Peak Oil Scenarios  

WorldChanging has a look at the scenario planning work being done on "Peak Oil in Ireland" by FEASTA and Vivid Logic. I like the closing phrase on the "dark eschatology" of most peak oil conversation (one to add to the apocaphilia and terriblisma canon).

I can think of few better topics for scenario-based analysis than peak oil. The mechanism (decline of petroleum production levels) is straightforward, but the timeline is highly uncertain; plausible results range from disastrous to transformative, with little chance that just ignoring the problem is the best path; it's arguably quite sensitive to technological development; and its impact will be felt at both the micro level of individual households and the macro level of global politics.

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Energy Scenarios Ireland is compelling, detailed and -- like every scenario project -- wrong. As the ESI site notes, no government will be as aggressively interventionist as the Enlightened Transition scenario, nor as hands-off as the Localisation scenario. Moreover, these scenarios make some assumptions that many of us, myself included, would disagree with, including global warming having little impact other than stormier weather through 2050, and no radical leaps in technologies related to energy, manufacturing or agriculture. Of course, given the level of uncertainty in those issues, they'd have to have their own scenario workshops.

But the goal of scenario projects is not to predict the future, it's to give the present-day a way to analyze decisions. What strategies would be robust across more than one scenario? What would make the bad scenarios worse, and what could we do now to soften their blow? The truism of scenario planning is that none of the worlds will be completely accurate, but the real future will contain recognizable elements of them all. In the case of the Energy Scenarios for Ireland, the underlying purpose is even simpler: to catalyze public discussion of the issue of peak oil. FEASTA and Vivid Logic aren't declaring to the Irish public "this is what will happen," they're saying "here are some examples of what might happen, what can we do about it?"

I think this is a tremendously useful strategy for introducing the peak oil concept to a larger audience. As I've expressed before, the apocaphile tendency among some peak oilers tends to shut off discussion by declaring that we're doomed, and that's final. Instead, an approach that says "here is a range of outcomes, and they're heavily dependent upon our choices" is both more accurate and more attractive. I strongly encourage people involved in the peak oil debate undertake their own scenario workshops; information about how the process works can be found here.

The Energy Scenarios Ireland project is still a work-in-progress, and will be worth returning to in the weeks and months to come. This is a discussion that will become more heated as we get closer to the peak, and projects like ESI will help us focus on solutions. I applaud efforts to bring illumination and choice to a debate that is far too often a kind of dark eschatology.