Xerosphere

By Warren Karlenzig, posted Mar 11, 2010:

Last post I covered some guiding principles for urban resilience planning in the face of climate change and diminishing resources (especially fresh water and oil). Considering these guidelines, what aspect of U.S. metro development stands out as the most ill-advised and risky? Short answer: exurban sprawl.

If the "Great Recession" taught us anything, it is that allowing the unrestrained sprawl of energy-inefficient communities and infrastructure is a now-bankrupt economic development strategy and constitutes a recipe for continued disaster on every level.

"Shy away from fringe places in the exurbs and places with long car commutes or where getting a quart of milk takes a 15-minute drive," was the warning the Urban Land Institute and PricewaterhouseCoopers gave institutional and commercial real estate investors in their Emerging Trends in Real Estate 2010 report.

I make the further case that the exurban economic model is an outright anachronism in the Post Carbon Institute's Post Carbon Reader, which comes out this summer from the University of California Press and Watershed Media.

Much of US "economic growth" in the 1990s and early 2000s was based on the roaring engine of exurban investment speculation with gas at historic record low prices. That bubble popped on the spike of $4 a gallon; we now are paying the piper with abandoned tract developments, foreclosed strip malls and countless miles of roads to nowhere. Gas prices are forecast to head over $3 this summer, and likely much higher when a forecast global "oil crunch" hits by 2014 or so.

Besides the economic risks, circa-twentieth-century sprawl has destroyed valuable farmland, sensitive wildlife habitat, and irreplaceable drinking water systems at great environmental, economic, and social cost. We can no longer manage and develop our communities with no regard for the limits of natural resources and ecological systems that provide our most basic needs.

A shining alternative is metropolitan areas that have begun to plan for the future by building their resilience with economic, energy, and environmental uncertainty in mind: top U.S. metro locations include Portland, Oregon, Seattle, San Francisco, New York and Denver, and suburbs such as Davis, California and Alexandria, Virginia. These communities are employing some of the following key strategies that underpin resilient urbanism:

Build and re-build denser and smarter

Most U.S. suburban and urban population or use densities need to be increased so that energy-efficient transportation choices like public transit, bicycling and walking can flourish. Multi-modal mobility cannot succeed at the densities found in most American suburban communities today. Increasing density doesn't have to mean building massive high-rises: adding just a few stories on existing or new mixed-use buildings can double population density--and well-designed, increased density can also improve community quality of life and economic vitality.

Focus on water use efficiency and conservation

Our freshwater supply is one of our most vulnerable resources in the United States. Drought is no longer just a problem for Southwestern desert cities--communities in places like Texas, Georgia and even New Jersey recently had to contend with water shortages. As precipitation patterns become less reliable and underground aquifers dry up, more communities will need to significantly reduce water demand through efficiency, conservation, restrictions and "tiered pricing," which means a basic amount of water will be available at a lower price; above average use will become increasingly
expensive the more that is used.

Global climate change is already thought to be melting mountain snowpack much earlier than average in the spring, causing summer and fall water shortages. This has serious planning and design implications for many metro areas. For example, Lake Mead, which provides 90% of the water used by Las Vegas (above photo) and is a major water source for Phoenix and other Southwestern cities, has a projected 50% chance of drying up for water storage by 2021.

Focus on food

Urban areas need to think much bigger and plan systemically for significantly increased regional and local food production. Growing and processing more food for local consumption bolsters regional food security and provides jobs while generally reducing the energy, packaging and storage needed to transport food to metro regions. In Asia and Latin America--even in big cities like Shanghai, China; Havana, Cuba; and Seoul, South Korea--there are thriving small farms interspersed within metro areas.

Gardens--whether in backyards, community parks, or in and on top of buildings--can supplement our diets with fresh local produce. Denver's suburbs, for instance, have organized to preserve and cultivate unsold tract home lots for community garden food production.

Think in terms of inter-related systems

If we view our urban areas as living, breathing entities--each with a set of basic and more specialized requirements--we can better understand how to transform our communities from random configurations into dynamic, high-performance systems. The "metabolism" of urban systems depends largely on how energy, water, food and materials are acquired, used and, where possible, reused. From these ingredients and processes (labor, use of knowledge) come products, services, and--if the system is efficient--minimal waste and pollution.

Communities and regions should decide among themselves which initiatives reduce their risks and provide the greatest "bang for the buck." Like the emergence of Wall Street's financial derivatives crisis in 2007, if we are kept in the dark about the potential consequences of our planning, resource and energy use in light of climate change or energy shortages, future conditions will threaten whole regional economies when they emerge.

Imagine if Las Vegas informed its residents and tourists on one 120-degree summer day that they would not be able to use a swimming pool or shower, let alone golf, because there simply wasn't any water left.

Odds are that the days are numbered for having one's own swimming pool and a large, lush ornamental lawn in the desert Southwest, unless new developments and desert cities are planned with water conservation as having the highest design priority.

By thinking of urban areas as inter-related systems economically dependent on water, energy, food and vital material resources, communities can begin to prepare for a more secure future. Merely developing a list of topics that need to be addressed--the "checklist" approach--will not prepare regional economies for the complexity of new dynamics, such as energy or water supply shortages, rising population, extreme energy price volatility and accelerating changes in regional climate influenced by global climate change.

Next Steps? Time to fold the climate action plan into a resilience action plan, so communities can addresses not only global climate change emissions, but also more urgent economic risks posed by climate change adaptation and resource availability.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

Originally published 10 March, 2010 on the Green Blog at Common Currents, cross posted at Worldchanging.com

View part 1 of this article here

By Bill McKibben, posted Mar 10, 2010:

[Excerpt] When Michael Wood-Lewis and his wife, Valerie, moved from Washington, D.C., to the south end of Burlington, Vermont, in 1998, "we'd landed in what we thought was our dream neighborhood. It was walkable, near the lake, full of trees. But we were having trouble getting to know the neighbors.

One night, we were sitting around the dinner table talking about it. It hit us that in the Midwest and the South, where we were from, people brought cookies to their neighbors. We'd been here a year--where were our cookies?"

Hence plan one. They baked up a batch of Toll House specials and delivered them to the neighbors. "We used china plates, because I figured that way they'd have to return them and we'd get another conversation," Wood-Lewis recalls. "We never did get them back. I was kind of dumbfounded. But I don't think it was because people were rude. I think it's because people are living in a different culture than they were 50 years ago."

A culture busier and more distracted than ever--busy enough that even in Vermont, the state with the biggest rural population percentage in the Union, famous for its town meetings and its civic engagement, something had changed. So, in 2000, Wood-Lewis cooked up plan two, which may just turn out to be one of the most innovative (and deceptively obvious) uses of the Internet so far. In his hands, the Net has become a way to meet not people half a world away, but half a block.

"I invested $15 at the copy shop, printed up 400 fliers, and put one on every door in our neighborhood," Wood-Lewis explains. "It pretty much just said, 'Share messages about lost cats and block parties.'" Thus was born the Five Sisters Neighborhood Forum, which he ran as a volunteer effort for six years. "It took about five minutes a day, and I was already on the computer anyway," he notes. Every evening he'd compile the five or six messages that had arrived at his inbox during the day and send them out in a single e-mail bulletin. That was it.

Someone would write in: "Neighbors, FYI: Late last night I observed a large possum ambling across my front yard. Not as bad as a skunk, but I understand that possums can damage gardens and dig up lawns." Twenty-four hours later, another neighbor would respond: "They have very soft feet that aren't good for digging and aren't likely to cause lawn damage--and they're very clean animals and spend much of their rest time grooming themselves."

Meanwhile, someone else had pruned his apples trees and wanted to share the news that he had kindling piled up on the back porch free for the taking. Down the street someone's car had been broken into: only thing taken was a gym bag filled with "my shoes, some sweaty clothes, and a couple of issues of The New Yorker. If anyone finds it dumped in their shrubbery, let me know."

Forget the World Wide Web--this one stretched barely four blocks. And no video, no rating systems, no celebrities, no hyperlinks. Just the daily rhythm of neighborhood life. "It grew steadily, from 10 or 20 percent of the neighborhood to the point where by 2006 we had 90 percent of the neighborhood signed up," says Wood-Lewis.

That's when Cottage Living magazine included the area in its list of the 10 best neighborhoods in the country: "And the reporter called me and he said that everywhere else in the country people would have dozens of different reasons why their place worked. But here, almost everyone put the e-mail thing on the list. That's what gave me the confidence."...

Read full article

Photo credit: William Duke

Originally published 09 March, 2010 in Yankee Magazine

By Tom Whipple, posted Mar 10, 2010:

Last week the stock markets soared when it was announced that the U.S. had lost only 36,000 jobs in February - less than Wall Street economists were predicting.

In the wake of the announcement, numerous learned analysts appeared on the financial networks to assure us that as soon as the snow melts an economic rebound would start and U.S. employment numbers would start to grow. It is apparent that the learned analysts are spending too much time watching the Dow Jones and not our 50 state capitols where chaos is breaking loose. As state and local revenues continued to plunge in February, and with most legislatures still unwilling to make up for the losses with tax increases in an election year, hundreds of thousands of state and local government workers are facing the prospect of becoming unemployed. The Census Bureau says that as of the start of the recession, there were about 17 million state and local government employees in the U.S. Laying-off 10 or 20 percent of this workforce can easily get into some very impressive numbers. Thousands of others work in the healthcare industry where they are dependent on state Medicaid expenditures for their livelihoods.

While few states have as yet settled on final budgets for the next fiscal year, which in most cases begins on July 1, only the general magnitude of what is about to happen is taking shape. As we now are entering the third year of the economic downturn, most of the "fat" and "nice-to-do-spending" has already disappeared in the $10s of billions that have already been cut at the state and local level. There is little left that can be done except let more and more employees go, furlough them, or cut their pay. Last year the federal stimulus covered about 40 percent of the states' budget deficits, putting the problem off until this year. Another round of help from Washington is not yet in sight. Many governors, however, remain hopeful that the Congress will increase its nearly $2 trillion deficit some more to bail them out for another year.

Short of such a "deus ex machina" bailout, lots more people seem likely to find themselves unemployed starting on July 1. The arithmetic is rather simple. Assuming that the average state and local government employee is costing the taxpayers about $35-$50,000 a year, then for each $100 million state spending is cut some 2-3,000 jobs will have to be eliminated. With each billion dollars you reduce spending, another 20 or 30,000 head for the unemployment lines. Here in Virginia, we are looking at more than $1 billion in new spending cuts for the year so we shall probably lose on the order of 20-30,000 workers whose jobs are dependent on the state budget. Extend this to the 50 states and the threatened jobs can easily approach a million or more considering that several of the more populous states are facing deficits of $8 billion to $20 billion.

Virginia is among the better-off states as it has been managed conservatively and benefits from much federal spending. States believed to be in serious trouble are California, Arizona, Rhode Island, Michigan, Oregon, Nevada, Florida, New Jersey, Illinois and Wisconsin. New York which is currently facing a $9 billion budget shortfall certainly falls on this list.

The reason cumulative state budget shortfalls and looming dismissals have not garnered much media attention is that in most states a relatively small portion of the revenue is spent directly on state government employees. More common is for significant amounts of money to be passed on to local governments, school boards, local social service agencies, and medical facilities that hire the employees. Thus when a state makes massive spending cuts, the governor and legislators can claim that only a handful of jobs will be lost. Here in Virginia, the Governor recently proposed budget cuts totaling $2.1 billion while claiming it only cost some 500 state employees their jobs. Others were quick to point out that the real total was likely closer to 40 or 50,000 when local government, school, social, and health care workers were considered. These numbers of course are difficult to assemble as they depend on the decisions of thousands of local governing bodies and private service providers that could, in theory, make up for the loss of state money by increasing local taxes or other means.

All this says that despite the incessant media repetition that the economic situation is getting better, there is growing evidence that the economy is in fact growing worse. Federal Reserve support of the Treasury security market and purchases of mortgage backed securities is supposed to end in the next few months. Many fear that this action will send interest rates much higher before the year is out.

Where all this leaves oil prices is not yet clear. Gasoline has been rising in recent weeks and now averages $2.75 nationwide. If normal patterns pertain this year, we could see $3 gasoline by summer, but these are not normal times. Two years ago high gas prices are believed to have done much damage to the economy. Asian and Middle Eastern demand for oil appears to be on track to remain strong. But even China's leaders are becoming concerned about too much pointless growth. Geopolitical dangers ranging from the Venezuelan drought to Iran and political stagnation in Iraq remain.

U.S. demand for oil remains weak and if unemployment does take another jump this summer or if interest rates start to climb, demand could get somewhat worse. Taken together, the prospects for an economic recovery in the foreseeable future still do not look good.

Originally published 09 March, 2010at Falls Church New-Press

By Zenobia Barlow, posted Mar 8, 2010:

One reason I like to host seminars at the Center for Ecoliteracy is that you never know who is going to show up.

Last August, one of the 80 people who participated in our Short Course on Systems Thinking with Fritjof Capra, David W. Orr, and Center staff was Claude Ouimet, a gracious gentleman who is senior vice president and general manager for Canada and Latin America at InterfaceFLOR, a division of Interface, Inc., the world's largest manufacturer of modular carpets.

Why a carpet-manufacturing firm would be interested in systems thinking and education for sustainable living might not be immediately obvious. But Interface has been focused on environmental sustainability since 1994; in 2006, the firm announced its goal of eliminating any negative impact it has on the environment by 2020.

Moreover, when greening a company, Ouimet understands that it is essential for business leaders to address both the technical and what he calls the "softer side" of sustainability.

One way the Center for Ecoliteracy reflects the softer side of sustainability is our Smart by Nature initiative guiding principle, "Sustainability is a community practice." Sustainability, in other words, depends on a healthy network of relationships that includes all members of the community.

Ouimet believes this idea is also essential to making a company sustainable.

"It's not so much about changing what we do," he says. "The goal is to change the way we think, and then we change what we do. We see lots of companies rushing in to change what they do without changing their ways of thinking. They go into a path with the same mindset, and they don't get very far."

"At Interface, we offer a higher purpose for people to come to work…beyond the salary and the bonus," Ouimet adds. "If you come to Interface in Canada or the U.S. and ask people on the line what they do, there is a high chance they won't say they are making carpets. They will probably say, 'I'm trying my best to make a difference.'"

The leadership that generates this kind of passion and commitment (the turnover rate at InterfaceFLOR's U.S. facility in Georgia is 5 percent, compared with an industry-wide 32 percent in the region) emphasizes cooperation — an ethic that encourages and invites people to look at their own strengths and talents to help resolve larger issues.

This attention to cooperation is very powerful, he says, because it unifies people. "When you have 5,000 people, all of them with different strengths, and you create a system that celebrates differences toward a common goal, then individual people's talents are a gift to the collective."

Ouimet recalls that during one business slump, senior employees were asked if they would rather lay off employees or reduce the hours of the total workforce. They voted unanimously to reduce hours and keep everyone. "When you have that emotional engagement with one another and feel safe within the organizational culture, it is a good place both for the business and for the employees," says Ouimet.
And if people are emotionally engaged, they are more likely to be creative when you bring a problem to them to help solve.

InterfaceFLOR has people working on the mechanical side, he says, who have delivered many innovations that senior management never thought of. "It takes a mechanical mind and experience to find solutions to our challenges. It can be a couple of guys on the mill who say, 'We can think of how to do this a different way.'"

For example, when you design a carpet tile, you need to place the pattern in the center of the tile square. So the question is how do you align the product so that it always cuts at a certain place in a certain way and the pattern is always in the center, with a little room around it for the border?

"Some companies have spent $100,000 or more to solve that problem," Ouimet says. "But in Canada, we brought everyone together and said, 'OK, we have a challenge. How can we do this differently?'" The solution they discovered cost $7,000.

"The solution emerged because people on the line wanted to participate. Their solution, which was ingenious, was to punch holes on the side. There is excess on each side of the roll, and the people on the line figured out how to punch holes and install sensors. The press comes down and they calculated on the rolls where the holes needed to be. It was really easy. And yes, now this registered cut is a patented solution."

In the end, Ouimet suggests that the imperative to live sustainably may be one positive result to come from the ecological crises we now face.

"We could be happier with less stuff," he said. "We could define ourselves by recognizing one another and seeing ourselves in one another. And if we start talking to one another and truly seeing one another, the corporate world cannot ignore it. Their success and profitability depends on it."

Originally posted at ecoliteracy.org

By Asher, posted Mar 6, 2010:

sunk cost [suhngk kawst]: Cost already incurred which cannot be recovered regardless of future events.

It's almost too easy to vilify corporations. What, with all the evil stuff they do. Take the coal industry for example, who blow up our mountains, poison our air and water, contribute massively to global climate change, and spend untold millions of dollars on disinformation campaigns, lobbying Congress, buying Senators, and lying to block efforts to tackle the climate crisis. I mean, they are practically begging for our hatred, right? Right. 

But all too often there's a fundamental lack of understanding, and dare I say hypocrisy, about some of the key drivers behind industries' and politicians' unwillingness to step away from business as usual. One of these is the reality of sunk costs. Bill McKibben, in his latest masterpiece, Eaarth: Making Life On a Tough New Planet, sums it up with this nugget:

The journalist Paul Roberts figured earlier this decade [2000s] that "the existing fossil fuel infrastructure, from power plants and supertankers to oil furnaces and SUVs," is worth at least $10 trillion, and scheduled to operate anywhere from ten to fifty more years before its capital costs can be paid off. If we shut it down early, merely to save the planet, someone will have to eat that cost. Given such a "serious asset inertia," no owner or investor in a power plant is likely to accept the writedown without a "nasty political fight."

Conventional economic theory dictates that sunk costs shouldn't influence business decisions. But let's get real here. People just don't behave that way, and neither do corporations or governments.

And now add in the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression. Again from Eaarth:

The sole even remotely plausible way out of this box canyon would be, as I've said, massive investment in green energy; but our mountains of accumulated debt make that harder, not easier. The current Australian government was elected on the promise of fighting global warming, but the economic slowdown quickly cooled its ardor, delaying the start of even modest plans for carbon reductions by two years. In equally progressive New York, Democratic Governor David Paterson quietly undercut the state's plan to control greenhouse gas emissions, a plan that had been crafted by a Republican predecessor, but in better economic times. On the other side of the globe... China was backing down on plans to close some polluting factories: "Money is increasingly needed to pay the salaries of workers whose companies have gone bankrupt and to provide social services for the rural poor who are having trouble selling their crops. There has been less money left over for environmental initiatives."

If your neighbors came to you and said that you could no longer drive the car you bought last year for $30,000 because it got too poor gas mileage, would you throw the keys in the garbage and leave the car in the driveway to rust? Be honest. And what if you had loved ones to care for? Kids to drive to school or a chronically ill mother to care for, or a desperately needed job that was 20 miles away from home. You'd tell those neighbors, in no uncertain terms, to mind their own *$%@ business, right? Right.

What's my point? Is it to somehow excuse away our political leaders lack of, you know, leading or the single-minded greed of corporate interests? No. But the truth is that our entire way of life—consumer culture, globalized economies, cities, suburbs, millions of miles of roads, lack of civic engagement, etc.—is one big sunk cost. We've invested the last 150 years—and really, the last 60—building it. They may have built the cars, the roads, the oil derricks, and the coal plants, but we own them. We own them because we use them. And until we stop, until we voluntarily shift away from the world we've built, we can't rightly expect them to. Can we?

So yes, lobby against new coal plant construction. Yes, demand meaningful climate legislation. But for every second we spend lambasting the fossil fuel industry or haranging our elected officials, we better spend 100 seconds walking our talk. Which is not to say it's easy. The very fabric of our lives, literally, was built with cheap fossil fuels. But that also means you can throw a dart in just about any direction and hit on someplace to start.

By Jason Bradford, posted Mar 4, 2010:

The following is the prepared text for a talk I gave in the city hall of Eugene Oregon the evening of Feb. 17, 2010. It was organized by two Lane County commissioners and the city mayor and is part of a series on Food Security. My role was to discuss food security in the context of peak oil. This speech is similar to one I gave last year that was also posted on The Oil Drum. At the end I recommended people look up The Post Carbon Institute and affiliates for good leads on what ideas and actions are happening in response to our predicament.

My presentation has 4 parts. First, I will connect what is going on in the economy right now with natural resources and the environment. Second, I will explain why oil is an especially important resource and what is meant by peak oil. Third, I will discuss the implications of economic decline and peak oil for the food system. And fourth, I will suggest what families and society can do given our predicament.

The Economy and Mother Nature

I want you all to imagine Mother Nature, in the personified sense. Now, and I realize this may be a stretch, think of her also as a banker, perhaps a matronly Ben Bernanke. Got that image in your head? Okay…

Several generations ago our forefathers walk into “Bank of Nature” and get a loan. Mother Nature approves our loan and offers us plenty of credit. Our ancestors are now endowed with the riches of ancient forests, prolific fisheries, fertile topsoil, clean water, concentrated mineral ores, vast reserves of fossil fuels, and a splendidly stable climate. These assets, Mother Nature’s credit slip, are the source of our wealth and comfort. Every widget, gizmo, thing-a-majig, do-dad, wach-a-macall-it and Winnebago produced in our factories, sold in our stores, stuffed in our closets, piled in our landfills and spilled in our waters originated as a loan from Bank of Nature.

Why are we having economic troubles? Because loans, as we are now discovering, are not just slips of credit, they also come with debt. While we gleefully liquidated the Natural Capital loan Mother Nature approved for us, we failed to develop a business plan that could pay back the debt. This ecological debt is the underlying drag on our financial system.

What this means, practically, is that as soon as the economy tries to heat up again, which we like to call increasing DEMAND, it will be capped on the knees by the henchmen Mother Nature hired. She will not extend us any more credit since we have done a poor job with the first loan. If you are unclear about what I mean here, I’ll explain this a bit more when I talk specifically about oil.

 

 

I have seen pictures of some great protest signs over the past couple of years that state this very succinctly: Nature doesn’t do bailouts. This is why the current policy of all central banks and governments to deal with the financial crisis, which is to essentially create and inject more money into the system, has no chance of success. More money doesn’t solve an ecological debt crisis, because money is a claim on resources and not worth anything by itself.

Oil is Special

Okay, now I want to highlight the special role of oil in our economy.

Over the recent decades, we have built what is called a “globalized economy” where materials, labor and services are readily exchanged across the globe. This feat has only been possible due to cheap oil. The “cheapness” is key. Transportation costs are assumed to be only a small part of doing business.

Some economists have calculated what is called the Goldilocks Zone for oil prices. Below $70 per barrel and it makes no sense for oil companies to explore and develop new supplies, while prices above $80 per barrel lead to a curtailing of demand, basically cutting off prospects for U.S. economic growth. And as mature oil fields deplete, the price to explore and develop new oil wells goes higher than $70 per barrel, essentially locking the U.S. into economic stagnation.

Step back for a moment and think about how potent and special oil is. Oil is highly energy dense and easily portable. A gallon of oil contains enough energy to do the work of hundreds of people simultaneously or a single person for hundreds of hours. You can drive a 4000 lb car at great velocity for tens of miles on a gallon of gasoline. Try pushing a car that distance (but before doing so, ask your doctor if that’s okay).

So when you hear the term peak oil, what does that mean? Peak oil is simply the point in time when the global supply of oil stops growing. Peak oil is not a theory, but an historic fact for 2/3 of oil producing countries, including the United States, which peaked in 1970.

What we experience is less supply leading to a spike in prices. High oil prices then choke off economic growth because our globalized economy is structurally reliant on cheap oil. And without economic growth loans are not paid back sufficiently and a financial crisis ensues.

This is essentially what happened between 2005 and 2008. We had a credit bubble because of lax lending policies PLUS a flattening of oil production at the same time.

Connecting to Food Security

Okay, so what does this have to do with food security?

1. Globalization and cheap energy led to the development of centralized processing and distribution channels, with what is termed “just in time delivery systems.” The typical grocery store, for example, only has a 3 day supply of food on the shelves, and relies on daily trucking from distance warehouses to restock basic supplies. An oil supply shock would disrupt getting food to stores.
2. Because of cheap and reliable transportation, it has been possible for entire agricultural regions to become highly specialized in production for export. So the Willamette Valley evolved into a grass seed capital, which replaced a diversified farm economy that contributed significantly to local consumption. Since we no longer have the local farms feeding us, we depend on global trade for basic sustenance.
3. Farming methods themselves rely on cheap energy, such as tractor fuel and imported fertilizers. Beyond the farm energy is used extensively in processing, distribution, storage and cooking. All told, about 7 calories of fossil fuel go into each calorie of food we eat.
4. Modern farming is highly connected to the financial system. A depressed economy makes credit scare. Many farms that are in debt and require bank credit to operate will likely go out of business. And some financing is going to be needed to help farms restructure for the transition towards new crops, new methods, and new markets.

What to Do

This brings me to the question of “What to do?”

I’ll first address this towards individual persons and families. As energy flows to society decline, our social systems will become less complex structurally, but our daily lives more complex. What I mean by this is that we will become less of “specialized cogs in a big machine” and instead have to take on more diverse, practical, and flexible roles.

The kinds of work we do will shift too. Consider whether you specialize in a “nice to have job” or a “need to have job”. Jobs are going to be more and more about securing basic needs, such as food, water, shelter, health, and security. Fewer paid jobs will be available. This will require people to rely more on the informal economy, which means getting paid through reciprocal exchange relationships. Start by getting to know your neighbors, joining social networks, and developing a few basic skills, such as gardening, bike repair, and inexpensive health care.

 

 

As our formal economy declines more work will be done in the informal economy, as is true now in so-called developing countries. Graph from Post Peak Living based on World Bank data.

 

This all may sound extreme, but it is already the reality for a growing subpopulation of tens of millions of Americans, and most of the 6.7 billion humans on the planet.

Now I’ll talk about what I’d like to see society do. Instead of thinking about policies and programs, I will talk about values and paradigms.

Primarily we need to recognize that the environment is our primary form of wealth. Bank of Nature, not Goldman Sachs or the Federal Reserve, is our master. It is far more important for us to pay back our ecological debts since these are non-negotiable, whereas financial ones are among people and can be forgiven. If you manage public funds, always ask whether allocating money is going to rebuild natural capital or further its liquidation.

I’d like to see community leaders ask people to consider themselves as contributors rather than consumers. The whole consumer identity should become passé. We will thrive by creating an ecological identity, which is a deep appreciation for our relatedness and absolute interdependence with other people, other forms of life on this planet, and the fundamental forces of sunshine and geology.

What I have said may provoke anxiety, and is certainly an immense undertaking, but ultimately we have no choice so let’s not whine and delay. Let’s take it on as a great adventure, a thrilling challenge. Our success or failure is going to hinge on our attitude. We need to take control of the circumstances and become active participants in transition. I can assure you that doing so is tremendously energizing, healthy, and rewarding in so many ways.

Originally published March 3rd, 2010 at The Oil Drum

By Tom Whipple, posted Mar 4, 2010:

With each passing day, it is becoming increasingly likely that the future of our gasoline prices and consequently our economic well-being over the next few years will be determined by what happens with China's economy.

For over 30 years, China's GDP has grown at an unprecedented 10 percent a year allowing for the absorption of 15 million new workers into the labor force annually. Much of this growth has been supported by ever-increasing exports as China converted itself from a backwards agricultural nation to the center of world manufacturing.

With domestic consumer consumption in China running at less than 35 percent of GDP as compared to over 70 percent in the U.S., it has long been believed that China had to export to survive. Indeed the global economic slump of 2008 reduced China's exports by more than 20 percent, cost tens of millions of its workers their jobs, and slowed economic growth to the lowest seen in recent decades.

To counter this situation, Beijing embarked on a massive stimulus program much larger in proportion to its GDP than the one undertaken in the U.S. In China, where the government directly controls the bulk of the banking system, and state-owned enterprises receive most of the loans, there do not exist the internal frictions and efforts for profit maximization that exist in other financial systems. The government simply orders and the banking system obeys.

The problem in China is what to stimulate. With well over half of its population mired in rural poverty and in no position to step up consumption of consumer goods, the state turned to expanding its infrastructure and housing - whether their was a need or demand for new projects or not. Millions of still empty apartments and retail establishments were built. Speculation drove real estate prices well beyond the means of the average worker. New highway and railroad projects were started. Production capacity was expanded and modernized. It was not long before foreign and few domestic critics of all this growth were starting to ask the question - Why?

It is one thing to build a trillion dollar dam that will supply massive amounts of electricity for decades, but another to spend trillions on 11,000 miles of ultra high-speed passenger lines that will whisk a relatively few passengers between cities at unprecedented speeds and costs. While improved electrified rail lines makes sense in a resource limited world, the 40,000 miles of new expressways that the Chinese will have completed in another few years does not make sense. Neither does the serious overcapacity in industrial production that is constantly being increased in the drive to keep growing. In short a lot of what is going on in China does not or will not have much real economic value outside of keeping the economy growing over the short term.

As economic troubles grow in the OECD nations, it is becoming apparent that a major rebound in China's exports outside of Asia is unlikely in the foreseeable future. Unless China can find a replacement for this market either in Asia or domestically, growth cannot grow indefinitely. This is the crux of China's dilemma.

Beijing of course has other problems. If projections for future global oil production that predict a marked decline starting in 3-4 years are correct, Beijing like all oil importers will have trouble sustaining growth. Although China is making a major effort to lock in dedicated oil supplies all over the world, this will only be a temporary remedy and shortages will inevitably develop. By the end of the decade China's economic growth will be at an end unless it finds ways to import increasing shares of the dwindling global supply of natural resources - a possibility that is not out of the question.

China, however, has a higher vulnerability to climate change than many other nations. With 1.3 billion people to feed, falling water tables, rising sea levels, and melting Himalayan glaciers, the country will one day be in considerable trouble This of course may well be decades away, but a couple of years of major droughts will force major shifts in priorities as the nation scrambles to find sufficient supplies of food and/or water.

Beijing, of course, is starting to realize that it may be in more trouble than a casual glance at its growth statistics would suggest. After an unexpected and unwanted spurt in lending in January, the government has begun to tighten the economic screws through its monopolistic control of the banking system.

Last week, the government's state-controlled press published an unusual admission from the Chairman of the National Development and Reform Commission, Zhang Ping. Ping said that 2010 would be a year that would severely test China's ability to macro-control its economy. If the government continues to lend out too much money, rapid inflation will occur. But if the screws are tightened too much, there will be recession.

The story went on to quote numerous senior economic officials to the effect that building too much capacity in certain industries cannot be good for the economy and that more emphasis needs to be placed on stimulating consumption and new [green] energy industries.

As March of 2010 opens there are already some tentative indications that the Chinese economy is slowing. Maybe the Chinese can tune their economy to the sweet spot between inflation and recession so that they can continue growing at their accustomed pace for awhile - and maybe not.

In recent months more and more of the world's exportable energy has been moving in the direction of China and to a lesser extent India and a few other Asian states. Due to the global recession, there is still excess capacity in the energy markets, but this will be a fleeting time. For America, growth or stagnation of China's economy will have much to do with the stability of oil prices during the next five years.

Originally published 03 March, 2010 at Falls Church News Press

By Warren Karlenzig, posted Mar 4, 2010:

With all the efforts going into urban climate action plans and carbon reduction, will many cities and suburbs be caught unprepared for other sustainability crises, such as acute water or energy shortages?

In carbon reduction management, should efforts such as focusing on renewable energy and energy efficiency deserve the highest priority, when a city such as San Francisco produces 78 percent of its greenhouse gases from transportation and only 17 percent from buildings?

These are questions that both policy makers and sustainability planners need to consider as we move into an era of climate change compounded by either diminishing resources and/or resources that are expected to continue to have extreme price volatility, such as gasoline.

My last post reviewed the findings of a UK industry study, partially backed by Richard Branson's Virgin Group, forecasting a major "oil crunch" by 2014-15 that could potentially mean shorter supplies and much high prices for gasoline. Because US cities do not use oil for electric power generation (Honolulu is the only one that still does), there should be much more focus in US cities on transportation and in other key areas that will be more severely impacted by the high price of oil. Cities should look at everything from citizen and business mobility options, to supplies such as asphalt for street paving, to regional food security.

At no time has effective planning, land use and public transit been so key to ensuring economic vitality, as well as equity (access to jobs and services with transit), environmental sustainability, climate security and health. That doesn't mean that increasing renewable energy and energy efficiency shouldn't be part of every community's planning, projects and budgets. It does mean that cities will need to simultaneously prioritize action plans for carbon reduction, peaking energy and peaking freshwater, which very few are doing, outside of those involved in the Transition Town movement.

To help illustrate the complexities of what I'm getting at, consider the following example. Water use in California accounts for 20 percent of electrical power use. This energy is needed to move water supplies from places with water to those largely without or to treat drinking water and wastewater.

Renewable energy sources such as solar thermal generating plants also require great amounts of water, competing for precious water supplies that can be used for drinking water and growing or processing food.

So where do water, oil or grain shortages fit in your city's or region's sustainability plan? There are no easy answers, and metro regions and cities will want to collectively consider their own energy, water and food sources when trying to assess combined carbon reduction goals and resource depletion risk factors.

I've developed some general urban resiliency rules of thumb for an upcoming chapter in the Post Carbon Institute's Post Carbon Reader: Managing the 21st Century's Sustainability Crises, which is coming out this summer from the University of California Press and Watershed Media:

1. Planning: Enable the development of vibrant mixed-use communities and higher-density regional centers, that create a sense of place, allow for transportation choices (other than private automobiles), and protect regional agricultural, watershed, and wildlife habitat lands.
2. Mobility: Invest in high-quality pedestrian, bicycle, and public transit infrastructure with easy access, shared connectivity and rich information sources, from signage to cell phone alerts.
3. Built Environment: Design new buildings and associated landscaping--and retrofit existing buildings--for state-of-the-art energy (smart grid applications), and resource efficiency, integrated with mobility options.
4. Economy: Support businesses in order to provide quality local jobs and to meet the needs of the new economy with renewable energy and other "green" technologies and services. Support local and regional economic decision-makers in adapting to the new world of rising prices, volatile energy supplies and national demographic shifts.
5. Food: Develop regional organic food production, processing, and metro-area distribution networks.
6. Resources: Drastically cut use of water, waste and materials, re-using them whenever possible.
7. Management: Engage government, businesses and citizens together in resilience planning and implementation; track and communicate the successes, failures, and opportunities of this community-wide effort.

These categories are not meant to be "checklist" items for sustainability or resilience planning, but rather lay out the relevant areas that should comprise planning for integrated metro area systems. Each metro area and every city should be looking at these factors together, in order to model how well they are prepared to collaboratively contend with risks such as:

1. Changing regional or local climate: extreme heat events, floods, droughts and other extreme weather events
2. Prolonged drought, e.g. loss of mountain snowpacks or aquifers providing water for residential, commercial, industrial and agricultural use
3. Oil crunches, including extreme price volatility; supply shocks from wars, political events, terrorism, natural disasters
4. Food security risks from high oil prices, drought, energy-food competition (biofuels), large-scale contamination, etc.

Admittedly, the overlapping and inextricable problems that cities face today can be overwhelming, especially when budgets are tight or non-existent, and people's time is stretched to the breaking point.

Selective problem solving, such as climate action planning if it is done in isolation from resilience planning, however, may lend a false sense of security for cities on the brink of an era that promises to be very different than anything ever experienced in the past.

 Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

Originally published March 03, 2010 at the Green Flow blog of Common Currents

By Richard Heinberg, posted Mar 3, 2010:

What if the economy doesn't recover?

In 2008 the U.S. economy tripped down a steep, rocky slope. Employment levels plummeted; so did purchases of autos and other consumer goods. Property values crashed; foreclosure and bankruptcy rates bled. For states, counties, cities, and towns; for manufacturers, retailers, and middle- and low-income families, the consequences were—and continue to be—catastrophic. Other nations were soon caught up in the undertow.

In late 2009 and early 2010, the economy showed some signs of renewed vigor. Understandably, everyone wants it to get "back to normal." But here's a disturbing thought: What if that is not possible? What if the goalposts have been moved, the rules rewritten, the game changed? What if the decades-long era of economic growth based on ever-increasing rates of resource extraction, manufacturing, and consumption is over, finished, and done? What if the economic conditions that all of us grew up expecting to continue practically forever were merely a blip on history's timeline?

It's an uncomfortable idea, but one that cannot be ignored: The "normal" late-20th century economy of seemingly endless growth actually emerged from an aberrant set of conditions that cannot be perpetuated.

That "normal" is gone. One way or another, a "new normal" will emerge to replace it. Can we build a different, more sustainable economy to replace the one now in tatters?

Let's be clear: I believe we are in for some very hard times. The transitional period on our way toward a post-growth, equilibrium economy will prove to be the most challenging time any of us has ever lived through. Nevertheless, I am convinced that we can survive this collective journey, and that if we make sound choices as families and communities, life can actually be better for us in the decades ahead than it was during the heady days of seemingly endless economic expansion.

In this essay, I would like to share my conclusions on this subject and the process by which I arrived at them. It's a bit of a long story, so please bear with me. First, the conclusions.

Four Propositions

The following summary statements are fundamental both to grasping our current situation and managing our way toward a desirable future:

1. We have reached the end of economic growth as we have known it. The "growth" we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it. The economic crisis that began in 2008 was both foreseeable and inevitable, and that it marks a permanent, fundamental break from past decades—a period in which economists adopted the unrealistic view that perpetual economic growth is necessary and also possible to achieve. As we will see, there are fundamental constraints to ongoing economic expansion, and the world is beginning to encounter those constraints. This is not to say the U.S. or the world will never see another quarter or year of growth relative to the previous year. Rather, the point is that when the bumps are averaged out, the general trend-line of the economy (measured in terms of production and consumption of real goods) will be level or downward rather than upward from now on.
2. The basic factors that will inevitably shape whatever replaces the growth economy are knowable. To survive and thrive for long, societies have to operate within the planet's budget of sustainably extractable resources. This means that even if we don't know exactly what a desirable post-growth economy and lifestyle will look like, we know enough to begin working toward them.
3. It is possible for economies to persist for centuries or millennia with no or minimal growth. That is how most economies operated until recent times. If billions of people through countless generations lived without economic growth, we can do so as well—now and far into the future. The end of growth does not mean the end of the world.
4. Life in a non-growing economy can be fulfilling, interesting, and secure. The absence of growth does not imply a lack of change or improvement. Within a non-growing or equilibrium economy there can still be a continuous development of practical skills, artistic expression, and technology. In fact, some historians and social scientists argue that life in an equilibrium economy can be superior to life in a fast-growing economy: while growth creates opportunities for some, it also typically intensifies competition—there are big winners and big losers, and (as in most boom towns) the quality of relations within the community can suffer as a result. Within a non-growing economy it is possible to maximize benefits and reduce factors leading to decay, but doing so will require pursuing appropriate goals: instead of more, we must strive for better; rather than promoting increased economic activity for its own sake, we must emphasize whatever increases quality of life without stoking consumption. One way to do this is to reinvent and redefine growth itself.

The transition to a no-growth economy (or one in which growth is defined in a fundamentally different way) is inevitable, but it will go much better if we plan for it rather than simply watching in dismay as institutions we have come to rely upon fail, and then try to improvise a survival strategy in their absence.

In effect, we have to create a desirable "new normal" that fits the constraints imposed by depleting natural resources. Maintaining the "old normal" is not an option; if we do not find new goals for ourselves and plan our transition from a growth-based economy to a healthy equilibrium economy, we will by default create a much less desirable "new normal" whose emergence we are already beginning to see in the forms of persistent high unemployment, a widening gap between rich and poor, and ever more frequent and worsening financial and environmental crises—all of which translate to profound distress for individuals, families, and communities.

'Limits to Growth'

The journey that led to my formulating these propositions began in 1972, when a book called Limits to Growth was making headlines. This relatively compact volume, which went on to become the best-selling environmental book of all time, provoked the first Great Wake-up Call of my adult life, changing the course of everything I have thought and done ever since.

Let me explain why Limits to Growth impacted me so deeply.

That book, which reported on the first attempts to use computers to model the likely interactions between trends in resources, consumption, and population, was also the first major scientific study to question the assumption that economic growth can and will continue more or less uninterrupted into the foreseeable future.

The idea was heretical at the time—and still is: during the past few decades, growth has become virtually the sole index of national economic well-being. When the economy grows, jobs appear, investments yield high returns, and everyone is happy. When the economy stops growing, financial bloodletting ensues. And so predictably a book saying that growth cannot and will not continue beyond a certain point proved profoundly upsetting in some quarters, and soon Limits to Growth was prominently "debunked" by public relations efforts organized by pro-growth business interests. In reality, this "debunking" merely amounted to taking a few numbers in the book completely out of context, citing them as "predictions" (which they explicitly were not), and then claiming that these predictions had failed. The ruse was quickly exposed, but rebuttals often don't gain nearly as much publicity as accusations, and so today millions of people mistakenly believe that the book was long ago discredited. In fact, the original Limits to Growth scenarios have held up quite well*.

In principle, the argument for eventual limits to growth is a slam-dunk. If any quantity grows steadily by a certain fixed percentage per year, this implies that it will double in size every so-many years; the higher the percentage growth rate, the quicker the doubling. A rough method of figuring doubling times is known as the rule of 70: dividing the percentage growth rate into 70 gives the approximate time required for the initial quantity to double. If a quantity is growing at 1 percent per year, it will double in 70 years; at 2 percent per year growth, it will double in 35 years; at 5 percent growth, it will double in only 14 years, and so on. If you want to be more precise, you can use the Y^x button on your calculator, but the rule of 70 works fine for most purposes.

Here's a real-world example: Over the past two centuries, human population has grown at rates ranging from less than one percent to more than two percent per year. In 1800, world population stood at about one billion; by 1930 it had doubled to two billion. Only 30 years later (in 1960) it had doubled again to four billion; currently we are on track to achieve a third doubling, to eight billion humans, around 2025. No one seriously expects human population to continue growing for centuries into the future. But imagine if it did—at just 1.3 percent per year (its growth rate in the year 2000). By the year 2780 there would be 148 trillion humans on Earth—one person for each square meter of land on the planet's surface.

It won't happen, of course.

In nature, growth always slams up against non-negotiable constraints sooner or later. If a species finds that its food source has expanded, its numbers will increase to take advantage of those surplus calories—but then its food source will become depleted as more mouths consume it, and its predators will likewise become more numerous (more tasty meals for them!). Population "blooms" (that is, periods of rapid growth) are always followed by crashes and die-offs. Always.

Here's another real-world example. In recent years China's economy has been growing at eight percent or more per year; that means it is more than doubling in size every ten years. Indeed, China consumes more than twice as much coal as it did a decade ago—the same with iron ore and oil. The nation now has four times as many highways as it did, and almost five times as many cars. How long can this go on? How many more doublings can occur before China has used up its key resources—or has simply decided that enough is enough and has stopped growing?

It makes sense that economies should follow rules analogous to those that govern biological systems. Plants and animals tend to grow quickly when they are young, but then they reach a more or less stable mature size. In organisms, growth rates are largely controlled by genes. In economies, growth seems tied to factors such as the availability of resources—chiefly energy resources ("food" for the industrial system). During the 20th century, cheap and abundant fossil fuels enabled rapid economic expansion; at some point, therefore, fossil fuel depletion could put a brake on growth. It is also possible that industrial wastes could accumulate to the point that the biological systems that underpin economic activity (such as forests, crops, and human bodies) begin to fail.

But economists generally don't see things this way. That's probably because most current economic theories were formulated during an anomalous historical period of sustained growth. Economists are merely generalizing from their experience: they can point to decades of steady growth in the recent past, and so they simply project that experience into the future. Moreover, they have ways to explain why modern market economies are immune to the kinds of limits that constrain natural systems; the two main ones concern substitution and efficiency.

If a useful resource becomes scarce, its price will rise, and this creates an incentive for users of the resource to find a substitute. For example, if oil gets expensive enough, energy companies might start making liquid fuels from coal. Or they might develop other energy sources undreamed of today. Economists theorize that this process of substitution can go on forever. It's part of the magic of the free market.

Increasing efficiency means doing more with less. In the U.S., the number of inflation-adjusted dollars generated in the economy for every unit of energy consumed has increased steadily over recent decades (the amount of energy, in British Thermal Units, required to produce a dollar of GDP has been dropping steadily, from close to 20,000 BTU per dollar in 1949 to 8,500 BTU in 2008). That's one kind of economic efficiency. Another has to do with locating the cheapest sources of materials, and the places where workers will be most productive and work for the lowest wages. As we increase efficiency, we use less—of either resources or money—to do more. That enables more growth.

Finding substitutes for depleting resources and upping efficiency are undeniably effective adaptive strategies of market economies. Nevertheless, the question remains open as to how long these strategies can continue to work in the real world—which is governed less by economic theories than by the laws of physics. In the real world, some things don't have substitutes, or the substitutes are too expensive, or don't work as well, or can't be produced fast enough. And efficiency follows a law of diminishing returns: the first gains in efficiency are usually cheap, but every further incremental gain tends to cost more, until further gains become prohibitively expensive.

Unlike economists, most physical scientists recognize that growth within any functioning, bounded system has to stop sometime.

But this discussion has very real implications, because the economy is not just an abstract concept; it is what determines whether we live in luxury or poverty; whether we eat or starve. If economic growth ends, everyone will be impacted, and it will take society years to adapt to this new condition. Therefore it is important to be able to forecast whether that moment is close or distant in time.

Hence the Limits to Growth study. The authors fed in data for world population growth, consumption trends, and the abundance of various important resources, ran their computer program, and concluded that the end of growth would probably arrive between 2010 and 2050. Industrial output and food production would then fall, leading to a decline in population. (By the way, the Limits to Growth scenario study has been re-run repeatedly in the years since the original publication, using more sophisticated software and updated input data. The results were similar. See Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update.)

My Personal Story of Waking Up to Limits

That's why Limits to Growth meant so much to me when I encountered it at age 21. I realized that the world in which I had been born, raised, and educated was headed toward what is politely known as a "historical discontinuity," but more colloquially termed "collapse," "a cliff," or "a brick wall." Millions of young people today are having the same experience as they learn about climate change. Welcome to the club.

At the time, I had been trying to make my way as a young musician. My father had been a chemistry and physics teacher, but I had gravitated toward the arts: after being trained as a classical violinist, I had taught myself also to play electric guitar.

As I absorbed the implications of Limits to Growth, I realized that there were more important things than band rehearsals and gigs to attend to, so I mostly left the music business (though I continue to be an avid amateur violinist) and began looking for ways to help shift society toward a more sustainable path. I became a freelance writer-editor and started pursuing projects I thought might lead me toward a better understanding of global trends and of how our species might avert an overwhelming economic and environmental disaster.

It was clear that society would need to undertake fundamental changes. But what were those changes, exactly? I thought the best way to find out would be to form an intentional community as a kind of social laboratory in which to explore alternatives in energy, food production, and lifestyles. I ended up spending most of the next 20 years living in three communities—one in Toronto that I helped establish, and others in Colorado and southern California that had already been going for some time before I joined. Intentional communities (sometimes also known as communes, with many now thriving under the banner of "eco-villages") are a fascinating social phenomenon, and hundreds still flourish worldwide.

By the early 1990s, I was eager to reconnect with mainstream society and bring what I had learned to a wider audience. My wife, Janet Barocco, and I had met in an intentional community in southern California; together we moved to a suburban home in Santa Rosa. By the latter years of the decade I was teaching in a college program on sustainability that I had helped initiate and design, while also continuing to make my way as a freelance environmental writer.

It was at this point, in 1998, that I heard a second Great Wake-up Call.

Peak Oil

It came in the form of an article in Scientific American by veteran petroleum geologists Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère (both of whom had overseen exploration and production in major oil companies), explaining why world oil extraction would reach a maximum around 2010 and begin its permanent decline thereafter. I quickly realized that Peak Oil would likely be the first non-negotiable global limit to growth. The hazy forecast that industrial society would hit a wall sometime in the 21st century was suddenly focused to a painful specificity. Growth had acquired a hard expiration date.

Of course, oil does not pose our only societal limit, or even the most important one in the bigger scheme of things: climate, water, and topsoil are clearly more crucial in the long run. But the peaking of world oil production could potentially bring modern industrial civilization to its knees, while also undercutting coordinated efforts to deal with all sorts of other problems.

Up to this point I had little interest in the subject of oil, or energy generally. However, as I re-read the Scientific American article, I realized the pivotal role petroleum plays in the modern world—in transportation, agriculture, and the chemicals and materials industries. I began spending hours each day studying energy history and oil production statistics. I soon realized that the Industrial Revolution was really the Fossil Fuel Revolution, and that our modern food system is based on cheap fossil energy. Further, the entire phenomenon of continuous economic growth—including the development of the financial institutions that facilitate growth, such as fractional reserve banking and the marketing of derivatives—is ultimately based on ever-increasing supplies of cheap energy. Growth requires more manufacturing, more trade, and more transport, and those all in turn require more energy. This means that if energy supplies can't expand and energy therefore becomes significantly more expensive, economic growth will falter and the financial system built on expectations of perpetual growth will fail, possibly in a rather spectacular way.

As early as 1998, Campbell, Laherrère, and others were discussing a Peak Oil impact scenario that went like this. Sometime around the year 2010, they theorized, stagnant or falling oil supplies would lead to soaring and more volatile petroleum prices, which would precipitate a global economic crash. This rapid economic contraction would in turn lead to sharply curtailed energy demand, so oil prices would then fall; but as soon as the economy regained strength, demand for oil would recover, prices would again soar, and the economy would relapse. This cycle would continue, with each recovery phase being shorter and weaker, and each crash deeper and harder, until the economy was in ruins. Meanwhile, volatile oil prices would frustrate investments in energy alternatives: one year, oil would be so expensive that almost any other energy source would look cheap by comparison; the next year, the price of oil would have fallen so far that energy users would be flocking back to it, with investments in other energy sources looking foolish. Investment capital would be in short supply in any case because the banks would be insolvent due to the crash, and governments would be broke due to declining tax revenues. Meanwhile, international competition for dwindling oil supplies might lead to wars between petroleum importing nations, between importers and exporters, and between rival factions within exporting nations.

Naturally, I also examined the arguments against the likelihood of a near-term peak in global oil production. What if Campbell and Laherrère were simply wrong? There are those who claim that new technologies for crude oil extraction will increase the amount of oil that can be obtained from each well drilled, and that there are nearly endless reserves of alternative hydrocarbon resources (principally tar sands and oil shale) whose development will seamlessly replace conventional oil, thus delaying the inevitable peak for decades. There are also those who say that Peak Oil won't be much of a problem even if it happens soon, because the market will find substitutes as quickly as needed—whether electric cars, hydrogen, or liquid fuel made from coal. I found all of these arguments weak: the new oil extraction technologies won't come into wide use for several years, and will be applicable mostly to newly developed fields (of which there are fewer and fewer each year as exploration efforts continue to show mostly disappointing results), not to the old super-giant oilfields that produce the great bulk of oil that we use today. Tar sands and oil shale will be slow to extract; indeed, in the case of oil shale, we may never derive liquid fuels in any substantial quantity due to the enormous costs of processing this very low-grade material. And substitutes like electric cars, liquids from coal, and hydrogen will take a very long time to develop and will in most cases be much more costly than the equivalent elements of our current system of petroleum fuels and internal combustion engines.

I continued to study the world energy situation for the next few years. And, with every passing year, events appeared to be supporting the Peak Oil thesis and undercutting the views of the oil optimists. Oil prices were trending upward—and for entirely foreseeable reasons: discoveries of new oilfields were continuing to peter out, with most new fields being much more difficult and expensive to develop than ones found in previous years. More oil-producing countries were seeing their extraction rates peaking and beginning to decline despite efforts to maintain production growth using high-tech, expensive secondary and tertiary extraction methods like the injection of water, nitrogen, or CO2 to force more oil out of the ground. Production decline rates in the world's old, super-giant oilfields, which are responsible for the lion's share of the global petroleum supply, were accelerating. Production of liquid fuels from tar sands was expanding only slowly, while the development of oil shale remained a hollow promise for the distant future.

I corresponded with and met the authors of the Scientific American article, and interviewed other petroleum geologists and engineers. One expert after another offered further reasons for concluding that the thesis of "The End of Cheap Oil" was correct, that there were no ready substitutes for crude oil, and that the consequences of a near-term global oil production peak would be profound.

Given the almost complete absence of mainstream media coverage of the subject, I spent several months assessing whether I should step into the breach and write a book on Peak Oil. The fact that I had no background in the oil industry or in any relevant academic field weighed against doing so. Yet the need was clearly overwhelming, so I decided to try. I spent 2001 and 2002 writing The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, which was published the following year and went on to sell over 50,000 copies with translations in six languages. I began receiving lecture invitations, and, over the next few years, gave over 300 talks to a wide variety of audiences in a dozen countries. More books followed: PowerDown: Options and Actions for a Post Carbon World (2004); The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse (2006); Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines (2007); and Blackout: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis (2009).

I was determined to sound a warning not just to the general public, but especially to politicians and appointed government officials. Members of a burgeoning informal global network of Peak Oil activists arranged for me speak to hundreds of national, state, and local politicians and appointed officials in the U.S., to about a hundred members of the European Parliament, and to national Parliamentarians in the U.K., Australia, and New Zealand.

From Scary Theory to Scarier Reality

Then in 2008, the Peak Oil scenario became all too real. Global oil production had been stagnant since 2005 and petroleum prices had been soaring upward. In July, 2008, the per-barrel price shot up nearly to $150—half again higher (in inflation-adjusted terms) than the price spikes of the 1970s that had triggered the worst recession since World War II. By summer 2008, the auto industry, the trucking industry, international shipping, agriculture, and the airlines were all reeling.

But what happened next riveted the world's attention to such a degree that the oil price spike was all but forgotten: in September 2008, the global financial system nearly collapsed. The reasons for this sudden, gripping crisis apparently had to do with housing bubbles, lack of proper regulation of the banking industry, and the over-use of bizarre financial products that almost nobody understood. However, there are reasons for concluding that the oil price spike was a much more important contributor to this economic meltdown than is generally discussed (see www.energybulletin.net/node/49798).

In the aftermath of that global financial near-death experience, both the Peak Oil impact scenario proposed a decade earlier and the Limits to Growth standard-run scenario of 1972 seemed to be confirmed with uncanny and frightening accuracy. Global trade was falling. The world's largest auto companies were on life support. The U.S. airline industry had shrunk by almost a third. Food riots were erupting in poor nations around the world. Lingering wars in Iraq (the nation with the world's second-largest crude oil reserves) and Afghanistan (the site of disputed oil and gas pipeline projects) continued to bleed the coffers of the world's foremost oil-importing nation.

Meanwhile, the debate about what to do to rein in global climate change exemplified the political inertia that had kept the world on track for calamity since the early '70s. It had by now become obvious to nearly every person of modest education and intellect that the world has two urgent, incontrovertible reasons to rapidly end its reliance on fossil fuels: the twin threats of climate catastrophe and impending constraints to fuel supplies (with most of the remaining oil reserves located in just a few countries). Yet at the Copenhagen climate conference in December, 2009, the priorities of the most fuel-dependent nations were clear: carbon emissions should be cut, and fossil fuel dependency reduced, but only if doing so does not threaten economic growth.

The cruel irony, obvious to my Peak Oil-aware colleagues but apparently not to the delegates at Copenhagen, was that the decades-long era of rapid economic growth based on increased fossil-fueled production and consumption is over anyway. The world's last chance to collectively, cooperatively negotiate a turn away from the precipice was being squandered for the sake of a goal that was no longer achievable.

I could take no satisfaction from these confirmations of the Limits to Growth and Peak Oil scenarios; being able to say "I told you so" hardly made up for the shock of knowing that our last opportunities to change direction had been missed and that the train of industrial civilization was now not merely still chugging toward a broken bridge, but was actually starting to plummet into the gorge below. We had succeeded somewhat in helping increase public awareness of an issue: due to the efforts of thousands of scientists, writers, and activists, "peak oil" had become a recognizable term in public discourse. But we had failed to budge government policy in more than very minor ways (I had, for example, assisted the City Council-appointed Peak Oil Task Force of Oakland, California, which produced a sensible report on which, so far, little action has been taken).

The world has entered a new era. The project of awakening and warning policy makers and the general public was worthy of the investment of all the effort we could muster. In fact, it would have been negligent of the Limits to Growth authors, Colin Campbell, Jean Laherrère, and thousands of climate and environmental scientists and activists (myself included) not to give it our best shot. But it is now too late to avert a collapse of the existing system. The collapse has begun.

It is time for a different strategy.

By saying this, I am not suggesting that we should all simply give up and accept an inevitable, awful fate. Even though the collapse of the world's financial and industrial systems has started, effort now at minimizing further dire consequences is essential. Collapse does not mean extinction. A new way of life will almost certainly emerge from the wreckage of the fossil-fueled growth era. It is up to those of us who have some understanding of what is happening, and why, to help design that new way of life so that it will be sustainable, equitable, and fulfilling for all concerned. We all need practical strategies and tools to weather the collapse and to build the foundation of whatever is to come after.

Journey to a New Economy

The propositions described above, and my personal journey, are the starting points for a search that can be summarized in a single question: What are the guideposts toward a livable, inviting post-growth society?

This search has in many instances entailed a literal, geographic journey. During the past few years, as I traveled the lecture circuit, I met thousands of people who had already concluded on their own that the global stage was being set for an economic crash of epic proportions. They had passed through the psychological stages of grief—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. They were thinking creatively, building new lives, and experimenting with a wide range of strategies for meeting basic human needs while using much less of just about everything.

Some of these folks, like me, had been thinking along these lines for a long time—since the 1970s. Many were much younger, though, had learned about Peak Oil or climate change just within the past few years, and had recently decided to devote their lives to building a post-hydrocarbon world. Some were clearly members of what was known in the 1970s as the "counterculture." Others were mainstream citizens—investment bankers, real estate sellers, high school teachers, small business owners, corporate middle managers—who had chanced upon information that awakened them forcibly from their routines. Many of these folks lived in large cities, but others in small towns or on farms; some were rich, some poor (a few by choice); some were devout, others agnostic or atheist; some were working alone on survivalist projects, while others were building community organizations; some saw the transition as a business opportunity while others were working through non-profit organizations. Here are just three examples that stand out.

In 2005, while on a lecture tour in Ireland, I met a young college teacher named Rob Hopkins who believed that life could be better without fossil fuels. He had led his students in developing an "Energy Descent Action Plan" for their town, and believed he had the seed for something larger and more significant. He soon moved back to his native England to earn his Ph.D., and designed his thesis project around helping the village of Totnes begin a cooperative, phased process of transitioning away from its dependence on fossil fuels. This project in turn led to the start of a series of Transition Initiatives in villages, towns, and neighborhoods throughout the U.K. In 2007, a version of Rob's written Ph.D. thesis was published as a book (The Transition Handbook) that quickly began inspiring others to take up this strategy. Today there are hundreds of Transition Initiatives at various stages of development in a dozen countries (including over 50 in the U.S.).

While in Montana for a speaking engagement at the University of Montana in Helena in spring 2009, some local Peak Oil activists drove me to the town of Ronan and introduced me to Billie Lee, who had helped start Mission Mountain Food Enterprise Center. The Center is housed in a fairly small, non-descript building and features medium-scale food processing equipment that local small food producers can rent at reasonable rates. This enables small farmers to produce value-added products (everything from canned soups to herbal tea bags) that are profitable and are price-competitive with those made by industrial food companies located hundreds or thousands of miles from Ronan. Local food has become an obsession for the sustainability-minded during the past few years, and local food systems will be a necessary pillar of post-growth economies. Yet aspiring small-scale farmers often have a hard time getting started because they cannot afford the equipment to enable them to produce profitable value-added products. Here in the tiny hamlet of Ronan was an ingenious solution to the problem, and one that deserves to be replicated in every agricultural county in the nation.

On a trip to New England in 2007, I met Lynn Benander, a community energy activist and entrepreneur who had started a project called Co-op Power to bring renewable energy to low-income and multi-ethnic communities throughout the Northeast. Typically, renewable energy projects cost more to get going than conventional coal or gas power projects, and so they tend to be found in wealthier communities and regions. Conversely, the most polluting energy projects tend to be sited in or near poor neighborhoods or regions. Co-op Power aims to change that imbalance of power—in a way that any community can copy. A typical project: You help four people put up a solar hot water system and everyone comes to help you put up yours; you save 40 to 50 percent off your total system price, get to know your neighbors, and learn how your system works. Co-op Power had also pioneered a cooperative financing method that cuts through the usual roadblocks to renewable energy projects in poorer neighborhoods by leveraging member equity.

Individually, these initiatives and projects may seem to be on too small a scale to make much of a difference. But multiplied by thousands, with examples in nearly every community, they represent a quiet yet powerful movement.

Few of these efforts have gained national media attention. Most media commentators who address economic issues are focused on the prospects—positive or negative—of the existing growth-based economy. These projects don't seem all that important within that framework of thinking. But in the new context of the no-growth economy, they may mean the difference between ruinous poverty and happy sufficiency.

The trends are already in evidence: as the financial crisis worsens, more people are planting gardens, and seed companies are working hard to keep up with the demand. More young people are taking up farming now than in any recent decade. In 2008, more bicycles were sold in the U.S. than automobiles (not good news for the struggling car companies, but great news for the climate). And since the crisis started, Americans have been spending much less on non-essentials—repairing and re-using rather than replacing and adding.

Many economists assume these trends are short-term and that Americans will return to consumerism as economic crisis shifts into recovery. But if there is no "recovery" in the usual sense, then these trends will only grow.

This is what the early adopters are assuming. They believe that the nation and the world have turned a corner. They understand something the media either ignore or deny. They're betting on a future of local food systems, not global agribusiness; of community credit co-ops rather than too-big-to-fail Wall Street megabanks; of small-scale renewable energy projects, not a world-spanning system of fossil-fuel extraction, trade, and consumption. A future in which we do for ourselves, share, and cooperate.

They're embarking on a life after growth.

* * *

The realization that growth is at an end raises many questions. Will the financial impact be inflationary or deflationary? Will some nations fare better than others, leading to protectionist trade wars? Will the "down-sizing" of social and economic complexity lead also to a substantial die-off of the human species? How quickly will all of this happen?

There simply are no hard and fast answers to such questions. The financial, energy, food, transport, and political systems on which we rely are complex, so it is almost impossible to reliably model their response to a shock such as a resource limits-imposed end to economic growth. The only reasonable response, it seems to me, is to act as if survival is possible, and to build resilience throughout society as quickly as can be, acting locally wherever there are individuals or groups with the understanding and wherewithal. We must assume that a satisfactory, sustainable way of life is achievable in the absence of fossil fuels and conventional economic growth, and go about building it. This will be the focus of my work from now on—and it is likely to be the work of the next few generations as well. Call it Transition, call it cultural survival and renewal, call it what you will, it is the only game in town for the foreseeable future.

* A recent study by Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organization (CSIRO) concluded, "[Our] analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of [the Limits to Growth] business-as-usual scenario…."

By Asher Miller, posted Mar 3, 2010:

[Excerpt] It should come as no surprise to anyone paying attention to the politics of climate legislation to hear Senator Lindsey Graham pronounce, “the cap-and-trade bills in the House and Senate are dead.” The truth is that they’ve been dead for quite some time. It’s just that now we finally have the coroner’s official report.

Many proponents and opponents of climate legislation have had one thing in common for some time now—they hate the American Clean Energy and Security Act (the Waxman-Markey bill which passed in the House by a narrow margin back in June).

So an unlikely assembly of hardcore climate activists and equally hardcore climate deniers likely greeted Graham’s announcement with some measure of satisfaction.

The opponents’ argument against the bill is stunningly simple: They don’t believe in human-caused climate change.

The arguments on the other side are, not surprisingly, more numerous and more complex, not to mention more valid. The reason why so many climate activists like myself have opposed ACES is that the 1,400-page House bill was riddled with so many giveaways to polluters, and set targets so low and so slow, that folks were honestly debating whether or not it would be better to have no legislation at all than this piece of… paper.

Keep in mind: with a much narrower majority in the Senate, the bill was likely going to get watered down even further.

So is Graham’s pronouncement good news? Yes, and for two reasons:...

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By Bill McKibben, posted Feb 25, 2010:

Why It’s the O.J. Moment of the Twenty-First Century

[Excerpt] Twenty-one years ago, in 1989, I wrote what many have called the first book for a general audience on global warming. One of the more interesting reviews came from the Wall Street Journal. It was a mixed and judicious appraisal. “The subject,” the reviewer said, “is important, the notion is arresting, and Mr. McKibben argues convincingly.” And that was not an outlier: around the same time, the first president Bush announced that he planned to “fight the greenhouse effect with the White House effect.”

I doubt that’s what the Journal will say about my next book when it comes out in a few weeks, and I know that no GOP presidential contender would now dream of acknowledging that human beings are warming the planet. Sarah Palin is currently calling climate science “snake oil” and last week, the Utah legislature, in a move straight out of the King Canute playbook, passed a resolution condemning "a well organized and ongoing effort to manipulate global temperature data in order to produce a global warming outcome" on a nearly party-line vote.

And here’s what’s odd. In 1989, I could fit just about every scientific study on climate change on top of my desk. The science was still thin. If my reporting made me think it was nonetheless convincing, many scientists were not yet prepared to agree.

Now, you could fill the Superdome with climate-change research data. (You might not want to, though, since Hurricane Katrina demonstrated just how easy it was to rip holes in its roof.) Every major scientific body in the world has produced reports confirming the peril. All 15 of the warmest years on record have come in the two decades that have passed since 1989. In the meantime, the Earth’s major natural systems have all shown undeniable signs of rapid flux: melting Arctic and glacial ice, rapidly acidifying seawater, and so on.

Somehow, though, the onslaught against the science of climate change has never been stronger, and its effects, at least in the U.S., never more obvious: fewer Americans believe humans are warming the planet. At least partly as a result, Congress feels little need to consider global-warming legislation, no less pass it; and as a result of that failure, progress towards any kind of international agreement on climate change has essentially ground to a halt.

Climate-Change Denial as an O.J. Moment

The campaign against climate science has been enormously clever, and enormously effective. It’s worth trying to understand how they’ve done it. The best analogy, I think, is to the O.J. Simpson trial, an event that’s begun to recede into our collective memory. For those who were conscious in 1995, however, I imagine that just a few names will make it come back to life. Kato Kaelin, anyone? Lance Ito?...

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Originally published at February 25th at TomDispatch

By Warren Karlenzig, posted Feb 25, 2010:

A new report by a United Kingdom industry taskforce predicts steep oil price rises and gasoline supply shortages by 2014-2015, which will put the global economy at similar risk to the 2007-2008 rapid rise in oil prices that helped trigger the Great Recession.

"The time period would be 2014-2015 when the oil market would be starting to experience rapidly rising prices and tightening oil supplies...It is notable that the CEO of Total, Christophe de Margerie, is already warning of such an outcome in the 2014/15 period," says the report, "Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil & Energy Security," funded by Virgin Group, Arup Engineering, Foster and Partners, and Scottish and Southern Engineering.

What can cities, businesses and individuals do to prepare for such energy price volatility, buy hybrids? Actually, the report asserts, "there is real danger that the focus on technological advances in cars is making consumers and government complacent."

More urgent steps need to be taken by policymakers in particular to avert this impending crisis:

• Support greater planning and funding for public transit, including taxation to benefit public transit taxation and allocating road space based on most fuel efficient modes (i.e., congestion pricing).
• Support planning for less energy-intensive forms of development (less sprawl, more transit-oriented housing, retail and businesses).
• Transition to more energy-efficient transportation fleets or vehicles.
• Coordinate policy mechanisms and organizational practices to create a behavioral shift from private car use to other more sustainable forms of mobility, including public transit, car sharing, cycling and walking.
• Encourage, enable and practice smart green city tactics: telecommuting, video conferencing and public work centers, such as those being piloted in Amsterdam with Cisco.

At the state and national government level, preparations for another "oil crunch" similar or worse than 2008 and 1980 should include: 

• Ending subsidies for oil in order to reduce economic dependence on oil-based industries.
• Transition agriculture and food production from operations highly dependent on the use of oil-based products such as diesel fuel, fertilizers and crop treatments, while encouraging bio-regional food production from urban foodsheds for nearby population centers. 
• Planning and support for high-speed rail networks (though this would be a longer-term preparation for post-carbon transportation era beyond 2020)

Daniel Lerch of the Post Carbon Institute authored a guidebook for cities and local government on how to prepare for an oil crisis. I have also written a study looking at US oil crisis readiness in the largest 50 US cities, "Major US City Post-Oil Preparedness Ranking" (second publication from top).

Whether, it is called "peaking oil" or an "oil crunch," many experts see total global oil production reaching a plateau of around 91-92 million barrels a day by 2012-2014 unless, as the report says, "some unforeseen giant, and easily accessible, finds are reported very soon."

 With fast-growing demand for oil in developing economies such as China (which overtook the US in 2009 for total automobile sales), India and the Middle East, developed nations in North America and Europe need to consider wholescale industrial and societal shifts.

The United State and Canada in particular should start reducing oil dependency now in preparation for oil price volatility and possible supply disruptions that would force such shifts without warning, with dire consequences for the economy, nationally and locally. Many cities (New York, Toronto, Vancouver, Washington, D.C.) are already somewhat prepared to make this shift because of infrastructure for public transit and other oil-free mobility options.

The world is heavily dependent on 120 oil fields that account for 50 percent of world production, and contain two-thirds of remaining reserves of fields in production. New discoveries of oil fields off Brazil's coast, under the Arctic and elsewhere, will not be enough to replenish the "drawdown" that is occurring. Besides, many of these fields take investments that require oil to be priced over $100 or $120 a barrel, so they will not be producing for a number of years after such investments are made: in other words, far beyond 2015.

"The challenge is that if oil prices reach the levels necessary to justify these high-cost investments, economic growth may be imperiled," says the Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security.

Another so-called energy "ace in the hole," oil sands deposits in Canada, are not a viable option. Oil sands produce at least three times the amount of atmospheric carbon over conventional oil when they are processed and used, which would exacerbate global climate change significantly, while also fouling the region's water supply.

What is being raised by this report is that the era of cheap oil is over, and that the consequences will be ugly, unless we start preparing for this profound change.

"Don't let the oil crunch catch us out in the way that the credit crunch did," said Virgin CEO Richard Branson and other corporate executives in the introduction to the report

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

Originally published February 22, 2010 at the Green Flow blog of Common Currents. Republished February 23, 2010 at Worldchanging

By Emanuele Bompan, posted Feb 24, 2010:

Original article in Italian by Emanuele Bompan, Terra News, published February 9, 2010.

Translated for Post Carbon by Lucy Segatti

INTERVIEW. A conversation with Daniel Lerch, author of Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, to understand how we can build cities that are resilient to climate change and able to meet their own energy needs without depending on oil.

Cities, peak oil production and climate change are intimately related. Today, cities are where more than half of the world’s population lives, and are responsible for 40% of greenhouse gas emissions. According to climate scientists, economists and urban geographers, cities are also where climate change and energy crises related to the peak production of fossil fuels will have devastating effects. Water shortages, soil salinization, changes in ecosystems and food production, floods and droughts caused by climate change will inevitably change the structure of cities. Terra News met with Daniel Lerch, author of Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, to discuss how governments must act to address the future challenges of building cities that are resilient to climate change.

In your book, you point out the urgent need to rethink cities as independent of fossil fuels and pay increased attention to the possible threats of climate change. Why?

The priority today is to create "post carbon communities"—communities whose goal is to become resilient in a world of energy and climate uncertainty. Communities must do much more than simply reduce greenhouse gas emissions and plan for "sustainability". The time has come to build cities that can face the looming economic, social or environmental impacts of peaking global oil production and worsening climate change.

So what can be done?

There are no simple solutions. Each community has its own unique economic, social and political context, so there is no single approach. Today, many municipalities have cut fuel use and have revolutionized how they do planning. It is especially important to adopt "best practices" in sustainability technologies like green building and energy efficiency, and to understand which technologies can work and which cannot in particular locations.

I always recommend that cities not have just reducing emissions as their primary objective. Reducing emissions is fundamental, but we must also support the energy needs of urban centers. The first thing that cities must do is perform a careful analysis of the vulnerabilities and opportunities they'll face in a future where oil significantly more expensive (say, $200 per barrel) oil and and where climate change is having visible effects on the economy, agricultural production, regional water supplies, and social justice. By understanding which are their unique weak areas, individual communities can take a more sensible approach. Better for a community to spend two years building a solid, comprehensive action plan for the specific energy and climate challenges they'll face over the next twenty years than for them to focus just on reducing emissions, only to find out later that their more immediate challenges have become more urgent and more expensive to address.

Today we talk about urban planning for climate mitigation (containing emissions) and for adaptation (adapting cities to phenomena such as water scarcity, rising sea levels, and energy shortages). How do you think communities should approach these needs?

In general, I believe that communities should focus on adaptation, that is, on how the regional climate will change and how that will affect regional water supplies, food production, public health, and social and economic needs in general. At the global level, it is absolutely important to reduce emissions. But at the local level, the impact of emissions is indirect, so it is less important to the local economy and social structures than problems resulting from climate and energy shortages, which would have immediate, direct and catastrophic effects. Let’s say that a city successfully reduces emissions by 10% between 2010 and 2015, but then suddenly finds itself in the midst of a global energy crisis, completely unprepared. There would be dramatic social and economic consequences, especially if this happened at the same time as disasters caused by climate change. By having focused only on cutting emissions, this city has created serious problems for its citizens, while having done little to solve global warming. Instead, it is important to reach an agreement on emissions at the national and international levels. The tools available to national governments and global markets are more efficient for stopping climate change than are millions of local bylaws.

Transportation is the key to adapting cities to a future constrained by energy shortages and climate change. The golden rule is to optimize resources. Cars use an absurd amount of resources to move goods and people. To move one person, we must also move an object that weighs several tons, while using non-renewable energy. Using all that energy just to go to work or go shopping is simply stupid.

By Richard Heinberg, posted Feb 18, 2010:

[Excerpt] Recent shale gas projects, including those involving the massive Marcellus Shale in several northeastern states, have been yielding significant quantities of fuel. Reserves of the stuff are enormous. But drilling costs and per-well decline rates are high, so producers can make a profit only if gas prices are near historic highs.

Where are oil prices headed in 2010? Forecasts for the year are all over the map, from more than $100 a barrel to under $50.

The difference hinges mostly on assumptions about whether the economy will recover or relapse. Yet it may be that price volatility has become an inherent feature of the oil market—and fossil fuel markets in general—for reasons that can perhaps best be explained with the help of a little history and an old children’s story.

Once upon a time (about a dozen years past), oil sold for $12 a barrel and a lot of people thought it would get even cheaper because the market was glutted.

But instead the price rose: many big oilfields were aging and yielding less, and it was getting harder to find new ones—especially in places easy and cheap to drill.

So the glut eroded and petroleum prices rose. Seeing a perfect opportunity (a necessary commodity with stagnating supply and growing demand), speculators drove the price up even further...

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By Asher, posted Feb 20, 2010:

This is old news, but new news to me: Eggo Waffles Facing Shortage Until Mid-2010.

My brother and his family are in town for the weekend and we were talking last night about their breakfast plans. Eggo waffles were a staple of their sons' breakfasts until the shortage forced them, like millions of other American households, to look for alternatives. (Apparently, Eggos had 73% of the waffle market.)

What's interesting to me in all of this is not humanity's great loss of Eggos, which I think taste like sugar sprinkled, waterlogged cardboard. It's the cause of the shortage--emblematic of the intersection of globalized, ultra-efficient supply chains with health epidemics and climate change.

First came closure of one of Kellogg Co.'s main plants in Atlanta due to bacteria contamination.

The Atlanta facility was closed during much of September and October to sanitize the plant after inspectors found Listeria monocytogenes --bacteria that can cause serious infection -- in a sample of Eggos, according to the Georgia Department of Agriculture... The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention considers Listeria harmless for most people but it can be particularly dangerous for pregnant women, newborns and people with weakened immune systems.

Next came record-setting floods in the southeast, caused by eight straight days of heavy rains in late September 2009, which flooded the area around that same plant. These rains killed ten people and caused an estimated $500M-$1B worth of damage.

Tragic and worrisome as plant contamination and killer storms may be, you could rightly think there was nothing exceptional here. That's true. And that's precisely the point.

We've built highly efficient, global supply chains that are almost miraculous in their ability to deliver things like hundreds of millions of frozen waffles to locations throughout the world each year. But they are also incredibly brittle and susceptible to breaks in the chain. Two events impacting a Kellogg plant and no more Eggos for six months. Snap. Just like that. With the shocks of peak oil and other resource limitations, along with climate changes and economic contraction, it's likely that we'll be needing to l'eggo of a lot more than just our Eggos in the coming days.

photo credit: AP Photo/The Atlanta Journal & Constitution, Curtis Compton

By Tod Brilliant, posted Feb 19, 2010:

The Letter
Last week we received a letter at the Post Carbon Institute office from Scott B., a sports car owner/engine rebuilder/computer programmer, whose frustration is boiling over at the lack of attention paid his Big Idea to Save the Planet (BISP).

The Idea
Scott’s letter presented a very, very simple idea, one that has been gnawing at me since I read it, forcing me to take a closer look at a perhaps unsolvable equation (more on the Great Puzzle below). Scott’s idea:

Cap the national driving speed limit at 34 MPH (55 KMH).

The idea is so simple and so perfect, that at first blush it seems impossible. While Scott isn’t the first to suggest such a bold plan, he’s the first to put this particular BISP in front of me. His writings on the subject can be found at http://maxattainablespeed.blogspot.com/

The obvious benefits of this proposed national slowdown:

• Massive reductions in oil consumption
• Immediate and significant C02 reductions
• Smaller, lighter vehicles = less materials consumption
• Instant surge in demand for high-speed rail (with vehicle docking stations)
• Large drop in tire-related particulate pollution (650,000 tons/year in U.S. alone)
• Plunging traffic fatality rates + reduced health industry expenses
• Constriction of suburbs

The list goes on, but you get a taste.

My Drive
Every morning I take my son, Justice, to his school located seventeen miles across the county. Adhering to Scott’s rules will take me ten extra minutes each morning. I don’t see this as much of a penalty to do the right thing by my boy, his classmates and the rest of the planet. The tradeoff is a no brainer.

But, Do Brains Matter?
Slowing down is an obviously great idea, one that is perfectly logical and hard to argue against using facts and logic. Some may gripe about ‘lost productivity’ or some such nonsense, but let these stone throwers first curtail their daily at-work Facebook excursions or email addiction. In fact, many studies show that many of our ‘productivity’ tools like email and smart phone applications actually create more work and chew up more time than their technologically inferior antecedents. In slowing down, we can gain time, free up mental space and increase clarity.

I digress. No matter the power of this idea, most of us will rail against it. Why? For starters, because most of us, myself included, are terrifically f$cking stupid. Stupid when and where it matters most (look around if you need confirmation). What good is our human intellect when we consistently disassociate it from our actions?

I invite you, gentle readers, to consider your very first thoughts on Scott’s idea. What was your immediate reaction? Skip your well-thought, logical answers, as the merits of the idea are inescapable. Rather, I want to know about your emotional reactions, because these seem to have a greater impact on our everyday habits and decisions.

Now reread Scott’s idea above. Though you’re pre-armed with knowledge of the concept, odds are good that it will still elicit some sort of reaction. There. Did you feel it? Did you chafe at the idea of such a drastic slowdown? Did you shudder a bit, deep down on the inside? Did you reach for an immediate compromise (“How about 50 mph instead?”)? Be honest. I really want to know.

[Let me take a split second to head off a potential distraction: To the O.G.’s who have been car-free for years: Bravo. I commend, respect and admire you.]

The next task is to explain your emotional reaction. Assuming, of course, that you’re being honest with yourself about your reaction (this type of honesty can be surprisingly difficult to achieve).

The Great Puzzle
I’m hoping your insights will be the critical hints that will help solve the Great Puzzle of the Well-Intentioned Do-Nothings (GPWIDN). To solve the GPWIDN we must learn to bridge the deep chasm between passionately professed beliefs and real-world actions. Much more than simple hypocrisy, this disconnect is in no small part responsible for the lack of movement in, to take one trite example, the reduction of greenhouse gases despite the awesomely urgent need. While some embody GPWIDN in the idea of ‘cognitive dissonance’, I prefer awkward acronyms linked to barely defensible positions.

Regardless of how we define it, if we can crack this puzzle, or at the very least locate a backdoor workaround, we’ll transform conflicted, impotent WIDNs like me into powerful agents of rapid and immediate change.

In Mass Mind
The makeup and rules of the political arena are far from my area of expertise, and daily I pray for this to remain so. Yet, in thinking on Scott’s crusade, I’ve been trying to imagine how damned difficult it must be for a well-intentioned politician (yes, I also believe in unicorns and omnipotent invisible creatures who live in the clouds), an elected representatives of the mass mind, to champion a good idea if that idea in any way conflicts with the creature comforts of a largely self-entitled populace. Magical legislation that would slash per capita emissions 80% but increase the price of HBO? You’d have an easier time electing the ghost of Harvey Milk to the Presidency. And that’s just damned sad.

While I’m daily frustrated at a lack of commitment by the U.S. government to tackle the overwhelming, overlapping resource and climate crises that threaten to obliterate life as we know it, Scott’s letter has reminded me (I’m a slow learned and very forgetful) that I can’t expect top-down change until the bottom-up folks get well and truly serious. It’s easy to envision great and heroic personal sacrifice for a cause. Many of us think of think of ourselves as leaders in and members of a resilience building army. But the moment we have to step up and truly embody the mission, a lifetime of conditioning dulls our charge.

And so today if you ask me if we’ll ever, ever voluntarily make the changes required as a society in time for them to be meaningful, I’d say there’s no way in hell. Thanks, Scott. Way to put a hitch in my giddyup. Fortunately, the odds are pretty darned good that tomorrow someone else will show me an inspiring example of mass behavior change, and I’ll be reinvigorated as I zoom down the road at 75 in my gas-guzzling Volvo wagon.

For the record, I’d vote the Milk ticket. With Lenny Bruce as his running mate, I’m seeing shades of Perot/Stockdale.

By Tom Whipple, posted Feb 18, 2010:

Another study warning governments of the imminence and danger of peak oil was released last week. This one was an updated version of a similar report produced by a group of British industrialists 14 months ago.

The intended audience of the report is the new British government that will take office after an election later this year. The authors hope that a new government will take a more serious view of the dangers to Britain (and everywhere else for that matter) of impending high oil prices and shortages which previous British governments were unwilling to confront or prepare for.

The English-speaking world has always been entranced with noble titles - Duke, Earl, Count, even Sir. When you combine "Sir" with the words multi-billionaire and virgin you have a sure winner. Even if the topic is as mundane as peak oil, much of the world press pays attention. When the spokesman for the recent report turned out to be none other than billionaire and Virgin Group founder Sir Richard Branson, many British publications and even a few American, including Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and the Christian Science Monitor, felt impelled to write serious stories about what Branson had to say.

The new report, produced by the UK's Industry Taskforce for Peak Oil and Energy Security, is of interest because it updates the estimates of when the oil "crunch" (when demand exceeds production) will occur to account for the global economic slowdown. In addition, the amount of unbiased attention that has been given to the report including that of the British government shows that a wider understanding of the problem is starting to take hold.

For most, the key concern is not whether there will be much higher gasoline prices ahead, but when. To answer this question, we have to take into account trends in the three major variables that determine oil prices and also be aware that there are numerous geopolitical factors affecting the situation, such as the Iranian nuclear standoff; stability of the Iraqi government after the US pullout; the drought in Venezuela; and the Nigerian insurgency.

The first two issues encompass the balance of new oil supplies and declining production from existing oil fields. Here the report suggests a fairly specific time frame when significant additions of new production to the world's oil supply is likely to end. The report says time is around the end of the current year. From 2011 on, the relentless drop in production of just over 4 million b/d from the fields that are currently producing about 85 million barrels a day will be just barely balanced with production from new projects through 2014. After that world production will go into decline.

In other words, the world's ability to keep increasing its oil production will come to an end this year after 150 years of more or less steady growth. While new production from projects such as those in the deep waters off Brazil and the Gulf of Mexico will continue, these projects are five to ten years away from significantly adding to global production and likely will be overbalanced by the 4 million b/d annual drop in production from existing fields. New production will, of course, slow the pace of global oil depletion, but will not be enough to allow for global economic growth.

High oil prices may or may not come in the next year or so because of recent drops in demand for oil in 2008 and early 2009. Currently world oil production is running about 85 million b/d; however, there is said be another 6 or so million b/d of unused productive capacity that could start producing oil in a few months. Although some are skeptical about the size and quality of this "reserve capacity" about 4 million barrels a day (b/d) of which is in Saudi Arabia, in theory it could keep the lid on prices for a while. In fact world oil production could increase to 91-92 million b/d if demand increases soon.

The third major variable determining the timing of the crunch, and one that is much harder to predict, will be the growth or decline in global demand for oil. At the moment, demand from the US and the other OECD nations appears to be falling slowly and all eyes are on China, India and other developing countries where demand grew rapidly in 2009 and despite accumulating problems shows every indication of continuing to increase in 2010 and beyond.

So there you have it. What is likely the best current thinking on the peak oil situation concludes that world oil production will stop growing at the end of this year; will just balance annual global depletion of 4 million b/d for the next four years or so; and then enter into irreversible decline. In the meantime, there may be enough spare capacity that has built up since 2008 to keep prices from spiking for awhile. If the growing demand from Asia and within the oil producing countries themselves continues, however, it is likely to consume much of the reserve production capacity over the next few years. Geopolitical disruptions of oil supplies could, of course, trigger off price spikes at any time.

Although they do not seem likely at the minute, governmental restrictions on carbon emissions could reduce the demand for oil and delay the task force's crunch beyond 2015.

An interesting sidelight to the new report's official launch was that Chris Barton, the government official responsible for Britain's energy security, showed up and answered questions about the government's position. In what can be best characterized as backing down the flag pole, Barton acknowledged that the government really does not know when peak oil will occur but acknowledged the risks could be serious. For a government that until recently had been in complete denial that is more evidence that the message and dangers of peak oil are sinking in.

View video of Chris Barton's comments

Originally published February 17, 2009 at Falls Church News-Press

By Warren Karlenzig, posted Feb 17, 2010:

One of the great challenges in urban planning and green building has been material life cycle energy use--how steel, concrete and wood products are produced and transported. Add to that the decisions people make once construction is finished, and you can rightly conclude that development standards have only scratched the veneer of total energy and sustainability impacts.

In addition to material climate and resource burdens, there are myriad consequences on life-cycle energy use that arise from commuting and transit choices, food and product consumption, and building heating or cooling.

Scientists at the US Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL) have devised a tool that may soon provide governments and urban planners ways with which to model complete material, building and residents' anticipated energy use.

After a proof of concept was applied to a Jinan, China, housing development, LBNL has integrated building life-cycle assessment (LCA) and urban form agent-based modeling tools to capture embodied, operational and behavioral aspects of urban form energy use and emissions.

With hundreds of new cities being planned or built in China, Indonesia and India, new tools such as LBNL's will be critical in managing and reducing the energy, climate and environmental impacts of this unprecedented urban growth era.

Adding 1.1 billion people to new or growing Asian cities will produce more than half of the world's increase in global climate change-causing greenhouse gases by 2027, according to the Asian Development Bank.

I met last week in the green hills of Berkeley with David Fridley, Nate Aden and Yining Qin at LBNL's China Energy Group offices. The team demoed their new urban form and behavior energy analysis tool, describing how they based its performance on a variety of existing approaches in urban form-related analysis and life-cycle materials analysis.

The innovative aspect to the group's project is that they combined these existing cutting-edge approaches with an extensive survey of 230 residental households in the Lu Jing Superblock.

The researchers examined where Lu Jing Superblock (built in 2008) residents worked and went to school, how they commuted, where they shopped, what kinds of appliances they owned and how they used them, and even how much meat and what kind of products they ate.

The result was perhaps the closest-yet attempt at modeling and thus being able to forecast the complete energy needs of a segment of urban population. This allows an integrated assessment of required energy supply and expected impacts far beyond a single structure, energy type or industry.

It's like Sim City, but for addressing real planning, energy, and environmental challenges, which is something I've always wanted to see.

Simulations ran through the four seasons, showing cumulative energy use based on household and individual appliance and transportation use, showing cars or buses shuttling between supermarkets, offices, schools and the Lu Jing Superblock.

Total energy use and types of energy used were continually graphed, and the final results showed a breakdown between how much energy would be used by the buildings for power, cooling and heating,  as well as for transportation, food and other areas.

The group sees the tool being used by policymakers trying to prioritize energy and climate regulations in land use, transportation, planning and energy. Urban planners are another obvious group of potential end users.

One planning issue unresolved for future iterations of the tool would be how water use and supply could be added to the analytical capabilities. Or perhaps LBNL's energy tool can be combined with a software-based supply analysis and use forecasting tool for water. Water life-cycle analysis is an especially relevant issue when planning development in areas of India and Northern China that are facing climate-related drought and water supply shortages.

Still, the LBNL effort is significant in synthesizing existing tools and approaches on urban energy use into a single model that can help guide our world as we move into what is increasingly becoming the century of urbanization.

Warren Karlenzig is president of Common Current, an internationally active urban sustainability strategy consultancy. He is author of How Green is Your City? The SustainLane US City Rankings and a Fellow at the Post Carbon Institute.

Originally published February 16th at the Green Flow blog of Common Currents

By Debbie Cook, posted Feb 16, 2010:

Jeffrey Sachs, economic advisor to the UN, in his recently published article, Fixing the Broken Government Policy Process , articulates four manifestations of the breakdown in Washington:

1. Inability to focus beyond the next election
2. Decisions are made through negotiations with those who will be funding the next election (i.e. industry lobbyists)
3. Technical expertise is ignored or bypassed
4. The public is largely excluded from the process

Sachs asks, “How can business and government work together without policies falling prey to special interests?”

He suggests that government initiate a more “open, transparent and systematic public-private policy process in each major area of sustainable development”—high-level roundtable proceedings that are open to the public, web-based, and include representatives from private business, nongovernmental organizations, government officials, scientists, and engineers.

While this all sounds good in theory, my eight years in public office tells me that one more group, no matter how it is constituted, issuing one more report, is not going to drive better public policy.

In my opinion the best way to influence policy is for the “scientists and engineers” to influence policy makers directly—and you don’t do that in a report, in a letter, on a petition, or a blog. It requires a commitment to face-to-face relationship building, nurturing, and maintenance—not the kind of activity typically selected by the pocket protector/lab coat types.

Rarely does a policy discussion center solely around facts. Emotions like trust, loyalty, anger, contempt, and sympathy are often just below the surface of every discussion. Facts become attached to emotions in large part because of the relationships that have developed between individuals, groups, and ideas. Words like “politician” and “government” evoke strong emotions that may have very little to do with facts and everything to do with how we synthesize information.

Here is a real life example of policy making on the fly.

On the same day that Scientific American published Professor Sachs’ article, the Southern California Association of Governments (SCAG) was taking up the issue of E85 ethanol fueling stations. See here and here for the agenda items. SCAG is the largest Metropolitan Planning Organization in the United States covering 6 counties and 19 million residents. It is guided by an unwieldy 83 member governing board whose members are elected representatives of cities and counties within the region. SCAG is mandated by the federal government to undertake planning and policy initiatives within the areas of transportation, growth management, hazardous waste management, and air quality.

This particular policy debate surrounding the E85 fueling stations serves as a good example of the fragmented decision-making process described by Sachs. It is also an example of the cast of characters whose relationships will have influenced the issue prior to it reaching the policy making body: a lobbyist who had applied for and won a grant in the agency’s name but without their knowledge; a businessman who was the sole source recipient of the grant; an Executive Director concerned over rejecting a DOE grant for fear it would affect future grant awards; an elected official or two whose communities are being targeted for an ethanol plant; air quality officials whose mandate is to reduce emissions; and a former colleague (myself) who spent her years on the board introducing concepts like peak oil and energy return on investment.

Every member’s vote represented a unique “truth” to that member based on facts filtered through their relationship matrix. It was the interactions between and among the characters that influenced the range of expressions preceding the vote. There were votes of loyalty for the Executive Director; votes of trust for a former colleague; votes of sympathy for the businessman who was losing out on an opportunity to build 55 fueling stations; and votes of anger against a lobbyist who may or may not have obfuscated information from the agency.

For me, the result was both unexpected and unsatisfying—unexpected because the inertia behind the industry seemed insurmountable, and unsatisfying because many board members are still holding onto the belief that cellulosic ethanol will displace transportation fuels and bring the U.S. closer to “energy independence.” Dissuading policy makers from these and other fantasies is going to require many more conversations.

The hope for cellulosic ethanol appeals to the same fantasy themes ascribed by Dr. Benjamin Sovacool, researcher on issues related to energy policy, to the hydrogen economy: independence, patriotism, progress, democratization, and inevitability. As Savacool says, “The desire to experience these sorts of fantasies will likely continue even if the hydrogen economy does not come to fruition.”

Indeed, the ethanol fantasy continues even as targets come up 90% short.

I have my own fantasy—to see CBS news journalist Dan Rather pay atonement to Robert Rapier for Rather’s 60 Minutes piece. Something akin to Mad Money’s host Jim Cramer’s repentance to Jon Stewart, host of the Daily Show:

Cramer: I always wish that people would come in and swear themselves in before they come on the show. I had a lot of CEOs lie to me on the show. It's very painful. I don't have subpoena power…. But Dick Fuld, who ran Lehman Brothers, called me in—he called me in when the stock was at 40—because I was saying: "Look, I thought the stock was wrong, thought it was in the wrong place"—he brings me in and lies to me, lies to me, lies to me.

Stewart [feigning shock]: The CEO of a company lied to you?

Cramer: Shocking.

So returning to Sachs’ idea that we can work together to fix government policy-making, here is my prescription for scientists, professors, and engineers:

1. Participate in the public discourse
2. Publicly challenge your peers who put forward junk science
3. Be mindful of fallacies in your own assumptions
4. Relationships are primary and every policy is derived primarily from relationships, not facts.

To each critic sitting in their ivory tower, I challenge you to create the conditions for these relationships to flourish.

Originally publised at The Oil Drum

By Bill McKibben, posted Feb 15, 2010:

[Excerpt] You want to hear my winter weather story? No, really, I know you do.

The cross-country ski race I've been training for, set for today high in the Green Mountains: cancelled, lack of snow.

Meanwhile, across the continent, backhoes and helicopters are moving snow down British Columbia's Cypress Mountain in an attempt to cover the Olympic ski courses, and technicians are burying cooling pipes beneath the moguls to keep them from melting. Some climate-conscious jokers put out a video pushing the sport of "bobwheeling" for future snow-challenged Olympiads.

And apparently there was some snowfall in the greater Washington area last week.

When you're trying to launch snowboarding tricks on dry ground and simultaneously shutting down the U.S. government because the snowbanks are casting shadows on the Washington Monument, something odd is going on. This isn't a good old-fashioned winter for the District of Columbia, not unless you're remembering the last ice age. And it doesn't disprove global warming, despite Sen. Jim De Mint's cheerful tweet: "It's going to keep snowing until Al Gore cries 'uncle.' "

Instead, the weird and disruptive weather patterns around the world are pretty much exactly what you'd expect as the planet warms. Here's how it works:...

 Read full article

Originally published February 14, 2010 at The Washington Post

Photo credit: ccperkdog/flickr