All posts in category Peak Oil

Earth Hour: We will Never Give up our Energy Slaves

One of the good things about the Peak Oil movement is to highlight just how much work and benefit fossil fuels have actually done for us. It has been calculated for example that a barrel of oil is equivalent to something around 25,000 hours of human-muscle power or manual labour; at 60 barrles of oil consumption per year, the average American has anything then from 60-450 “energy slaves” working around the clock for them, providing lighting, heating, food, transport and entertainment, not to mention health care and art and other cultural exploits.

This reality of modern life was brought home most effectively in a TV show a couple of years ago in which, unbeknownst to the residents, a family house was run for a week literally by a gym full of pedal-powered dynamos- including the “Human Power Shower”:

What is odd then is how this emancipation from drudgery that fossil fuels have given us is often decried as more of a curse than a blessing. Peak oil guru Richard Heinberg for example quotes Nikiforuk’s new book (which I have not read) The Energy of Slaves: Oil and the New Servitude:

The energy in oil effectively replaces human labor; as a result, each North American enjoys the services of roughly 150 “energy slaves.” But, according to Nikiforuk, that means that burning oil makes us slave masters—and slave masters all tend to mimic the same attitudes and behaviors, including contempt, arrogance, and impunity. As power addicts, we become both less sociable and easier to manipulate.

This would seem to be a classic example of retro-romantic thinking- the conviction that things are not perfect now so they must have been much better in the past- thinly disguised as concern about “dependency” on or even “addiction” to oil and technology, which is apparently a much bigger worry than the vaguaries of nature that under “normal” times would cut us down in our prime and steal our children by the sack-full; a kind of miserabalist negative thinking, where nothing good can come of progress, which is sure to end badly, perhaps even worse than if we had not bothered in the first place.

Peak oil of course is all about the problems that will face us if we “run out” of these energy slaves- and is often explained in rhetorical language as if to say, how stupid we humans are! we think we are improving our lives by exploiting these non-renewable resources but it will be all the worse for us in the long run! We should have just stayed in the caves! In fact, however counter-intuitive it may seem, human ingenuity and continuing advances in science and technology mean that we are running into resources rather than running out.

Add in an unhealthy dose of guilt about having it better than many who do not yet benefit from the stupendous gains of the last couple of centuries and you have…

Earth Hour. That is tonight, 8.30-9.30 pm when we are supposed to turn the lights off for an hour in what has become according to Andy Ridley, CEO & Co-Founder of Earth Hour, the world’s largest mass-participation event, with 7000 cities and 152 countries involved around the world.

“We didnt start this to turn the lights off, but to do something much much bigger.” says Ridley at the Earth Hour Global Media Launch last month, but I wonder if he was even dimly aware of the irony in his next sentence:

We wanted this to be about hope, not about fear… the digital revolution has meant that we are undoubtedly the first generation in history that has the power to connect behind a common purpose, the empowerment of communities…

The digital revolution powered by…. the very fossil fuels that are causing global warming and environmental destruction that Earth Hour is supposedly campaigning against.

More than that, as Lomborg points out, turning the lights out for an hour will do nothing to reduce CO2 emissions, and if you light candles instead – or drive any distance to Earth Hour events -you will in fact cause more pollution.

Tom Zeller disagrees: why does Lomborg takes pot-shots at a “relatively benign awareness campaign like Earth Hour?” Precisely because it has indeed grown so large and influential and really does give out the wrong message- that the changes being called for in the name of solving climate change will be benign fun things like going to a fire-juggling event, or that we really should be feeling guilty about deriving better lives from the use of fossil fuels.

So I will not be participating in Earth Hour, or driving to the local event. As someone who lives off-grid on solar pv, turning out the lights would be quite redundant: in this sunless country and in this year of apparently never-ending winter, the solar panels do very little in any case and I will in fact be running a petrol generator to finish writing this and cook my dinner. (Not for much longer- I have applied for a grid connection and will soon be joining 21st century with a secure power supply.)

Instead, we should be celebrating human ingenuity and working together to ensure abundant power and electricity become available for the rest of the planet’s 1.3 billion. The Earth Hour people would do well to mull over the lessons of the peak-oilers as they sit by candle-light tonight, but be careful to draw the opposite conclusions: we will never give up our energy slaves, it is they that banished real slavery, not to mention the slavery of women in the home, and these are gains that we really should not trivialize and that we should ensure above all else are never reversed.

10 Comments
by skepteco on March 23, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Environmentalism, Peak Oil
Tagged , , ,

Posted by skepteco on March 23, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/03/23/earth-hour-we-will-never-give-up-our-energy-slaves/

Green for Me Talk for UCC Enviro Soc

I had an enjoyable evening at the Green for Me event at UCC Environmental Society on Tuesday where I gave a talk along with Dan Boyle of the Green Party and well-known biologist and TV/radio presenter Eanna ni Lamhna as part of their Green Week.

The theme given us for our talks was “My Reasons for Being Green.”

Eanna spoke first, but I had already got into a discussion with her about population as soon as she came into the lecture hall, pointing out that birth rates are declining everywhere, and hurriedly added in a few graphs to prove my point; her own graph was I felt somewhat misleading in that it showed only the dramatic population expansion of the past hundred years, without any context or explanation that this phase finished some 20 years ago.

Update: As Patrick Hayes writes here in response to David Attenborough’s recent Malthusian remarks, even sub-Saharan Africa has seen a massive drop in birthrates:

But as Slate has observed, it’s not just the most developed nations: ‘From 1960 to 2009, Mexico’s fertility rate tumbled from 7.3 live births per woman to 2.4, India’s dropped from six to 2.5, and Brazil’s fell from 6.15 to 1.9. Even in sub-Saharan Africa, where the average birthrate remains a relatively blistering 4.66, fertility is projected to fall below replacement level by the 2070s.’

All of which is bad news for Attenborough and his Malthusian ilk, as it reveals that what lurks behind their doom-mongering is prejudice rather than fact. That becomes increasingly evident when you hear headline-generating comments, such as those Attenborough made recently to the Radio Times: ‘We keep putting on programmes about famine in Ethiopia; that’s what’s happening. Too many people there. They can’t support themselves – and it’s not an inhuman thing to say. It’s the case.’

Too many people in Ethiopia? This is a country which, according to the World Bank, has a mere 83 people per square kilometre. This is the same as Serbia, and there aren’t mass starvations there. At 196 people per square kilometre, Switzerland has a far higher population density than Ethopia, but people aren’t starving there. Nor in Japan, where there are 350 people per square kilometre, or the Netherlands, which has 493 people per square kilometre.

She then went on to talk about climate change and supported the issues around this with two more rather misleading slides, one of polar bears and one of deserts. Polar bears are of course the poster child of climate change and have been used to very good propaganda effects since before Al Gore; but the reality seems very different- many polar bear populations are increasing, they seem remarkably adaptable to declining sea ice.
A much greater threat to bears in the Arctic than global warming is hunting.

So bears polar bears are probably an eye-catching but bad example of the effects of climate change- so far at least. Similarly, desertification also is more complex than just laying it at the feet of CO2 emissions- de-forestsation from human activity being another obvious cause, with underlying poverty often being the problem.

Eanna then wnet onto talk about renewable energy- “we have very little renewable energy- and yet the wind blows all the time!” Yes, it’s a no-brainer: humans, especially Irish humans in a country that has been hailed as the Saudi Arabia of wind- choose to use Polar-Bear murdering fossil fuels when they could just switch to clean wind.

Unfortunately, one of the major draw-backs with wind is that it does not in fact blow all the time even in Ireland, as anyone who has lived off-grid with wind-power as I have done in the past will tell you: plenty of calm still “soft” days Ireland where you get effectively no power from wind, no matter how many turbines you might have.

Even a super-grid covering the whole of Europe would not solve the problem- there is really quite dramatic indetermittency issues Europe-wide as well. For this reason, wind can never on its own replace fossil fuels or nuclear, and as another graph of Eanna’s showed quite well, renewables currently only supply a tiny percentage of energy- for well-understood reasons that are more to do with the laws of physics and cost than anything else.

More controversially, Eanna then went onto discuss waste, asking why dont we have have incinerators- a local hot-potato. “You can’t even mention them- they are considered as bad as GMOs!” The last time I had seen Eanna was at the potato day last year in Skibbereen, where she had had done an admirable job of myth-busting about the GE potato trials that started last year.

She then commented that at the protest meetings on incinerators she had been to, at the break about a third of the protestors went out to smoke!

Eanna finished her entertaining talk by admonishing us to eat only food that is in season and plant trees to help combat climate change.

I was up next, and began by staking out my credentials as a back-to-the-lander. While preparing the presentation I had in fact dug up photos of a commune I had lived in in the 1980s on the Welsh borders.

This is a photo of the Earthworm Housing Co-op from 1990, possibly when I was still actually living there.Brings back memories- many of which make me cringe!

854064249_021ca8daae_m

I then discussed my involvement with the Peak Oil movement, and how my views had changed as time went on and the expected collapse failed to materialise, and the new energy story became one of the Golden Age of Gas.

I then used Stewart Brand’s Four Environmental Heresies to frame my new perspective on “Being Green.”

-population growth stablising and the world is not over-populated;
-cities are green
-nukes are green
-genetic engineering is green

I then gave a brief explanation of the Environmental Transition- the idea that environmentalism is a product of wealth and industrial growth rather than a reaction to it, and told the story from Shellenberger and Nordhaus’ book Breakthrough about the fires on the Cuyahoga River:cuyahoga_fire650

In June 22nd 1969 Time Magazine showed this photo of burning oil on Cuyahoga River with the caption
“The Price of Optimism” and it became emblematic of start of the US Environmental Movement.

The problem was, the photo was not from the 1969 fire, which has burned out in half-an-hour before the Time photographer could get there- but from an earlier and much more severe fire from 1952. In fact, there had been fires on the Cuyahoga river for a hundred years, some of them burning for days and causing loss of life: but the society had not yet reached a level of wealth and development- which would support universities with Environmental Societies- until much later. Poor people are not generally environmentalists- they have more expressing concerns, but once society has a critical mass of relatively affluent educated people with time on their hands, then industry is compelled to clean up its act.

I concluded my presentation with a quotation from Daniel Botkin’s book The Moon in the Nautilus Shell.:

Our perspective, ironically in this scientific age, depends on ancient myths and deeply buried beliefs. To gain a new view, one necessary to deal with global environmental problems, we must break free of old assumptions and myths about nature and ourselves while building on the scientific and technical advances of the past.

Dan Boyle followed me and began by expressing surprise to find himself having to defend the broad thrust of the environmental movement from the past few decades. He began by emphasising his agreement that Luddism is false, and that greens depend upon science and technology;

but seemed to struggle to hide some exasperation at my reference to Lomborg: “It is NOT the case that you burn your hydrocarbons and then clean up afterwards”- rather missing the point about the environmental transition, because of course that is precisely what the greens have been doing, otherwise we would never have embarked on industrialisation in the first place: the greens would have stopped us!

Dan’s main points seemed to be a bunch of Green Herrings: the supposed rallying cries of “bigger faster more” are the problem; untrield technology is dangerous and we should proceed with greater caution;
while his reference to dangers of the “chemical soup” used in frakking, and from “cross-contamination” from genetic engineering belie his claim to environmentalism being underpinned by science. Not to mention his suggestion that we can have “smaller and more efficient” wind turbines- surely not? To become more efficient, wind turbines can only do one thing: get bigger, due to well-understood laws of physics concerning wind-speed increasing to the square of the altitude/height and rotor span’s ability to collect the diffuse wind energy from a given space.

In the discussion and questions afterwards I was challenged quite strongly on nuclear waste issues, and general “Pandora’s Box” concerns about whether naughty humans should really be trusted with technology.

Dan Boyle made the very good point that at a meeting he had attended recently in the midlands concerning the proposed giant wind farm there, anti-wind activists used the same rhetoric and alarmism used by the anti-nuclear lobby, even including the threat of radiation- from wind turbines!

A popular theme seemed to be that rather than constantly striving for more energy sources, we should just use less. “Let’s turn out the lights then!” I said looking up to the ceiling at the dozens of lights that were probably consuming more energy that evening than I would at home in a year. My personal experience of living off the grid was apparently not persuasive however, and when I pointed out that there are still a couple of billion people without electricity at all in the world, I was told, “They can just use the Gravity Light!”

“Would you use one?”

“Well, it would be great for an outdoor light or something.”

Indeed it would, and for those without electric lights of any kind, this remarkable invention will surely be a wonderful boon. But for those who think that we can or will do anything other than make cosmetic changes in our energy usage, that “powerdown” can in some way substitute for cheap reliable electricity supply, should contemplate what life might be like if one or two gravity lights is all you ever have as a light supply, for the rest of your lives, ie without development.

Several people came up to me afterwards and thanked me for a thought-provoking perspective, while others took a more conventional green- perspective, concerned more about a presumed loss of contact with Nature, the virtues of the simple life and the insanity of endless growth rather than addressing the concerns of the poor. “We are all too greedy in this country!” proclaimed Eanna at one point.

But as Colin McInnes shows in this award-winning essay, growth is not just a matter of extraction and consumption, but is also about complexity:

While innovation-driven growth has delivered immense improvements to the human condition, it is also the means through which human needs can be gradually decoupled from the environment. Growth emerges from productivity, doing more with less. For example, new additive manufacturing technologies, so-called ‘3D printers’, look set partly to replace the wasteful subtractive manufacturing of machine tools. In contrast, in coming down from our oil high, as advocated by {Richard} Heinberg, we could regress to using whale oil for lighting, as was the case prior to commercial oil production. But this hardly constitutes progress, economic or environmental….

The real worry of Heinberg’s vision of a post-growth world is his straight-faced assertion that ‘there should be [an] increasing requirement for local production and manual labour’. This chilling claim is more Year Zero than zero growth. A return to carbohydrate-fuelled manual labour may be appealing to Heinberg and others as a means of powering down our lives and reconnecting with the land. But he shouldn’t expect a long queue of volunteers.

Maybe not- but he could well expect a long line of green ideologues who have forgotten that their green ideas are only possible because of the benefits brought by the very techno-industrialism that they campaign against.

6 Comments
by skepteco on February 7, 2013  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Eco-Pragmatism, Environmentalism, Fracking, Genetic Engineering, Nuclear, Peak Oil, Renewable Energy, Technology
Tagged , , , , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on February 7, 2013

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2013/02/07/green-for-me-talk-for-ucc-enviro-soc/

The End of Peak Oil?

It would seem so if you believe the latest report by Leonado Maugeri, a prominent critic of the peakists, whose analysis claims that we could see a surge in liquid fuel production from its current level of 91 million barrels per day to an astonishing 110 mbd by 2020.

Maugeri sees new production coming mainly from the USA, Canada, Brazil and Iraq; while Mexico, Iran and the North Sea producers UK and Norway seeing net declines.

Maugeri’s analysis is hotly disputed on the Oil Drum here claiming “unsupportable assumptions”; and by Gail Tverberg, who aregues that a closer look at the realities of each region shows that oil production has not increased by much, and concludes that the more likely scenario is

at best oil production in the near future will be virtually flat, leading to more spiking of oil prices and greater world economic problems. Another possibility is that world production will begin to decline. The likelihood of decline would appear to be increased if more oil exporters encounter political disruptions, or if the world enters a major recession leading to an oil price decline.

It seems to me that Peak-oilers are somewhat playing down the fact that the world has indeed seen an increase in production last year, driven in part by new drilling technology in America, when peak-oilers have been claiming this is all but impossible. So the argument shifts- the “easy oil” has peaked; the era of cheap oil is gone; and, just in case this trend continues and Maugeri is shown to be even half-way correct, you can hedge your bets by saying, whatever about oil production rates, we just don’t want it- the real problem is climate change.

This is the tack taken by Heniberg in his response to Maugeri who carefully inserts into his piece the rhetorical question “What will be the climate impact as the world’s petroleum supply is increasingly derived from lower-grade resources?” But even Heinberg admits “some of the Peak Oil forecasts for world oil production declines starting in 2005 or 2008 have proven premature” – just as all of the last 100 years of predictions of doom have proved “premature”.

Monbiot on the other hand seems to fully accept Maugeri’s projections, but comes out even gloomier than before: energy abundance is not a blessing, allowing more human development and better lives for all, but a curse which will “fry us all”, concluding, bizarrely,

Humanity seems to be like the girl in Guillermo del Toro’s masterpiece Pan’s Labyrinth: she knows that if she eats the exquisite feast laid out in front of her, she too will be consumed, but she cannot help herself. I don’t like raising problems when I cannot see a solution. But right now I’m not sure how I can look my children in the eyes.

(“I find crouching down a bit usually does the job” quips one commentator.)

So what to think? Are we entering a new era of energy abundance, or is this just the start of a bumpy plateau which will see ever-increasing oil prices and marks the beginning of the end of industrial society?

One thing that seems for sure is that oil prices could go down as well as up: indeed,this is Maugeri’s conclusion, that we are seeing a surge in supply as a result of unparalleled investment and new technology since 2003, and that certain combinations of events- especially political events in Iraq and Iran- could result in a price collapse within the next few years. High prices have signaled investment, and more will flock to the table than the market can support, thus resulting in a glut a few years hence.

Increase efficiency, continuation of the Euro crisis and substitution with cheap gas could all play their role.
In addition, there have been a lot of new discoveries made in recent years around the world.

It is easy to point to rising prices and the “end of cheap oil” but the Peak Oil theory is not just about figures on a graph but the idea that this means the end of the modern world, the end of Progress even. But as one commentator on the Oil Drum points out,

If I told everyone here 3 years ago that North Dakota oil production would be pushing 600,000 bpd as soon as 2012, I would have been laughed at and my pronunciation would have been dismissed as a Cornucopian fantasy!

Even if Maugeri is only half right, this hypothesis is falsified; why then does it still persist? Why are predictions of doom always premature?

Julian Simon explains it best in his 1998 book “The Ultimate Resource II”.

According to Simon, Malthussians, Peak-oilers and doomsters of all kinds use simplistic engineering methods to predict the future: take the known reserves, divide by the annual rate of per-capita use, and bingo, you have the number of years the resource will last. This provides a very static view of the world in which it is assumed things will stay pretty much the same, and moreover, assumes that we can actually predict the future.

Instead, Simon advocates an economists’ approach: look at past data: predictions of the oil (and any other mineral resource) running out have been around for more than 100 years and, using an engineering approach, they were in their time accurate enough. But they were all wrong, and even as we have used more and more resources, the “known reserves” have continued to grow.

This completely counter-intuitive fact is what the data tells us. In the long run, things are getting better, and the doomsters have been proved wrong repeatedly, as market forces combine to create new technology that overcomes the short-term shortages. This is what the data tells us: relative to the average wage, the price of commodities has been falling through most of history.

But oil is finite! There is only so much of it and so it has always been running out, and will surely get harder to extract and more expensive.

Simon (and no doubt Maugeri) dispute this, though it may be true in an absolute sense: no-one really knows how much resources there are in the earth, because generally we don’t look for resources until we need to. It is impossible to obtain an accurate picture of what the ultimate recoverable resource in any given commodity will be.

This is why it is misleading to talk in terms of “the easy oil”- sure, if there is such a category, it will be gone sooner, and be of relatively smaller supplies; but in fact in the case of hydrocarbons there are many many different grades; $20/barrel oil may only have lasted 100 years, but the supply of lower-grade $70-80 oil could last thousands of years, and each year we learn to use it more effectively and more efficiently.

Simon then explains how we should indeed extrapolate from this past experience, and assume innovation will save the day again… and again, even if from the engineers’ accounting viewpoint it seems crazy to think so. Unless there is hugely compelling reasons to think otherwise, the fossil-fuel party will continue for a very long time, and we will only give up on oil and gas when eventually a cheaper alternative is developed- this is the meaning of the saying “the stone age didn’t end because we ran out of stones, and the oil age won’t end because we run out of oil.”

So this is how the “cornucopians” support the apparently absurd and counter-intuitive belief that “the more we find, the more there is to find” and that we will never run out (or “peak”) in resources, including energy.

Leave a Comment
by skepteco on July 3, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Collapse/Die-off, Peak Oil, Uncategorized
Tagged , ,

Posted by skepteco on July 3, 2012

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/07/03/the-end-of-peak-oil/

The Perils of Prediction

A couple of weeks ago The Royal Society published a major new report called People and the Planet(pdf),which has drawn a lot of criticism for its apparent commitment to outdated “Limits to Growth” type thinking.

Who can know the future?

As Tim Worstall points out, while there is much to merit in the nuanced analysis of the main report, in the actual discussions of what we should do about both consumption and population,

it appears that we really are running out of “reserves” and that we should hand out condoms to all and sundry. That last isn’t all that surprising, as Jonathan Porritt is part of the team and he’s incapable of saying anything else on the subject.

Indeed, Porritt is not of course a scientist at all, more an activist, and his presence here which does in itself raise serious questions about the integrity of the study, if it means that the science is being mixed up with ideological interpretations and policy recommendations.

Similarly, Mark Lynas argues

Whilst using a lot of dark language about increasing numbers of humans globally, the report nowhere acknowledges that the current median level of total worldwide fertility has fallen dramatically from 5.6 in the 1970s to only 2.4 today. In other words we are already close to natural replacement levels in terms of total fertility – the reason that the absolute population will continue to grow to 9 billion or more is that more children are living long enough have their own children. To my mind a reduction in infant mortality and an increase in life expectancy are self-evidently good and desirable – and their impact on world population levels should be celebrated, not bemoaned.

Lynas goes onto to explain that the main failing of neo-Malthussianism is that it assumes resource consumption is a “zero-sum game”- that there is a finite pie to be shared by an expanding population, with only one possible outcome- not enough pie to go around. While this might be true in an absolute sense, it ignores technological developments which allow economic growth – “qualitative” rather than just “quantitative” growth to continue even as per capita, and ultimately even total impacts may plateau and even decline.

Chris Goodall at Carbon Commentary picks up on this theme by arguing that more resource consumption and growth need not necessarily result in greater impact. He uses the example of waste and rubbish:

Waste production per person in the UK peaked at around 520 kg a year in the year to March 2002. The latest two quarters figures are fifteen per cent below that level. The latest quarterly figures suggest a figure of about 443 kg. The decline from year to year isn’t smooth but is probably getting steeper.

As societies get richer, they become smarter, more eco-conscious and generally have a tendency to clean up our act. Goodall wryly continues

In contrast to what the Royal Society says, growth may be good for the environment. We waste less and are prepared to devote more cash to ecological protection. Technology improvements mean things last longer and use fewer physical resources to make. Regretfully, I have to say that the world’s most prestigious scientific institution should spend more time checking its facts.

(more…)

18 Comments
by skepteco on May 23, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Climate Change, Collapse/Die-off, Peak Oil
Tagged , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on May 23, 2012

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/05/23/the-perils-of-prediction/

Review: Peak Oil Personalities

Peak Oil Personalities

 

A Unique Insight into the Greatest Crisis Facing Mankind

Edited by Colin Campbell

Pbck; 337pp

Inspire Books 2011

Dr. Colin Campbell has collected short biographies from 27 contributors, many of them oil geologists and petroleum engineers, who have worked with Colin over the past 20 or more years on the issue of peak oil and its implications for the world economy.

One of the most striking impressions one gets from reading this fascinating collection is what a colorful life it must have been to be an oil geologist or engineer during the Golden Age of Oil.

His own chapter makes for colourful and entertaining reading on the professional career of one of the founders of the peak Oil movement.

Colin read geology at Oxford and went on to work for Texaco, BP and Amaco, taking assignments in Trinidad and Columbia, Australia and Papua New Guinea, and later in Europe, including Norway, before taking early retirement in 1989. He continued work as a consultant, and it was during this period that he published the first book on the subject of Peak Oil, The Golden Century of Oil 1950-2050, published in 1991. He lived in France for some years and then settled in Ballydehob, West Cork, in 1999.

Much of the early oil exploration in Latin America was adventurous and risky work:

{In 1958} I then had two heroic and fantastic years doing field work in the Andes and Magdalena Valley. It involved riding mules with about twelve Columbian field workers and camping in very remote and often bandit-infested country.

(more…)

1 Comment
by skepteco on December 28, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in 9-11, Climate Change, Collapse/Die-off, Peak Oil, Population
Tagged , , , , , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on December 28, 2011

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2011/12/28/review-peak-oil-personalities/

Colin Campbell interviewed

Dr. Colin Campbell, retired oil geologist and founder of ASPO, was recently interviewed by Walter-Ryan Purcell in West Cork.

Colin outlines his peak oil thesis which sees energy constraints as inextricably linked to the economic collapse: the bankers and bond-holders borrowed vast amounts from the future, predicated on continuing growth. This growth has stalled because, Colin believes, we passed a peak in world production (of “conventional” oil) in about 2006, and are now “peering over the abyss” at a future of declining energy supplies.

Hence the current financial collapse, which Colin sees as precipitating over the next few decades, a societal collapse which will inevitably lead to population collapse as a world with less liquid fuels must contract, and the heavily oil-dependent agricultural sector struggles to feed the world’s still growing population.

He points out that the trade in oil futures exceeds actual oil production 10-30-fold, and that financial traders do not like stability- it is in their interests to have fluctuating markets and boom-and-bust cycles.

The densely populated UK is in a “desperate situation”, and should look to controlling immigration; while Ireland, with good farmland and far less people is relatively better off and could look forward again to becoming the food basket for the UK. He suggests however that Ireland should strengthen its navy in order to fend off burgeoning numbers of refugees desperate to reach our green and fertile land.

China’s economic boom has arrived “at 5 minutes to midnight” and considering its depleting aquifers, horrendous pollution and huge population, the future for this giant country looks extraordinarily bleak, with the return of famine on a massive scale to look forward to;

whilst in dire need of radical reform, including the downsizing of its “completely unnecessary” military, with its vast natural resources and innovative and resilient populace, Colin sees the USA as being relatively well placed to adapt over time. (Interestingly, this viewpoint is in stark contrast to fellow-doomer Dmitri Orlov for example, who sees the plight of the US as being worse even than that faced by Russia in the 1990s.)

Colin feels a move to more regionalism, with regional currencies based on real measurements of value like work, will be necessary, pointing to the potential devolution of Scotland from the UK.

All is not bad news however. The survivors- those who can achieve local self-sufficiency and make a life for themselves outside of the global financial system, may still look to a bright future and a simpler existence that may even be preferable in some ways.

Thanks, Colin! And Happy Christmas :)

1 Comment
by skepteco on December 24, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Collapse/Die-off, Peak Oil, Population
Tagged , ,

Posted by skepteco on December 24, 2011

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2011/12/24/colin-campbell-interviewed/

My Peak Oil Story

Just received my copy of the new collection Peak Oil Personalities from Inspire Books.

Compiled by Dr. Colin Campbell, founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (ASPO) in 2000,the book includes essays by 25 contributors from both sides of the Atlantic- some of them oil geologists, describing how an understanding of Peak Oil has impacted their lives, and what consequences it will have for society.

I wrote the first draft of my chapter in March 2010; when Colin came back to me nearly a year later to ask if I had any revisions, I felt that my views had changed so much that he should leave me out of the book. Still keen to have my input, Colin persuaded me to just make some revisions to reflect my current thinking on the issue,so here I present the chapter as it appears in the book.

I will write a full review of this fascinating book in a subsequent post, and continue with a critical look at the Peak Oil movement in the coming weeks.

While reading my contribution again makes me squirm a little as I remember the evangelical fervor with which I preached the message of Peak Oil Doom for a few years, I think it still gives an important insight into some of the motivations and thinking behind aspects of the peak Oil movement.

My Peak Oil Story

My views on Peak Oil and its possible consequences for society have changed considerably from when I wrote the first draft for this collection.

I come from a small town in the south of England. My father was a tree pathologist, and my parents were keen gardeners. I certainly picked up a lot of my love for Nature and the outdoors from them, especially trees and woodlands, but also had a keen interest in social issues and politics, opting for sociology for my degree.
I was brought up with a strong conservation ethic, although far from austerity, and clearly remember the power cuts of the early 1970s, which I now understand to have been a result partly of the US peak in oil production around that time and the “First Oil Shock”. My father’s injunction to turn the lights out! and save energy is still with me today.

Sociology opened my eyes to the complexities of human behavior and the injustices of society, but rather than continuing with any political activism, I opted for solutions: learning to grow my own food and become more self-sufficient, rather than continuing to depend on an industrial system that seemed both inhumane and unsustainable, became my main priority.

In 1989, I completed my first course in Permaculture Design in Shropshire. Permaculture fitted my needs and aspirations perfectly: a practical approach that leads to self-reliance through simple, appropriate design solutions and a low-tech approach with the emphasis being on working with nature.

I was, by this time, already convinced that industrial society’s days were numbered: the big question was always: how long before major systems failures? How long before collapse?
In a burgeoning world population, ever-increasing calls for more growth and consumption in the industrial world, pollution, species extinction… it seemed clear that something would have to give. (more…)

Leave a Comment
by skepteco on December 17, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Collapse/Die-off, Peak Oil, Population, Transition Towns
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on December 17, 2011

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/my-peak-oil-story/

Heinberg and the End of Growth

Last month doyen of the Peak Oil movement Richard Heinberg had a piece in the Guardian called Life after the End of Economic Growth..

I first came across Heinberg in the cult peak-oil classic documentary The End of Suburbia and then went on to read some of his books, starting with his 2003 The Party’s Over.

Heinberg’s basic argument is that we are at a turning point of history: the rapid development of industrial civilization over the past 200 years has been possible largely because of the extraction and combustion of easily available fossil fuels, primarily oil, which has facilitated the rapid expansion of populations, cities and a consumer-oriented middle-class. With the peaking of world oil production imminent, approximating the “half-way stage” in oil consumption- this period is now coming to an end. In the future, energy will be more expensive, and we could be looking at rapid economic contraction, or even collapse, as the gains of the modern era are swept away by resource constraints, leading to rationing and possibly even international conflicts over the last drops of the unique and precious energy-dense black liquid we all have come to depend on so much.

(more…)

1 Comment
by skepteco on December 10, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Collapse/Die-off, Peak Oil
Tagged , , ,

Posted by skepteco on December 10, 2011

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/heinberg-and-the-end-of-growth/

Transition Towns Interview

Earlier this year the journalist James Gray interviewed me to get my views on the Transition Town movement which I had been peripherally involved with during its inception in Kinsale six years ago.
James never got around to publishing so I’m posting it here as I wrote it back in March, with a couple of updates as indicated:

James Gray interviews me on Transition Towns
Mar 31st 2011

JG: Could you briefly explain who you are, what you do and how you became involved in the Transition movement?

My name is Graham Strouts, I teach Permaculture and Green Building at Kinsale College of Further Education, which was the birth place of Transition Towns.

The course I teach was founded 10 years ago by Rob Hopkins and I took over from him when he moved to Totnes and started the Transition Towns Network.

I like to think I played a small but crucial role in TT- it was myself who gave Rob his first copy of The End of Suburbia, the film that first turned me onto the concept of Peak Oil which was about 6 years ago. Rob immediately turned this into a class project, the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan, still available by download from his website. We were very excited about peak Oil at the time- I was then a very typical environmentalist, fairly anti-modernist, anti-technology and convinced the world was going to hell in a handcart. For myself and my colleagues, Peak Oil was a huge opportunity to say, hey, now we know the end of civilization is coming and we even have a date- Peak Oil was set to occur in the next few years, by round about now, according to oil geologist Colin Campbell and many other Peak Oil Doomers, so this was seen as a great opportunity to galvanise the complacent public to mend their evil ways of pursuing mindless consumerism and growth and start growing vegetables and cycling.

I guess I got caught up in the wave of Transition in its early stages also because I was jumping into Rob’s fairly large boots in the college and it was easy to generate interest in the new project. I began touring the country giving Peak Oil talks, explaining how growth was finished, new technologies were a fantasy, we would all be better off living close to nature and with simpler lifestyles.

Although I was involved with the very first meetings of Transition Towns in Kinsale, I actually live an hour-and-a-half away in West Cork so soon dropped out; so in fact I have had no direct involvement with Transition Towns at all since then. In fact, my only involvement seems to have become one of its most strident critics on my Zone5.org blog!

(more…)

18 Comments
by skepteco on November 3, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Alternative medicine, Anthroposophy, Climate Change, Collapse/Die-off, Genetic Engineering, New Age, Organics, Peak Oil
Tagged , , , ,

Posted by skepteco on November 3, 2011

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2011/11/03/transition-towns-interview/

7 Billion Minds, 7 Billion Hearts

Today we are told the world’s population has reached 7billion. For many environmentalists concerns about population growth remains a critical issue, overwhelming all others, as they see more and more people meaning more and more resources being consumed and more and more pollution and CO2 being produced.

William Stanton, in his 2003 book The Rapid Growth of Human populations 1750-2000 lists graph after graph showing how populations have soared during the industrial era.

“Lemmings and locusts are classic examples of animals whose numbers explode when conditions are favourable and crash when they run out of resources. Does a population crash, lemming style, await our species?”

Al Bartlett is an influential voice in the Peak Oil movement; in his “Laws of Sustainability” his point “F” under the First Law states for example:

“Persons who suggest that sustainability can be achieved without stopping population growth are misleading themselves and others.”

One problem with this idea is that “sustainability” is not clearly defined, and implies a static state of affairs which may never be achievable in practice, while demographic trends are by their very nature fluid.
(more…)

7 Comments
by skepteco on October 31, 2011  •  Permalink
Posted in Peak Oil, Population

Posted by skepteco on October 31, 2011

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/7-billion-hearts-and-minds/

« Older Posts
Follow

Get every new post delivered to your Inbox.

Join 605 other followers