The original post was deleted from ThinkorSwim, but I re-posted the extensive comments here.

Among other things, John distinguished himself during this debate by becoming perhaps the first- and last- person to represent temperature changes in percentage terms:

John Gibbons February 16, 2011 at 09:11:

Just in case you’re not familiar with the basic science (and I really am now beginning to wonder), the current global average surface temp. is c.14.5C. Add 4C to that in half a century and you have increased the average surface temp by over 25%.

He does acknowledge this mistake later in the thread, but apparently still regards himself as someone qualified to talk about climate change and its potential impacts, as evidenced in his recent opinion piece in the Irish Times:

GLOBALLY, 2010 was a year of weather-related disasters on an almost unprecedented scale. Last year was worse, with a record $380 billion in economic losses attributed to “natural” disasters, many climate-related, according to insurance giant Munich Re.

Few experts expect to see any break in this upward trend this year, or any time soon. Instead, as record emissions of greenhouse gases continue unabated, the climate system is now behaving precisely as scientists have been projecting for decades. The rapid build-up of energy in the system is the “engine” that is fuelling extremes, from storms and floods to severe droughts.

As pointed out on Bishop Hill, a Scientific American article shows that much of the cost of disasters last year was not attributable to man-made climate change, in fact was not even weather related:

Almost two-thirds of 2011′s exceptionally high costs are attributable to two disasters unrelated to climate and weather: the magnitude-9.0 earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan in March, and February’s comparatively small but unusually destructive magnitude-6.3 quake in New Zealand.

In the Bishop Hill thread, Richard Toll suggests a plausible vested interest in climate alarmism amongst the insurance industry:

Note that Munich Re enjoys generous tax treatment on its financial reserves. These terms were extended when the Greens were in power. In return, Munich Re agreed to support the climate agenda.

Gibbons goes onto lament the failure of the media to continue engage with climate change or give it the attention he feels it deserves, warning:

Given the complexity of the issues involved, non-specialist journalists are often easy meat to be drawn into spurious “debates” which give unwarranted airtime to contrarians and industry shills (this is known as bias-in-balance).

But this seems to a spurious debate that John Gibbons himself is trying to draw us all into, even though anyone who is familiar with the climate change debate will be aware that insurance figures are at least as affected by things like increasing population and wealth than by extreme weather, never mind tsunamis and earthquakes- as Lomborg among others explains in his excellent, peer-reviewed 2001 book The Skeptical Environmentalist.

Gibbons was jumped on for this misrepresentation of the facts by commentators on the IT piece of course, and he responds on his own blog with the preface:

The posting has been viewed over 7,500 times and has attracted 90 user comments, with the usual generous contributions from skeptics/deniers, who swarm like flies on any article or commentary that dares ‘join the dots’ between weather disasters and the larger picture involving the slow death spiral of our gravely damaged biosphere.

No, John, the reason you are being criticized for this egregious mistake is not because people are “deniers” funded by right-wing think tanks, or even necessarily climate skeptics, but because you are wrong. That you still present yourself as some kind of authority on climate science is indeed extraordinary, and suggests either grandiose self-delusion, or willful blindness, possibly in the service of some kind of “virtuous corruption”.

I don’t like the epithet “denialist” at the best of times- it is ideologically laden and usually misrepresents other people’s actual positions, apart from being completely inappropriate. But reading articles like this, I really do begin to wonder to which side of the climate debate it would be most suitably applied to.

He appears somewhat incongrously in the New Age film Anima Mundi, alongside Deep Ecologist John Seed, Holistic “Science” tutor at Schumacher College Stephen Harding, 9-11 conspiracy theorist Mike Ruppert and Anthroposophist Dr Mark O’Meadhra;

and also took part in a recent round table discussion with Dmitri Orlov, James Kunstler, Nicole Foss and Richard Heinberg, discussing peak oil and the fate of civilisation.

During the discussion, Chomsky cites Daniel Yergin, author of The Prize and The Quest- two books about the oil industry, and is chalenged by Kunstler who askes him,

I hope you don’t take Mr. Yergin seriously. He’s the oil industry’s chief public relations prostitute.

to which the venerable man responded somewhat testily,

Oh, absolutely not. He’s a serious analyst and the same is true of the Financial Times and others. But that’s missing the point. Suppose he’s right. Then it’s a disaster.

Earlier, Nicole Foss had claimed that shale gas was not all it has been frakked up to be:

Shale gas is an absolute mirage. Right now, they’re using what’s left of conventional natural gas–a whole gas field from Northern Alberta–for the purpose of tar sands. But conventional natural gas in North America peaked in 2001. When we realize we actually do not have a hundred year’s worth of shale gas sitting in the wings–we might have five–then all of the sudden we’re going to realize natural gas is not going to be cheap in the future.

Now, Kunstler may well be correct about Yergin- there are plenty of compelling reasons to believe that oil has peaked and the world will find it harder and harder to fill the gap of diminishing production from existing wells with either new discoveries or new technology.

So the shale gas issue is critical because it is being widely hailed as the bridge fuel to a renewable future which will slowly begin to substitute for oil in transport over the next few decades until renewable energy improves or new technology is developed.

The IEA has recently upgraded reserve estimates to in excess of 250 years of global supplies of shale gas- how can Foss’ and the other doomers certainty that it will be more like 5 years possibly be reconciled with this?

The truth may be somewhere in between. Feasta have a good review of the different views on this here. A recent Deutsche Bank report concludes:

Whilst we think that EU shale-gas deposits certainly have the potential to contribute meaningfully to indigenous production over the next 10-20 years, we do not expect the impact of shale-gas production on EU gas prices to be anywhere near as great as has been the case with US shale-gas production.

Shale gas is still a new technology to be tried on any scale outside the US, and explorations are only just beginning in most of the world,(and already meeting widespread opposition from local groups who balk at having to pay the environmental cost for fossil energy they have been used to importing from distant countries they rarely visit) so ongoing improvements in technology and discoveries of this particular hydrocarbon over the next decades can be expected. It may not be as cheap in the future as is being hyped, but it does still appear to represent an example of a new technology that peak-oilers like Kunstler have always dismissed.

Medialens lament the fading faculties of the grand old man of the Left:

Kunstler’s rejoinder that Yergin is the chief public relations prostitute of the oil industry is dead on the bullseye, and apparently Noam hasn’t caught up with that reality yet. Nor does he seem to grasp that there is no longer any possible doubt that global oil production has peaked decidedly during the past decade. This is tragic to witness. But time and weariness stymie us all in the end. Commiserations, and respect as ever for this great old man.

What is more interesting is what the panelists all readily agree to- that it would be worse if Yergin is right and sufficient energy resources are available to offset collapse and allow civilisation to continue.

Chomsky explains:

The more peak oil is removed, the worse off we are and I think that ought to be kept in mind. The point before about the huge programs in the 1950s and since to shift us to a fossil fueled based economy and why that worked and why green technology doesn’t, I don’t think it’s a matter of us having made that decision, that has to do with corporate profits, and the government’s commitment to maximizing corporate profits. The highway act of the 1950s was not put to public judgment, any more than the development of computers and the internet was. These are government programs that are carried out in the interests of concentrations of private capital, which have an enormous influence on government policy and the population is left out of it.

So the transition to oil was driven by the drive for corporate profits and nothing to do with the energy density of oil and how it can do more work for us and thereby improve living standards in myriad ways. Chomsky would apparently have us believe that industrialisation brought no benefits at all and we would not have chosen it but for the greed of the corporations and a complicit government.

Chomsky may be growing senile, or he may have been coming from a very different position to the peak-oilers, more concerned with the horror of the prospect of another century of American hegemony than with the more mundane issues of irreversible resource depletion, with associated dangers of collapse, resource wars, famines, die-offs, and gang-warfare.

Orlov, Kunstler and Heinberg however, having written copiously about the likelihood of such events, have no such excuse. Don’t you just get the smallest feeling that their conviction that shale gas, for example, is a mirage, may be slightly colored by their death-wish for the modern world?

In truth, Rob has always been a vocal Warrior for Woo.

By a curious if not actually cosmic synchronicity, the very day I posted the last item on woo in permaculture, Rob Hopkins was posting a parallel post on Transition Culture about more woo, this time in the form of a film I was previously unaware of called Thrive:

What do you do when you are the heir to the Proctor and Gamble fortune and you have spent years surrounding yourself with new agey thinking and conspiracy theories? You make a film like ‘Thrive‘, the latest conspiracy theory movie that is popping up all over the place. I’ve lost count of the number of people who have asked me “have you seen ‘Thrive’?” Well I have now, and, to be frank, it’s dangerous tosh which deserves little other than our derision. It is also a very useful opportunity to look at a worldview which, according to Georgia Kelly writing at Huffington Post, masks “a reactionary, libertarian political agenda that stands in jarring contrast with the soothing tone of the presentation”.

Since the post was complimentary to my own and raising similar questions, I joined in the debate and sent in this comment:

Thanks Rob
I hadn’t heard of this film previously, thanks for alerting me! I’ll hardly be rushing out to view it, and of course you are absolutely right to challenge fantasies of conspiracy theories and free- energy machines.

There does seem to be a considerable cross-over with a lot of stuff Transition and the Greens/Left are also infected with that seems impossible to overlook- as Robert correctly states above King of Woo Deepak Chopra is also a darling of the Schumacher College of Woo where you also teach:

http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2011/11/20/schumacher-woo-macher/

Can we expect to see from you as forthright an expose of the woo promoted by this new film, as you have done for Thrive?:
-
featuring Holmgren, John Seed and Stephen Harding (also of Schumacher)and others:

http://animamundimovie.com/

Permaculture and transition are also full of woo, and Im not the only one to have an issue with this:
http://skepteco.wordpress.com/2012/01/09/does-the-spiritual-have-a-place-in-permaculture/

The comment was held in moderation- and then I received this email from Rob:

Graham

Thanks for your comment. I think at this stage, given that your engagement with me has descended to point of labeling me “a professional purveyor of woo”, and that you quite clearly disagree with virtually everything that is talked about on Transition Culture and take an overtly antagonistic stance to it, if we just agree to disagree, and I don’t post on Skepteco and I don’t post your comments on Transition Culture. Your ongoing engagement is puzzling, like a lover of beef continually posting comments on a forum for vegans and berating them all for not sharing his culinary passions. Unless you post anything that defames Transition or myself personally, I will no longer go anywhere near Skepteco, and will no longer post your comments on Transition Culture unless you feel that I have personally slighted you in some way (unlikely, but do let me know). It’s a shame, but we have done the ‘Is Transition riven with woo’ rubbish to death I feel, and there is little to be gained from going over it again and again. You think it is, I think you are wrong. It’s your passion, your Inquisition, and it’s not one I share to anything like the same extent. There we go.

Best of luck
Rob

Now, before continuing I should address the issue of my charge that Rob is “a professional purveyor of woo”.
This was in a comment after my post on Christopher Hitchens in which Rob concluded his case against the Iraq war by saying:

Ah but then presumably the reason I don’t think it was a supportable idea was because I’m not ‘rational’ enough?

I have to admit that, since I have been debating Rob for several years on a wide range of topics such Crop Circles, alternative medicine and Anthroposophy, I found it irresistible to respond to this direct question thus:

@Rob Hopkins- I would not be one to accuse you of being “rational”- you are in fact a professional promoter of woo (among other things)-

-the “(among other things)” being carefully added in because naturally I do not think that all Rob does is promote woo. However, I meant it in a factual, evidence-based kind of sense, with specific reference to the Transition publications that bear Rob’s name:

Transition Handbook,(2008) p. 110:

..Conventional and complimentary practitioners are seen very much as two sides of the same coin

Transition Timeline (2009) Shaun Chamberlin (Forward by Rob Hopkins)

p.82:

What used to be known as “alternative medicines” were embraced, as practices like herbalism, acupuncture, massage and osteopathy became core pillars of public healthcare, with a big investment in teaching these skills
leading to a blossoming of independent regulated practitioners in most communities.

Transition in Action (2010)
p.89

Strong and active group of local biodynamic farmers and growers

p.111 Health and Wellbeing

Local evening classes help people to measure their own energy levels through kinesiology and biofeedback

I have previously asked Rob if there is any woo in the new book Transition Companion but have not had a response. (Since I havn’t managed to get my hands on a copy yet I would be obliged if anyone could help me on this.)

On this last example from the Transition in Action, Rob defended the inclusion of kinesiology, saying:

The Totnes EDAP came about from asking many hundreds of people for their vision of how Totnes might most successfully navigate energy descent, and see that as an opportunity. As such, it contains the input of all those people, their ideas, their visions. You may be able to sit in your intellectual ivory tower and rubbish things because you see instances where peoples’ understanding of science doesn’t match yours, but as someone working with the diverse, messy, vibrant thing that is a community, I don’t have that luxury. I am not going to take ideas and suggestions offered in good faith by all those people and edit out all those I disagree with. That would be arrogant, disrespectful and self-defeating.

Note that he doesn’t deny that kinesiology is nonsense- and dangerous- but rather exasperatedly berates me for not appreciating the collaborative process that went into the production of the Totnes EDAP. Earlier he had described how his attempts to include Critical Thinking as one of the core themes in the Transition model was perceived as just sounding too clever, and was divisive and so was dropped. I applaud his efforts to at least try, but he now seems to have given up completely- rather than supporting my stance (which to his credit Rob has at least tried to do) he has acquiesced to the demands of those who want to co-opt Transition to promote their own superstitions.

To me, this just smacks of moral cowardice. Rejecting a rational approach in the context of an important and influential global movement is a mistake which will certainly not be without consequences.

Which brings us to the issue of the film Thrive, which Rob angrily denounces because, well, it is full of woo:

Wheeled out as ‘experts’ to support the film’s arguments are Deepak Chopra and, erm, David Icke, among others. Gamble is keen on talking about “my research”, yet his research, such as it is, is so undemanding that I am reminded of Sir Terry Frost’s words, “if you know before you look, you cannot see for knowing”. Gamble wheels out the classic conspiracy theorists’ gambit, “could I be wrong? Perhaps. But what if I’m not?” No, you are wrong. And even if you were right, you have presented us with so little evidence to back up you claims that you would have no way of knowing whether you were right or not.

But this is a slightly different kind of woo, coming as it does from the Right, advocating free energy machines, UFOs and conspiracy theories by the bucket load- all apparently to hide a libertarian agenda of no government and no taxes.

What is fascinating is the comments which were posted on the blog, several of which take umbrage not only against dictatorial tone- “to be frank, it’s dangerous tosh which deserves little other than our derision…Avoid.”- but also his conclusions. Free energy appears to be quite popular as a possibility amongst some of the Transition supporters it seems; and reducing the role of government and lowering taxes in favor of more community-based and self-reliant approaches seem on the face of it quite compatible with the aims of Transition.

Doug Atkins says:

…But you are dead wrong about this, Rob. And your position reveals a danger about Transition: that it appears to feel that peak oil is identical to energy power-down, and that power-down needs to be the basis for cultural transition….

So my question is, given that kinesiology, say, is really completely on the same basis as free energy or UFOs in terms of its credibility, and at least some Transitioners apparently feel they would like the movement to be open to such things, how come Rob takes such a strident stance against some kinds of woo, but not other kinds? Is not all woo equal under the evidence? Is Transition taking a partisan and divisive approach to certain types of woo which are considered perhaps inferior or unworthy for this august organisation?

If those commentators who liked Thrive had partaken in the collaborative writing of the Totnes Energy Descent Action Plan would their views on Free Energy etc have been excluded- or perhaps included, alongside all the other woo?

Other points in Rob’s otherwise interesting review may not have been thought through too clearly, or may reveal again an some of the underlying contradiction within Transition, especially concerning renewable energy and climate change policies:

I would argue that it is only the realisation that we are nearing the end of the age of cheap energy, cheap fossil fuels, that is finally bringing some sense, some awareness of the fact that we live on a finite planet and that we need to live more responsibly.

This is a tautology- if we had free, inexhaustible energy, we wouldn’t be on a finite planet. The fact that we have to face limits is necessary to teach us that… we have limits.

One could argue from a religious or moralistic standpoint, that we would be like spoiled children if we had all this free energy- that we need limits and hardship “for our own good”-(actually, as David Holmgren taught me in a class on systems theory, if we had free energy, we would be able to overcome all other limits of resources- eg we could desalinate the oceans, fly to other planets etc..). Perhaps that is what is being argued here- that technology and abundant energy is just no good, whether “free” or otherwise. (Unless it is useless, like solar panels .)

Free Energy that involves breaking the laws of physics is as near to impossible as you can get; but new nukes- Integral Fast Reactors, Thorium reactors- could conceivably replace fossil fuels and allow the continuance of Civilization as we know it- something Rob is of course totally opposed to, as is his right; but while many still oppose nuclear, it is not deluded to consider its increasing relevance plausible and perhaps even urgent- this would however be rather inconvenient for the Transition narrative.

As I read the review, while agreeing of course with much of it, I wondered why Rob saw it necessary to take such a strident stance against it when there is so much similar nonsense around, but when I saw the comments I realized that Transition itself has already been infiltrated by this kind of thinking, that it may be a threat within the movement.

There may also be competition with Transition from outside groups, for example the Occupy Totnes Movement promoted the film Thrive in December.

There are many cross-overs as well between the libertarian woo and the Earth religion woo. The belief that there is a conspiracy to suppress alternative medicine (wish there was!) for example is of course what most greeny people who like that sort of thing believe. This kind of conspiracy thinking is exactly what quacks want people to believe.

Letting any kind of woo go unchallenged will naturally permit the entry of all manner of noxious beliefs into your movement, because they are fundamentally anti-science and therefore reactionary.

It is, of course, Rob’s choice if he wants to ban me from his forum. But his is not only a personal blog, but the mouthpiece for a global environmental movement. Excluding the moderate voice of reason that I try to represent in my own small way may not be the most politically astute move for a man under pressure from David Icke fans.

I will return to the issue of the cross-over between libertarian- and earth-religion beliefs in a forthcoming post.

I personally often feel frustrated that too many permaculturists are mixing subjective spiritual/metaphysical/religious elements into their courses, and are thereby helping to ensure permaculture is relegated to the periphery rather than — as desperately needs to happen — being taken up broad scale by all people everywhere, regardless of their culture and preferred belief system.

As permaculture teacher myself, this is an issue I have been wrestling with myself for the past several years, in the PC (permaculture) movement as well as the wider environmental movement.

The concern is that Permaculture Design Courses- which are typically run over 10 days or two weeks as residential courses- are being diluted and compromised by some teachers who include time or even give classes on spiritual beliefs and practices, including Shamanism, yoga, and other aspects of New Age or Earth religion.

Apart from just taking up time, and alienating some people, Mackintosh also makes the excellent point that this kind of New Age spirituality that is clearly so strongly connected with permaculture is potentially just one of many interpretations, and if permaculture aims to be inclusive- which is often one of the justification for “being open” to New Age stuff- it would also need to embrace and facilitate every other spiritual and religious belief under the sun, from Islam to Mormonism.

I was also pleased to see this early quote from Bill Mollison, the co-creator of permaculture, who clearly saw this as an issue right from the start and took a dim view of the fairy-worshippers:

Bill Mollison

As I have often been accused of lacking that set of credulity, mystification, modern myth and hogwash that passes today for New Age Spirituality, I cheerfully plead guilty. Unqualified belief, of any breed, disempowers any individuals by restricting their information.

Thus, permaculture is not biodynamics, nor does it deal in fairies, devas, elves, after-life, apparitions or phenomena not verifiable by every person from their own experience, or making their own experiments. We permaculture teachers seek to empower any person by practical model-making and applied work, or data based on verifiable investigations.

-Bill Mollison, Travels in Dreams

One commentator told of the anecdote of the time Mollison was watching lions with some tribesmen in Africa. As the lions became interested in them and moved closer, the Australian became nervous. “Don’t worry,” said his guides, “If we get eaten by lion, we come back as lion.”
Unconvinced, Bill wryly responded, “If I get eaten by lion, I come back as lion -shit”.

Mackintosh suggests that the PRI will actually write guidelines for teachers and refuse to accredit teachers who use PCDs as a vehicle for their religion. This is an excellent initiative, and the first case I know of where an accreditation body is making such a ruling.

“In short, I plead for all permaculture teachers to leave their subjective beliefs at the door when they begin to teach”.

The problem is, where to draw the line, and my own view is, this issue cuts much deeper than just guidelines for teachers. For a start, I would take issue with Mackintosh’s own view of spirituality, which he takes pains to defend:

I want to clearly express that I have nothing against spirituality — indeed, it is clear that mankind’s lack of spiritual development is a central cause of our modern woes. Spirituality goes beyond hedonism and living for the moment, and becomes inclusive of concepts of altruism and objectivity and can lift a man above his baser instincts to drive him to become a force for good in the world. Man’s spirituality grants him the ability to think beyond necessity, beyond desire, so he can make decisions based on principle.

What is needed here is a definition- what, exactly, is “spirituality”? I would argue that for most people it means something essentially “religious”- not necessarily in the formal sense of an established Church, but definitely in the sense of unsubstantiated beliefs in Another Realm- the Spiritual Realm- which in some important way transcends this mortal realm, but which we can interact with in meaningful ways- indeed, I would suggest that spiritual beliefs always claim to be over and above, more important than this realm- and often map on in some important ways onto the Judeo-Christian myth of a Fall from the garden of Eden- in other words, New Age spirituality tends to point to a Higher World that transcends the Fallen, sullied and sinful material world- which is where we actually do, say, permaculture design.

What does Mackintosh mean by the statement it is clear that mankind’s lack of spiritual development is a central cause of our modern woes.? What is “spiritual development”? and why should it have contributed to our woes? What woes, exactly?

This kind of viewpoint is reflected in some of the (well over 100) comments below the article. Many agree that spirituality should not be mixed in with PCDs but also expressed spiritual views themselves; while a few seemed to feel that spirituality and permaculture are intertwined, that they are really part of the same thing, that it is not practical to try to separate them.

Permaculture was created in 1970 by Australian ecologists Bill Mollison and David Holmgren as a system of sustainable landscape design, with an emphasis on learning from nature, cycling energy and nutrient flows, diversity, edge, polycultures and perennial food crops. Although Mollison used to joke that Permaculture is “revolution disguised as organic gardening” over time it became much broader than just landscape design, and began to embrace “softer” areas, such as community and personal development.

Some of the history of this is described in the book Living Lightly: Travels in Post-Consumer Society by Walter Schwarz. Schwarz visited Crystal Waters Eco-village in Australia, which had been designed by architect and permaculture designer Max Lindegger

As the eco-villagers moved in and the community developed, new ideas emerged about how permaculture was to be taught, and some people felt there were limitations in the physical lay-out of the village that did not perhaps fully facilitate the development of an integral community. This resulted in 1994 the publication of, The Manual for Teaching Permaculture Creatively. by Robin Clayfield and Skye. A rejection of traditional “chalk and talk” methods of teaching, this new approach aimed to focus on more participative processes in teaching permaculture design, bringing out the best in the students, as well as attempting to break down the division between students and teachers.

While this might have pioneered a more fluid and accessible teaching technique, it may also have begin to open the door to a greater emphasis on permaculture as “personal development” which then lead onto all manner of woo and spirituality.

This wider reach was formalised in 2003 with the publication of David Holmgren’s Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability in which he presented the Permaculture Flower, which covered 7 Domains of permaculture Activity, which, in addition to the traditional areas of “Earth Care and Nature Stewardship”, “Tools and Technology” and “The Built Environment” included so-called “invisible structures” of “Land Governance and Community Tenure” and “Health and Spiritual Well-Being”. A summary of the Ethics and Principles can be read here.

Permaculture Flower

Permaculture had always included three ethics which were really the starting point of the approach, singling it out from purely utilitarian systems of design: Earth Care, People Care and Fair Shares. It was this People Care aspect that seems to have gained in significance over the years, and it is through this ethic that I think many people see as the entry route for spirituality.

Holmgren addresses the issue of spirituality in permaculture early in the book:

Although permaculture can be reasonably seen as essentially materialist and scientific, it depends on an ecological perspective. Spiritual beliefs about a higher purpose in nature have been universal and defining features in all cultures before scientific rationalism. We ignore this aspect of sustainable cultures at our peril.

I think Holmgren is making a couple of logical fallacies here. Firstly, it is not clear to me that earlier cultures were actually “sustainable”- even though it may look that way to us because their way of life remained stable for long periods of time. Their populations were small and the available land to migrate into was almost inexhaustible- at least for thousands of years. But they did have an impact, perhaps more than we would like to think, and eventually, incrementally, over-hunting and other impacts- hunting was done in many cases by burning the understorey of the forest to flush out game- may have played a contributory role in nudging us towards domestication of plants and animals and the development of agriculture.

We may have been, as Richard Leakey suggests in The Sixth Extinction been responsible to wiping out all the mega-fauna of the Americas as we migrated down through that continent, and possibly, earlier still, may even had played a foul hand in the extermination of our cousins the Neanderthals.

In any case it would take some fairly convincing evidence that our animistic superstitions represented some kind of higher spiritual/ecological consciousness- I consider this to be a myth.

But Holmgren continues:

The more we understand the world through the lens of system thinking and ecology, the more we see the wisdom in spiritual perspectives and traditions. The same process has happened in the filed of psychology, especially Jungian psychology. Many thinkers and writers have suggested that the most progressive aspects of science are moving towards a union with the universal aspects of spiritual belief. Rudolf Steiner’s spiritual science, although generally ignored, is a past attempt at union that has since borne some practical fruits in the fields of education (Waldorf schools) and agriculture (biodynamics).

This appears to be an allusion to the New Age belief that science and spiritual beliefs are somehow merging with the New Sciences of Quantum physics- something that is not however subscribed to by quantum scientists.

Neither Jungian psychology nor Steiner’s Anthroposophy have any basis in science. For Holmgren to cite Steiner as being on some sort of vanguard of this supposed union is a serious mistake. Steiner was a pure mystic whos whacky beliefs were not in any way connected to science- he apparently just made the whole lot up from his not inconsiderable imaginative powers. His beliefs were however of their time and place, and, based as they were on a system of racist karma, they were adopted by some high-ranking members of the Nazi party who saw an affinity between Steiner and their own occult views of Blut und Boden, the esoteric link between the chosen race and the Fatherland.

The Nazis were the first to use Biodynamics on a wide scale- a magical system based on astrology,
rejecting it only later more from a sense of it competing with their own ideology, and more materialistic influences pushing for industrialisation, than anything else.

I find Biodynamics a source of fascination amongst many permaculture students- it seems to nearly always crop up, and claims a strong loyalty from its followers, who strongly resist any attempt to deconstruct it.

But are these values ones that permaculture wants in any way to support or embrace?

Holmgren goes on:

Permaculture attracts many raised in a culture of scientific rationalism because its holism does not depend on a spiritual dimension. For others, permaculture reinforces their spiritual beliefs, even if these are simply a basic animism that recognises the earth is alive and, in some unknowable way, conscious. For most people on the planet, the spiritual and rational still coexist in some fashion. Can we really imagine a sustainable world without spiritual life in some form?

As an atheist and secularist, I would say emphatically, “Yes”- in fact- leaving aside what we might actually mean by “sustainable” (a word rarely defined) that this is the only world worth hoping for- one based on rational and secular values and not influenced too much if at all by people who believe in fairies.

Holmgren then goes on to finish the section with a quite contradictory passage in which he proclaims he is proud of his atheist upbringing, yet feels himself being drawn towards a spiritual awareness… and yet “for the present, my own interpretation of the ethical principles of permaculture rests firmly on rational and humanist foundations”.

One might begin to wonder just how firm those foundations really are, especially since Holmgren now appears in a recent film, Anima Mundi, alongside Stephen Harding (Holistic Science in Schumacher), John Seed (Deep Ecology- an Earth religion), 9-11 conspiracy theorist Mike Ruppert and purveyor of Anthroposophical medicine Dr Mark O’Meadhra.

I have not seen the movie but the clip on the website and the cast imply Holmgren has aligned permaculture unequivocally with New Age religion and a motley crew of dubious quacks and snake-oil salesmen.

The view that lack of spiritual development is one of our main problems is very prominent in the wider environmental movement, and also strongly expressed in Deep Ecology for example, an earth Religion which is closely connected to Permaculture. Along with Anthroposophy this belief advocates an anti-modernist, anti-technology agenda, that holds that when we lost our connection to the Earth and consequently our spiritual path, we embarked on a path of environmental destruction, loss of community and Sense of Belonging, materialism, consumerism, that lead eventually to where we are today, with meaningless empty lives governed by Twitter and Reality TV.

The Path back, we are told, is to adopt a simpler way of life in harmony with Nature’s cycles. A good way to do this is to take cheap flights to attend Permaculture courses in natural, unspoilt places where the people still live in harmony with Nature.

An alternative view of course is that it is only the emergence of science and rationality that have brought us out of the dark Ages of superstition and religion, and that the hard-won values of the Enlightenment are amongst humanities crowning achievements. According to this narrative, Permaculture and green movement are products of the modern, industrial world, not responses to it.

This is best explained by looking at Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs model, which does in fact feature on the curriculum of many permaculture courses; rather than being a system that copies traditional knowledge, permaculture is best seen as something that can be made use of once people’s basic needs are met, something that has only really happened with the advent of industrialization.

Before then, most people lived rather precarious and short lives, often under the psychological stress of belief in witches and devils and accompanying unappetizing practices which at times included cannibalism, human sacrifice, bride price and tribal warfare.

Therein lies the difficulty with this issue. It is not surprising that permaculture has become infected with New Age beliefs of all kinds, including Biodynamics and all manner of alternative medicine and spiritual practices, because it has emerged clearly as part of an anti-modernist agenda. How can it embrace science when science is seen to represent a way of thinking and an approach to reality which is the fundamental cause of our problems? How can we even have a rational discussion about this when rationality itself is rejected as the Devil’s work?

The comment thread under Mackintosh’s article contains several encouraging comments from those who are aware that this is a serious issue for permaculture; but it also includes comments from those who have no understanding of the scientific method. Anyone who has crossed swords with a homeopath will know the script: science is just another belief system, just another religion.

Permaculture does have a lot to offer the landscape designer who wants to use energy efficient methods and grow food, build houses and protect soil. But unless the permaculture movement as a whole rejects these corrosive elements of “spirituality” and gets over the basic issue of epistemology regarding science and how real knowledge is acquired it will likely be more a malevolent influence than a progressive one, and will never live up to its loft aspirations of making the world a better place.

Plait begins by referring to Bryce as of “the far-right think-tank Manhattan Institute”.

That is worth a double-take and alarm-bells- far-right?? In conventional parlance, the “far-right” is a term reserved for neo-Nazis and fascists. This most certainly does not apply to the Manhattan Institute, which might better be described as “libertarian”. By opening with this egregious error Plait sets out his stall as taking a political stance on the issues he examines- while hiding behind science and skepticism.

Plait calls the article “one of the most head-asplodey antiscience climate change denial pieces I have seen in a while- and I’ve seen a few” ignoring that Bryce’s piece clearly identifies itself as being, not about climate science per se, but concerning what he sees as “five obvious truths about the climate-change issue.”

This is what usually happens when so-called “warmists” or those who accept unquestioningly the consensus view of climate change, namely that this is the most pressing issue facing us and we must respond immediately with drastic CO2 cuts and international treaties if we are to save the planet and humanity- examine the climate change issue- science and policy and politics are confused, and claims are made to the effect that, since in their view “the science is settled”, so must be the policy response.

Plait goes on to say the article is “almost a textbook case in logical fallacy”, an attempt to “smear the reality” of climate change, but then skips the first four points of Bryce’s article- ie. the bulk of it- because in these Bryce “doesn’t actually deal with science and makes points that aren’t all that salient to the issue”.

But as already made clear, the issue Bryce is addressing is much broader than just the science, and since this is a topic that is indisputably highly politicized- underlined by Plait’s opening salvo of the “far-right” connection- the issues Bryce raises appear to be extremely pertinent to any understanding of climate change:

-1) despite Al Gore’s notorious film winning an Oscar, and sharing the Nobel Peace Prize with the IPCC in 2007, and despite the international convention in Copenhagen in 2009, carbon emissions just keep rising:

Carbon-dioxide emissions are growing because people around the world understand the essentiality of electricity to modernity. And for many countries, the cheapest way to produce electrons is by burning coal.

This is not a smear designed to obscure the reality of climate change, but a very salient fact exposing the failure of climate change activists to address issues of poverty and global development.

2) Regardless of whether it’s getting hotter or colder— or both— we are going to need to produce a lot more energy in order to remain productive and comfortable.

Now, how exactly we are to do this- or even if it is possible- is a very different issue, perhaps more pertinent to Peak Oil than climate change- but again, it is an obvious point that activists really need to take on board- rather than merely repeating the usual platitudes about how scary climate change is, I would urge activists to get real about how scary not having enough energy to keep warm or cool is as well.

Bryce’s third point is that you can’t just keep pointing the finger at Big Bad Gas Guzzling America- because of massive and rapid increases in energy consumption in China and India, which is helping those countries to lift millions out of poverty,

over the past decade, U.S. carbon dioxide emissions—about 6.1 billion tons per year—could have gone to zero and yet global emissions still would have gone up.

Again, this is clearly a pretty important and amazing statistic which really needs to be engaged with if people are serious about a realistic climate policy.

Bryce’s fourth point is about increases in efficiency- this is actually his weakest point, because while certainly true that we should work to increase efficiency in appliances and power generation, the evidence seems to support Jeavons’ Paradox, which means that increased efficiency tends to lead over-all to increased energy consumption as we find more useful things to do with the energy savings. So this is not really a point about climate change but about energy use.

But it is Bryce’s fifth point- about science- that really gets the Bad Astronomer’s goat:

The science is not settled, not by a long shot. Last month, scientists at CERN, the prestigious high-energy physics lab in Switzerland, reported that neutrinos might—repeat, might—travel faster than the speed of light. If serious scientists can question Einstein’s theory of relativity, then there must be room for debate about the workings and complexities of the Earth’s atmosphere.

Plait responds:

And he’s wrong anyway: even if the neutrino story turns out to be true, it doesn’t prove Einstein was wrong. At worst, Einstein’s formulation of relativity would turn out to be incomplete, just as Newton’s was before him. Not wrong, just needs a bit of tweaking to cover circumstances unknown when the idea was first thought of. Relativity was a pretty big tweak to Newtonian mechanics, but it didn’t prove Newton wrong. Claims like that show a profound lack of understanding of how science works.

But this is clearly a response to the “climate science is settled” meme which Plait- with his repeated use of the toxic phrase “climate deniers” has apparently bought into unquestioningly. Bryce is not saying, or even implying, that this proves anything- just that, in science, skepticism is the key, skepticism is the process to be adhered to and respected- in climate science just as in well-established fields such as Relativity.

It is shameful that Plait abuses this principle with his parroting of the extremely unhelpful “denier” charge.

Now I don’t actually think that CERN and neutrinos make for a particularly good example, since it would appear to me as a complete layman when it comes to physics that the most likely explanation is simply that there is an error in the measurement (last time I tried to measure the speed of a neutrino I was way out).

However, in climate change, science has constantly been pressed into the service of forcing through a particular policy response- of completely unrealistic carbon cuts- under the banner of science that must not and cannot be questioned- that there is a consensus- and that anyone who questions any aspect of this at all is a denier.

So it seems reasonable enough to compare the state of climate science with the far, far more solid case of Relativity. Are the CERN researchers being jumped on as being Relativity deniers? Could it possibly be, Mr. Bad Atronomer, that the reason for this is that there is no current highly politicized issue concerning the finer details of Relativity (apart from possibly the issue of how much more funding to throw at the LHC)? What would the correct policy response be to discovering that neutrinos might travel faster than light, given that this would open the possibility for time-travel? Maybe we would be compelled by the consensus scientists to travel back in time and prevent our ancestors from discovering fire!

Most climate skeptics- including Bryce- are not “deniers” in the sense of “denying” the scientific method as do homeopaths (with whom @SLSingh, from whose tweet I picked up this story, is fond of lumping in with what he calls the “climate numpties”) or even “denying” that the evidence suggests the earth is indeed warming- they are skeptical about the politicization of this science, and about the proposed policy responses which, as Bryce shows above, are all but irrelevant at this stage.

Let’s accept that man-made CO2 is contributing to global warming- there still remain plenty of questions:

do we know by how much? do we know what the effects will be? do we know if the feed-backs will be positive or negative? do we know what, if anything, we should do about it?

do we know for sure if drastic cutting of CO2 emissions will actually be of benefit given the huge cost to human development that they would entail?

-and should we really be expected to trust the IPCC whose leader apparently told us in 2007 that we would all be doomed if we didn’t have effective action to reduce CO2 emissions in place by 2012?

Bryce concludes by pointing to a study that suggests that the benefits of moving to cleaner fuels could be cancelled out by losing the particle pollution (eg from coal) that help cool the planet through the so-called “global dimming” effect- just one of many variables and unknowns in the still young (much younger than Relativity), still evolving and still highly unsettled science of climate change.

On the “traditional” but soft skeptics topics such as fake moon-landings and UFOs, I’m sure Bad Astronomer is doing a good job- but when it comes to climate science, he is just being a Bad Skeptic. I really wish that he, and other “celebratory” skeptics like Simon Singh would make an effort to understand the difference between science and policy- and in so doing desist from giving skepticism a bad name. Thank-you.

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.

Colin says he first became aware of the geological limits of a countries’ resources in oil and gas in 1966 while writing a comprehensive report on the resources in Columbia, but it was only later while based in Chicago, when writing an evaluation for the resource base of the whole of Latin America for Amoco, that he began to understand the significance of global limits in oil production:

…the pattern I had already identified in Columbia applied to all countries in varying degrees. The most prospective areas were normally identified early, being too big to miss. My colleagues evaluating the other regions of the world confirmed the same general relationships, and it became evident that the world, as a whole, faced limits that in turn set the pattern of production. Admittedly, in those days we had limited knowledge of the offshore, which has produced much more than we foresaw, but the evaluation of the onshore regions has been generally confirmed.

For me, this was so to speak my Peak Oil Moment, making a deep impact, both professionally in that I realised the transcendental value of any genuine geological prospect, whatever its current economic attributes might be, and in more personal terms, as it became obvious that the age of consumerism, nowhere more evident than in Chicago, could not continue indefinitely.

Others in the oil industry became interested, and in 1997 the International Energy Agency held a conference at which Colin and Jean Laherrere, a former exploration manager for the French company TOTAL, “confronted the flat-earth economists.” -this last phrase being used by Colin to describe those who believe that the Market will always supply resources, once the price is right.

The team within the IEA, lead by Jean-Marie Bourdaire {who also has a chapter in the book}, was satisfied with the evidence for Peak Oil but faced many political constraints. They did however succeed in delivering a coded message in their World Energy Outlook of 1998 in the form of a table showing that oil demand would outpace supply by 2010, save for the entry of unidentified unconventional, a euphemism for shortage.

Colin now sees the IEA as “coming clean” about Peak Oil “as the long predicted crisis unfolds”.

In 1995 Colin began publishing a monthly newsletter for the newly formed Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, which he continued to do for 10 years, submitting the final, 100th newsletter in 2009.

He concludes:

The evidence indicates that the peak of all categories of oil was reached in 2008, heralding the onset of long-term decline during what may be termed the Second Half of the Oil Age….The transition to the new chapter of history threatens to be one of great tensions as indeed are already being observed around the world, especially in urban circumstances.

It is not, however, necessarily a doomsday scenario as the end of the current financial and military empires may herald a return to rural living in local communities, opening a new more benignage for the survivors who may develop a greater respect for themselves, their neighbours and, above all, the limits within which Nature has ordained them to live.

The other contributors in the book are oil industry experts who have come across Colin’s work during the course of their professional careers, and come to accept as valid his conclusions, that oil peak is passed or not too far off, and that this will have dramatic effects that the world’s governments and populations should know about.

The emphasis is on biographical accounts putting a peak oil awareness in the context of the author’s careers and personal lives, successfully in showing that the predictions of Peak Oil are coming, not (only) from some lunatic fringe cult of apocalyptic environmentalists, but a wide range of technical specialists and oil industry professionals who have come to appreciate the value of Colin’s work though direct experience of the oil industry over many years and decades.

This is mainly an older generation of oil geologists and analysts- at 47 I am, as the single “environmentalist” represented here, the youngest contributor by more than 10 years; and, although wives are mentioned in many of the chapters, it is an all-male cast.

One of the most engaging chapters is by Jeremy Gilbert, originally from Dublin, now also retired to West Cork, who gives a fascinating and account of an exciting life in the oil industry, working all over the world. His account of escaping from Iran after the overthrow of the Shah in 1978 is gripping. In 1988 he became appointed BP’s chief petroleum engineer. It was only on retirement to West Cork that he really became aware of Peak Oil and on first encountering Colin and his work was highly skeptical:

{I} felt confident that I would be able to find flaws in whatever data Colin had managed to acquire.
My confidence was misplaced. Over the next few months I had many meetings with Colin, reviewed his data, and was made aware of the methods he had used to make estimates of the likely future production for each of the world’s oil-producing countries.

Another chapter of particular interest is from Roger Bentley, a solar scientist from the University of Reading, who elucidates some of the technical issues that permeate the peak oil debate, such as the different categories of oil viz. “Proved Reserves” (those classed as being close to being produced, which therefore may remain fairly constant for decades) and “Proved-plus-Probable-reserves” (which are likely to give a better estimate of what may ultimately be recoverable). After a seminar from Colin Campbell in 1995, Bentley and his colleagues became persuaded that Campbell might be more right than wrong, and investigated the sources for the data, and were “astonished to discover that mankind’s knowledge of how its future dependency on oil would evolve was largely down to the data judgements of a single man {Dr. George Lecke of Petroconsultants.}” Issues with the industry data is a recurring theme in the book, and continues to be contentious in the peak oil debate.

For several of the book’s contributors, a key reference which sets their investigations in context, is the 1972 report by the Club of Rome The Limits to Growth. While the peak oil authors are not generally environmentalists (I am the only contributor listed as such) in citing the influence of this book they share common ground with them.

While the contributors all agree pretty much on an early peak of world oil production, on related environmental and energy issues their differences are quite interesting, particularly on the issues of climate change and nuclear power.

French petroleum geophysicist Jean Laherrere- an early collaborator with Colin Campbell- is an outspoken climate skeptic:

All scientists agree that in Vostok and Dome C {ice cores} if carbon dioxide and temperature vary in parallel, the driver is temperature (Milankovitch) and that CO2 follows with a lag from 800 to 1,300 years….
CO2 is now taken as the main cause of global warming but it is against the facts. It is a minor part in greenhouse gases, with water being the main contributor with 60% to 90%. Everybody knows that in winter a cloudy night will be warmer than a cloudless one….
Cloud coverage is very difficult to model, and anyway cannot be modeled with the size of grids (average IPCC models = 200km).
Everybody knows that warm temperatures, as experienced in 1998, resulted from El Nino, which has nothing to do with CO2…
Carbon dioxide is the wrong target for government policy. The right one is saving energy because energy reserves are limited and because energy is often wasted. CO2 is considered by many as a pollutant , when it is the source of life, being transformed into chlorophyll by plants….. Life is based on carbon and on carbon dioxide. Aiming at a post-carbon world is a joke.

He goes onto criticize the fraudulent carbon trading market, and condemns IPCC head Pachauri for making up excuses for “Himalayagate.”

Colin Campbell also expressed a skeptical position on climate change when I interviewed him in February 2010, and most of the other contributors who mention climate change see it as an important issue related to oil depletion;

but while Laherrere saw global warming as detracting attention from the more urgent issue of energy supplies, Schindler and Zittel, who both worked for the German think-tank LBST, found the opposite view expressed when tensions arose between themselves and climate activists who felt that Peak Oil might be stealing their thunder. They found that other institutions looking at fossil energy use

spoke with one voice: It’s a matter of fact that fossil energy resources are finite.
Nonetheless this fact will not be relevant in the foreseeable future or in the decades to come. There is only one urgent problem which requires immediate action- that is climate change.….

On another occasion they found their findings for a hearing in 2000

received some quite hostile reactions from scientists actively involved in climate politics. When I entered the room… I was attacked by a scientific member of the parliamentary committee with whom I had shared quite good personal relations up to then: “What the hell are you doing in Munich? We have spent years to convince the politicians that climate policy has to get top priority. Now, you are distracting the politicians with the finiteness of fossil energy sources…”

Film producer Amund Prestergard, who made the film featuring Colin Campbell Peak Oil- Imposed by Nature, tells another occasion in which these two issues were intertwined, when interviewing the Norwegian Minister for the Environment in 2007. Off camera she confessed to him she was aware of peak Oil, but seeing it likely to be delayed a long time if the Arctic continues to melt- she believed that there were vast deposits locked up under the ice.

Opinions are also diverse on the issue of nuclear power, the only non-fossil alternative that could conceivably replace oil to a significant degree with current technology.

Another French petroleum geo-physicist, Jean-Marie Bourdaire, says:

It would be a long story to describe my fight against the OECD Ayatollahs who were pushing market reforms and green energy without any reservations, and were also against nuclear energy. (When I arrived at the IEA nuclear was like a four-letter word in countries like Austria, Denmark, or New Zealand, and nobody was disputing this judgment, even in France.)…Some countries were stubbornly green and anti-nuclear.

Investment banker and consultant Chris Sanders takes a different view, claiming that the risks the oil industry is increasingly taking cannot be justified in any way, citing the recent disaster at BP’s Macondo well:

As the oil industry has moved to the frontiers of technology, depth, and scarcity, it has also shifted its risk profile to something more resembling the nuclear industry, Nuclear power plants are uneconomic, not because they are expensive but because the risks they pose are uninsurable. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than Chernobyl, which is the true forebear of Macondo.

Renewables are not discussed much by the authors, although Jeremy Leggett, founder of Solar Century, believes

we have the clean-energy technologies and strategies for running a world without oil, and indeed without any fossil fuels for that matter

but sees a real challenge with the lead-in times for energy transition;

and solar engineer Ron Swenson is actually working on many renewables innovations, including proposals for “people pods” or “podcars” as mass transit in urban areas, consisting of little cars suspended from an over-head rail, underneath a roof of solar panels to power them, which, he claims, would work even in cloudy northern climes.

Petroleum industry analyst Charles Maxwell, sees the potential for shale gas as a “bridge fuel” with nuclear playing a role as well, but also has concerns for the long lead-in times required; and is on the board of American DG Energy Inc, which converts diesel engines to run on natural gas to be used as Combined Heat and Power systems which can be a cheaper alternative to grid electricity.

Perhaps the most maverick character included in this collection is Mike Ruppert, who ran the website From the Wilderness, and in 2004 wrote the lengthy Crossing the Rubicon in which he describes his early career working for the LAPD, during which he uncovered widespread drug smuggling activities by the CIA, and honed his skills as an investigative journalist which later helped him uncover the true story behind 9-11, the gist of which he repeats here:

according to Rupert, the Bush administration arranged to deploy the air defense forces far from New York on the morning of the attacks in apparent connivance with Al Qaeda. It was about a month after the attacks that Ruppert became aware of the Peak Oil hypothesis, and claims that 9-11 was staged because of the threat of Peak Oil, providing a pretext for the invasion of Iraq, the country possessing the second-largest oil reserves in the world.

The inclusion of Rupperts’ conspiracy views might seem somewhat incongruous amongst the otherwise relatively sober voices from oil industry professionals and scientists, and it runs the risk of discrediting the whole peak oil theory in the eyes of sceptics; but Ruppert would certainly count as a Peak Oil Personality and he appears in films like The End of Suburbia, as well as having attended many of the significant peak oil conferences over the years.

Ruppert represents the extreme end of doomerism amongst the authors here, citing Richard Duncan’s Olduvai Gorge theory, which sees peak oil as presaging humanities’ painful but inevitable reversal back to a more stone-age level of existence;

Richard Heinberg, author of The Party’s Over, and Powerdown is not quite so bleak, and invokes us to try our best to weather the storm by good preparation along the Transition Towns type model, but also sees collapse as inevitable:

…it is now too late to avert a collapse of the existing system. We have hit the limits to growth and the collapse has begun.

Dutch mechanical engineer Francis de Winter condemns American profligacy, saying his experience of growing up and surviving in the war have shaped his views that the main problem is greed, and simpler lives would be better;

the US consumes the full body-weight of its total population in petroleum every week. To somebody who survived on very little, this is very clearly not a US need. Indeed, it is very clearly a US disgrace and it is time for the population to wake up to it.

he is passionate about the Iraq war, “a war that the whole world has recognised as nothing but an oil war” costing thousands of US soldiers’ lives and countless thousands of Iraqi’s lives, as well as squandering colossal amounts of resources:

If even a very small fraction of these wasted and destroyed resources and killed people had been devoted to serious and well designed energy programs instead of being wasted on an unnecessary, useless, illegal, and destructive oil war, the world would be in better shape. The Iraq oil war started because the US population was too naive in believing the US government, but such oil wars must not be allowed to happen again.

Richard Bentley sees the possibility that adaptation, energy substitutions such as increased availability of shale gas and non-conventional oil, combined with energy efficiencies, could offset a peak but warns

we “peakists” point out that if society goes on as it is, without a dramatic change in how it sources its energy, then calculations show that the world will almost certainly hit its recoverable-resource oil limit fairly soon. Moreover, in such matters, we think it is better to be forewarned.

This is an original contribution to Peak Oil literature, fascinating on many levels, and should be widely read and discussed.

I shall return to the issue of Peak Oil soon with a future post looking at the counter arguments.

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

I first came across him as one of the Four Horsemen of New Atheism- the New Atheists being Hitchens, Dawkins, Dennett and Harris, “New” because they were taking the fight to the religious and irrational, and refused to give the respect to irrational beliefs and religions that the apologists of such beliefs generally demanded. They actively advocated the critical examination of religious beliefs and lent authority and scholarship to atheism, giving us all permission as it were to speak out.

In his 2007 bestseller God is Not Great Hitchens eviscerates the religious in a way that only he can:

Violent, irrational, intolerant, allied to racism and tribalism and bigotry, invested in ignorance and hostile to free inquiry, contemptuous of women and coercive toward children: organized religion ought to have a great deal on its conscience.There is one more charge to be added to the bill of indictment: With a necessary part of ts collective mind, religion looks forward to the destruction of the world. By this I don’t mean “looks forward” in the purely eschatological sense of anticipating the end. I mean, rather, that it openly or covertly wishes that end to occur.

Later in the book he points out that, while great intellectuals of the past had already “ripped away the disguise of idolatry and paganism” and even risked martyrdom,

a moment of history has now arrived when even a pygmy like myself can claim to know more- through no merit of my own- and see that the final ripping of the whole disguise is overdue.

Hitch keeps it real

He goes on to compare religious faith with his own beliefs as a young man in Marxism:

When I was a Marxist, I did not hold my opinions as a matter of faith but I did have the conviction that a sort of unified field theory might have been discovered. The concept of historical and dialectical materialism was not an absolute and it did not have any supernatural element, but it did have its messianic element in the idea that an ultimate moment might arrive, and it most certainly had its martyrs and and saints and doctrinaires and (after a while) its mutually excommunicating rival papacies.

Hitchens describes his remarkable conversion from the youthful Marxist zealot who spent time in Cuba in Castro’s camps for International Socialists a few years after the death of Che Guevara, to sympathies with the neo-liberals and support for the Iraq invasion in his riveting memoir Hitch-22, published last year.

On the morning of September 11th 2001 Hitchens was boarding a plant to Seattle to deliver an attack on Henry Kissenger at Whitman College, Wa.. He came to see 9-11 as an attack on the secular liberal and Enlightenment values embodied in his adopted America, perpetrated by the same, most primitive and backward religious ideologies of apocalyptic nihilism which he had dismantled in the earlier book.

The anti-war demonstrations and what he saw as the hypocrisy of the Left became a pivotal point in Hitchens’ shift of ideological allegiance:

I didnt have to wait long for my worst fears about the Left to prove correct. Comparing Al Quaeda’s use of stolen airplanes with President Clinton’s certainly atrocious use of cruise missiles against Sudan three years before…Noam Chomsky found the moral balance to be approximately even, with the United States at perhaps a slight disadvantage.

The difference between himself and Chomsky came down to the fact that Chomsky regarded “everything since Columbus as having been one continuous succession of genocides and land-thefts, [and] he did not really believe that the United States of America was a good idea in the first place.”

Hitchens likewise takes an excoriating view of Gore Vidal who deigned to suggest that Bush and the US government may have had a hand in the attacks, either by design or by neglect:

President Bush had evidently forewarned himself of the air piracy in order that he should seize the chance to look like a craven, whey-faced ignoramus on worldwide TV.

He goes onto explain

As the Iraq debate became more intense, it became suddenly obvious to me that I couldn’t any longer remain where I was on the political “spectrum”. Huge “anti-war” demonstrations were being organised by forces that actually exemplified what the CIA and others had naively maintained was impossible: a declared alliance between Ba’athist sympathizers and Islamic fundamentalists….
My old friend Nick Cohen wrote scornfully that on a certain date, “about a million liberal-minded people marched through London to oppose the overthrow f a fascist regime”. But what is “liberal-minded” about the Muslim Brotherhood and its clone-groups, or about the rump of British Stalinism, or about the purulent sect into which my former comrades of the International Socialists had mutated? To them- to the organizers and moving spirits of the march in other words- the very word “liberal” was a term of contempt.

Fascinatingly, Hitchens- who spent a lot of time reporting from Mesoptamia- claimed that he did indeed see evidence of “weapons of mass destruction” in Iraq, and points out that the WMD card was previously used as an excuse to leave Saddam in power lest he unleash them. Yet he was no fan of Bush- “I probably now know more about the impeachable incompetence of the Bush administration than do many of those who would have left Iraqi in the hands of Saddam” – and is fiercely critical of the failure of the US military to make a credible plan to put the lights back on in Baghdad or prevent looting.

It seems ironic as well as sad that today on which we see the last US troops withdraw from Iraq, we no longer have a Hitchens to comment, to elucidate and educate us on the significance of this most traumatic period of modern history, and he will be missed for his ability to raise the level of debate and for the license he gave for the contrarian.

Christopher Hitchens 13 April 1949 – 15 December 2011 R.I.P.

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.

At this time, there was also a growing awareness of climate change, and of the depletion of fossil fuels.
I first read about just how completely dependent on the dwindling resources of fossil fuels we have become in Thom Hartman’s The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. This made a big impression on me. I began to think like a human geologist – everything that we thought of as the modern world, the economy, modern appliances and machines, our dreams and aspirations, our very personalities and consciousness perhaps, are all dependent on this magic black substance dug out of holes in the ground.

For the first time, reading Hartmann’s book, I came to understand that even renewable technologies such as wind and solar have a fossil fuel component. There just seemed no getting away from oil, but still the question was unanswered: how long before it starts to run out?

I moved to Ireland in 1992, and spent the next few years working as a landscape gardener and permaculture designer. I began teaching in schools with the Heritage in Schools Programme, building school gardens and planting trees. One of the topics I made a point of covering in those classes was our dependency on oil, not just as a fuel but to manufacture nearly everything we think of as making up the modern world. Few, if any, of the school children I talked to had any understanding that plastic came from oil.

I started teaching short permaculture courses in 2004. I was giving a talk in Dublin with Davie Philip of the Cultivate Centre and he said that I just had to see a film The End of Suburbia which he showed me. It was really this film that joined together all the dots of sustainability, fossil fuel depletion and the End of the Oil Age. This was my first introduction to the concept of Peak Oil, and I understood, for the first time, that it was not a question of the oil running out, but of global peak in supply, leading to spiraling prices, shortages, oil wars and marking the end of what we have known of as the modern era of “endless” growth.

Not only that, but this turning point was not at some far distant point in the future, but was increasingly believed to be just a few years away. I learned that global peak in oil discovery had been around 1964 – the year I was born. This made the whole issue somehow more personal and immediate. My whole life had been lived on the rising curve of oil extraction, and the society I had grown up in was also predicated on continuing growth in energy supply. According to Peak Oil theory, substitution and new technology will not be able to make up for dwindling supplies of this precious liquid.

For myself and my colleagues at the time this was not a doom and gloom end of the world scenario; rather, it was a powerful opportunity to campaign more vigorously for a shift to sustainable lifestyles. Like most environmentalists we felt strongly that modern society could not continue on what we saw as the fantasy of unending growth; and the peak oil theory seemed like the most compelling evidence we yet had for change.
I started reading around the subject, and was amazed to find the introduction to Richard Heinberg’s book The Party’s Over,

Colin Campbell

written by one Dr. Colin Campbell of Ballydehob, West Cork. I literally looked him up in the phone book and began giving film showings and talks with Colin in and around West Cork.

A few years later, in 2007, I contributed a short chapter to Colin’s booklet Living Through the Energy Crisis, which presented the evidence for the imminent peaking in world oil supplies, and an early proposal for community adaptation.

The following year I took up a teaching post on the Practical Sustainability Course in Kinsale. I had already given a copy of The End of Suburbia to Rob Hopkins, who had created the course some years before, and he immediately turned it into a class project, creating with his students the report Kinsale 2021- An Energy Descent Action Plan.

The first Energy Descent Action Plan

I took the opportunity in the summer before the new term started to travel to Slovenia for a two-week permaculture design course with the co-originator of permaculture, David Holmgren.

Rob Hopkins (left) with David Holmgren, Fuelling the Future, Kinsale 2005

His book, Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, had been published in the previous year, explaining how the origins of permaculture, more than thirty years before, were deeply rooted in an understanding of peak oil and resource depletion. It was this book that first made more widely known the concept of energy descent and of how civilisation would have to adapt each year and in each generation to declining supplies of fossil fuels, fuels that would have to be made up for, not by a magic elixir of some new technology, nor by a switch to renewables alone, but by dramatic changes in the way we relate to natural resources and run our economies.

These were exciting times. On the course in Slovenia, we would stay up til the small hours each night listening to David explain the relationship between energy, society and ecology, arguing and debating the implications for a low-energy world, and how much time we would have to adapt.

David Holmgren travelled back with me to Ireland where we went straight to the Fuelling the Future conference that Rob Hopkins had organised at the Kinsale College. During my first term as a tutor in Kinsale, some of the students launched the concept of Transition Towns, gaining the backing of the Kinsale Town Council for implementing the recommendations contained in the Energy Descent Plan.

I included classes on peak oil as the main underpinning theory as to why we need permaculture, and gave dozens of public talks around the country over the following couple of years.

On the Peak Oil/Collapse circuit

Meanwhile, Rob Hopkins had moved to Totnes, England, and his charisma and hard work quickly led to the Transition Towns concept going viral. Peak Oil, together with the other carbon twin – climate change – had become a galvanising theme for a whole new social and environmental movement, drawing together many groups and ideas.

It was around this time that a group of my friends set a “peak oil sweep stake”: we each made a “bet” on the future price of oil five years’ hence. Mine was the most pessimistic- I apparently was convinced that some in five years oil would be rationed, and declined to put a price on it, so scarce would it have become. When the time was up and we reviewed the bets, it turned out that the price was within a dollar or two of what it had been at the time: the price was essentially unchanged.

It was this experience that first made me question some of my assumptions about Peak Oil and the supposed civilisational collapse that would inevitably ensue a few years over the peak. I started to think differently about how much we can really predict about the future.

Even though I continued for a few years to teach classes on Peak oil and the need to powerdown, as the years went by it started to feel like civilisation might be proving more resilient after all.

Of course since then we have seen oil price spike to over $150 and as I write it has once again tipped $100/barrel- this in the midst of the deepest recession in one or two generations.

Clearly as the pressure in the oil wells declines the pressure on society to respond in some meaningful way with a new strategy for energy usage, which will be a truly gargantuan task.

I also became influenced by “eco-skeptics” such as Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist and Matt Ridley author of The Rational Optimist. They reinforced the idea that there have been many predictions of doom, resource depletion, over-population and ecological collapse in the past few decades, but they have not come to pass.

From looking more closely at how far we still are from replacing fossil fuels with renewables such as wind and solar I began to realise that a “powerdown” response was not going to be relevant except temporarily perhaps in times of recession: we are all so power hungry, the sum total of human ingenuity will have to be brought to near on the issue.

I am much more optimistic now that new technology will be developed, because so much effort is going into it- although we could still justifiably ask for more resources for research and development. New ways of getting gas by fracturing shale deposits, and new developments in nuclear, new forms of storage for renewable sources- as well still as improved methods of oil extraction and more efficient ways of using energy are just some of the ways that we will overcome the present challenges.

Most likely, the new technologies that will emerge in the future will be a great surprise to us, but one thing is sure: we are clearly going to try everything we can to innovate and adapt to our changing circumstances. This is after all what we excel at as human beings.

Graham Strouts
Derryduff Mor
Bantry
Feb 23rd 2011

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.

Heinberg argues:

in recent years a few economists have advanced a contrary view. Tim Jackson in the UK, Herman Daly in the US, and Serge Latouche in France have argued that growth is not always good for the environment or for the real health of communities, and that GDP growth is impossible to sustain over the long run anyway because we live on a planet with limited natural resources.

As recession in Europe takes hold and there is no clear resolution of the credit crunch, Heinberg’s is a compelling narrative that appeals to the post-modernists who see the modern world as the source of our problems, rather than the solution to them; but there are many grounds on which it can be questioned.

Firstly, the economic contraction we are now experiencing is not (yet) as bad as previous ones from which we have emerged, such as the great Depression, and appears to be largely a result of political factors, lack of financial regulation, criminal activity even in some quarters, and does not necessarily vindicate the messianic narrative of the End of the World. It is far from clear that the financial collapse we are experiencing is a result of breaching fundamental ecological limits.

Secondly, Heinberg’s conception of what creates growth is simplistic and undefined: he assumes in this article as elsewhere that growth is just a question of digging holes in the ground and extracting the goodies until they are all gone. Thus, oil is seen as being lakes of black liquid that we pump out until the pressure drops so much it takes more energy to pump than is returned by the actual oil.

While this is no doubt part of the story, peak oilers tend to dismiss the role of technology. In The End of Suburbia peak oil pundit and doomer Howard Kunstler emphasizes the point that “technology will not save us”- because technology is not a substitute for non-renewable raw materials. While this is true in a literal sense, it may not be that relevant: humans have always been surrounded by resources, but it is only as we develop the technology to exploit them that they become available. In this sense, technology is everything: the oil has after all always been there, sitting placidly in the ground, for the whole of human history, untouched for millennium and silent witness to the rise and fall of successive civilisations.

It was only once we had developed the technology to drill for it that it became available. Even if all the world’s oil had just sat in open lakes for us to dredge with buckets, it is unlikely to have spawned what we think of as the modern world without us having first developed mathematics, chemistry and knowledge of the periodic table, and much more, before we could use it for plastics, pharmaceuticals, pesticides or even for running the internal combustion engine.

The view of the “cornucopians” is in direct opposition to the peak-oilers for this reason: they see the earth as being replete with minerals and resources which can be exploited, not literally forever, but at least for many more centuries, as technology develops. Thus, the exploitation of shale oil, tar sands and other forms of “non-conventional” oil has recently lead to a surge in oil production from North America which could even surpass the early peak of the early 1970s and see the US return to its historical position as the world’s no. 1 oil producing country, albeit at much higher prices.

All this is only possible because of new technology: the technology does not of course literally create the resource, but for all practical purposes as regards growth and the economy, making resources available that otherwise were not amounts to the same thing- and could push back “peak energy” for a long time, if not in fact indefinitely.

A more dramatic example of this still is shale gas, a technology which, although known about for decades, has only become economically viable in the last ten years or so, thus transforming the world’s energy profile, especially in the US where it now provides as much as 30% of America’s gas:

In The Party’s Over Heinberg opines “it is enough to merely point out that North American production of natural gas may be peaking by the time this book is printed.”- shale gas is not mentioned in the book at all. Yet with proven reserves of natural gas in the US already well above what they they were at the end of the 1970s you might think Heinberg and other peak-oilers would have learned the cautionary lesson that predicting the future in the energy world is at best a hazardous occupation.

Then there is nuclear, also with vastly improved technology, which, political and ideological objections notwithstanding, is also likely to play an important role in pushing back the date of Peak Energy far into the distant future.

Another issue is that growth can also come from efficiency gains at use- improved mileage in motor vehicles could cut oil use in transport, and thus free up the black stuff for higher-value uses in medicine or materials- thus promoting more growth without in principle needing any more resources, or even permitting a decline in resource use for greater benefit.

Matt Ridley, in The Rational Optimist, points out that historically two of the main drivers of growth in addition to raw materials and technology, has been specialization and trade: the principles of competitive advantage. Thus, growth could continue even without more resource consumption for these reasons also- the more we specialize, the greater the advantage all round, as one person or industry becomes marginally more productive at a given task for whatever reason, and is thus able to supply the world with niche products at a slightly lower price.

While it is indeed a difficult position to argue in the worst recession of a generation that growth may not be over, while Europe and the West struggles, the emerging economies continue to grow apace, and the likelihood is it seems to me that the West will indeed return to growth after some years of hardship. The end of growth would mean the end of technological progress, and that is simply not in anyway credible.

More than that, there are reasons to question the ideological underpinnings of the peak oil movement and Heinberg’s own perspective: growth is seen to be undesirable. Heinberg writes:

Still, over the longer term there will undoubtedly be life after growth, and it doesn’t have to play out under miserable conditions. With less energy to fuel globalisation and mechanisation there should be increasing requirement for local production and manual labour.

This is a recipe for returning to the 80s, and then progressively, to the 50s and the 30s, and even further back: and for many this will of course mean a return to miserable conditions. The life of the peasant laborer, confined to the fields and proscribed social roles for their lifetimes, is no fun. Much of the world has not yet benefited from the growth we have seen in the west, and romantic notions of returning to local economies- thus losing the competitive advantages of specialization and trade- and the joys of manual labour, when most people who currently live like this tend to be amongst the poorest in the world, smacks of complacency if not hypocrisy.

Heinberg concludes,

There’s light at the end of the tunnel. If we focus on improving quality of life rather than boosting quantity of consumption, we could be happier even as our economy downsizes to fit nature’s limits.

This betrays I think his romantic ideology. We are in fact unlikely to be happier if we become poorer.
I just had this very conversation with a neighbor who happened to drop in just as I was writing the last sentence: he is expecting the Eurozone crisis to deepen and thinks that if it all collapses,we will at least have time for each other more, we will see a resurgence in the local community and people will get together to help each other out. He reminded me that when he arrived here in West Cork in the 1980s, he chose to live as people had done in the 1950s, rather than pursue the path of growth and materialism.

I had to remind him of one key difference: in the 1980s he, and many others like him who came here seeking a simpler life (including myself some time later) had the dole, a product of the very growth that we were all running away from. In the 1950s, life was genuinely much harder here, and there was little other choice but emigration. We really do not want to go back to that.

Heinberg has more than a touch of Malthussianism in him- he once showed a slide at a conference I attended asking if humans were more intelligent than yeast in a petri dish, since we apparently are unaware of “nature’s limits” that he refers to. In this much, Heinberg repeats the same mistake that environmentalists have always made: they assume that humans are subject to the same limits as the rest of nature, and ignore the role of technology because they are suspicious of it, they regard it as an evil. Behind this assumption is a moralistic position that humans are bad, that growth- the way in which we improve our circumstances- is also bad.

Heinberg doesn’t just believe this is the end of growth- he wants it to be the end. In this, I believe he is premature, and for this reason, we should be sceptical of his conclusions.