So can the oil companies deliver deep oil?

Probably not quite as easily as they have suggested:

http://www.energybulletin.net/node/53292

Deepwater Horizon

An interesting (and more than a little unnerving) contribution to the current debate on the Deepwater Horizon spillage at http://www.marketoracle.co.uk/Article19923.html from Dr Stephen A Rinehart - advocating the use of nuclear weapons to plug the hole, raising the prospect of the Gulf of Mexico rapidly degenerating into a carcinogenic benzene pool, and concluding that 'this is a “National Emergency” on the scale of a nuclear weapon attack'. The author's conclusion:

Bottom Line: We are looking at the worse environmental disaster in human
history and it continues to grow and the US Government has failed totally in
responding to this epic crisis because of BP and Big Oil political clout and
money.

The problem isn't Peak Oil. It's just plain OIL

It seems to be very hard for some people to 'get' what the problem with fossil fuels really is. Daniel Yergin, Mr Peak-Oil-What-Peak-Oil? in person, is apparently in Davos for the annual jamboree in which all those clever people who got us in the current mess celebrate how clever they are.

Mr Yergin thinks Peak Oil is a long way off. A lot of other people in Davos would agree, I suspect, though whether this is a matter of superior knowledge, judgement or self-interest I would not like to say.

But what does it matter how far away Peak Oil is? Assume that it is close, or has even arrived. The contradiction between falling supply and massively accelerating growth (courtesy of China, India, etc.) will create an equally massive economic crisis. But what if we assume that Peak Oil is far off, as Yergin argues. What then? We syphon billions of barrels of the stuff up the surface and burn it into CO2? Yes, that's exactly what we do.

As various people have now noted, we cannot afford to burn more than a small fraction of even the fossil fuels at our disposal now, let alone any additional future supplies - not because of its economic price but because of its environmental consequences.

So, Peak Oil is a huge problem. But so is the oil continuing to flow.

To put the matter in a nutshell, the problem is not Peak Oil. It's just plain Oil. A uniquely valuable and important commodity, but one for which we haven't even begun to really pay.

Those who cannot remember the past...

Three decades ago, the Carter Administration tried to pass legislation to establish an energy policy for the USA. Writing in Wednesday's FT Energy Source, Philip K. Verleger - then Carter's Director of the Office of Energy Policy at the U.S. Treasury - claims that the current Obama administration hasn't a hope of getting his global warming legislation through. The reasons: arrogance, ignorance of the substantive issues, and failure to recognise the power of pork.

For Verleger the implications are clear, and in the light of recent events in Congress (and Copenhagen, because, whatever the scorn within which Europeans treat US politics, this is by no means a uniquely American problem) I find it hard to disagree. Here are Verleger's closing words:

"Many of the veterans of the Carter battle have quietly exchanged emails and
phone calls as the Obama legislation awaits its fate. The consensus opinions are
these:

1. None of the people putting the Obama energy policy forward understood the
   problems they would face in Congress.
2. The bill’s supporters (”greens”) are less aware of history than we were in
   the 1970s, if that is possible.
3. The legislation’s passage is unlikely absent an outside precipitating
   event.

It will be difficult to take effective action on emissions even when every
American accepts global warming as fact. Concerns regarding economic security
are far greater than those over climate impacts 10 or 20 years in the future.
Tragically, individuals pushing such actions - the representatives of various
NGOs covered in this blog, for example - do not understand history, the concerns
of voters, or the workings of Congress.

The battle is lost."

For those of us for whom the problem of global warming is, as energy was for Carter, the Moral Equivalent of War (MEOW!), it's a depressing insight.

Tax breaks for accelerating Peak Oil

Yesterday's Financial Times includes an article by their Energy Editor, Ed Crooks entitled 'Tax breaks to lure oil and gas sector'. It reported that tax allowances of up to £160m per field will be made for developing an area west of the Shetland Islands that probably includes more than 2 billion barrels of oil.

Tax breaks on oil wells? What sense does this make? Oil companies are some of the richest on the planet, and subsidising them to drill is doubly stupid - in a world fast approaching (passing?) Peak Oil, this is foolish short-termism, and in a world that cannot afford to burn more than a small fraction of its remaining fossil fuels before it trips us into irreversible global warming, paying them extra to make sure it happens is simply bonkers.

So why are they doing it? It's a hard region to develop, so if the UK government wants oil money to continue flowing into the economy, they have to bribe oil companies to bring it here. Hence the tax breaks.

It's a characteristic environmental/resource problem that follows from a) the mass nature of many decision-marking processes (e.g., multiple nations and companies making related decisions in parallel) and b) the absence of effective overarching (e.g., global political or regulatory) systems capable of ensuring that the whole - the net impact of a mass of individually intelligible decisions - does not undermine the interests of us all.

And in this case, that is exactly what is happening: a hundred countries trying to attract investment for the sake of the employment, the tax revenues and the boost to GDP are collectively abandoning the responsibility for handing over a sustainable resource base to future generations and accelerating global warming. A thousand companies, all hungry for investment and struggling to maximise their returns, ravish the planet and resist even the most superficial controls.

But there's nothing unique about the oil industry: we subsidise a huge range of damaging and short-term practices (e.g., airline flights through tax breaks and indifference to 'externalities'). In fact governments and business have been 'managing' the economy between themselves for perhaps as long as there has been an 'economy' to manage. Monopolies, politically inspired subsidies, corruption are the normal practices of all major economies - all delivering short-term gains for state and business that destroy the long term interests of society. All that is new today is that these mechanisms are so powerful and so far of the leash that we are simultaneously creating an unprecedented threat to society's very survival and abandoning every tool we once had to manage such a problem.

Where does obsessive growth come from? Well, not consumerism, that's for sure

Contemporary society is widely described as consumerist, and when politicians and pundits are asked how we can control the endless expansion of the economy, their first hand-wringing response is that what ‘the consumer’ (a group that seems to have superseded ‘the voter’ as the arbiters of political policy) want is simply ‘more and more’. So growth is the only game in town.

The environmental implication of this frozen staring into the contemporary economy is simple: nothing can be done. Nothing can be done to prevent us driving right over the CO2/ resource/ ecosystem cliff, because ‘the consumer’ is king and ‘the consumer’ would not stand for not having more stuff, more holidays abroad, more everything.

This is mythology at its most deceitful – and, given its environmental implications, most disastrous.

Look at how the economic process that links consumers to the economy really works. Somewhere out there is someone – some billionaire, some bank – with a lot of money to invest. They build/buy a factory that makes some consumer goody – iPods, perhaps, or ‘designer’ jeans’, or the latest ‘taste sensation’. The new owner invests millions, maybe billions. They’ve invested millions in creating the product, millions more in setting up production, millions more paying managers and production line workers, millions more for natural resources and energy, millions more to create the supply chain that gets it into the shops.

The sole reason all this investment takes place is to make money – lots of money, and certainly more than the millions invested. Otherwise there is no profit. So they need people to buy their product. You and me. Hence the endless orgy of marginally differentiated goods and services, the interminable and increasingly in-your-face advertising, marketing, the lobbying, the focus groups, the viral messages.

Consumerism exists not because consumers want to buy but because companies need to sell. If they don’t invest more and more in manufacturing, services, energy, transport, and so on, there will be no returns on their capital. They go bankrupt. But if they do invest, then there must be sales. It is not consumerism that drives growth but capital’s need for a return - endlessly.

But why does this lead to growth rather than simply a ‘steady state’ economy in which we can continue to have what we have now? Or if we must expand, why can we not expand in directions that contribute to the sustainability and equity so many commentators – Nicholas Stern, Jonathan Porritt, George Monbiot, and many more - insist must be the goals of the 21st-century economy? The answer is quite simple: there are plenty of mechanisms built into the contemporary economy that enforce growth - whether or not we want it - but none of then involve doing anything for developing countries – unless, that is, they can pay as well as developed countries can.

Ironically, one of the key mechanisms for ensuring that growth will happen is the very efficiency improvements that so many pundits are relying on to reduce future growth. From society’s point of view it makes sense that, if we can produce the same goods and services by using less energy, less resources, with less damage to the atmosphere and the environment, then surely this is the way we should be going.

But from a capitalist perspective, there reverse is true. If I – just me, rather than my rivals – can use the same resources to produce more, then I will. I will not – could not – simply produce the same in a more environmentally benign way - the assumption of the pundits – because the goals of investment is to maximise profits, not minimise total costs. Given that I have already invested hugely in plant, resources, supply chains, marketing, and so on, many of my costs are already fixed, regardless of how much I actually produce. As a result, if I want to maximise my profits the only rational thing to way to exploit improved efficiency is to use the same investments still more intensively.

After all, I will still be paying fixed rent on my factory and offices, still paying the same fixed interest on my loans, and so on. The main variable costs come from the inputs (labour, materials, energy, transport, and so on) that I use to create actual goods and services. So if I want to maximise the profit I make from this enterprise, simple arithmetic dictates that I should increase the amount of stuff I make (i.e., increase my investment in resources, labour, energy, etc.), because the same fixed costs will now be spread over more units. That will minimise my unit costs, and so (other things being equal) increase my profits. Hurrah!


This logic becomes more compelling the more capitalism matures. History as a whole can be seen as humanity building and rebuilding society with more and more fixed capital – roads, education systems, hospitals, technology, and so on – so that each generation is blessed with a greater stock of means to its ends. In a rational universe this would lead to societies in which, having satisfied its ‘basic’ wants, humanity might not ever quite lose its appetite for progress, but it would at least be able to decide exactly what progress meant.

In our present position, this would surely mean the very commitment to sustainability and equity referred to above. But again, capitalism bucks the trend. As the level of fixed investment needed even to join the game grows – the size of a new car plant, the cost of R+D, and so on – the more fixed costs dominate, the more units that must be sold to cover them, and the more compelling the need to grow becomes.

There are whole countries devoted to this model. China, for example, has put overwhelming emphasis on manufacturing for export – feeding the West’s addictions before developing its own. But there is little reason to believe that even China’s authoritarian government will be able to resist the logic of capitalist investment. And no doubt the boys from Goldman Sachs – or whatever their Chinese incarnation turns out to be – will, for a handsome fee, show them how to lock the handcuffs on themselves.

So growth won’t be ending any time soon. On the contrary, there is only acceleration ahead. Our despoliation of the planet won’t be quite as rapid – those efficiency gains are real (because they are profitable) and neither public nor governments are quite helpless. But until we recognise exactly what the link between capitalism, growth and our all too unpleasant environmental fate is, there is no turning back.

Welcome to the machine.

The Limits to Growth

Just about the most convincing – and scary - book I ever read about the environment was The Limits to Growth. I would guess that everyone has heard of this book but my impression is that relatively few people have ever read it, or the two follow-up volumes. I read it when it first came out – almost four decades ago – and then again a few months back.

The book was written by a group of MIT researchers - Donella and Dennis Meadows, Jorgen Randers and William Behrens – and published in 1972 by the Club of Rome. The timing is interesting, as the first edition of The Limits to Growth is roughly contemporary with a number of other foundation texts in the overall environmental movement. 1971 saw the publication of Paul Ehrlich’s Population Bomb, which gave the growing concern with population growth a kick start. Then in 1972 Barbara Ward and the well-known anthropologists René Dubos published Only One Earth – a sort of semi-official UN report that attracted a lot of attention. And then in 1974, M. King Hubbard gave what was perhaps his most important summary of the position on oil and energy production, namely his testimony to Congress on the peaking of US oil production.

The reason I found The Limits to Growth so compelling – even more than Only One Earth or Silent Spring - was the simplicity and centrality of the question it posed and the directness of the method its authors used to answer it. Instead of endless facts and figures and yet another multi-faceted discussion of our environmental predicament, they simply asked what would happen if humanity at large continued with a small number of key trends:

• World population.
• Industrialization.
• Pollution.
• Food production.
• Resource depletion.

Their method was equally straightforward – so much so that, had I felt very doubtful about its validity when I first heard about it. They started with a very generalised model of these factors - the ‘World3’ model developed by Professor Jay Forrester (also from MIT). This is described in Forrester’s World Dynamics (published the previous year), which used a ‘system dynamics’ approach. This was really a very simple model - basically a suite of functional interactions (circular, interlocking, sometimes time-delayed relationships, etc.) between what the modellers regarded as the key social and natural phenomena. World3 was based on large, long-term factors, which it defined in self-consciously simple and gross terms, without much detail. It made little attempt to explain why these interactions were as they were.

When tracking what happened when the trends they were interested in unfolded, the Limits to Growth team were not looking for trouble. They made strongly optimistic assumptions when in doubt, and took into account most of the qualifications critics usually offer about predictions of environmental doom and gloom – resource substitution, the power of innovation, and so on. On the other hand, they did assume that all these factors tend towards compound growth - which is to say, that they grow by a constant percentage, and constantly accelerate, not by a constant amount, which would lead only to regular increments of the same size. They also interact with one another, which has the effect of overshoots and disruptions in one undermining the others.

A typical outcome of the model went like this:

1. Population cannot grow without food.
2. Food production can only be increased by growth of capital.
3. Creating more capital requires extracting and processing more resources.
4. Discarded waste from resource extraction, refining and usage become pollution.
5. Pollution interferes with the growth of both population and food.
6. So the system tends towards eventual collapse of both population and food production.

It’s crucial to understand that this collapse happens not only because a specific input is damaged or reduced (which might be ameliorated by resource substitution, innovation, etc.) but because the system undermines itself. That is, the initial success of the system destroys the conditions for its continuing success. This is, I think, why it makes relatively little difference to assume that we will eventually find far more resources than are currently expected, or that we can continue to have cheap energy.

The authors made multiple runs of the model based on different assumptions. Although, like most futurologists, they avoided claiming to be making strict predictions, the consistency of the outcomes is quite frightening enough.

The book analyses quite a few scenarios (though only a fraction of those actually run, apparently). The starting point was ‘business as usual’, which led to the following outcomes:

1. Massive industrial growth depletes resources.
2. Resource prices then rise and stocks are depleted.
3. So more capital used for obtaining resources, leaving less for growth.
4. Eventually investment cannot keep up with depreciation.
5. With that, the industrial base collapses, taking with it the service and agricultural systems, the tax base for government, and so on.
6. However, population keeps rising, so the death rate is driven upward by lack of food and health services.

Radical collapse comes ‘well before the year 2100’.

As I say, the authors presented other scenarios in which:

• Nuclear power is cheap and safe.
• We manage to discover vastly increased resources.
• Innovation and technology allow much reduced pollution.
• Agricultural yields are greatly improved.

And so on. By and large, these optimistic assumptions mean that the eventual collapse is delayed by a decade or two – never more.

Here’s another typical example: the Green Revolution. This has indisputably increased food production, but at a price. The specialised seeds require a great deal of fertiliser and water. The former accelerates fossil fuel use and depletion, while the latter extracts more water than natural systems can sustain. In addition, the need for extensive capital also leads to peasant farmers being evicted from the land by their landlords, and hundreds of thousands of landless peasants end up in Mumbai, Kolkata, Sao Paulo or Mexico City, where they have no resources and no relevant skills from what they might earn a living. This increases pressure on urban systems and causes fertile land to be built over by slums.

The increase in capital requirements – tractors, petrol, fertiliser, shipping etc. – needed to operate the Green Revolution hugely depletes resources, including oil and natural gas. What is worse, the intensive treatment of the soil under a monoculture régime means that it becomes less able to support any other sort of agriculture, so the system becomes even more locked into an inherently unsustainable ‘solution’, and by this remarkable ‘advance’ we have managed to convert what one would have thought was an inherently renewable resource – fertile soil – into a non-renewable resource. Aren’t we clever? Meanwhile, the planet’s carbon footprint is made that little bit bigger, global warming is given that small extra shove upwards, and the glaciers that feed the irrigation systems that feed the crops melt that little bit faster. More jam today, but not only less jam tomorrow but also a lot less ability to manage having less jam tomorrow.

More generally, the consistent result reported by The Limits to Growth was overshoot and collapse. If the present trends in world population, industrialization, pollution, food production, and resource depletion continue, the limits to growth will be reached by 2070. The alternative scenarios only delay collapse: all end by 2100. The most probable direct outcome will be sudden, uncontrollable falls in population and industry – in other words, the ‘hundreds of millions’ of deaths predicted by the Stern Report. Only The Limits to Growth predicted it all three and a half decades earlier.

The authors conclusions about the ‘business as usual’ scenario are stark:

The unspoken assumption behind all of the model runs we have presented in this chapter is that population and capital growth should be allowed to continue until they reach some ‘natural’ limit. This assumption also appears to be a basic part of the human value system currently operational in the real world. Given that first assumption, that population and capital growth should not be deliberately limited but should be left to ‘seek their own levels’, we have not been able to find a set of policies that avoids the collapse mode of behavior.

As so often, the reactions to the original publication illuminating not only for the welcome offered to this absolutely vital book but also by the disdain expressed by those who could see no further than the status quo. It was described as ‘the most fascinating and the most disturbing book’, and it was said that ‘if this doesn't blow everybody's mind who can read without moving his lips, then the earth is kaput’. But it was also described as ‘a piece of irresponsible nonsense’ and ‘an empty and misleading work’.

The authors reviewed their findings in updates published in 1992 and 2004. These books are worth reading in their own right, as they both go far beyond updating the original methods and finding. Their original conclusions, they find, were sound. They needed some qualifications, but by comparison with the critics who greeted the original publication with such scorn and the deniers by whom they are still surrounded, they seem to have been pretty much spot-on.

Nor is this merely their own opinion. In 2008 Graham Turner published a comprehensive re-evaluation of the data, and concluded that:

The analysis shows that 30 years of historical data compares favorably with key features of a business-as-usual scenario…, which results in the collapse of the global system midway through the 21^st century.

In other words, we have done nothing significant to deflect our fate.

So are there no scenarios that lead to a happy ending? Maybe - it depends on what makes you happy. If you want interminable consumerism, then no, there aren’t. If you ever wanted a ringside seat at the end of the world, consumerism represents the front row. But if you are willing to settle for mere sufficiency, to imagine that there might actually be an ‘enough’, then yes, a somewhat reduced standard of living – something like the 1940s or 1950s, it is said – is available for all. Not bad, given the alternative, and hardly desperate poverty by any standard. It’s not as though we are any happier than we were then, though it might take a bit of getting used to. Nor need it look quite like that slightly dismal era – we start from here, not there, and a great deal can be done with a 1950s carbon footprint, give the science and technology of the 21^st century.

But there is a lot to be done – population control, the end of ‘the American Way of Life’ (which surely represents the biggest threat to the planet since the last ice age), serious support for developing countries, and so on. But it’s hardly worth thinking about – we never have done anything about these things, we show no signs of doing anything about it, and we are led by politicians, media and business people with as much grasp of our situation and as much interest in dealing with it as a bucketful of molluscs.

But not to worry – it will soon be too late to deflect the worst effects of our own actions, so we won’t have to worry about it any more. Just die in our millions. If you have ever wondered what the fall of the Roman Empire looked like, stay tuned.

Read this book.

References

Ehrlich, P. (1971). The Population Bomb. Cutchogue, N.Y.: Buccaneer Books.

Forrester, J.W. (1971) World Dynamics. Cambridge, Mass.: Wright-Allen Press.

Hubbert, M.K. (1974). Testimony to Hearing on the National Energy Conservation Policy Act of 1974, hearings before the Subcommittee on the Environment of the committee on Interior and Insular Affairs House of Representatives. June 6, 1974. Published as The Nature Of Growth by Technocracy.org.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, J. and Behrens III, W.W. (1972). The Limits to Growth. A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on the Predicament of Mankind. New York: Universe Books.

Meadows, D.H., Meadows, D.L., Randers, and J. (1992). Beyond the Limits: Confronting Global Collapse, Envisioning a Sustainable Future. Earthscan.

Meadows, D.H., Randers, J., and Meadows, D.L. (2004). The Limits to Growth: The 30-year Update. Earthscan.

Turner, G. (2008). A comparison of the Limits of Growth with thirty years of reality. CSIRO Working Paper Series 2008-2009.

Ward, B., and Dubos, R. (1972). Only One Earth. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.

The worst threat to the environment on Earth

By far the single best demonstration that business is about profit, not any sort of social or environmental responsibility, is the Alberta Tar Sands. Billed by Greenpeace and others as the largest industrial and energy project, the biggest capital investment and the worst environmental crime on earth, it really does have to be seen to be believed.

For a first-hand view, click here. Right now.

The real point? That tar sands make no environmental or social sense at all. Imagine someone replacing Florida with a slag heap - that's the new Alberta.

But for business? Lots and lots and lots of money. A no brainer, really. Say goodbye to Alberta now, children - and don't worry about the mess. No, I don't ahve any plans to clear up after me, but always remember - Daddy Business knows best.

Getting the sums right

The International Energy Agency – described by the Financial Times rather implausibly as the ‘oil watchdog’ – announces that if we don’t invest very heavily indeed in new exploration and production, world oil production can be expected to fall by 9.1% per annum from now on. Apparently meeting the demand from China, India and other developing countries’ demand will cost around $360bn each year until 2030. And even if we do make all that investment, it will fall by 6.4% anyway. So peak oil is well and truly here.

Curiously, this does not occur to the FT, who then add that the IEA has consequently revised its projections for oil consumption downwards from 116 mbd (million barrels a day) to 106 mbd - a little under 10% less. Yet we are currently producing only about 87 mbd. So according to the FT, if we start with 87 and subtract at least 6% a year, we will get to 106 in 2030…

Who says educational standards are falling? Evidently some of the best educated members of my own generation – the FT’s journalists – can’t add up either.

But the FT are hardly alone in this peculiar visual impairment. Governments everywhere seem to be totting up the figures for economic development – especially in the developing countries – and coming up with equally fantastic numbers for all sorts of things. Oil, gas – even coal looks a bit shaky now. Industrialisation will proceed apace, yet the supply of many of the most important inputs will peak soon. Nor do we have even an idea about substitutes for most of them. So prices will rise and rise, supplies will grow scarce and then fall to nothing – but industrialisation will proceed apace.

Population too – it will level off at around 9 billion sometime around 2050. Yet many of the basic ‘inputs’ for population growth – water for crops and drinking, fertile land, farming skills, people in the right places (i.e., not in giant slums) – are not only in hopelessly limited supply for such a number but we are actively reducing them by our current policies. We are currently producing less and less cereals per head each year, we spent most of the summer sorting out a global crisis in rice supply, we are responding to the melting of the glaciers on which a huge proportion of the world relies for basic drinking water by introducing crops that demand more water – but there will still be another 2,500,000,000 of us by 2050.

Why the double vision? Because a) we don’t want it to be true, b) most of the tools we have for analysing the problem simply don’t work when faced with problems like this, and c) we haven’t a clue what to do about it, not least because we have absolutely no faith in popular willingness to support radical change.

Take environmental economics – surely that can give us the answers? The clue’s in the name!

Not really. Like all other flavours of ‘modern’ economics, environmental economics assumes that most problems can be understood in marginalist terms - balancing claims on our resources to maximise marginal utility, optimise the distribution or substitution of resources, etc. But it has nothing to say about a situation in which resources fall below basic survival level and we haven’t any substitutes, or where the decision to be made about ‘utility’ is about who will die and who won’t. Not really a ‘marginal’ question, unless you are willing to regard the falling over the edge of a cliff as just another incremental step.

That doesn’t add up either. Perhaps it’s time for remedial maths classes for economists or politicians.

A summary of where I think we are now

The problems posed by the human impact on the environment are huge and extremely urgent and we have no previous experience in solving problems of this type or magnitude. The means at our disposal are not only essentially incapable of solving these problems but they are inherently inclined to make them worse. Yet there is no time to create new systems. Therefore the only realistic option is to learn to manage these systems far more radically and on a far larger scale than we do at present. But so radical are the necessary changes that they are likely to be heavily resisted, and resisted by some of the most powerful forces on the planet.

The problems posed by the human impact on the environment are huge and extremely urgent. We need to reduce the impact we are having on the environment radically. In the leading industrial countries we need to reduce our collective carbon footprint by 90% or more, or perhaps even shift to a carbon-negative economy, in which we compensate for past excesses by absorbing more carbon than we emit. We are starting to move, but even the most ambitious national and international targets commit us to probably failing to halt this process. Meanwhile, almost every worst-case scenario – Arctic melting, climate damage, habitat loss – is turning out to be the best case. At this rate, we may well be living in the last century – if not the last few decades - of industrial civilisation.

At the same time, many strategic materials on which our current economic system relies – not only oil and natural gas but many metals and minerals - will become scarce to the point that they will start to disrupt our current economic systems within the foreseeable future. A number of absolutely basic resources such as fresh water and fertile soil will also come under threat within the same timescale, affecting so many people (especially in developing countries) that their effects are imaginable only if you are prepared to imagine the very worst.

But we started to exceed the Earth’s carrying capacity about a quarter of a century ago, and we have already started to witness the consequences.

We have no previous experience in solving problems of this type or magnitude. Pundits like to compare the impending crisis with the Second World War. As the next couple of chapters will make clear, if we do not take vigorous actions quickly enough, the fall of the Roman Empire may well turn out to be a better comparison – if not the last Ice Age. We are already losing – in many cases, actively destroying - the means to solve our problems. Within a few decades the losses will trigger a sequence of environmental implosions in which the collapse of this or that area – the Amazon forests, the Siberian tundra, vast undersea methane hydrate reservoirs - will release enough additional carbon to change the question from ‘How do we manage this?’ to ‘How do we survive this?’

Other events will be equally devastating. The melting of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets alone will make some of the world’s most heavily populated areas uninhabitable and flood many of the world’s greatest cities. The droughts that inevitably follow the final melting of most of the world’s glaciers (which feed many of the most important rives) will turn many of the world’s most densely populated – and nuclear-armed – regions to scrublands capable of supporting only the most meagre of populations. In the same timescale we can expect some of the world’s most fertile and productive agricultural areas to fail, including the American Midwest and California’s Central Valley, several of China’s rice-growing regions$$ and the Ganges valley.

Taken together, these processes will combine to ignite civil and political conflicts on an unprecedented scale even while massively damaging the social and political systems we rely on to manage such conflicts.

Meanwhile, the means at our disposal to solve all these problems are not only essentially incapable of solving these problems but they are inherently inclined to make them worse. Faced with any global problem, our most important resource is our economy. It is this that produces the means to do anything else, especially create the new systems and technologies we will undoubtedly need to deploy to escape our predicament. More than three decades after the first credible warnings of what would happen if we continued with unabated industrial growth and almost two decades since global targets and agreements on climate change were first promulgated, we have failed to meet practically every target we have set ourselves.

The fundamental reason for this is, straightforward enough. A capitalist economy relies absolutely on the continual expansion of profits. Without continuing the cycle of profit, investment and profit, it has no rationale and will cease to function. With that, all the remainder of society that relies so entirely on capitalist relationships – employment, consumption, taxation, government – will also collapse. With such a large proportion of all capital tied up in industrial machinery, global transport systems, vast retail networks and an enormous advertising and marketing industry – not to mention an almost official post-ideology ideology of consumerism – not only is our current economic system not designed to help us cut back, but it positively demands endless expansion. Although industry as such is not a problem – any machine can be turned off – capitalist industry is an absolute catastrophe. Under a capitalist regime, turning off the machines would put an end not only to the profits but also to the only system we possess that is capable of creating the means to solve our current environmental problems. Even replacing them with more environmentally friendly alternatives before they had recouped their original investment would cripple businesses.

Yet there is no time to create a new economic system. The problem is Now, and every past transformation as radical as the replacement of capitalism has taken literally centuries. Therefore the only realistic option is to learn to manage these systems far more radically and on a far larger scale than we do at present. The famous ‘turning on a penny/dime’ at the start of the Second World War is encouraging, but the changes needed now are far more fundamental. We have longer to complete them, but there is scarcely an area of everyday life they will not touch, and unlike the changes wrought at the start of the Second World War, this is not a transient change to be made in the face of a clear and present danger. If we are to succeed, we must take far more radical steps than anything ever contemplated before, forcing an extraordinary level of change (and perhaps disruption).

But so radical are the necessary changes that they are likely to be heavily resisted, and resisted by some of the most powerful forces on the planet. The situation is essentially that the next century will be by any standards the most expensive century in human history. That is, we will be investing not so much in grow as in change – often accompanied by shrinkage. Faced with such a situation, most governments and practically all businesses will try to deal with this problem by either evading their responsibilities or making someone else pay for them. Given that at least a significant fraction of governments and businesses have demonstrated a willingness to obtain economic resources and avoid social obligations by a combination of force and fraud, this may well prove to be the most violent century in human history too.

Yet there is a great deal we can do. But only if we are prepared to face up the reality of the situation, and only if we are willing to take action. Now.

Peak oil vs peak energy

One issue I am having real difficulty with is in distinguishing between peak oil and peak energy. Peak oil is coming - it may already be here. But as there is no such thing as peak energy, what are the real implications of peak oil itself? Not necessarily an energy-poor society, if peak energy is nowhere in sight. So what then?

Specific issues I would like answers to:

1. How much does the transition to a post-fossil fuel energy regime rely on making the most of peak oil - such that, the oil fails too soon, we won't make it?
2. Energy is a physical issue, but fossil fuels also have a major chemical role in our economy - in plastics, in fertilisers, and so on. How can this be dealt with?
3. Biggest of all by far, it has been argued that a specifically capitalist economy relies on fossil fuels - its extremely rapid and highly focused cycles rely on such a mobile, flexible and instantaneous form of energy. To what extent is this true? And if it is true, what are the political implications of this fact, which vastly exceeds the planning of any current political system?

Transition Towns

Everyone should know about Transition Towns. They are local initiatives designed to galvanise local action to reduce a locality’s carbon footprints and energy usage. There are currently dozens of towns active in the UK, Europe, USA and elsewhere.

The Transition Network (an umbrella body in the UK) publishes a full-size manual on how to start up a Transition Town initiative, and provides training and an annual conference. And it links you to lots of friendly, helpful, enthusiastic people.

Most of all, they make me feel like someone somewhere is really doing something that everyone can join in with.

Arguments against peak oil

The fact that the oil industry is chronically obscure, if not downright dishonest, about its reserves is no reason to believe that the situation is as bad as the Peak Oil lobby believes. Personally I would guess that the peak of our oil supply is already upon us, but this entry will try to list any reasons to disbelieve in the urgency of peak oil.

1. It is in corporate and oil-state interests to create a sense of panic, to drive prices up and to justify 'emergency' actions in their own interests.
2. Companies and oil states report increased reserves.

Anyone have any more reasons to disbelieve in Peak Oil? I think they need to be aired and, if appropriate, refuted. And if they can't be refuted, what then?

Industries for which oil is currently essential

I don't recall where I got this from, but here is a partial listing of the industries that, in their present guise, depend fundamentally on oil:

Ammonia, anesthetics, antihistamines, artificial limbs, artificial turf,
antiseptics, aspirin, auto parts, awnings, balloons, ballpoint pens, bandages,
beach umbrellas, boats, cameras, candles, car battery cases, carpets, caulking,
combs, cortisones, cosmetics, crayons, credit cards, curtains, deodorants,
detergents, dice, disposable diapers, dolls, dyes, eye glasses, electrical
wiring insulation, faucet washers, fishing rods, fertilizer, fishing line,
fishing lures, food preservatives, food packaging, garden hose, glue, hair
coloring, hair curlers, hand lotion, hearing aids, heart valves, ink, insect
repellant, insecticides, linoleum, lip stick, milk jugs, nail polish, oil
filters, panty hose, perfume, petroleum jelly, plastics, rubber cement, rubbing
alcohol, shampoo, shaving cream, shoes, toothpaste, trash bags, upholstery,
vitamin capsules, water pipes, yarn.

Any more?