You are currently browsing the tag archive for the 'peak oil' tag.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
We live in bittersweet times. On the one hand, we face multiple challenges, crises and threats, from climate change, economic instability, growing social inequalities and resource depletion. On the other, we’ve got a real chance for change in the way we think about economics, the things we value and what really matters to us as societies and communities. It’s with this bewildering and complex dynamic in mind that I bring you Friday’s over-simplistic Good News, Bad News.
This week, the good news is:
- Carbon emissions have decreased by 3% from 2008 levels, because of the recession. This is the sharpest fall in emissions for 30 years, according to the International Energy Association.
- E.on will not be building a new coal-fired power station at Kingsnorth, at least for now. While pressure from climate campaigners may have had a impact, the company cited the recession as being the main reason for shelving the plans.
- Income inequality is now coming under the political radar of the Conservative Party. The painstakingly thorough work of Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett of the Equality Trust has shown that countries with less inequality are generally stronger, safer and happier places to live. nef held fringe events on inequality, featuring Dr. Wilkinson, at all three party conferences.
The bad news:
- Peak oil is still likely to hit us within the next ten years, despite recent discoveries of new fields in the Gulf of Mexico, says a new report from the UK Energy Research Centre.
- British people say they wouldn’t give up their flights to help the climate. A study conducted by Loughborough University found that fewer than 20% of people said they were trying to reduce the number of flights they took.
- The Conservative Party are putting corporate lobbyists up for parliamentary seats. An investigation by the Times newspaper found that over a fifth of the Conservative Party prospective parliamentary candidates most likely to gain seats in the next election are or have been involved in corporate lobbying or public relations.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Regular readers will have no doubt wondered what has happened to the nef blog in recent weeks. Truth is I’ve been on holiday. Although perhaps ‘holiday’ is too strong a word, given that my colleagues have teased me for giving up my hard-earned annual leave to do a course in environmentally-friendly land management. Perhaps I should take it as a compliment: getting mocked for being too much of a greenie at nef of all places shows that I must be doing something right.
I mentioned a while back that the practice of permaculture might hold some answers to our present predicaments around energy, climate change and looming food scarcity. Now, having spent two weeks in the Forest of Dean actually studying the thing, I feel knowledgeable – or foolhardy – enough to attempt to explain it here.
Permaculture was first developed during the energy crisis of the mid-seventies by two Australian scientists, David Holmgren and Bill Mollison. Its name stands for both permanent agriculture and permanent culture: a way of growing food and organising human life in a manner that is genuinely sustainable. Permaculture seeks to be fossil fuel free: while organic agriculture dispenses with pesticides and fertilizers, it still relies on diesel to run farm machinery and operates on a similar scale to conventional agriculture. When oil becomes expensive and scarce, even organic farms will feel the pinch. To many, it is hard to imagine how we could even grow food without the help of oil. We certainly wouldn’t be able to return to a life of hard physical labour to get our daily bread: most of the knowledge and physical strength simply isn’t with us anymore.
Ducks on slug patrol in a permaculture garden
Permaculture’s answer is a fairly simply one: rather than struggling against nature, either by hard labour or with big energy input, aim to work with it by designing food growing systems which mimic natural ecosystems. This means creating more or less closed systems, where human input is kept to a minimum (read: less work) and all outputs are used in a productive way (read: no waste). Permaculturists always avoids monocultures. Diversity – an important aspect of natural ecosystems – is used to create beneficial relationships between different plants, people, animals and other aspects of the land and living space.
Imagine you have a house at the top of a slope. You dig a pond beside it, because this will reflect light into the house, meaning you need to use less energy. And because the pond is at the top of the slope, you can use its water to irrigate vegetable gardens and orchards at the bottom of the slope. The pond will provide a habitat for ducks, who you will periodically invite into your vegetable garden so that they can go on slug patrol. You can also dig a trench coming out of the pond and fill it with reeds. This can be used to filter gray water (waste water from sinks, showers and baths), cleaning it for later use. In the pond you might also have some carp, who feed on tiny animals in the water, turning unusable protein into a human food (fish). On one side of the pond you grow willow, which can be used for fencing, decoration, craft materials and firewood, while on the other you dig out “chinampas” – fingers of land that jut into the pond. Here you can grow yet more vegetables, particularly those which need lots of water. Note how inputs such as water for the garden and food for the ducks and fish have been removed or minimised, and otherwise unused outputs such as light from the pond, waste water from the house and slugs in the garden become useful parts of the system.
By clever design and a keen understanding of the kinds of ecological relationships which animals and plants need to survive, permaculturists have been able to do some remarkable things. According to a documentary we watched on the course, the self-dubbed ‘rebel farmer’ Sepp Holzer has managed to grow figs, cherries and even kiwi fruits at an altitude of over 4,000 feet in the Austrian mountains, all by using permaculture principles.
Corn and squash, growing together
Permaculture is satisfying because its solutions are so elegant, so simple and yet also so ingeniously thought out. We tend to have the notion that “technology” must mean something complex, and yet we forget that some of the best technologies, the ones we use everyday without even noticing, are perfected in simplicity and need no further work. Witness the button, the stairs, the pencil. You reach the end of a permaculture course armed less with a host of facts than a way of thinking which informs a huge range of decisions you might take in your life.
And contrary to my colleagues’ jibes, the course did manage to hold its own as a holiday. Staying on an organic farm, with beautiful scenery, fantastic food, good company and regular camp fires, it hardly felt like I was doing any work at all. And that is a crucial permaculture principle. As permaculturist Andy Langford put it: “Ask yourself, as a permaculture designer, how many siestas can I easily take this week? If its less than three or four, be worried.”
Resources
- Patrick Whitefield – a pioneer of British permaculture, and the brilliant teacher of my course
- The Permaculture Association of Britain
- Permaculture Magazine
- The Agroforestry Research Trust – if its hard facts and practical research you want, you’d do no better than see the work of Martin Crawford.
- “High time agriculture got back to its healthy roots” – veteran environmental journalist John Gibbons, who recently completed a permaculture design course, writing in the Irish Times.
Andrew Simms is nef’s Policy Director and head of nef’s Climate Change programme.
An example of Cuban urban agriculture
The hiss from the audience could have been shock, surprise or a simple misunderstanding. A woman whose question stretched almost to the length of a speech by Fidel Castro said that Cuba’s dire economic predicament was the result, partly, of a criminal government. It just wasn’t clear which government she meant (more on which below). This was the first of a series of Hay events organised by nef called Surviving the Crash, and it looked into Cuba’s forced, but artful, transition from oil dependency.
Today, the UK and the US are living through challenging economic times. But, so far, we face nothing compared to the shocks endured by Cuba over the last two decades. It was uniquely unlucky at the end of the cold war, losing the support of one superpower, the Soviet Union, while keeping the animosity – and a comprehensive economic embargo – of the other, the US. Only now, years later, is there a suggestion of a thaw in relations.
But regardless of what American administrations think, suddenly the world is finding Cuba interesting for reasons that are little to do with the cold war’s long shadow. Like a nervous scout sent ahead of the main party to see what risks lurk in the valley beyond, Cuba has been hit by a triple crunch – three separate shocks that are creeping up on the rest of the world. Speaking earlier in the day, Adrian Goldsworthy, a writer on ancient Rome, said that the remarkable thing about the Roman empire was not that it fell from a position of unchallenged power, but that it lasted so long. Conversely, hearing the litany of misfortune that has befallen modern Cuba, the astonishing thing is not the threadbare state of the economy, but the fact that the country has not descended into complete chaos and become a failed state.
One crunch was the loss of cheap oil imports on which almost the whole of Cuba’s economy, including transport and farming, depended, following the Soviet Union’s collapse. On the panel, Julia Wright, author of Sustainable Agriculture and Food Security in an Era of Oil Scarcity, described how a massive revival of largely organic, small scale, and community-driven urban agriculture helped prevent starvation. Even more, the general health of the nation improved dramatically, much as in Britain during the second world war, as people’s diets became healthier and they exercised more.
Another regular impact is the kind of extreme weather set to become more common with global warming. Cuba sits in the pathway of annual hurricane season in the Caribbean. The other speaker, Carlos Alfaro, who was for years the Cuban advisor to various UN agencies, had to plan for major disasters and emergencies in a country largely lacking fuel for its vehicles. Yet a combination of central planning and local organisation means that even when big hurricanes hit small, poor Cuba casualties are minor and recovery is quick. Compare this to the chaos of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. The final crunch is the continuing US economic embargo (and this was the criminal act by a government referred to above). To get some sense of what that must be like, perhaps we need to imagine something like the current banking crisis in the US and UK carrying on for 20 years.
Cuba has seen it all and survived. It’s not perfect, but after living through the decline of oil, climate change and an economic crisis, it still has an impressive health and education system and an ingenious population who cope with adversity.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
nef will be at the Hay Festival Wales from Tuesday 26 May presenting a series of talks called Surviving the Crash. Our event on the Transition Towns movement is already sold out, but it’s not too late to get tickets for the rest of our programme.
We’ll be exploring how Cuba survived its oil crash of 1989, examining the power wielded by city investors in deciding our environmental fate, dbeating the potential of the Green New Deal and discussing what Britain’s homefront during World War II can teach us about a national response to climate change.
We have a host of fantastic speakers including the economist John Kay, gardening guru Monty Don, London Food czar Rosie Boycott, Guardian journalist John Vidal and our own Andrew Simms and Stewart Wallis.
At every event, the onehundredmonths clock will be ticking down in the background, bringing a sense of planetary urgency to an otherwise sleepy, secluded part of the country.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
My spoof movie poster for a fictional 2027 newspaper
Sometimes, it seems, wishes do come true.
I spent much of last week designing graphics for some spoof newspapers which our Participation and Democracy team are creating to engage people in discussions about climate change. There are four different papers, all set in 2027 but each with a different climate change outcome, ranging from a sustainable future to a veritable apocalypse. I’d been asked to make a suitable film advert for each scenario and decided that a documentary called The Great Transition: The tale of how it turned out right was a good fit for the sustainable future paper. As I emailed the finished image to my colleagues, I wrote ‘I really hope they get a chance to make this one’.
Well, now they have.
The pioneering communities who make up the Transition Network have a film on the way, called In Transition, which promises to be perfect sequel to The Age of Stupid: providing the positive solutions to the climate change crisis. It’s premiering at 1.45pm on 23 May at the Transition Network Conference, which is now completely sold out, but you will be able to watch it streaming at http://www.mogulus.com/intransition (the link isn’t active yet, but bookmark it anyway). Watch the teaser trailer here:
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Yesterday's farm...
As if you weren’t worried enough about climate change, economic calamity and now swine flu, there is now a growing number of agricultural scientists who think we are heading for a food crisis. Dr Lester R Brown has a big piece in Scientific American this month, while over this side of the Atlantic Professor Douglas Kell has warned that rising temperatures and diminuishing energy supplies will lead to food riots unless the Government acts.
So far, so familiar to most environmentalists and oil peakists. But Kell has also called for £100 million of public money to made available for research into how crop yields might be maximised, so that the crisis might be averted. Now where do you think that money would go? From a cursory internet search I can’t find exactly what Kell, a professor of biotechnology, thinks about genetically modified food, but I would bet good money that this Government, with its affection for large, centralised, corporate solutions (think mega-banks, nuclear power, car manufacturers) would, in the face of a looming food crisis, cave in to the lobbyists and hastily push through a GM agenda.
I should add that I’m not a purist about these things. I have no fixed opinions about genetic modification, and my objections to it are more about corporate control, terminator seeds and copyrighted genomes than they are about the safety or ‘naturalness’ of the resulting crop.
What worries me is that the Government will hear people like Kell asking for research into increased crop yields and automatically think ‘GM’ rather than making the effort to explore the alternatives. A community gardening, “digging for victory” initiative would not only help tackle food scarcity at a minimum cost, it would also promote the kind of solaridarity and community spirit to see us through a major crisis. If we promoted food sharing to eliminate waste, we might not even need that much space. There is plenty of research which shows that a nation of small farmers tends to be more productive than a nation of a few large farms, centrally controlled.
What’s more, there are ways in which small farmers and gardeners can maximise their plots for higher yields simply by attentive design. The permaculture movement, founded by the Australian biologist and conservationist Bill Mollison, has created a low-energy, low-maintenence and yet high-yield method of food growing, by copying the patterns of growth seen in thriving natural ecosystems, such as woodlands. They have been doing this without corporate investment or government grants. According to Dr Martin Crawford of the Agroforestry Research Trust, a forest garden designed for maximum yield could feed around ten people an acre. That’s about twice as much as conventional agricultural farming, and with a fraction of the work and none of the fossil fuel energy.
... and tomorrow's?
While the supporters of GM have been shouting from the rooftops and rallying an army of lobbyists to promote themselves as the saviours of a starving world, the permaculturists have been, in the words of Transition Movement founder Rob Hopkins, ‘far too long hidden up misty lanes in the middle of nowhere’, quietly experimenting. They now need to get out of those lanes, and show Governments, communities and individuals the potential of their revolutionary system. Whether or not GM can feed the future becomes a moot point. If permaculture can feed us for less money and energy, and by liberating people to feed themselves as opposed to locking them into corporate dependence, then surely it’s infinitely preferable.
Earlier this year, the BBC made a fantastic documentary on permaculture solutions to the food and energy crises, called Farm for the Future. It’s just been made available again to watch on BBC iPlayer until 12 May. In my ideal world, Professor Kell, and the Government, would go and visit the pioneering food growers in this film first, and the GM corporations second.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
As promised, here’s the second half of this week’s Green New Deal round-up, featuring none other than the 44th President of the United States, Barack Hussein Obama.
Yesterday afternoon, the relentless pace of thinking and doing that usually characterises life at nef headquarters was momentarily put on hold as we gathered to watch the inauguration speech. Murmours rippled around the office whenever Obama mentioned a topic which strayed into new economics territory. Early on, Obama spoke of the “greed and irresponsibility” which has brought the economy to its knees. Cue nods from those researching ethics in the new economy. Obama later described how “all deserve a chance to pursue their full measure of happiness”. Some whispers from our well-being team. But the new President received the most oohs and aahs from us whenever he touched on climate change and the environment. The issue wasn’t centre stage, but after eight years of denial and ignorance, we finally have an American government which is ready to make progress on these issues.
Which is just as well really: James Hansen – NASA climate scientist extraordinaire – has already warned Obama that he has only four years in which to act if we are have any chance at all of stopping extreme climate change. Hansen’s admonition is even starker than nef’s One Hundred Months campaign, which gives us less than 95 months – or just under eight years – to make the necessary changes. But whether it happens in his first term, or his second, it’s clear that Obama is going to be the most pivotal figure in the fight to stop global warming.
Although the phrase has been repeatedly associated with his economic and energy policies, Obama has been blowing hot and cold on the subject of a Green New Deal. Shortly after being elected, he seemed to rule out a New Deal-style programme by saying that “to simply recreate what existed back in the 30s in the 21st century… would be missing the boat”. But many of his promises to create jobs by rebuilding American infrastructure have certainly echoed Roosevelt’s earlier programme. And his address yesterday leaned further towards the Green New Deal, describing how the new America would “harness the sun and the winds and the soil to fuel our cars and run our factories”. Let’s just hope that ’soil’ translates as geothermal energy rather than biofuels. Check out BBC environment correspondent Richard Black’s very thorough dissection of the green content of the address at his blog.
Perhaps the most moving moments in the speech came towards the end, as Obama compared our situation today with that of America’s founders: “a small band of patriots huddled by dying campfires on the shores of an icy river” in 1776. He then quoted the words of Thomas Paine:
“Let it be told to the future world…that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive…that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet [it].”
Our ‘common danger’ today is not so singular: it is a triple crunch of climate change, energy depletion and economic meltdown, with all the associated conflict, famine and social upheaval which those crises fuel. But the broad point remains: the existence of a ‘future world’ very much depends on the decisions we make right now. Let’s make them good ones.
David Boyle is a nef fellow, a writer and the editor of nef’s newspaper, Radical Economics.
Disease caused by doctors is called ‘iatrogenic’. There is a lot of it about. But it maybe that we will have to come up with a new word, invented for the recession, for economic disease caused by regenerators. And the worst of the iatrogenic disease caused by conventional regeneration is the over-supply of heavily subsidised shopping centres.
Many of them, like the new Westfield shopping centre that now dominates Shepherd’s Bush, are now busily moving round retail business that existed before, draining existing centres and smaller shops in particular. Other new supermarkets, so excessive in their provision in the past decade, are now draining nearby high streets – making local economies and their populations more dependent and more vulnerable to global recession than they were before.
That has been the legacy of the expansion of Tesco in the UK and Wal-mart in the USA. More dependence, less enterprise.
Now we are in a global down-turn, these things matter enormously. Because their local councillors have colluded with powerful retailers to build a new supermarket, they will be poorer than they would have been.
So the first impact of the triple crunch on UK retailing is going to be a new way of measuring the impact of potential shopping infrastructure, working out the impact plans are likely to have on the local circulation of money. Will it keep money in local circulation and build local economic independence, or will it corrode it?
The other impact is going to come from the energy crisis. If oil is going to be a great deal more expensive – and it is – then the whole basis of our monopolistic retailing is going to have to change. We will no longer be able to fly in tomatoes from the Caneries, or shuttle vegetables down to Italy and back for packaging. We will have to reconnect local people with local production, because it will be affordable.
The third effect is going to be the increasing cynicism of people when they are faced with marketing, spin or corporate claims. There is already a growing demand for what is authentic, real, unspun, local and human – not yet by anything near a majority, but a growing minority nonetheless. This, and the other impacts, are going to change retailing enormously: shops will be smaller, and their networks will be more local, more responsive.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
A few picks from the web.
The Guardian has just put up a fantastic Carbon Atlas, which represents countries by the size of their emissions. It’s a very effective way of making the stats accessible – and astounding. Compare the United States with one our favourite little countries here at nef, the kingdom of Bhutan.
The Green New Deal is gathering endorsements so quickly that my regular round-ups can barely keep up. The lastest one comes from the International Energy Association. It’s worth bearing in mind that the IEA have been notoriously sceptical of peak oil. Getting their backing on this cause is therefore especially significant. The IEA’s Energy Director, Nobuo Tanaka, said:
The current volatility in global energy markets and the broader economic slowdown must not push us off-track from our efforts to address climate change. We must put in place the framework that will guide investment during the recovery and we must start the green infrastructure that will enable the sustainable economy going forward. We think there is an enormous opportunity to develop a ‘Clean Energy New Deal’ to achieve energy security, economic and environmental goals.
The Independent has a fascinating article about an ancient fertilization technique used by pre-Columbian Amazonian tribes which might help us sequester carbon dioxide. The idea is to grow thousands of trees, turn them into something called biochar and then bury it in the ground. The carbon dioxide take in by the trees will then be safely stored for thousands of years, improving soil quality in the meantime. And if you think that sounds like a dubious geoengineering or off-setting fix, consider that Professor James Hansen – godfather of climate science – is supporting the idea as a means of getting us back to the safety zone of 350 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Finally, a video from timetolead.eu. Watch and then sign the petition.
Andy Wimbush is nef’s Communications Assistant and blogmaster.
Today sees the release of two rather sobering reports. First up, we have the 2008 edition of the WWF’s Living Planet Report. It calculates that human beings are using natural resources up faster than the world can replenish them: this year we’ve overshot our ecosystems’ carrying capacity by 30%. Not surprisingly, WWF have chosen to describe this situation as an ‘ecological credit crunch’. Our estimated ecological debt in monetary terms is £2.5 trillion (about twice as much as this year’s credit crisis). More coverage of this at the Guardian and the BBC.
Next is the latest from Green New Deal co-author Jeremy Leggett and his colleagues at the UK Industry Taskforce on Peak Oil and Energy Security. They warn that the UK is going to start feeling the pinch of peak oil around about 2013. We should expect oil prices far higher than the record $147-a-barrel of this summer. More on this at the Daily Telegraph.
It’s not all bad news, however. Only a few weeks after Ed Miliband, the new Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, announced that Britain will commit to an 80% cut in greenhouse gas emissions by 2050, it seems he’s now agreed to include aviation and shipping in the climate bill. These are some encouraging promises. Now let’s get on with that Green New Deal.
Vimeo
Twitter
Flickr
