At last! I’m no longer classing myself as an ‘out there’ peak oil nutter as this is the week the things Bealers and I have been fretting about are suddenly Big News in the mainstream educated press.

(pic: The Economist – Derek Bacon)

Firstly Bealers came home on Saturday morning with a copy of The Economist with a cover page entitled ‘Britain’s Energy Crisis: How long before the lights go out‘ .

One of my bigger worries is around the unreliability of supplies of things we have become utterly accustomed to having all the time because they have always been there during our lifetimes. This article shows that before too long we may experience upsetting, unnerving and prolonged power cuts in the not too distant future due to politicians spending the last 30 years of North Sea power not talking about what to do when it runs out. I guess the journalist is hinting that it won’t just be occasional power cut like the ones we have round here on a windy night when a tree knocks into a rural overhead supply of electricity and very soon miraculously ‘They’ fix it for us), but really long ones where no-one knows when the power is likely to be supplied again and freezers defrost, lighting is not available and people have no access to tv or internet information.

Secondly I saw that that this week’s edition of MoneyWeek was running a key piece entitled:

Peak Oil: why we must take it seriously

Energy expert Dr Bakhtiari believes that oil production is entering a new era, during which it will undergo four stages of transition.

Finally as someone who takes no action to consume ‘news’ (or is it just infotainment these days which only provides people with stories which will sell newspapers and tv airtime?) my little toddler worked out how to turn the radio on for the first time this morning. She pressed the button just as the Secretary of State for Environment, Hilary Benn was telling the UK via the Today programme on Radio Four ‘We are heading for a perfect storm of food insecurity’ – the rocketing population of the planet, the seriousness of climate change and the increasing prices of petro-derived fertilisers (by this he means WE ARE RUNNING OUT OF OIL BUT IS NOT ABLE TO SAY ANYTHING IN CASE PEOPLE FEEL ANXIOUS ABOUT IT). Hilary Benn spoke in weak analogies of food ‘challenges’ and ended up being a comedy advert for GM foods but his opening gambit had me shouting out to Bealers ‘They’re finally talking about it on Radio 4 – come quickly!’

With the global increase in population of 2.5 to 3 billion in the next few decades – that’s a lot of additional mouths to feed. The challenge we have as a world and as a country is to increase food production at the same time as doing it sustainably because we know in particular that climate change is going to have an impact on our ability to do that and we know that food production is quite [QUITE?] heavily dependent on oil – we saw last year a big increase in food prices, in part because of the weather and the drought in Australia increasing the price of bread here in the UK but because the cost of oil went up and that effects fertiliser and fuel.

I think that was a wake up call. A lot of people maybe have taken food for granted and said that we’ll always be able to keep food production ahead of population growth (and we have succeeded in doing that in the past) but the circumstances in which we’ve got to do that again are going to become a bit [A BIT?] more challenging

I’m now wondering what has happened for these three pieces to be given such prominence. Has the memo finally gone to the people in charge round saying ‘Actually I think we should probably start talking about it after all’ or have we reached a tipping point where enough enquiring minds are worrying about the possible catastrophic scenarios of the future that we, and our progeny will face (and that many millions of people are already facing due to our wanton consumption and resulting destruction) to start writing about it  or has a load of data recently been released that proves we reached peak oil decades ago, the planet is about to run out of fresh water and all other resources we need to survive and its not going to be pretty if we don’t start reducing our impact with immediate effect?

Who knows but ‘m happy to see these things being broadcast and printed for a rare change.

Cathie and I disagree on how this is all going to play out.

Whilst Cathie thinks we’re going to have a number of major game-changing and horrible shocks over the coming years I think it’ll be a more gradual and under-the-radar bumpy downwards path. There will be some big shocks for sure. But I can’t see there being one single end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it event.

Admittedly one pretty big shock did happen recently and that’s the current ‘global economic crisis’ which some argue convincingly was a direct result of peak oil; I’ve no doubt that it played a part. Others say that our climate is approaching a tipping point due to the vast quantities of Co₂ that we’re pumping into our atmosphere, fuelled (excuse the hilarious pun) by this too-cheap energy. I can’t decide what’s more scary: a world system predicated on cheap energy that must grow economically just to stand still AND that energy is about to run out, or, as a result of using this too-cheap energy, we utterly screw up the place that we live and kill ourselves off. Climate change *slaps wrist* sorry I mean Anthropogenic Global Warming is so mind numbingly frightening that it’s no wonder that so many really clever people either deny it’s happening at all or just start chanting La La La La, stick their fingers in their ears and head into town to buy some more (cheap) crap.

Richard Heinburg  gives some excellent comment on this continual growth insanity buried within his recent guest posting on The Oil Drum:

During the past century growth has become institutionalized in the very sinews of our economic system. Every city and business wants to grow. This is understandable merely in terms of human nature: nearly everyone wants a competitive advantage over someone else, and growth provides the opportunity to achieve it. But there is also a financial survival motive at work: without growth, businesses and governments are unable to service their debt. And debt has become endemic to the industrial system. During the past couple of decades, the financial services industry has grown faster than any other sector of the American economy, even outpacing the rise in health care expenditures, accounting for a third of all growth in the U.S. economy. From 1990 to the present, the ratio of debt-to-GDP expanded from 165 percent to over 350 percent. In essence, the present welfare of the economy rests on debt, and the collateral for that debt consists of a wager that next year’s levels of production and consumption will be higher than this year’s.
Given that growth cannot continue on a finite planet, this wager, and its embodiment in the institutions of finance, can be said to constitute history’s greatest Ponzi scheme. We have justified present borrowing with the irrational belief that perpetual growth is possible, necessary, and inevitable. In effect we have borrowed from future generations so that we could gamble away their capital today.

I digress…

Huge climate events or meteorites hitting the earth to one side, I think it’ll be lots of ’small’ crises: mass redundancies, petrol being a bit more expensive wobbling up then down but always tending upwards. More floods, droughts and freak weather. Ice caps melting just a bit more each year. Deserts getting that bit bigger each year. There being a bit less drinking water because that ice on those mountains up there melts too quickly and isn’t replenished because the snowy season is much shorter. Food becoming a bit more expensive because the fertilisers, oil based of course, are more expensive. As is the cost of picking it, transporting it, packaging it and running the shops we go to buy it in (which is more expensive as it costs more to drive there).

Looking back in 30 years time I feel sure that our society will look very different to that one we see today in ways that great big swathes of the global population just would not [want to] believe if confronted with right now . Energy will be very expensive. Water will be very precious in a lot more places and arable land – that’ll be productive arable land that can grow things on it without needing fertilisers –  will be in shorter supply. People will also pay the real cost for their goods that take into account the total energy cost of the product as well as the materials used. If they are not already dead then there will be lots more poor and that [lack of] wealth will be measured not just in terms of assets owned but in terms of energy resources one has access to.

A good example of unthinkable change is Sharon Astyk’s excellent post Will the Internet Still Be Here in Tough Times? It makes points that will seem ridiculous to some:

I think the assumption that we are making, that the internet will always be here for all of us – and I think it is an assumption made even by many people who should know better – risks enormous negative consequences.  Whether we are printing out valuable information (on the backs of other paper, of course) or remembering that even though we may like the people on the internet better, we still will have to live with our neighbours, perhaps exclusively, our assumptions should be that we may not always have things, just because we find it unthinkable to live without them.

A 16 year old with a modern internet connection would probably not be able to conceive of a world just 10 years hence where downloading a 20MB file would have taken at least a couple of hours and cost a fortune in telephone bills. Internet not always on? You had to manually connect? Unbelievable.

In a way I think that not having these big shocks is A Good Thing, it’ll mean we’ve time to get our business in order. However I do wonder whether bigger shocks would actually give us the kick up the ass to DO SOMETHING about the underlying problems. Living sustainably and within our means would be a nice start.

So I’m not expecting big shocks, no end of the word, just lots of small dips that can almost be missed on their own. When we get to the other side it’ll either be too late and the game is up, or – as I sincerely hope – we’ll have made the tough decisions needed and will be living within our means more.

On an ending note I thought it interesting to see articles on coming energy shortages in both this week’s Money Week (Are we about to hit peak oil?) and The Economist, the latter having the front cover with the headline “How long till the lights go out?”

I am only just  starting to really understand the challenges that we are faced with to keep those lights on. Best crack on eh?

I got one of my Raleigh Grifter’s ‘Supergrips’ made into a belt. Isn’t it great?

On our recent Permaculture course I could see that Ruth was wearing a belt made from an old bike tyre and I thought that was pretty cool. So when I got back I googled and found TyreBelt.

I had an emailed conversation with Duncan the guy that runs it to see if the tyre from my old 1983 Grifter was going to be suitable. There were some concerns about the rubber being cracked as it was so old but he was happy for me to send it up to him on the basis that he’d give me a refund and send me my rare old tyre back should it turn out to be not suitable.

Evidently there was nothing to be worried about as it’s turned out brilliant.

Kudos to Duncan for his excellent service. What a great way to turn an old tyre into something useful.

http://tyrebelt.co.uk

Next week I shall be moving away from our current home to start our new life at the recently formed south west of England eco-village. It is really very early days for the community because up until now although they have had great ideas and plans on how to become self-sufficient in food, energy and water but there has been a lack of people to do the work and finances to help shift things along.

We will be among a large ‘new wave’ of new people joining the group. Since the original eleven people bought the smallholding in 2007, two have moved out, a new family of three has moved in to become ’stage one’ members and a new baby has been born.

At the same time as our move down, another young family of five will be moving in as well as another family of three so the new wave influx will double the original population and will hopefully provide new energy, new ideas, new ways of getting things done, new finance and also just loads more muscle power (to weed the veg patch, dig a reed-bed water purification system, insulate current houses against the brisk Atlantic winter winds and to build office spaces in one of the barns, think about wind turbines, allotments for the local community etc).

We’re really happy to be moving in. The decision process for us has been a long one but now we are hoping to make the farm our new home for at least a year while the other community members and we decide whether or not it will be somewhere we will want to live permanently.

This week a couple who were very serious about moving in at the same time as us made what seemed to be the very sudden decision not to join the community after all. They were kind enough to share the reasons that made them realise that this community would not be a suitable place for them to make their home in a long email to us all.

Most of the reasons were around the fact that the community was not yet operating in a self-sufficient, sustainable manner. At the moment meals that are cooked and eaten communally are often made using some fresh veg from thew garden but also augmented by ingredients from the local supermarket, these ingredients often include meat products from a questionable source (ie. not organic), the rain water harvesting and reuse system is not yet in place and although we have plans to build lots of composting toilets for people to use in order to save  flushing litres of drinking water away each time the use the loo the system is still only in the planning stages. The couple (who I was very much looking forward to being neighbours with as they have so many years of gardening and woodland management knowledge) are also very concerned with the way that there is not a community work ethos and various people work on various land-based projects when they fancy but there is not a need for everyone on site to ensure they have spent some time working on a community project. For this couple who have spent many years living lightly on the earth as vegans and commune members this would have been to hard to bear.

For us, however, the fact that the community is a work-in-progress project is very much one of the attractions.

We are hoping to learn how to be self-sufficient at the same pace as the others who have decided to live there. We are hoping to gain huge amounts of rich experience by partaking in so many projects and hope that very soon with so many great minds and so much human energy available the community will move from becoming self-sufficient to being truly sustainable and can proudly call itself a well functioning eco-village.

Yet another fabulous book chomped through last week. The author is the same woman who writes a very inspirational blog aimed at normal family folk like me and you but focused on the annoying fact that we in the rich west must change our naughty power hungry ways.

Sharon Astyk’s book ‘Depletion and Abundance: Life on the New Home Front‘ (or ‘One Woman’s Solutions to Finding Abundance for your Family While Coming to Terms with Peak Oil, Climate Change and Hard Times’) is a great read, an easy read and a truely life-changing read as it enables one to work out a personal transition plan (to a low energy future) with happiness and without hardship.

She’s a great author and I really like her slightly witty style. She’s made a name for herself simply by virtue of the fact that she is one of the only female contributors to the world of Peak Oil writings.

If nothing else please click though to her superb list: “100 Things You Can Do to Get Ready for Peak Oil”

Her blog is great too and despite having a time-depleted lifestyle with the all the low-energy choices she’s now making (growing food, burning wood, not driving too much) and four young children to look after she still writes great posts which as a fellow peak oil worried bloggin’ mama provides huge amounts of inspiration, tips and food for thought.

I’m already looking forward to reading her new book “A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil”

A Nation of Farmers: Defeating the Food Crisis on American Soil, written with Aaron Newton, will be forthcoming in March of 2009. Our present agricultural system depends on heavy inputs of increasingly expensive and scarce fossil fuels, and is exacerbating our current world food crisis.  It warms the planet and depletes soil and water and contributes to every major problem we face.  Meanwhile, 100 million people have joined the starving and one in every 10 Americans requires food stamps to sustain them. But that doesn’t have to be the case – agriculture could help us regenerate our society.  We explore the possibility – and urgent necessity of creating a truly sustainable food system.  There is a short excerpt here: http://henandharvest.com/?p=166.  The book will be available for preorder shortly.

Photo by Mr Sardonicus

Ed Miliband makes no mention of peak oil in his review of his recent experience of being a ‘keynote listener’ at Transition Towns conference. In his review he talks of ‘climate change’ and ‘low carbon’ but to me it feels like a big important memo has gone round parliament telling politicians they are not under any circumstances allowed to worry the public by bringing attention to the small matter of fossil fuel dependency and how little time we have to prepare for a future without such an incredible resource.

I’ve been wondering for a while (since I first watched the very brilliant BBC 2 documentary ‘A Farm for the Future‘ made by Rebecca Hoskins – do please watch it if you haven’t already, it is absolutely brilliant and very thought provoking) WHY DO WE NOT HEAR ABOUT THIS IN THE MEDIA?

Surely surely surely if little old me can work out what’s likely to happen to millions of innocent UK citizens if adequate awareness programs and preparation programs are not started as soon as possible (errr I’m so sorry folks but we, you and our/your children are likely to starve, be very cold, go short on medicines and be without access to lovely clean drinking water) then SURELY the clever people elected to govern our country have also been tipped off on this trifling matter?

According to the Rob Hopkin’s Transition Culture website, his accompanying book ‘The Transition Handbook‘ was one of the top 5 books taken on holiday by *all* MPs last summer. I’ve got this book and there is little doubt that the subject matter is all about the very terrifying prospect that the one substance the whole of our society requires for most of things we do is not going to come out of the ground easily or cheaply anymore. The book aims to help towns across the country (or the world) to make themselves become ‘resilient’ to supply deficiencies which are inevitable as oil and its derivatives become less and less plentiful (and owned by Arab countries who may not want to sell their precious commodity to us nasty westerners).

So, this terrible fact is known to our lovely leaders. Yes it is. But, for some mysterious reason, ‘They’ are hell bent on keeping this knowledge to themselves. They seem to be going to really really great lengths to not have communities begin to prepare for life without global food distribution networks, without loads of nonsense high-tech jobs, without affordable heating, without affordable transport. Yes it would be of huge concern to all the electorate if the message started coming out but at least the electorate would have the opportunity to Do Something (like the electorate did in the war years when people grew food at home, adopted a ‘make do and mend’ culture and generally pulled together for the common good). For those of us who have figured out for ourselves what is likely to happen we all went through a period of shock, horror, denial, anger and worry but are also able to begin to take steps to mitigate disaster wherever possible.

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A ridiculous situation because I could write essay after essay on why western modern life is not sustainable (and how sadly for you folks and me that means IT MUST END), how far removed families have become from providing for themselves (food, skills, care etc), why Peak Oil theory is way more scary than climate change (and that’s pretty scary in itself), how thrilled I am to have the opportunity to help lead some brand new local food initiatives when we move to Cornwall, how inspired I’ve been by Sharon Astyk, George Monbiot, Richard Heinberg, Rob Hopkins, Barbara Kingsolver to name just a few of the writers I’ve been chomping up.

BUT

I almost feel I’ve got too much to write, too many different types of people to cater for (am I writing for people like my dear dad who is one of the few remaining climate change and peak oil nay-sayers left and trying to convince them that denial is a route which they may live to regret? am I writing for dear chums who have a similar view on what the future may hold for our cherished children but are wondering what they may be able to do to prepare themselves, their families, their neighbourhoods? Am I writing for people who like us have found themselves exploring an interesting new path leading them towards self-sufficiency? or am I writing for people who are intrigued by our opting to live in a newly established eco-village – or is it a commune with virtual strangers who are most likely to become the people closest to us in every sense as we live, work, celebrate and commiserate lifes’ events alongside one another?) and so am finding myself writing very little at all but with loads whirling round my head every hour of every day.

Perhaps just by ranting out tonight I have stumbled upon the answer (in permaculture we are told that ‘The problem IS the solution’). Maybe I just need to write whatever I fancy and then at the end will categorise it or tag it to be for one of the four groups above unless it is just random bimblings which may not be of interest to anyone apart from those just vaguely wondering how we are getting along.

Mike Ellis wrote a blog post yesterday entitled Too Cheap which relates to western society’s mass consumption orgy that is largely driven by goods being produced at a cost that is much lower than their real cost, in terms both of exploitation of the human resources as well as earth’s diminishing resources.

It’s a view that we plainly agree with here so I felt compelled to comment upon the post.

Part of my comment has grown upon me so I decided to reproduce it, slightly edited for grammar, here:

The Elephant in the room is there. Look it in the eye. It’s going nowhere and the longer it’s left there alone the pile of shit it’s leaving is getting bigger.

Wake up people.

The Introduction to Permaculture course Darren and I both took part in last weekend was brilliant and for those of you wishing to find a positive path in the heavy chaotic business of worrying about what the future holds for ourselves, our families, our friends and our societies and lifestyles this course delivered by Ruth O’Brien in Bristol comes very highly recommended by both of us..

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This week Ed Milliband launched the UK government’s Low Carbon Transition Plan and on balance I think it could have been a lot worse.

At 228 pages it’s a weighty tome but thankfully you don’t have to trawl though it all as Transition’s own Rob Hopkins has done that for you in his excellent summary of the plan.

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