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The Peakist (audio)
RN 360, ABC (Australia)
In a world confronted with climate change, financial crisis and peak oil, this is the story of a highly individual response to the challenges ahead. Lloyd Morcom, a former oil man and ex hippy, has not only made radical changes in his own life, he’s also encouraging friends and neighbours in his small, rural home town to reconsider their lifestyles.
However, when he calls a public meeting to outline his fears for the future he knows deep down that his message won’t make him universally popular. Wary of what he calls ‘doomer porn’, Lloyd believes small communities should adapt housing, transport and food production to survive the coming storm.
(21 March 2009)
Several EB writers are listed as links (Arch Druid, Dmitry Orlov, The Oil Drum and Amanda Kovattana.
Book review: Future Scenarios by David Holmgren
Siel Ju, Mother Nature Network
Permaculture co-founder David Holmgren says we should prepare for an “energy descent” future.
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Since Obama’s become president, we’ve heard a lot about stimulating our economy with green jobs — with the implication that green tech can save the environment while also promoting economic growth. But not all enviro-minded people see such eco-nomical synergy when looking to the future with green-tinted glasses. In fact, David Holmgren, best known as one of the two co-originators of the permaculture concept, sees economic decline as inevitable — and he’s actually looking forward to that decline.
How’d David come to that conclusion? In his new book, Future Scenarios, How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change, David outlines 4 different future scenarios that’ve been proposed by scientists and environmentalists:
* Techno-explosion (great advances in science that, for example, let humans form space colonies),
* Techno-stability (a seamless conversion from dirty to clean energy that keeps our economy intact),
* Energy descent (”a reduction of economic activity, complexity, and population in some way as fossil fuels are depleted”), and
* Collapse (catastrophic disasters that mean death for most of us).
(25 March 2009)
In Review :: The Road to Sustainability
Michael Marien, Yes! Magazine
Economics for a Crowded Planet
by Jeffrey D. Sachs
The Bridge at the Edge of the World
by James Gustave Speth
Mobilizing to Save Civilization
by Lester R. Brown
Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change
by Pat Murphy
The deep recession now underway will probably last another year at least, but could spiral down to a second Great Depression. Political leaders worldwide are under pressure to use a variety of economic stimulus tools to restore normalcy. This will likely lead to some progress toward renewable sources of energy and energy conservation, especially in the U.S., now under the competent leadership of President Obama. But these welcome changes are only first steps toward meeting long-term sustainability challenges. The four books reviewed here illustrate contrasting approaches to the big changes that are needed, perhaps best appreciated as four points of the compass: north (global action) vs. south (local action), and east (reforming capitalism) vs. west (U.S. government policy reform).
… With a title like Plan C, readers might expect Pat Murphy’s book on community survival to be a response, but Lester Brown is never mentioned. After making a detailed case for (indisputable) climate change and for (disputable) “peak oil” depletion just ahead, Murphy lays out four possible futures. Plan A, or “Business as Usual,” is seen as still favored by “a sizable majority of the U.S. population.” Plan B, the “Clean Green Technology” approach, is dismissed as failing to sufficiently challenge capitalism and “its underlying values of competition and infinite growth.” The dystopian Plan D or “Die Off” describes individual and family survival for those who believe “it is too late to avoid catastrophe.”
Murphy favors Plan C, or “Curtailment and Community,” which involves “buying less, using less, wanting less, and wasting less.” Most of his book offers details of radical cutbacks, and food and energy conservation at the local level, no doubt now underway for many people as an economic necessity. Notably, Plan C is the only book reviewed here to see communities and individuals as an important part of the long-term shift to sustainability.
Murphy’s “Die Off” scenario is quite possible if bold actions are not taken, or if they prove unsuccessful. But it’s equally possible that, with luck and sensible policies, the economic shocks will stimulate many positive reforms. Already, the “sizable majority” that still practices business as usual is rapidly embracing Clean Green Technology in the unfolding age of Obama, while a number of business leaders are greening corporations with a “triple bottom line” that values social and environmental goals along with profit.
But much more will be needed. To accelerate the transition, ongoing global conversations are needed among the many authors who advocate different approaches to sustainability, and politicians, journalists, businesspeople, academics, and others who have yet to consider and embrace the sustainability imperative.
(Spring 2009)
Towards a New Sustainable Economy – Robert Costanza
Robert Costanza, The Oil Drum
BigGav recently highlighted a talk by Robert Costanza given in New Zealand (scroll down). Below the fold is a new paper “Towards a New Sustainable Economy” by Professor Costanza (who happens to be my phd co-advisor). I agree with much of it – science is rapidly answering the questions of ‘who we are’ and ‘what we have’ – the crux is how to get from here, to what comes next. I must admit I’m very tired of the talking heads on television discussing everything about our financial crisis with no acknowledgement that ALL global currencies for past generation are functioning as fiat markers for real capital. I would fall on the floor if someone like Bob Costanza or Herman Daly was on CNN or CNBC. But the advertisers might not like it….
– TOD editor Nate Hagens
Toward a New Sustainable Economy
Robert Costanza [University of Vermont, USA]
The current financial meltdown is the result of under-regulated markets built on an ideology of free market capitalism and unlimited economic growth. The fundamental problem is that the underlying assumptions of this ideology are not consistent with what we now know about the real state of the world. The financial world is, in essence, a set of markers for goods, services, and risks in the real world and when those markers are allowed to deviate too far from reality, “adjustments” must ultimately follow and crisis and panic can ensue. To solve this and future financial crisis requires that we reconnect the markers with reality. What are our real assets and how valuable are they? To do this requires both a new vision of what the economy is and what it is for, proper and comprehensive accounting of real assets, and new institutions that use the market in its proper role of servant rather than master.
The mainstream vision of the economy is based on a number of assumptions that were created during a period when the world was still relatively empty of humans and their built infrastructure. In this “empty world” context, built capital was the limiting factor, while natural capital and social capital were abundant. It made sense, in that context, not to worry too much about environmental and social “externalities” since they could be assumed to be relatively small and ultimately solvable. It made sense to focus on the growth of the market economy, as measured by GDP, as a primary means to improve human welfare. It made sense, in that context, to think of the economy as only marketed goods and services and to think of the goal as increasing the amount of these goods and services produced and consumed.
But the world has changed dramatically. We now live in a world relatively full of humans and their built capital infrastructure. In this new context, we have to first remember that the goal of the economy is to sustainably improve human well-being and quality of life. We have to remember that material consumption and GDP are merely means to that end, not ends in themselves. We have to recognize, as both ancient wisdom and new psychological research tell us, that material consumption beyond real need can actually reduce well-being. We have to better understand what really does contribute to sustainable human well-being, and recognize the substantial contributions of natural and social capital, which are now the limiting factors in many countries. We have to be able to distinguish between real poverty in terms of low quality of life, and merely low monetary income. Ultimately we have to create a new model of the economy and development that acknowledges this new full world context and vision.
(25 March 2009)
LEARN: An Acronym to Avoid Societal Collapse
John Howe, The Oil Drum
This is a guest post by semi-retired mechanical engineer John Howe. John is well known in peak-oil circles for his invention of the solar tractor.
Below the fold is a short essay by John Howe on the steps he feels are necessary for adaptation in a post-peak oil world. He indicates that five steps are needed. These steps can be remembered by the acronym “LEARN”.
– Gail Tverberg, TOD editor
L E A R N
A one-page acronym to define five actions necessary to avoid
societal collapse because of the imminent decline of finite fossil fuels:
LOCALIZE agriculture, energy production, social services, essential manufacturing, etc. All will have to regress to a limited “twenty-mile radius” community. This will not be a choice. The inevitable curtailment of transportation fuel will reduce future travel. Intercity light rail will be impossible without energy. www.postcarbon.org.
EDUCATE yourself and others. We passed peak oil in late 2008. Natural gas, coal, and fissionable uranium are not far behind. Without ever-increasing energy, real growth, including a debt-based financial system based on future principal plus interest, cannot continue. Recognize the fallacies of bogus solutions like: “There’s plenty left”; “The scientists will save us”; “We can efficiency our way out of our dilemma (not if we don’t reduce consumption)”; “Biofuels, including waste, cellulosic ethanol, and grease will suffice” (at the expense of food). The honest facts must reach the public, the media, and decision-makers even in the midst of denial. Start with www.peakoil.net, www.theoildrum.com, www.321energy.com, etc.
(24 March 2009)
Energy Descent, and A World Without Property
Dave Pollard, How to Save The World (blog), Salon
… If we had a world without property, it would work something like this:
- Land would only be ‘borrowed’ from future generations and from nature, not bought or sold.
- Any use of land (including gardening and building) would only be done by collective agreement of the community, for the community’s interest. No one outside the community would be able to touch the land in any way, other than visiting it.
- Use of the land would be zero net footprint — no use would be permitted that lessened the utility of the land for other creatures or for future generations. You could only take out what you replenished. All use would have to be sustainable and be such that, if abandoned, the land would quickly return to its pre-use state. There would therefore be no ‘permanent’ structures, and only local natural materials would be permitted in gardening, building or other uses.
- . Land that could not comfortably and naturally sustain human beings on this basis would not be inhabited by human beings. Most of Canada, ‘my’ country, for example, would be very sparsely inhabited by gatherer-hunter cultures, with the possible exception of the West Coast, which because of its climate and growing season could support a somewhat higher human population density.
Such a world would, of necessity, have a lot fewer people than our world. It would have a steady-state economy — zero growth. It would not have to worry about war, the End of Oil, the End of Water, or climate change, because resource use would be low and population self-limited to the carrying capacity of the land (so there would be no need to go to war for more land or resources). While there might well be short, violent inter-tribal skirmishes over the territory each ‘tribe’ belongs to, these would be brief and limited. Many of the modern problems that are related to over-population (epidemic diseases, chronic diseases, poverty, desertification and soil impoverishment, food insecurity and famine etc. etc.) would not occur. We would live long, healthy, peaceful, joyful lives, sustainably, following the natural process depicted in the top chart above.
The problem, now, is that we can’t get there from here. Too much of our culture — our political, social, economic, health and educational systems for a start — are built on the rocky, crumbling foundation of human entitlement to unlimited population growth and unlimited use of and despoilment of the Earth’s resources. We can’t ‘go back’ from the new man-made systems depicted in the lower chart above, to the natural systems, depicted in the upper chart, that prevailed for virtually all of the millions of years of life on Earth prior to our modern civilization.
Some neo-survivalists I know are hoping that our civilization culture collapses soon and fast, on the assumption that a better world would rise from its ashes. In the first place, that’s a dubious assumption. Many human civilizations have been built on the same faulty basis, and there is no evidence that we would learn from our mistakes and create a new civilization any better than the one that is killing us, and our planet, today. And the collapse will be truly ghastly, and will take decades if not centuries of enormous suffering and misery before it ends.
… Many of the new conservation and steady-state economy models prescribe something called a ‘energy descent’ strategy. The idea is to toggle the ‘overconsumption’ box in yellow in the lower chart above to the ‘sustainable consumption’ box in the upper chart above, in such a way as it causally flips the entire lower chart to the upper chart, and, voila — we’re saved. Or, if we’re too late to do so, at least the collapse is made much more bearable. The energy descent strategy is described by the Transition movement as:
A scenario in which humanity has successfully adapted to the declining net energy availability [and perhaps climate change impacts] and has become more localised and self-reliant. It is a term favoured by people looking towards energy peak as an opportunity for positive change rather than an inevitable disaster.
Well, maybe. This suggests an adaptive strategy rather than a proactive one, that we can’t change human behaviour (excessive consumption) globally, so instead we can adapt to the consequences of our global excess locally, so when the global civilization collapses, the pockets of Transition Towns will survive. It’s an interesting approach, and one that appeals to idealism (and perhaps selfish survivalism) sufficiently to have spurned hundreds of such Transition movements, vaguely coordinated. These Transition Towns aren’t willing to give up property ownership, trade, imported technology or any of the other trappings of the Industrial Growth Economy that they don’t see any need to jettison. But, like the toxic financial assets that are bringing down the global financial system (and perhaps with it, the Obama administration), these trappings of the economy and civilization that have produced the lower chart above, will, if retained, sooner or later lead to its re-establishment. We can’t have our cake and eat it too.
The only way to rid ourselves of our toxic addiction to overpopulation and overpopulation is to go ‘cold turkey’ — to give up on our civilization entirely and create a new society, self-managed, self-sufficient, independent in all respects (including belief systems) from civilization culture. If you know any addicts, you know how hard this is to do, the low probability of success, the high rate of relapse, and the terrible damage the transition to a healthier, unaddicted way of life can inflict on everyone connected to the addict. Transition Towns will have to go ‘cold turkey’ on their addiction not only to oil, but to imported goods, many modern technologies (including medicines) that rely on the unsustainable Industrial Growth Economy, the concept of ‘property’, and lots more. Breaking the cycle of a hundred addictions all at once. Not easy. Methadone please.
(24 March 2009)
