Peaking, Tipping and Discovering [2008]

I’ve been watching a speech on YouTube by Richard Heinberg, an, or perhaps even ‘the' expert on resource peaking – as in PEAK OIL. He says crude oil production has already peaked, total petroleum production will soon peak and that things aren’t looking that rosy for other fuel sources like coal and some of the minerals used to make solar cells.

If you’re a baby boomer, you’ll be interested to know Heinberg estimates that half of all the petroleum-based energy ever produced has been consumed in your lifetime.

Heinberg’s analysis seems very thorough and well-founded, but perhaps he steps outside his area of expertise when he envisions the likely future effects.

His future scenarios are a little unimaginative. I don’t like to put it down to the fact that he’s a classic Grey Lynn baby boomer intellectual, but that’s pretty obvious in his choice of future possibilities for civilisation as we know it.

They are:-

Feudal Fascism – jackboots and work camps like the Nazis did in the 30’s when faced with hardship.
Eco Deal – a variant on Roosevelt’s New Deal of the 30’s which invested in infrastructure to help end the Depression
Bottoms Up – localised responses, returning to the self-sufficiency principles of village life and community, even in cities.

This kind of thinking has its roots firmly in the seventies. E F Schumacher, author of Small is Beautiful, a seminal work published in 1973, would be wondering what took us so long to realise that non-renewable resources are like capital, not income.

Nice to have been ahead of your time – even if you’re no longer around to appreciate it.

So overall, the peak oil issue’s all good if you’re already a pessimist, but I’m not – and neither are most New Zealanders. So I looked for a silver lining and found some:-

Compared to energy junkies America and Canada, we in New Zealand have a lot more renewable energy sources and we don’t use nearly as much fuel anyway – they have almost double the per capita supply that we do . Those cold houses of ours are a bonus now - we won’t have to get used to doing without petroleum-based central heating. Our coal reserves might be useful too – in the future anyway. So let’s not sell them off just yet.
The future scarcity of fossil fuels will pretty much solve the problem of carbon emissions won’t it? In a century or two, climate change will be a thing of the past – a blink of the eye in earth time. One less thing to worry about.
And even though the full effects of peak oil are a long way off, people in New Zealand are already beginning to organise themselves. The fledgling “transition towns” concept is evidence of this.

Back in 1997 I wrote a future scenario for 2007 which suggested the rise of a new group - irritable neo-hippies - who were baby boomer, back to the earth people, resuming their 1970’s quest for self-sufficiency and enlightenment, but irritable because succeeding generations wouldn’t play along.

Well perhaps they will now.

But let's return to Heinberg and his future scenarios. Contempt for rampant consumer capitalism may well have clouded his judgement about the means and mechanisms of change, because in fact the early signals of peak oil have pretty much all been market-driven – reflected in the increasing price of oil and its flow on effects into transportation and food..

Over time, steadily rising prices of all major forms of fuel and energy are likely to have two effects: first, they will provide stronger and stronger incentives to limit use or substitute alternatives and second, they'll make previously uneconomic alternatives far more viable.

It’s already happening –and relatively rapidly too. Even in the US there's a discernible move to smaller, more fuel-efficient cars, and there's far greater investment in more expensive energy technologies like wind turbines.

We perhaps forget that the progression of land transportation options from foot to horse to train to car/truck/bus/scooter has been associated with increasingly expensive infrastructure.

As a realistic optimist I suggest that while all of Heinberg’s future scenarios will no doubt exist in some societies at some point in time, it is likely that the revaluation of the cost of energy will have far more subtle and evolutionary effects than he envisages.

I think the economics of everyday life will change substantially, and to the extent that the world economic system depends on the energy-based manufacture and physical transportation of goods, there will be a dramatic re-shuffle.

But this isn’t doomsday just yet. I’d suggest that there will be massive investments in global telecommunications as a primary substitution mechanism for physical transportation and that we in New Zealand had better make some serious investment in virtual tourism because our pristine landscapes are likely to be visited primarily by us in time to come.

At Windshift we're going to do a shared Discovery Project this year on the winners and losers in the current economic downturn – to find out what’s really happening and what are the likely changes that producers, consumers and employers who’ve become used to continued economic growth will make now that the economic news is so mixed..

But within that framework – and given the looming tipping point in the Peak Oil issue, we’re also going to investigate the likely future effects that a phase change in the cost of fuel will have on the emerging economy.

Cheers

Jill

Jill Caldwell is Director of Windshift Communications Ltd. Click Here to contact Jill directly This is a free monthly newsletter provided to direct subscribers and legitimate Windshift contacts only. No further use is made of subscriber information. [Copyright Windshift Communications Ltd 2006]

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"Back in 1997 I wrote a future scenario for 2007 which suggested the rise of a new group - irritable neo-hippies - who were baby boomer, back to the earth people . . "