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Towards a Scale-Free Energy Policy
Jeff Vail, blog
… energy policy is not the only crisis that we face. Far from it. More than a brilliant new political solution to our energy problems, what our civilization truly needs is to adopt a bold new process for developing political solutions in the first place. We need a process for developing political solutions that doesn’t depend on someone else to solve our problems for us, but that simultaneously allows people with more power to carry a commensurately larger share of the burden. We need a process for developing political solutions that increases systemic resiliency, rather than driving ever lower civilizational marginal returns on investments in hierarchal complexity. We need a process that leverages parallel information processing and develops locally-appropriate solutions, rather than clinging to the Nation-State fantasy that a single state solution can adequately serve a monolithic “nation.”
In short, we need to implement a system of scale-free design.
Scale-free design describes a process that operates similarly at any scale, at any level of organization, that is fractal in structure. It is neither grass-roots nor top-down, but rather consciously, simultaneously “all of the above.” More than that, rather than merely a collection of separate national, local, and individual programs, it strives to develop programs and practices that operate simultaneously at all these levels. A simple example would be the achievement of 25% energy self-sufficiency—that is, for individuals to produce 25% of their energy needs domestically, for communities to produce a further 25% of their energy needs locally, etc.
Scale-free policies provide all the benefits listed above.
Jeff Vail is an attorney at Davis Graham & Stubbs LLP in Denver, Colorado specializing in litigation and energy issues. He is a former intelligence officer with the US Air Force and energy infrastructure counterterrorism specialist with the US Department of the Interior.
(2 March 2009)
Jeff Vail is a regular contributor to Energy Bulletin and The Oil Drum.
Bright Green, Light Green, Dark Green, Gray: The New Environmental Spectrum
Alex Steffen, WorldChanging
People ask me with increasing frequency to explain what I mean by “bright green,” and what the differences are between bright green, light green, dark green and so on.
… What is bright green? In its simplest form, bright green environmentalism is a belief that sustainable innovation is the best path to lasting prosperity, and that any vision of sustainability which does not offer prosperity and well-being will not succeed. In short, it’s the belief that for the future to be green, it must also be bright. Bright green environmentalism is a call to use innovation, design, urban revitalization and entrepreneurial zeal to transform the systems that support our lives.
… Light green environmentalists tend to emphasize lifestyle/behavioral/consumer change as key to sustainability, or at least as the best mechanism for triggering broader changes. Light greens strongly advocate change at the individual level. The thinking is that if you can get people to take small, pleasant steps (by shopping differently, or making changes around the home), they will not only make changes that can begin to make a difference in aggregate, but also begin to clamor for larger transformations.
… Dark greens, in contrast, tend to emphasize the need to pull back from consumerism (sometimes even from industrialization itself) and emphasize local solutions, short supply chains and direct connection to the land. They strongly advocate change at the community level. In its best incarnations, dark green thinking offers a lot of insight about bioregionalism, reinhabitation, and taking direct control over one’s life and surroundings (for example through transition towns): it is a vision of collective action. In a less useful way, dark greens can tend to be doomers, warning of (sometimes even seeming to advocate) impending collapse. Some thinkers, of course, (for instance, Bill McKibben and Paul Glover) blend a belief in the rural relocalization efforts of dark greens with the more design- and technology-focused urban solutions of bright greens. (Some of my own thinking can be found in these pieces Deep Economy: Localism, Innovation and Knowing What’s What, Resilient Community and The Outquisition.)
Grays, of course, are those who deny there’s a need to do anything at all, whether as individuals or as a society. …
(27 February 2009)
The World of Tomorrow 1 The Old Future (video)
Brian Kaller, YouTube
Partial transcript:
Thank you very much. My name is Brian Kaller, I live here in County Kildare, Ireland.
I was a reporter and newspaper editor in America, I’ve been interested in ecology and the Limits to Growth all my life, and I learned about peak oil about a decade ago, but found that no mainstream paper wanted to write about it. About five years ago I got my first front-page article on the subject into a magazine, and I’ve been writing and speaking about it ever since.
I am the vice-chair of FADA, a group that is preparing local communities for the kind of future I’ll be talking about. In only the last two years FADA members have organized street festivals that drew hundreds or thousands of people; persuaded the head of the county’s major industry to switch to clean energy; created community gardens and Farmers’ Markets; spoke from pulpits of local churches against climate change. For two years we have published probably the only weekly newspaper column about dealing with peak oil, and we have given talks on the subject to hundreds of teenaged students and youth groups.
Tonight I’m going to assume that you all know the basics of peak oil and climate change, and go beyond the fears and warnings and talk about what kinds of future we can realistically expect.
My favourite books as a child were about the world of tomorrow. I grew up in the 1970s and 80s reading the science fiction of the previous decades, and with the gravity of a child I absorbed their domed cities, their mile-high skyscrapers, and this futuristic world I couldn’t wait to see someday, when I was a very old man of, say, 30, in the faraway 21st century.
Everybody recognizes this standard Futureworld of robot slaves, jetpacks, flying cars and pills for food – there’s even a recently coined word, Zeerust, for images that look dated because they were recently supposed to look futuristic. It wasn’t just Star Trek and a few cartoons – this philosophy was all over popular mechanics magazines, lay science books, advertisements – dating back to the 1890s, and always a few years away. A lot of this focused on the millennium – as in the film 2001, with its space stations and moon bases. This comic book, 2000 A.D., shows the requisite impossible architecture, apparently two miles tall, high-speed rails, ray guns and – remember when we had the big problem that year with the cyborg gorillas?
Of course with hindsight we realize how ridiculously inaccurate they were even about the near future — my favourite is Back to the Future II, made in 1989 and set in futuristic 2015, and with flying cars, futuristic clothing and with everyone sending messages by fax, because no one imagined that in a few years everyone would have e-mail.
You can see how this Futureworld was created, though – this is the curve of oil production, and parallels our population growth, extinction, carbon emissions — writers like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke were born into a largely agrarian world and lived to see it transformed. By the mid-1900s everyone had electricity, their own personal telephones, their own high-speed fuel vehicles, we had highways, nuclear power, men on the moon and the United Nations. Futureworld just extrapolated that trajectory.
Where did they go wrong? Well, that trajectory was exponential growth, and that never lasts long.
(2 March 2009)
