Transcribed by Miranda Huey
[Music intro] Sue Supriano: Welcome to Steppin' Out of Babylon, produced by Sue Supriano. Babylon is everywhere. It's the isms and schisms both in the system and within ourselves. Let's unify, stand aligned, and step out of Babylon. [music ends] Hi everybody, my name's Sue Supriano and my guest today is Richard Heinberg. Richard Heinberg is the author of, most recently, he has a bunch of other books, but the most recent one is Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World. Richard Heinberg teaches human ecology at New College of California in Santa Rosa. He's written a bunch of books but the last one is The Party's Over. What's the subtitle there?
Richard Heinberg: Oil, War, and The Fate of Industrial Societies.
Sue Supriano: Right. So, we have already talked about a lot of reasons why and what's happening with the end of cheap oil, basically, easily accessible oil that we cannot live how we have been living. If you want to say a little bit about that, Richard, and then we're going to go onto the positive things we can be doing.
Richard Heinberg: Right, well, just in brief, first thing, oil at $50 a barrel as we speak, we're recording this on September 26.
Sue Supriano: '04.
Richard Heinberg: '04, right. [chuckle] And, we're likely to see prices go even higher very soon because spare production capacity, globally, is just evaporating. And, probably within the next couple of years, we will see oil production globally hit its all-time peak and start its long-term decline, which means as demand continues to go up, supply will increasingly diverge from it, and that means we will be competing more and more for what's left, unless we find a way to power down. Now, in the book, I describe the real problem as being not only geological but also political because right now, we have political systems around the world that, and especially in this country, that are set up on the basis of the assumption that industrial growth, economic growth will continue into the future. And no country in the world, currently, has much of a Plan B. And with the possible exception of Iceland, Germany, which is now the world's leader in renewable energy. And so, what we see is the outworking of what I call the strategy of “last one standing” In other words, as we reach this historic watershed of a decrease availability of oil globally. Countries are going to start fighting for what's left, and the U.S. has already declared its intentions in this regard with its invasion of Iraq, and I think this is really only the beginning of this strategy which ultimately, I'm afraid, will lead to, as our Vice President has said, war for the remainder of our lifetimes, and -
Sue Supriano: He's definitely right up front about that, a never-ending war [chuckle].
Richard Heinbeirg: It's going to increasingly involve nations, not only like Iraq and Iran and Syria, but also China and Russia, and as the competition gets to that stage, I think things could get very, very nasty indeed. So, if we're not going to go that way, we the people of Planet Earth are going to have to rethink our dependency oil, and we're going to have to work together in a cooperative and coordinative way to do what I call a “powerdown”.
Sue Supriano: Well I just want to mention also that there's issues with other resources besides oil, although we're certainly focusing on oil in this interview, but there's also water, and there's climate change, and the Pentagon even put out their report of the attempted censorship of the White House about how there can be, just really huge wars, are predicted. So we really need to learn to live, as you say, Richard Heinberg, cooperatively and differently if we are to survive. I mean, the way humans ruin their own nest, it's just – how much more stupid can you get?
Richard Heinberg: Well, we were warned back in the 1970's by The Limits to Growth Report of The Club of Rome, a report which, by the way, a number of right-wing thinktanks have gone well out of their way to trash, and they suggested that The Limits to Growth Report made all sorts of predictions that have turned out not to be correct. In the course of my research for my book, I went back to my first edition copy of Limits to Growth and checked out every page of that book and there is not a single prediction in that book that has not turned out to be correct.
Sue Supriano: Lies, lies, lies, and more lies.
Richard Heigberg: [laughs] Well, the book was projecting resource consumption through the 21st century and it came to the conclusion that by the middle of the 21st century, we would be facing major scarcities of many important resources. And we're right on track for that. There's a new update of that book, by the way, a 30-year update of Limits to Growth, and for anyone who's possibly living under the illusion that Limits to Growth has been debunked somehow, I would suggest getting that new update and looking at it.
Sue Supriano: Interesting, and not surprising. [chuckles] So, what can we do?
Richard Heinberg: Well, what we have to do is relocalize our economies. Now, we have been living with localization for the past 10 or 20 years, and globalization is really all about using cheap fuel for transportation to increase the distance between producers and consumers, so that we – we no longer make shoes in this country, for example. Take a look at the sneakers on your feet, and chances are they were made in China or Indonesia or Korea. The same thing with your car. Even if it's an American car, most of the parts were probably made in Mexico, and maybe even the car was assembled there. That all makes a certain economic sense. I think globalization's been actually catastrophic for people and culture in all sorts of ways, but the fact is, it's a completely unsustainable process from an ecological point of view because it's based on non-renewable energy resources that are about to become much more scarce. And after the global oil production peak, there simply isn't going to be the cheap energy to support globalization of food or manufacturing or labor or anything else, so we are going to have to relocalize our economies and it's not going to be easy because we have cannibalized whole industries and sold off factories and machine tools for scrap to the Chinese, and we're going to have to rebuild all of that from scratch, if we're going to maintain anything like a viable economy in this country.
Sue Supriano: Well, I've been thinking about this a lot, and we're lucky to have the farmers' market here. I have a garden. I'm lucky to have a space to have a garden. But even the farmers' market, those folks come from a long distance. Not across the world like so many things do in the Safeway, the commercial supermarkets, but still, they come a hundred miles, even more sometimes, from the farm to the city. That's just one little example. But just thinking about the energy necessary to move things.
Richard Heinberg: Right. And food is the most important thing to move because we human beings absolutely depend on that. You know, one of the best historical examples we can look to for guidance, inspiration, in this is Cuba at the time of the fall of the Soviet Union. You know, at that time, Cuba was more dependent on fossil fuels than we are now, at least for agriculture. Cuban farmers were using more petrochemicals per acre than American farmers in the late 1980's. In 1989, of course, the Soviet Union collapsed economically, and so the oil imports to Cuba virtually vanished overnight. And Cuba became very close to social collapse as a result of that. A whole generation of Cuban children grew up malnourished because they simply weren't able to produce enough food for everyone. However, they were able to survive by pulling together, in a very clever way, I think. First of all, they reduced the gap between producers and consumers. They broke up the giant collective farms into smaller farming co-ops. And then they moved a lot of food production into the city so that, by now, Havana has tens of thousands of urban gardens right in the city. Also, they reduced their need for transportation as much as they possibly could. Now, we are going to have to do essentially the same thing in this country. We have some, actually some disadvantages to start from. We don't have the same kind of command and control economy that Cuba had in 1989. And so it's going to be more difficult for us, I think, to work in a coordinated way to do what they did. But, ultimately, what they did is what we will have to do. We will have to find ways to reduce the amount of transportation going on in this country, move producers and consumers closer together, and make our cities places not just of food consumption but also of food production.
Sue Surpiano: I studied urban planning and [chuckle] we used to talk about it way back then and – what was that, 35 years ago – about how that's a good idea, but I haven't seen it happening too much. It sometimes does, but...
Richard Heinberg: We have the beginnings of it here in Berkeley with the Berkeley food policy which prioritizes growing from local or buying from local farmers and also prioritizes organics. One of Cuba's strategies was to go organic because they no longer had the petrochemicals on their farms. And you can't do that overnight. Once you've started farming with chemicals, you're really, in a sense, entering into an addictive process, because you're using the soil just as an inert medium with which to prop up the plant while you force-feed it water and chemicals, and the soil becomes degraded over time. So, in order to make the transition to organics, some time is needed. Usually at least about 5 years. So we're looking at global oil production peak probably within the next couple of years, so we need to start today. We need to make food policy really our first priority, and I'm talking about local food security.
Sue Supriano: Well, I'm just going to ask you about time, we haven't been talking about it. The next couple of years, cheap oil is going to very possibly not be available any longer. Well, that's bad news, I guess. And, just wanted to say also, that every school in Berkeley has an organic garden, speaking of Berkeley.
Richard Heinberg: Yes, and that's a very, very wise move. Another aspect of this is going to be funding development of renewable energy substitutes, primarily wind and solar. And I think we have to understand the scale of the problem here. While energy substitution is important, I think it's important that we understand that this is not a solution. The reason I say that is there's a time-scale required in order to build up the sort of energy infrastructure that would be needed in order to replace fossil fuels. We're talking about decades of work and trillions of dollars of investment. We're starting from a very, very disadvantaged position in terms of solar and wind. If we were to take what has been put in place over the past 20 years in terms of solar and wind energy production capacity and double that, which is no small feat, and then double that again, we still wouldn't be up to 1% of our national energy budget. So, we're not talking about a billion dollars here or there in needed new investment in solar and wind. We're talking about probably tens to hundreds of billions of dollars of new investment every year starting immediately. Now, that's not going to happen. I mean, we have to be realistic about this. It's going to be impossible to put that kind of energy infrastructure in place rapidly enough in order to forestall the dire economic impacts of global oil production peak, so what we have to do first and foremost is to approach the problem from the standpoint of reducing demand. The demand side of the equation is going to be far more important than the supply side. And this is hard to get into people's minds. When I speak, especially to rooms full of economists and engineers, they always want to go to supply-side solutions, energy substitution. Yes, we have to have to do that, but that's not going to get us where we really need to be. We need to look at the demand side of the equation, which means reducing the amount of transportation. It means designing our buildings so that less energy is needed to heat and cool them. And that ultimately will mean making a transition from a perpetual growth economy to a steady state, or even for a while, a contraction economy. And no economist wants to go there, but that's where we're headed.
Sue Supriano: Well, I think most people don't want to go there because it means breaking our addictions to all the things that we're addicted to, which is just about everything.
Richard Heinberg: Right. Well, we have to understand that Europeans are already living in an environment in which they're using energy at one-half the per capita rate of us Americans. So we Americans are energy hogs and we can dramatically reduce our consumption without really eating into our core way of life for some time, I mean, beyond a certain point. As the oil trickles out, we're going to have to contract in fairly dramatic ways. But we should understand that if we do this cooperatively, if we do it with a plan, and it's going to require some intelligence and some courageous leadership from the top, if we do it in a coordinated way, we can come out of this together. Just as the Cubans managed to survive their energy famine of the 1990's, I think we can do the same. But it's going to take awareness. People have to understand that this is what we're facing. It's not some evil people on the other side of the world who are withholding our oil from us because it just happens to be under their sand. Our politicians are going to hold up scapegoats in front of us and send us off to war after resource war. The only thing that's going to keep us from doing that is if we understand that this is not a political problem at its core. It's a problem simply of geology. Mother Nature only puts so much oil there for us and we've become foolishly dependent on it, and now we have to break that dependency. Over time, we have to go cold turkey and find a way to live without it. That's the real nature of the situation.
Sue Supriano: I was just thinking about how, I think the second preventable cause of death in the United States is obesity. It just popped into my mind because of the connectedness of everything, and you teach human ecology, Richard Heinberg, and that's going to probably not continue. [chuckle]
Richard Heinberg: Yeah, I know, I often – of course I travel overseas myself, but then when my friends from Europe or Asia come here and visit this country, the first thing they remark on is seeing such large people [chuckle] driving such large vehicles. They just can't understand it. It's extraordinary. And unless we Americans are willing to change our way of life and learn to live with less, we are going to be in deadly conflict with the rest of the world. Can you imagine yourself living in another country which is – imagine ourselves now past the oil production peak. There's less every year to go around. And you are finding yourself in some other country having to forego conventional economic growth and do with less and less while you see people in the U.S. attempting to control the remaining resource supplies of the world using military force and still gorging themselves on cheap energy. I don't think that's going to win us any friends around the world. That's the way to short-circuit, really to torpedo, global cooperation. And global cooperation is going to be the only way we will be able to survive the oil production peak without unending resource wars.
Sue Supriano: So is anything happening in terms of what do you think should happen? And where is it at, in terms of global agreements about these things. I know that the United States and our president-select Bush nixed the Kyoto agreement but I don't know anymore detail.
Richard Heinberg: Well, Kyoto was really only the first step. It was a step in the right direction, and as you say, the U.S. has not gone on board. Unless the U.S. is on board with these kinds of cooperative agreements, they're not going to really mean anything because the U.S. is the main consumer and the main polluter. So, what we need in fact is what we might call Kyoto on steroids. We need global agreements to limit oil exports and to limit oil imports. Why do we need that? In order to, first of all, prevent profiteering on the part of oil industry and also on the part of oil producing countries. And also, we need those kinds of agreements in order to forestall deadly competition for remaining resources. Currently, no one is even proposing those kinds of global agreements. I have to hope that, when it becomes scare, as I think it will just in the next few months, that we are in fact approaching this global historic watershed of oil production peak. When that happens, the necessity will start to become clearer in more people's minds. But I don't think this is going to spontaneously occur to politicians unless the people of the world demand it. And that's why I think it's so vitally important that the message of oil production peak and the impacts of it, the understanding of it, gets out to as large an audience as possible, because if we don't understand what's happening to us, our politicians are simply going to hold up scapegoats in front of our faces and we'll be attacking next Iran, and Syria, and countries in West Africa. We will have troops in countries around the world trying to hold down the fort in maintaining the supply and it's simply not going to – just as it's not working in Iraq, it's turning out to be just a horrific debacle there and I think it will in every place we attempt to do it.
Sue Supriano: And what you're saying, Richard Heinberg, is that not only will people hate us even more, hate the United States even more, but it's not doable, because the oil is just not there, I mean, it's there, but access is too expensive, really, so it's almost as if it's not there, in terms of the average person.
Richard Heinberg: The “last one standing” strategy is [chuckle] laughably futile, and yet it's the path of least resistance for politicians, because they don't have to stand up in front of the American people or the British people and say, “Hey, look, sorry, we misled you. We enabled you to become more and more dependent on this non-renewable resource that's now running out and becoming expensive.” They don't have to do that. Instead, all they have to do is say, “Well, the problem is these nasty people, or these terrorists, or people in foreign countries who speak different languages who are preventing us from getting the resources that we need.”
Sue Supriano: So, we are before the election. Since we're in September 2004, the end of September, and I guess we're not hearing from the candidates about this, of course, needless to say. So, in the last remaining time here, what do you suggest that people start doing, besides thinking, noticing, and changing where they get their food and of course, we don't need all these chemicals, mostly a lot of it's not good for us, not good for the environment. So, there's a lot of positive effects in that way, too, but still, it's a huge change. And politically, what do we do? What do we look for and ask for?
Richard Heinberg: [chuckle] On the national level what we first have to do, I think, is change the current regime. Because the people in office now, I'm speaking primarily right now of Dick Cheney, who I think is actually calling the shots in terms of both energy policy and foreign policy for this country. This is an individual, and he's surrounded by the famous neo-cons. These are people whose entire plan is based on military domination of global energy supplies. I don't think that the Democrats have a much better plan right now, but the neo-cons are going about it in such a disastrous and inept way, and their plan is so completely wrong-headed from the get-go that I think it's absolutely essential that we get these people out of office immediately. I plan to vote for Kerry, and I hope that, once Kerry is in office, it will be possible, then, for us collectively to put pressure on him and the people around him to recognize and acknowledge the problem of our addiction and dependency on oil, and enable him and his policy team, therefore, to make some real changes, and to put some real effort into economic contraction and the conversion to renewable alternatives.
Sue Supriano: And in the meanwhile, I guess we can do that at our own personal lives without relying on politicians.
Richard Heinberg: Absolutely, and we have to do it not only individually, but as communities, because in the energy downturn, if we think of this only in survival terms, like I'm going to get my 40 acres and shotgun and grow a garden, and so on, it's just not going to work because your neighbors will have more shotgun shells than you have and they'll wait for you to go to sleep. No, we have to do this as communities. We have to approach this cooperatively and we have to think in terms of our community's security and community survival.
Sue Supriano: So if we can't be safe, we can't be happy, unless the people around us are also.
Richard Heinberg: That's right. And I think running for local office is a very good thing to do right now. I have a good friend named Bob Gragson who is up in Hopland in Mendocino County. He is the director of the Solar Living Institute, and he's keenly aware of peak oil, and he's actually running for city council on a peak oil platform, primarily as a way of educating his community about the problem that's approaching and what his community needs to do in order to be secure and to survive.
Sue Supriano: Is anything like that happening in any other parts of the United States that you know of?
Richard Heinberg: He's the only candidate that I know of who's running on a peak oil platform anywhere in the country, but I think he's the first, and I'd like to see a lot more.
Sue Supriano: I heard you, when we were watching, we were at the film The End of Suburbia, which I really recommend. The End of Suburbia you can get it from postcarbon.org. That's a great film to show to your friends in addition to Richard Heinberg's book, Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World. Anyway, just real quick, we were talking about the only solar panels in the United States are made in the East now. In fact, you said that the corporations, the oil corporations bought up all that stuff so I guess, anyway, you say it.
Richard Heinberg: Yeah, well, if we're going to be turning to wind and solar, what about local production of solar and wind capacity? What about local production of PV panels or wind turbines? We need to be relocalizing our economies in really practical, down-to-earth ways: food, energy, water. These are the things that we need to be thinking about. Where do these things come from and how can we supply them in the context of an environment in which transportation is much more expensive and oil is no longer cheap?
Sue Supriano: Okay, well thank you very much, Richard Heinberg. Thanks for your work, thanks for this interview. People, get the book, Powerdown by Richard Heinberg. And my name's Sue Supriano. Thanks for listening. To hear other programs produced by Sue Supriano, go to my website at www.suesupriano.com. Sue Supriano is spelled S-U-E S-U-P-R-I-A-N-O. And to order copies of my shows, you can send me an email at sue@suesupriano.com or you can call me at (510) 883-1979. Again, that's sue@suesupriano.com is the email and the telephone is (510) 883-1979.
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