Julian Darley on Relocalization and Energy Use - Sustainable Enterprise Conference (transcript)

Transcribed by Miranda Huey

Host: And it's now my pleasure to introduce a man who is cultivating that garden where so much is in bud. So many of the possibilities for the new resources and new ways of generating energy that we're going to need on the other side of what's happening. Julian Darley is the president of the Post Carbon Institute, which, to the great benefit of Sonoma County and this region, has just relocated to Sebastapol from Vancouver, British Columbia [applause] because of, because of people like you. Julian has a master's degree in environmental science from the University of Surrey in England, a master's in journalism from the University of Texas in Austin. He's the author of High Noon for Natural Gas, and co-author of ... has it been released yet?... coming very soon, Relocalize Now, which is what we're all about hear, so please welcome Julian Darley. [applause]

Julian Darley: Thank you very much. It's an enormous pleasure to be here, and as Larry said, Post Carbon Institute's HQ has relocated from Vancouver, Canada, and we still have an office there. We have an office in various parts of the world, Australia and Washington DC, and Portland. But we came here because we had to. [chuckle] We were drawn here because we feel that there's a literal and metaphorical sense of energy and its not an accident we're here. I've always found America to be an absolutely extraordinary place, but I believe this is the center of where we can start something that will lead us into the 21^st century and lead us out of the many difficulties of the 20^th century. Now, I wanted to start with a little story which I think illustrates some of the difficulties we're facing and move through into trying to show how almost every challenge that you can think of is actually an opportunity and has to be an opportunity, especially for business, especially for enterprises that want to become sustainable. And, I'll just mention that we've come up with the idea of a regional renaissance. Local renaissance, regional renaissance, this idea that we need to rethink the region, rethink the locale and here's Botticelli's The Birth of Venus here, showing that we can do this with color and vigour, and there's also some wind there, which is a very useful renewable thing that Botticelli discovered for our benefit. And some waves, my goodness, thank you Larry, yes, yes. Waves, too. He was way ahead. And sunshine, too. [chuckle] Good. I should explain that Post Carbon means both beyond hydrocarbons, especially non-renewable ones, and beyond anthropogenic, man-made, greenhouse gases. And there are links to all our programs from postcarbon.org. Now, in keeping with the speed of that task of having to do this transformation, this long transition which was what we were talking about, this presentation will be quickly paced, fast-paced. I think a lot of you are already familiar with the kinds of problems. I'm just going to frame them in a slightly different way, I hope, and put a couple of details on. And, Stephen Hawking was told by his publisher, when he did A Brief History of Time, quite a long time ago, now. Every equation that you put into it halves the readership [audience chuckles] but he went in and put one in, naughty fellow here: E = MC². Well, I'm not going to mention E = MC², but I have just a couple of charts. I have to show you a couple of charts that are really important, but I'll go quickly through them, and this'll all so you can drool or lament over them as you wish later on. Now, so here we are, back to my story. So I was driving back from Canada, a big, long drive, more than a thousand miles. Heard on the radio about the unfortunate fate of a fighter pilot whose plane had crashed in a demonstration, and apart of the sadness of this event, a human lost his life, a fellow who was commenting on Fox News. Actually, I hadn't heard it before. I thought I'd take the opportunity for an interesting experience. And he was talking about the way that a jet fighter has to basically be on more or less full blast, and what happened was that the engine flamed out, went off, and apparently the pilot is instructed to have one go at restarting, and if that fails, you bail. Now, I think we've built an economy more or less like jet fighter. The trouble is, we don't have the option to bail. There's only one planet earth. Okay, there aren't many trips to the stars, and we've not even found a good planet like this one to get away to. I think we should dump this idea of trying to bail. We have to make do with what we've got. And, there's some evidence it was pretty good, and it could still be that way. So, we've built this fighter thing and unfortunately just like a fighter, our present economy seems to just go around attacking things. It's not really very productive, or not nearly as much as it could be, of the right and most useful kinds of things. Now what on earth was I doing driving back from Canada? It is a long drive. I was driving back biogas digesters that we had made in Canada and I was driving back some of our own wind turbines that we had made in Canada. I was also, had some special panels that were made locally in Canada, which somebody was kind enough to donate to me. Now, driving these things a thousand miles in an ordinary truck doing about, goodness knows, 9 miles to the gallon. Something horrifying. Will those panels and digesters and wind turbines ever make back the energy I spent driving them down? I really have to doubt it. But, the symbolic value, the research value, the fact that that's what we've got, we needed to bring them here to work on them more, overrode the fact that in this case, what we call the energy return on energy invested is not going to pay back on those devices, but after all, if we can make more of them, if we can make them work better, if we can deploy them at scale, then that effort may well pay back. And part of the lesson there is: what are we going to invest our energy in? We've still got a lot. We've still got a lot around now. In fact, we've never had so much energy. What are we going to spend it on? That's a big question that we're all part of. And, the other curious thing about this, to end this little story, when I rented this van, it made me sign, literally, they made me sign on a contract that if I had to go into reverse, I was to ask for some help. Now, this van is a huge looking thing, very hard and dangerous to reverse. It couldn't see anything when you were going backwards. So literally, I was supposed to ask for help when going backwards. And I had to arrange my whole journey so I didn't have to go backwards, which I can tell you, if you're pulling into a gasoline station or trying to buy something on the way, it's pretty tricky. And so that's the point, is that reversing either this van or this fighter plane can be really difficult, and I've got a picture here of a liquefied natural gas tanker, which is one of the biggest civilian ships on the planet. Reversing those things really is very difficult or just not on. But the big lesson is, in order to reverse what we've got and to start to recuperate and make something different, we're going to have to collaborate. We're going to need to sign people up to help us change and go backwards.

So, 21^st century, excitingly enough, I'm here to tell you, is going to be about limits. We know about the limits to the atmosphere now. We should have known about them a lot longer ago, where all our carbon dioxide and methane and so forth is going. We see limits to soil and water. We know about water difficulties here. There are limits to oil, peak oil, natural gas, especially in the US, peaked. Coal looks like it may be about to peak very soon. The next 10-15 years. Uranium may go the same way. There's a uranium crisis coming anyway in the next 7 years for other reasons which I won't go into. Large hydros in trouble for various reasons, including climate, and there are very few new large hydro sites in much of the industrialized world. And, indeed, it really is true, there are limits to growth. They were right in 1972, although they were derided and Richard Heinberg's new book this year from New Society is called Peak Everything, if that, just to hammer the idea home. So this is good news, I want to tell you. This is good news because unrestrained growth is the ideology of cancer, and we know that cancer is a really dreadful thing. Nature is full of limits. Art is full of limits. That's how you become creative. It's a true form of freedom. And so, I believe that limits are a fantastic opportunity for the local economy, and they are the break that local sustainable enterprise has been waiting for. And furthermore, being an energy importer, which the US so gloriously is, and I've got a few quick pictures of it, being an energy importer is a fantastic opportunity to start using less energy and start producing locally. This is the way we need to think of it. So it's great that the US is such an energy hungry beast because it gives you so many fantastic opportunities to reduce. It's really wonderful. Other countries will really envy you this possibility. You ask now. I'm part of you, too. The even better news is, limits will be even sooner and even better than we thought, so I say, bring on the limits. And this is -- [audience laughter, applause] So here we are. California is a truly shocking energy importer. Isn't that fantastic? [audience laughter] There are 4 states which import more than 5 quadrillion BTU's and California is one of them, I'm pleased to say. What is a quad? It's equivalent to – 3 quads, excuse me. 120 nuclear reactors. We've only got 104 in America. It's worth more than all the nuclear reactors in America, is what California, at least what California imports. 600 million barrels of oil. That's 3 quads, or 1.5 million railroad cars of coal. Fantastic. More importantly, at least that much in Canada. That is exciting. That would be, at least, a 15,000 mile coal train. Isn't that wonderful? [audience chuckles] 15,000 miles. But the even better news is that California doesn't import 3 quads. It imports 4 quads, which is even better, because that means its equivalent to a 20,000 mile coal train or 160 nuclear reactors. What a fantastic opportunity to do without these things. So, that's really exciting. The total amount of California's energy demand is around about 7 quads. So that's nearly even double what I just said. A train of about 40,000 miles of coal, that's I think a really exciting idea to not have that. Transportation fuels are making up over half of California's energy demand. The US is even better news. World's largest importer of energy, equivalent of importing 1,000 atomic power stations. I think it's just wonderful. I get very excited when I see that. And oil looks like it is really peaking, plateauing around about now. This is from the International Energy Agency in Paris, and you can see fairly clearly that we're around about flat there. And in Saudi Arabia it really has peaked. We're in the decline. And this is very exciting because it gives us all an opportunity to get off oil as fast as we possibly can. Now, one way at busy of getting off oil, in my book, I talked about, High Noon for Natural Gas, which is by the way, by coincidence, on sale in the back. And I do also talk about relocalization in the back of the book. It's the longest chapter. Now, this should be really something to engage you, is that here, this shows not only that North America is now finally done its final peak in natural gas production, more than half of all California's electricity comes from natural gas and 60% of heating of homes in this country is natural gas, definitely in decline, and how do we know that the story's over? This is the number of producing wells. It's shot up. It's nearly doubled in the last few years, and yet, natural gas is in decline. We really have to get off this stuff, and we have to get off it fast. That's the message there. And natural gas was being heralded as the great green new fuel not so long ago. It's cleaner than the other things, but it really is in decline, and its very difficult to get it from elsewhere. So that's my book. Energy comes in a fuel. One of the reasons we like natural gas is, it's the most dense by weight of all the fuels. If you were to convert baked potatoes to fuel your economy, it's 10 times less dense in energy. Now, baked potato is a biofuel. It tells you something. Water supply, in California, the actual amount is going down, that's available to Californians, even as the population is projected to go up. This increase in population I think is not the most brilliant idea that people have come up with, but using less water is a good idea. It's absolutely necessary and we know it has to happen in Sonoma County. These are greenhouse gas increases,. This is the projected temperature increase. Do we really want to cook like that? It's a pretty bad idea. These just show how much the US is producing of these things, a wonderful opportunity. Look at that! The US only produces 2% wind and 1% of 6% of renewable energy. That's a tiny, minuscule percentage and represents a fantastic opportunity. Now, big changes in energy flow mean big changes in the whole system. We're going to see uncertainty, both in climate and also in energy. First, it's going to be price gyrations up and down. We've already seen it again generally going up. But there'll also be problems with the supply, and we're not used to that. Fundamental change is necessary. We need to think about where we get our energy and materials, and we really should be thinking about how locally we can get them. This is something fundamentally new for everyone, and it's new for business, but it's a real opportunity for local business. What we're talking about here is a practical vision based on facts and realistic projection. We need to get this message through to some places in DC if we can. But, the good news is that the message has long been heard in many local towns and cities, and local government, and need hardly say around here, is absolutely amazing. That's one of the reasons why we've come here. This is going to have to start with local business and local government. We know, unfortunately, that there's almost no national government in the world which is really, seriously grasping this, especially the energy depletion component. So, all of these challenges are potential local business opportunities especially in provisioning our vital, daily needs. We need to ask new questions. Where do profits really come from? What are they? They are, in a sense, surplus energy. And the only place where genuine, sustainable profits can come from is the sun. That's the only place where new energy comes in. All other profit, I fear, is strip-mining, and we have to stop doing this. Revenue, after all, should cover operation expenses. It shouldn't be taken out of our capital. We need to start managing, therefore, on our solar budget. This is a real challenge, but we do have lots of useful technology, we are going to have to do this. We don't really have a choice about this. We've been using our ancient sunlight in the past and burning up our environment in the future. That way of life is coming to an end. We've got to work within our carrying capacity, and we've tried to determine what that is, and it may tell us some surprising things. Again, water is a very serious constraint in the whole American West. We've got to live within our water budget as well as our solar ration. Part of this answer of relocalization, which is what I'm talking about, is also the answer to the climate change problem. It's also the answer to the environmental destruction that we're wreaking. So, the challenge is, can we imagine and achieve a steady state economy that actually lives within our means and can we do it quickly, because that's what we need to do.

So, the solution. The only solution that I've come across is to reduce consumption and produce locally. It's going to be a long transition, although we've got to do it as fast as we can, and we call this long transition relocalization, getting your daily needs as locally as possible but as practically as possible. We've been trading for various reasons for a long time. We have to go on trading, but we need to recognize that trading has very serious limits and implications. We need to invert our conventional global logic. Put the local first, then regional, then national, then international. They all have a place, but we've got them the wrong way around, so we need this local and regional renaissance. We need to reframe our thinking to start planning in terms of reducing consumption and producing locally. We will need new ideas, but also many old ideas will be very useful, and I would like you to hear Terry say that with regard to history. Many of the ideas are in our history book. So there's some really good ideas in there. There's some really bad ideas in there, too. Let's not copy the bad ideas. We need to reframe our current economic thinking. It's really not going to do the job for us. It's really also part of the problem. We need to start seeing energy, not just money, thinking about energy budgets, not just dollar budgets. It causes us to think and plan in a different way. And key to all of this is shortening our supply chain. We've been doing just the opposite, especially since the Second World War. When you think about scale, the physical size of our projects need to be smaller, but then we'll need to network them together to deliver the kind of quantity that we need, even our reduced quantity is still very considerable. There'll be a great need for networks of distributed suppliers, which are, I'm afraid have been run out of business by the vast global businesses, the huge corporations of retailers. They squeeze them out. We actually need middle people. We need middle supply chains. And the scale of knowledge, different networking, the small together is very different from connecting a small number of very large projects. We need careful planning. And everything I've put in red is an opportunity for business to seize and become part of this, and in some places, only business can do this, and in some places, only government, and in some places, and in fact most places, it'll need to be some kind of partnership between that and citizens. Collaboration needs to trump competition. We've had a long period of dangerous competition. We must start sharing and collaborating .We need a new age of sharing. High-tech has its uses. Technology has its uses. We actually need it, unfortunately. We're all wearing clothes, after all. But, much high tech breaks easily. It's hard to fix. We don't understand it. It's very proprietary. We need a local technology. We shall need much innovation in all kinds of processes in research, development, manufacturing. I must stress manufacturing, and I will. In distribution. We can't just switch the economy over from this strip-mining system to a sustainable one. We need lots of what I call non-investment money, angel money, research for anthropic money and so forth to help discover what to do. We will make mistakes and we have to be prepared to make mistakes. This is something we can learn from Silicon Valley. You don't get anywhere in Silicon Valley unless you've had at least one failed start-up. We need to invest in basic as well as applied research. We need to think about and extend our planning horizons, bring back critical thinking into all that we do. We kind of eradicated it from our education system. We need to learn to think systemically, long range planning will be required. The market is not very good at long range planning, in fact, it's thoroughly lousy at it. We need to be proactive, responsive, flexible, innovative, research-oriented, all things that people here, especially in this region, all things that we are. We need new and pre-petroleum knowledge, new ways of thinking and being. This matter of supply chains is critical. I know lots of people here have been engaged already in analyzing supply chains of water and energy and other things, but we're going to need think through our material daily needs much more carefully as well. What is coming in and going out? Where to and where from? And that includes our money. How do you shorten supply chains quickly? Some ways it's easy, some ways it's difficult, but one of the keys is sharing. Sharing is a magic way of reducing your consumption literally overnight. People have talked about car-sharing yesterday. That's an amazing way of getting down your energy demand very quickly. The economy is presently not set up to do these things, unfortunately. So, unfortunately, but fortunately, this is where huge opportunities lie in shortening the supply chains. Now, this is going to require money, and we're not designed to do that. We're more or less unfortunately, most of the world and America, is designed to invest in the wrong things and it sucks the money out of local life into global speculation. We all know this to be true. We need to keep money circulating in the locale. We need local investment in local production. Things like mutual funds, local banks and credit unions. Local stock markets that Michael Schumann has talked about, and indeed, he's talked about it here. Local currencies, local pensions are a huge part of the money supply picture, but they mostly get invested elsewhere, and local healthcare is something that we need to invest in and start rebuilding here. If we don't have some kind of healthcare system which is a lot better than this ghastly broken insurance-bound nonsense that we have in America, a lot of other things, the great employment boom that we're looking at could possibly have the potential to be stillborn. We have to do something about the healthcare situation and I don't know what happens if we don't start locally. I know there are profound difficulties with that, but health is pretty important. Post carbon economy means more people taking part in primary production and the making of finished goods. That means fewer in the current knowledge economy, but that doesn't mean the knowledge economy goes away. Huge opportunities in education. We need to reinvest in vocational education, including apprenticeships. We need to rebuilt light industry and we'll need some regional heavy industry. Who here is not sitting on a lump of steel? Uh, that fellow there who's sitting on the petroleum-made carpet. [audience laughter] We need to be very careful about our manufacturing, though. We've done it very badly in many places for 200 years, but we've got to start thinking about making things again. Wonderful opportunities in transport and transit for bringing back metal rails which we compile with renewable energy so much more easily than individual vehicles, which are still suffering from the lamentable underinvestment in battery technology, which has been going on since the first way of storing electricity in 1746, but we haven't made so much progress since then. Making of electric vehicles, especially light, slower, shorter-distance ones which will help us to walk and cycle so much more easily, especially once we start building our life locally and building our home and work and education and culture. We have to aim to build that within 5 minutes walk of the vital places. I'll show you some pictures just before we end, of places where I've lived. All of those places in Europe, all, I got all my daily needs within 5 minutes walk. It's not happening on some other planet. It's happening on just a continent, just a short hop by a petroleum-powered aircraft over the water. [laughter] But we can use pictures and we can use all the books and all the understanding of how it's been done. It can be done. We must do it. Return of manual work. This is going to be a real surprise. The return of muscles. We need to combine muscles with minds in a different kind of way. We've got to bring that back, and it will be brought back, and it's part of the disaster of the last 40 years is that automation has done away with manual work and it's one of the reasons why we have such terrible problems with drugs and people being in prisons and so forth. And that's another fantastic opportunity to make our society better and rebuild the local economy. This is one of the absolute keys. Local farming needs to become the engine of the economy. We need to support and grow a huge network of small- to medium-scale locally owned farms, just like we used to have, but the new part is that we're growing not just food sustainably but also fuel and fiber and feedstock and fertilizer and forest and I should say also regrowing our soil. This is vital, and we've got a program called the energy farms network, which I invite you to look at, to help this happen. We need to save our soil. That surely is clear to all of us. We need to see the farmer as hero. Save the small family farm. Stop building on farmland. This is a, I'm sorry to say such a shocking thing, but it's crazy to build on good soil. We need to rebuild the cities. The inner parts of the cities. We need to revitalize urban centers, rebuild rural life, create public spaces, and we've got a program called Post Carbon Cities which has just started at postcarboncities.net, and a new guidebook on this coming. One of first, I think, to address peak oil and climate change together. That's the post carbon cities' guidebook, and this is to help people in local government and I encourage businesspeople to look at this, too, because you need, you all know it, surely, you need the connection with local government to prepare the local economy as a whole for future challenges and opportunities.

This is an extraordinary diagram created from our relocalization idea by the writer of that post carbon cities book. This is available on the internet, it's a schematic of how a relocalized provisioning system could work. I haven't got time to go through it in detail, but it will be on the web, and it's up available as separate large PDF also on the web. Talk about local manufacturing and local money and the local energy systems, and even a local currency system. All these challenges are opportunities, but one thing is absolutely key. Prices of energy and food, I'm sorry to tell you this, prices of energy and food are way too cheap, possibly, especially in the case of energy, 10 times too cheap. But way, way too cheap. In any system, whether it's market or otherwise, and I'm not a particular fan of the market system for various reasons, however you do it, you must pay decent prices, fair prices, for your local renewable energy and your local good food. If not, there is no sustainable energy and farming, and without sustainable energy and farming, there is no sustainable economy now or in the future, so we must get used to paying fair prices, otherwise sustainability is not sustainable. There are no easy answers, but there are many exciting ones. There are many challenges and goodness knows which place on the planet is better at facing exciting challenges than Americans and America. However, let us not be deluded by the hydrogen hype, nor by carbon sequestration. Notice that there backlash is quite rightly growing against industrial biofuels. We need local biofuels. There's no such thing as clean nuclear, never was, it's a ghastly nightmare. Don't be, however, don't be driven by desperation or haste. That's bad for planning.

How can we help? Right now, many sensible things don't make economic sense. The system makes it very difficult for local producers to get started. So, during the long transition of relocalization, we will need these dreaded things which economists have told us are so evil. Subsidies, although, of course, notice that much of the midwest and the oil industry gets plenty of them, but that's different. We need incentives. Regional and community support of all kinds. We need local economic zones to help local producers get started. Even the dreaded tariffs - may I be struck down by The Economist magazine? - may be necessary. It will require extraordinary collaboration. What we don't need are band-aid approaches. They are not sustainable. We need systemic change. This will lead to job creation on a vast scale if we do it right., especially with local manufacturing. And we can manufacture energy machines. We must manufacture the energy machines that we use locally. There are so many reasons: wind turbines, PV, there's new kinds of PV, solar film and so forth. Everybody here in the room knows about these things. Local biofuels need to be grown and processed, locally. We need to, how about manufacturing press? We already do, but we need to manufacture more of our green building materials. We use chemicals in our lives all the time, bad idea most of it. We'll still need some. We should be making those locally. We need simple tools. We need hand tools. They need to be made locally. Don't just buy them in from Holland. They make very good ones. But we should be making local tools. We need to use more elbow grease, as my late mother would put it. That's the muscle power. And this'll be more also. More jobs for more people, and healthier people, too. Especially if they're not breathing in the chemicals that they won't be using anymore. Less privatization. Less privatizing means much more of the pie for locally owned businesses. We've been sold a bad deal over the last 50 years about this privatization. We need to nurture and develop local talent, bring back apprenticeships, we've got wonderful educational institutions in the area. Sonoma State just near here, New College in North Bay, and many, many fine community colleges. Quick examples from business interface, probably many people know this one. They own the product of the industrial carpeting and they retrieve it after use. Mondragon, I do suggest you look at Mondragon in Spain, the world's largest co-op. Notice they created a bank very early on, which was their savior, and everybody who was part of it used that bank. Let's think about making paper, for instance, without using trees, and perhaps we can finally have the paperless office. There must be many, many local suggestions as to how we can rebuild local production. These are all cities I've lived in in the 1990's, where I got my daily needs within a 5 minute walk. Rome, Bratislava, Munich, Paris, San Sebastian. Some of these are astonishingly beautiful, and this is one of the amazing things. When you start relocalizing, living your life locally, living within 5 minutes walk of your daily needs and your friends, beauty becomes not only practical but becomes an accidental necessity. It just starts to happen. You build your houses at the right height, you bring back decoration. Beauty becomes part of your life and beauty is one of the things that makes us care about life and care about each other. Let us bring back beauty and let us bring back beautiful architecture at a human scale with, please, as few cars and ideally no cars. That would be a glorious thing.

Some of the benefits of relocalization: less economic polarization, a rebuilding of the community, less crime, better food, more active culture, better health, return of public service. The idea of public service. The rebuilding of the common good. I seriously believe, and I've seen it in Europe and I've seen it in some places in the US, life will be better.

The final good news. The return of the local is inevitable. Where have you heard this phrase? It's not true about globalization. There is an alternative. It's the return of the local, and in fact, return of the local has no alternative. We must relocalize. Thank you very much. [audience applause]