WORD OUT! The Blog to Build a New Society

This just in from Richard Heinberg, author of Blackout, Peak Everything, The Oil Depletion Protocol, The Party's Over and Powerdown. (This entry was originally posted on the Post Carbon Institute website and is reprinted with permission.) Thanks Richard! (And also thanks Richard for causing me to have the Monty Python song of the same name running through my head all afternoon. Really, thanks. We'll talk later.)

Recently I've begun compiling a list of things to be cheerful about. Here are some items that should bring a smile to any environmentalist's lips:

• World energy consumption is declining. That's right: oil consumption is down, coal consumption is down, and the IEA is projecting world electricity consumption to decline by 3.5 percent this year. I'm sure it's possible to find a few countries where energy use is still growing, but for the US, China, and most of the European countries that is no longer the case. A small army of writers and activists, including me, has been arguing for years now that the world should voluntarily reduce its energy consumption, because current rates of use are unsustainable for various reasons including the fact that fossil fuels are depleting. Yes, we should build renewable energy capacity, but replacing the energy from fossil fuels will be an enormous job, and we can make that job less daunting by reducing our overall energy appetite. Done.
• CO2 emissions are falling. This follows from the previous point. I'm still waiting for confirmation from direct NOAA measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere, but it stands to reason that if world oil and coal consumption is declining, then carbon emissions must be doing so as well. The economic crisis has accomplished what the Kyoto Protocol couldn't. Hooray!
• Consumption of goods is falling. Every environmentalist I know spends a good deal of her time railing both publicly and privately against consumerism. We in the industrialized countries use way too much stuff — because that stuff is made from depleting natural resources (both renewable and non-renewable) and the Earth is running out of fresh water, topsoil, lithium, indium, zinc, antimony...the list is long. Books have been written trying to convince people to simplify their lives and use less, films have been produced and shown on PBS, and support groups have formed to help families kick the habit, but still the consumer juggernaut has continued — until now. This particular dragon may not be slain, but it's cowering in its den.
• Globalization is in reverse (global trade is shrinking). Back in the early 1990s, when globalization was a new word, an organization of brilliant activists formed the International Forum on Globalization (IFG) to educate the public about the costs and dangers of this accelerating trend. Corporations were off-shoring their production and pollution, ruining manufacturing communities in formerly industrial rich nations while ruthlessly exploiting cheap labor in less-industrialized poor countries. IFG was able to change the public discourse about globalization enough to stall the expansion of the World Trade Organization, but still world trade continued to mushroom. Not any more. China's and Japan's exports are way down, as is the US trade deficit.
• The number of vehicle miles traveled (VMT) is falling. For decades the number of total miles traveled by all cars and trucks on US roads has relentlessly increased. This was a powerful argument for building more roads. People bought more cars and drove them further; trucks restocked factories and stores at an ever-growing pace; and delivery vans brought more packages to consumers who shopped from home. All of this driving entailed more tires, pavement, and fuel — and more environmental damage. Over the past few months the VMT number has declined substantially and continually, to a greater extent than has been the case since records started being kept. That's welcome news.
• There are fewer cars on the road. People are junking old cars faster than new ones are being purchased. In the US, where there are now more cars on the road than there are licensed drivers, this represents an extraordinary shift in a very long-standing trend. In her wonderful book Divorce Your Car, Katie Alvord detailed the extraordinary environmental costs of widespread automobile use. Evidently her book didn't stem the tide: it was published in the year 2000, and millions of new cars hit the pavement in the following years. But now the world's auto manufacturers are desperately trying to steer clear of looming bankruptcy, simply because people aren't buying. In fact, in the first four months of 2009, more bicycles were sold in the US than cars and trucks put together (over 2.55 million bicycles were purchased, compared to fewer than 2.4 million cars and trucks). How utterly cool.
• The world's over-leveraged, debt-based financial system is failing. Growth in consumption is killing the planet, but arguing against economic growth is made difficult by the fact that most of the world's currencies are essentially loaned into existence, and those loans must be repaid with interest. Thus if the economy isn't growing, and therefore if more loans aren't being made, thus causing more money to be created, the result will be a cascading series of defaults and foreclosures that will ruin the entire system. It's not a sustainable system given the fact that the world's resources (the ultimate basis for all economic activity) are finite; and, as the proponents of Ecological and Biophysical Economics have been saying for years, it's a system that needs to be replaced with one that can still function in a condition of steady or contracting consumption rates. While that sustainable alternative is not yet being discussed by government leaders, at least they are being forced to consider (if not yet publicly) the possibility that the existing system has serious problems and that it may need a thorough overhaul. That's a good thing.
• Gardening is going gonzo. According to the New York Times ("College Interns Getting Back to Land," May 25) thousands of college students are doing summer internships on farms this year. Meanwhile seed companies are having a hard time keeping up with demand, as home gardeners put in an unusually high number of veggie gardens. Urban farmer Will Allen predicts that there will be 8 million new gardeners this year, and the number of new gardens is expected to increase 20 to 40 percent this season. Since world oil production has peaked, there is going to be less oil available in the future to fuel industrial agriculture, so we are going to need more gardens, more small farms, and more farmers. Never mind the motives of all these students and home gardeners — few of them have ever heard of Peak Oil, and many of the gardeners are probably just worried whether they can afford to keep the pantry full next winter; nevertheless, they're doing the right thing. And that's something to applaud.

But wait, before our cheering becomes an uncontrollable frenzy, we should stop to remember that most of these developments are due to an economic crisis that is taking a huge toll. With the possible exception of the last item on the list (and maybe some of those bicycle purchases), we're not talking about voluntary behavior that's evidence of forethought and collective intelligence. Whatever gains in sustainability these trends signify have come at an enormous cost in terms of unemployment, homelessness, and lost retirement savings.

We'd love to hear what you think. What are your reasons these days for cautious optimism? Please leave us your feedback in the comments section below.

And for those of you are still reading - an earworm for your troubles - cheer up Brian!

     

Whether you call him a maverick or a pioneer, Neville Williams, author of Chasing the Sun: Solar Adventures Around the World , is one of the more fascinating characters in the history of photovoltaics. Responsible for bringing household electricity to hundreds of thousands of people in the developing world, Neville's current focus is on bringing the sun home - he firmly believes that due to peak oil, economic pressure and climate change, conventional electricity production in the US will be overtaken by renewable electricity production in a matter of a few short decades.

Neville was recently featured in a profile on the Mother Nature Network. The Johnny Appleseed of Solar Power is an in-depth look at his quest to deliver photovoltaic technology into the hands of those that need it the most. From Africa to Sri Lanka, India and Vietnam, Williams and the companies he founded have installed solar lighting systems in the homes of thousands of rural families. Throughout his illustrious career, Neville has attracted the attention of many diverse luminaries - among them former president Clinton and Sir Arthur C. Clarke.

From Chasing the Sun:

Each of us can choose our energy future, and we just may have to as events force us to make a transition to a new energy paradigm. Richard Heinberg has stated in Powerdown: Options and Actions for a Post Carbon World that “the most likely trajectory for the energy transition will consist of the collapse of industrial civilization as we know it, probably occurring in stages over a period of several decades.” That’s not a very nice outlook!

He advocates becoming “preservationists” rather than “survivalists,” meaning we can preserve a civilized way of life for ourselves and our communities by preparing now for a shared, not a selfish, “post carbon” lifestyle.

But whether we are sharing or selfish, the sun shines for all of us, and solar electric technology is here and ready to go to work. Individually or collectively — the sun doesn’t care — we can respond to the triple threats of global warming, energy security, and the end of oil. Or to quote Hermann Scheer once more, “The fight for renewables is a ‘no’ for fatalism and a ‘yes’ for an everlasting future and a spiritual hegemony.” We can also live simply and use less; we don’t need to personally send 10 to 20 tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere every year, as we in the West presently do. And “new energy for a new world” can be our guiding thought.

As long as the sun shines and photosynthesis grows our crops and the photovoltaic effect makes our power, what else do we need? When you’ve got solar power, every day is a sunny day. And best of all, solar power is your power.

Greenpeace activists boarded a bulk freighter carrying coal to the UK's controversial Kingsnorth power station in Kent on Monday June 22nd. Just after midnight, Greenpeace volunteers intercepted the freighter using rigid inflatable speedboats. As the ship headed towards Kingsnorth, nine people succeeded in boarding it and scaled the huge E.ON-branded funnel and the towering foremast. All were eventually arrested but released.

Emma Gibson, a local mother of three, was one of three Greenpeace activists swimming in the river Medway in front of the jetty, trying to prevent the ship from docking and unloading. She explains her motivation on the Greenpeace International website.

We're going to swim right in front of the approaching ship and try to stop this massive coal shipment reaching Kingsnorth power station, because coal is the most climate-wrecking fuel there is. Every tonne of carbon counts, and E.ON's ship is delivering enough coal to pump tens of thousands of tonnes of CO2 into the atmosphere. There's no way we can stop climate change if power companies are allowed to keep on burning so much coal. I'm terrified by the scale of the problem my children will have to deal with. We have to give the next generation a chance of beating global warming, and that's why I'm putting my body in the way of that ship.

Chasing and boarding a behemoth ship in the dark or swimming in the cold waters of the North Sea to protest the increasing use of coal are not everyone's cup of tea, but there are many less uncomfortable and dangerous ways to alert people to this coming crisis. What could you do to help raise awareness?

If you want to find out more about the dangers of coal, Richard Heinberg's latest book, Blackout: Coal Climate and the Last Energy Crisis lays out everything you need to know about coal in a clear and rational fashion. Read Blackout, and you will understand why Sara Shoraka and Emma Gibson, Greenpeace volunteers, call coal "the single most climate-wrecking fuel there is."

The U.S. Global Change Research Program, operating under the authority of the Federal Advisory Committee, has released a landmark climate change report entitled Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. Weighing in at nearly 200 pages, this exhaustive document summarizes the science of climate change and its impacts on the United States, both now and in the future. This report does not pull any punches. It makes for some pretty frightening reading, with stark declarations about the impact of global warming and extreme weather on everything from water resources, transportation and energy to agriculture, ecosystems, society and human health. Just the sort of thing that makes you want to curl up with a nice cup of hemlock tea.

These are the report's key findings:

1. Global warming is unequivocal and primarily human-induced.
   Global temperature has increased over the past 50 years. This observed increase is due primarily to human-induced emissions of heat-trapping gases. (p. 13)
2. Climate changes are underway in the United States and are projected to grow.
   Climate-related changes are already observed in the United States and its coastal waters. These include increases in heavy downpours, rising temperature and sea level, rapidly retreating glaciers, thawing permafrost, lengthening growing seasons, lengthening ice-free seasons in the ocean and on lakes and rivers, earlier snowmelt, and alterations in river flows. These changes are projected to grow. (p. 27)
3. Widespread climate-related impacts are occurring now and are expected to increase.
   Climate changes are already affecting water, energy, transportation, agriculture, ecosystems, and health. These impacts are different from region to region and will grow under projected climate change. (p. 41-106, 107-152)
4. Climate change will stress water resources.
   Water is an issue in every region, but the nature of the potential impacts varies. Drought, related to reduced precipitation, increased evaporation, and increased water loss from plants, is an important issue in many regions, especially in the West. Floods and water quality problems are likely to be amplified by climate change in most regions. Declines in mountain snowpack are important in the West and Alaska where snowpack provides vital natural water storage. (p. 41, 129, 135, 139)
5. Crop and livestock production will be increasingly challenged.
   Agriculture is considered one of the sectors most adaptable to changes in climate. However, increased heat, pests, water stress, diseases, and weather extremes will pose adaptation challenges for crop and livestock production. (p. 71)
6. Coastal areas are at increasing risk from sea-level rise and storm surge.
   Sea-level rise and storm surge place many U.S. coastal areas at increasing risk of erosion and flooding, especially along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts, Pacific Islands, and parts of Alaska. Energy and transportation infrastructure and other property in coastal areas are very likely to be adversely affected. (p. 111, 139, 145, 149)
7. Threats to human health will increase.
   Health impacts of climate change are related to heat stress, waterborne diseases, poor air quality, extreme weather events, and diseases transmitted by insects and rodents. Robust public health infrastructure can reduce the potential for negative impacts. (p. 89)
8. Climate change will interact with many social and environmental stresses.
   Climate change will combine with pollution, population growth, overuse of resources, urbanization, and other social, economic, and environmental stresses to create larger impacts than from any of these factors alone. (p. 99)
9. Thresholds will be crossed, leading to large changes in climate and ecosystems.
   There are a variety of thresholds in the climate system and ecosystems. These thresholds determine, for example, the presence of sea ice and permafrost, and the survival of species, from fish to insect pests, with implications for society. With further climate change, the crossing of additional thresholds is expected. (p. 76, 82, 115, 137, 142)
10. Future climate change and its impacts depend on choices made today.
    The amount and rate of future climate change depend primarily on current and future human-caused emissions of heat-trapping gases and airborne particles. Responses involve reducing emissions to limit future warming, and adapting to the changes that are unavoidable. (p. 25, 29)

While this is depressing news by most standards, the fact that the White House is taking scientists seriously, and in fact officially launched the report is cause for some optimism in my opinion. Compare and contrast their current response with the news (from less than a year ago today) that the White House "refused to accept the E.P.A.’s conclusion that greenhouse gases are pollutants that must be controlled, telling agency officials that an e-mail message containing the document would not be opened". A New York Times story last June included a scathing condemnation of the Bush administration’s failure to support the regulation of greenhouse gases under the Clean Air Act or other environmental laws - the same story stated that E.P.A. officials accused the White House of pressuring the agency to water down and eliminate large portions of their original recommendations, which argued for tough regulation of motor vehicle emissions.

I strongly encourage you to download the full report and read it for yourself. We'd be very interested in hearing your thoughts on it and any other issues regarding the government's response to climate change in the comments section below.

My partner and I recently cleared approximately 3/4 or an acre on our 5 acre property. While the experience was, on a gut level, acutely horrifying to my treehugging soul, it was entirely necessary to bring some light and openness onto the property and render more of the land usable.

If you've never seen land-clearing (I hadn't) it's a sight to behold. An enormous machine comes in and literally pushes over 60 foot trees like so many matchsticks. Logs and usable wood are stacked to one side, the debris are pushed into a big pile and the soil is churned ready for fall seeding. It took about 20 hours to clear the area we had selected, and although the value of timber is comparatively low right now, we estimate that the value of our logs just as firewood is approximately double what we paid to have the clearing made.

This got us to thinking. The land clearing was simply not a job that we could have completed with shovels and wheelbarrows. Even using chainsaws and a great deal of labor it would have been next to impossible, as a chainsaw leaves a stump behind, whereas a big excavator simply pushes the tree with enough force that its stump levers right up out of the ground.

When you look at the amount of human labor saved by driving a car to work instead of biking or walking, that amount is negligible. If we live less than 10 km from our workplace, most of us are physically capable of getting there in some form of self-propelled fashion, or in urban areas we can cover even greater distances by using public transit (although some may not find the idea particularly attractive in inclement weather or for a variety of other personal reasons.)

But when you look at the amount of human labor saved by using fossil fuels to accomplish such tasks as land-clearing and excavation, the ratio changes completely. It may take me 2 to 3 times more time to commute to work on my bicycle than it would in a car, and I may burn a greater number of calories (although actually I consider that to be a feature not a bug), but it would take us months of back-breaking labor to equal what was accomplished in 20 hours with a fossil fuel-powered machine. Given that the quantities of fossil fuels remaining to us are so limited, aren't we obligated to ensure that we're getting the most bang for our buck?

Janaia Donaldson of Peak Moment TV recently contemplated the same issue in her newsletter. In the process of creating a gravity-fed water system, Janaia began hand-digging a trench. She estimated that for the 2200 ft of trench she needed she could dig about 3 ft an hour. Ouch!

Janaia writes:

Instead, we rented a trencher, a robust machine which dug the 4-inch trench, cutting most tree roots and even belching out boulders the size of a soccer ball. In two days, we used 10 gallons of gasoline, plus maybe 2 gallons in our automobile to get and return the trencher. Those twelve gallons (and our 24 work-hours), then, equal about 730 hours of hand labor.

Janaia estimated based on these calculations that trench-digging work-power in a gallon of gas is worth at least $488. While you could argue (and she admits) that she is skipping over the various embedded energy costs in her trench-digging machine, her point is still extremely valid.

A couple of years ago we published a book by Dale Allen Pfeiffer called Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food, and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture. This prescient critique of energy-intensive agriculture was actually way before its time - Dale's predictions about the collapse of industrial agriculture sounded far-fetched to mainstream readers in late 2006 - two and a half short years later his calls for a return to localized, community-supported, sustainable farming methods have become conventional wisdom, and are of course echoed by many of our other authors such as Sharon Astyk and Aaron Newton who discuss at length the possible methods for rejuvenating our local food system in A Nation of Farmers.

What do you think about all this? Is it most desirable to reserve remaining fossil fuels for high-intensity uses? How should we assign priorities? Who should be responsible for making those decisions? Please leave us your thoughts in the comments below.