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Post Carbon Institute Manifesto
Post Carbon Institute
The Time For Change Has Come
Contents
- Introduction
- The Limits
- Challenge & Opportunity>
- The Role of Post Carbon Institute
- Appeal
Introduction
The United States is in the beginning stages of an historic economic collapse. As of early 2009, five million Americans have already been pushed into the unemployment line, while an average of more than 600,000 join them each month. The Federal government has thrown more than a trillion dollars at the financial crisis, but the symptoms only worsen.
Meanwhile, an even more profound crisis has been silently gathering for decades and is now reaching a point of no return. This crisis manifests as the twin challenges of global fossil fuel depletion and environmental collapse.
The world almost certainly experienced peak oil production last summer, and peaks in natural gas and coal production are not far off1. But renewable energy sources are nowhere near ready to substitute in the quantities and applications we currently require. The best known, and potentially most severe, of environmental challenges is global climate change. Yet we are also now facing a series of natural resource limits—fresh water supplies, fish stocks, topsoil, and biodiversity—that threaten our very existence.
Our 21st century dependence on 20th century hydrocarbon energy (fossil fuels) is the root of all the economic and environmental threats we face. Individually, each of these challenges would test us. Their combined force will reshape our planet and society in unimaginable ways.
All of the debts for society’s century-long industrial fiesta are coming due at the same time. We have no choice but to transition to a world no longer dependent on fossil fuels, a world made up of communities and economies that function within ecological bounds. Thus the most important question of our time: How do we manage the transition to a post-carbon world?
Post Carbon Institute is dedicated to helping individuals, families, businesses, communities, and governments understand and manage the transition to a post-carbon world. Our aim is to bring together the best thinking and models in such a way that the challenges we face can be easily understood, and the best solutions can be identified and replicated as quickly, sustainably, and equitably as possible.
These are unprecedented times that will test our courage, resourcefulness, and commitment. Many communities have already begun their post-carbon journey. We hope you join us
(Spring 2009)
We hope to post the entire manifesto soon. -BA
Confessions of a Reformed Worrywart
Heather Boerner, Whole Life Times
As a child in suburban southern California, I used to lie in bed with the covers pulled up to my chin, wide-eyed, listening intently as fighter jets practiced nighttime maneuvers at the nearby Air Force base. I’d done the calculations and was convinced: given our proximity to a military target, my small town would be among the first blown off the map when Russia attacked.
… With the economy in tatters and our planet getting steamier by the day, you’d think I might be one of those people squirreling away bottled water and canned food, planning a Transition Town or preparing for 2012, the end date of the Mayan calendar that predicts major societal shifts.
Like Dave, a 28-year-old millionaire living in LA, who’s stockpiling silver to prepare for the dollar’s possible devaluation. He’s down with 2012, and calls it a serious societal evolution.
“This is different than anything that’s ever happened to modern civilization,” he says.
Or Jane, a dear friend of mine in Santa Cruz, who’s socking money away to buy a farm with independent water and electricity, and “adequate defense capabilities.” She and a friend have discussed starting a group — Librarians of the Apocalypse — to protect knowledge from marauding bands of looters.
“Kind of like Hypatia defending the great library of Alexandria,” she explains in an email. “Imagine how much better off humanity would be if it hadn’t been destroyed.”
I can’t argue with her there. In fact, if and when the time ever comes, Jane has invited me to join her on the farm, and I am grateful.
But while I might take comfort in the prospect of Jane’s safe haven, I stop short of orchestrating my own. It’s not that I think I’m right and others are wrong, it’s that I firmly believe two things: We can’t know with certainty what will happen, and the world always changes.
In Thich Nhat Hahn’s version of the Buddha’s Five Remembrances, there is one that goes, “All that is dear to me and everyone I love are of the nature to change. There is no way to escape being separated from them.”
I think of that every time I read a hyperbolic headline, every time a friend or a newscaster alludes to pending cultural catastrophe, every time my paralyzing pre-adolescent vigilance threatens to kick up again.
(April 2009)
The back-to-the-lander: Vandana Shiva interview
Scott Carlson, The Urbanite Magazine (Baltimore)
Vandana Shiva, India’s leading environmental activist, says that the industrialized West is literally consuming the developing world. We eat cinnamon that comes out of Thailand, bananas from Central America. To feed our ever-growing appetites, we push industrial agriculture methods on once-traditional agrarian societies, and now we want these faraway lands to produce a different kind of food: biofuel, to feed the West’s automobiles. At some point, Shiva argues, we’re going to have to choose between sacred cow and sacred car.
Shiva founded an organization called Navdanya to promote research in organic agriculture and saving heirloom seeds. In her 2008 book Soil Not Oil: Environmental Justice in an Age of Climate Crisis, she argues that the rebirth of sustainable, traditional agriculture offers the best way forward, in both India and in the West.
“There is a myth that there are agricultural societies, and then there are industrial societies and service societies, as if when you become an industrial or service society you don’t need food,” she says. “As we hit climate chaos, as we hit peak oil, assuming that you can get your food from far away and use fossil-fuel-intensive systems to produce food is totally not sustainable. Bringing food security close to home will have to be the project of the future.”
(April 2009)
Life After Oil
Rachel Dowd, Whole Earth Times
The Transition Town movement aims to wean us off our fossil fuel addiction — without knowing if it’ll work. How an unproven social experiment is becoming a phenomenon
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In the late 1980s, Joanne Poyourow’s life looked like the American Dream. A certified public accountant in charge of multistate taxation at a boutique practice in Newport Beach, Calif., she had earned the shiny little sports car, three-inch heels, and business class flights to which she had grown accustomed.
Then she left it behind.
To see Poyourow today — sporting a low-slung ponytail and blue fleece jacket as she harvests organic chard from the Holy Nativity Community Garden in Los Angeles — it’s impossible not to wonder, “What happened?”
“We’ve created a society where it’s very easy to be unreal,” she explains. “We’ve maxed out on nearly everything. For me, it was about getting back to real — because we have to.”
Poyourow is part of a budding number of Americans embracing the phenomenon of Transition, which starts with the idea that our triple-latte, two-hour commute, plugged-in and gassed-up way of life is on borrowed time. Faced with the real threat of climate change, economic decline and peak oil (the point when cheap and abundant oil ends) they’re ripping up their grass lawns for edible gardens, installing rainwater collection barrels under roof gutters, and forming coalitions to transition their communities to a local and low-energy lifestyle.
(April 2009)
A Green Future Where You Can Borrow Cars And Drink Rainwater
Alok Jha, Guardian via WorldChanging
A low-carbon economy will be the culmination of thousands of decisions by governments, businesses and individuals about how we choose to balance environment and economy. There isn’t one correct future but many, with each detail in each country dependent on the will of its people.
One thing is certain, though. Anyone concerned about having to give up their modern lifestyle for an austere existence can rest easy. The big differences between now and the low-carbon future will not be the way the world looks or what we will be able to do in it, but how it is arranged.
The biggest hurdle is electricity. Three-quarters of our global electricity needs come from burning fossil fuels. The low-carbon future will demand that none of that electricity emits carbon dioxide. So every gas or coal-fired power plant, of which there will be many in China and India, will have carbon-capture technology to trap and store CO2 underground. Renewable sources including wind, tide, wave and sun will, through investment in basic research in the coming decades, be commercially viable. Far from being forbidding installations belching out carbon dioxide, renewable power stations will be smaller, emit no CO2 and tap into near-limitless supplies of free fuel.
Clean electricity will have a knock-on effect on the other modern carbon nasty – transport.
(31 March 2009)
