.
Car sharing. In Vancouver we have one of the largest English-speaking car shares in the world. There are well over 2,000 members and about 130 cars, and it certainly makes life possible in a city which, despite claims to the contrary, I think otherwise has a better public transport system than say, Houston. Nonetheless, it is still highly problematic, especially if you are trying to run an organization there. I think car sharing is one of the single most powerful things that we can start fairly quickly; it’s not easy, and reduce our petroleum use immediately.
Currency is a very tricky area. The last sort of hundred years have seen various attempts to make local currencies flourish. They haven’t always done very well. There are reasons for that. I had an article in AlterNet recently in which I was promoting the idea of renewable energy-backed currency, and indeed there’s quite a long chapter in the forthcoming Relocalize Now! book about renewable energy-backed currency. And I think it’s a very interesting idea, but in order to do it you have to have some renewable energy, so one needs to precede that with something like an Energy Farm before you consider this. Once you’ve got that, I think one needs to think very soon about local currency based on renewable energy. One of the key things about a renewable energy-backed currency is it will provide natural boundaries to the economy. You will start to have a much better idea of how much economic activity you really should have, at least of the material sort. Because, money mediating the economy as it does, if you’ve got your money backed by energy, and you find you haven’t got enough energy, and therefore haven’t got enough money, it will limit the amount of economic activity you’ve got. You may throw your hands up in horror at that, but sometime during this century that will turn out to be a very good idea, and we will tend, as we used to, to flow to the places which can supply the food and fuel more easily for us. So it will help guide us.
In terms of education, apart from the awareness-raising that we’ve done, we have not yet had a great deal of influence over the educational system, and I think many of us in the Peak Oil world might feel that. We will have to change this; we are starting to work on trying to get more influence in universities. I would love to be able to do more work in the so-called K-12 education system as well.
Our book Relocalize Now! which contains in a lot more detail much of what I have been talking about, especially about Energy Farms, the currency, community-supported manufacturing and many other things besides, much about the Relocalization Network and things called scripts, which will help local groups to do small concentrated things, exercises, experiments.
In terms of the media, a very important, very tricky area, I founded about five years ago now Global Public Media in response to the perceived difficulties that I could see particularly in North America with media. And still five years later, it’s still going, it’s donations-based, it’s free access, if you can get access to the Internet, you can get access to Global Public Media. And you can see streaming audio and video broadcasts of many of the most important thinkers and actors in the world of energy and environment, and you can also see and hear many of the programs produced so wonderfully by Janaia and Robyn of Peak Moment TV, and including this talk itself.
In beta testing for some time now, is Local Public Media, and what we want to provide with Local Public Media is that everyone in the Relocalization Group will have the chance to create their own if you like radio and TV stations. We’d like to link it to the terrestrial ones, but this is a good place to start. So I think this is very exciting, and there will be further announcements about that.
In terms of culture, it will be a very good idea to produce more local culture, particularly local stories, local music, dance, theater, film. By clothing one means the design of the clothing, more local life. It’s been so badly attenuated in the last fifty years, particularly in the last twenty years by the globalized systems, partly by the global communications system.
So to conclude, relocalize.net, you can find this information package and download it. There are in the foyer just a few cards about the Relocalization Network. There are some signup sheets, both for Local 20/20 and for Post Carbon Institute. There are also some brochures for the Post-Carbon Institute which contain a lot more information, a summary of much of what I’ve said and more. And there are also some Oil Depletion Protocol postcards which you are all very welcome to take.
So there we have it, Global Public Media, postcarbon.org, my first book, High Noon for Natural Gas, which contains a lot about relocalization, the last chapter is actually called, But What Can We Do?, energyfarms.net, and our forthcoming book, next year, Relocalize Now! Preparing for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil. We hope, with the permission of the publisher, to make some parts of this available sooner than that on the Internet. I can’t say that for sure yet, but that’s our aim. So these are some of the things we provide for you and with you. We rely on your help in so many ways to make this flourish, and go forward. I think it’s been an amazing five years for us and much of this amazingness is thanks to you, and let’s go forward together. Join us, if you haven’t already, and let’s work with each other to make this thing a much more comfortable transition into the 22nd century than is currently looking the likely path.
Thank you very much indeed.
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