The Tao Of Peak Oil  

Energy Bulletin has an interesting pair of interviews with Fritjof Capra on relocalisation and peak oil which touch on a lot of very Viridian ideas. Jonathan has some comments on part 1 at Past Peak.

Fritjof Capra is one of the foremost green thinkers, especially in the field of ecology and systems thinking. He is the author of many seminal books, such as the Tao of Physics, The Web of Life, The Turning Point and most recently, The Hidden Connections.

In your latest book ‘The Hidden Connections’ you write, “creating sustainable communities is the great challenge of our times”. In relation to Totnes and the relocalisation initiative about to start here how might we start to achieve this?

This is a question that would generate different kinds of answers from different kinds of people. Some would say you need a revolution, some that you need community development and so on. I always come back to education because that is my area. It is not necessarily the best way but it is the one I am most familiar with. My answer derives from the fact that the concept of sustainability is alien to most people, and many don’t understand it. Lester Brown who devised the term 25 years ago and if later became widely known as the Brundtland definition, “sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

When I first heard it I was confused by it. It set me thinking as to why I found it confusing, and I ended up thinking that it was because it is a moral exhortation to create as many opportunities for future generations as possible, yet it is an exhortation that doesn’t actually tell you how to do it. I tell people that what we need instead is an operational definition. The key to this is that we can use ecosystems as models. They are adaptive and sustainable, they support life, they recycle, they are solar powered.

In terms of creating sustainable human communities, our aim has to be to redesign them so that they don’t interfere with nature’s inherent ability to sustain life. Our first step is to understand how Nature sustains life. The second step is then to introduce these principles into design, which we call ‘eco-design, to redesign our technologies, social institutions, commerce and so on. The first step is that we have to help communities become what I call ‘eco-literate’, there is really no way round this. It needs to happen at a very early stage in a relocalisation process.

How can the concept of the Network be applied to relocalisation, beyond just linking the various local groups together?

When you study the principles and basic concepts of ecology you can see them as basic principles of all living systems. At the Centre for Ecological Literacy we have tried to turn these principles into bite sized pieces for teaching, distilling them into 6 principles of ecology. For each one we have created a symbol and photos and we have been teaching it in schools. The 6 principles are;

1. Networks
2. Nested Systems
3. Cycles
4. Flows
5. Development
6. Dynamic Balance

Networks is listed as the first principle because it is it the defining characteristic of life. Wherever there is life there are networks, be they metabolic networks, food webs, human social networks. I tried in recent years to put all of these principles into a nutshell, as they are all different ways of seeing the same thing. Nature sustains life by creating and nurturing communities. We all know what a community is, even if we don’t have it. It is something that, if we have it, we recognise it, and if we don’t have it we feel its absence. Be it English football hooligans or US inner city gangs, they are all seeking community. Community is visceral and real, and that is why I think it is central to a definition of sustainability. The experience of a living network is the experience of a living community. The network concept is important, as sustainability is the quality of a community, an individual cannot be sustainable. Creating communities is creating sustainability.

...

Do you see peak oil as a crisis or an opportunity?

Well I think obviously it’s a crisis. But every crisis contains in itself an opportunity. In fact its quite interesting that the new conception of life that is now emerging in science has some interesting lessons to teach us here, because what we have learnt from complexity theory and systems theory is that the crisis that we are experiencing is an integral aspect of dramatic transformation. Every emergence of novelty has an instability preceding it or a crisis preceding it. So, the crisis may lead to a breakdown, but it can also lead to a breakthrough, and we can achieve a new state of affairs, a new way of life, that can be a much higher quality of life, and it’s up to us to shape that transformation.

If the approach that you propose were to come to fruition, and you woke up 30 years from now, in that reality, what would it look like, smell like, feel like, talk us through it!

We would use Nature as a model and a mentor, and we would have designed societies and communities that are in harmony with the basic principles of organization that Nature has evolved to sustain life. Nature contains ecosystems as sustainable communities; communities of animals, plants, and microorganisms that have evolved over billions of years so as to maximize their long-term survival or sustainability. So, we would have patterned our communities after those natural communities, which means that we would use solar energy as our main energy source, including wind, biomass, and so on. We would have arranged our industries and our systems of production in such a way that matter cycles continuously, that all materials cycle between producers and consumers.

We would recognize that diversity enhances resilience in an ecosystem as well as in a human community. So, we would have diverse communities; culturally, intellectually, ethnically, and so on. We would grow our food organically, and we would shorten the distance between the farm and the table, which is now thousands of miles, and we would shorten that, produce food mainly locally. We would also shorten the distance between the home and the workplace, so that we don’t need to use cars to go to work, we can bicycle or we can use public transportation, we can walk to work. All of this would combine to create a world that has dramatically reduced pollution, where climate change has been brought under control, where there would be plenty of jobs, because these various designs are labour-intensive, and as an overall effect there will be no waste, and the quality of life would increase dramatically.

How do we get here from there?

I think it is useful to start from the concept of sustainability, because what I have been talking about it of course a sustainable society, a sustainable community, which is a community that is designed in such a way that its ways of life, its technologies, its social institutions, its physical structures, do not interfere with Nature’s ability to sustain life. The outstanding characteristic of the biosphere is that is has sustained life for billions of years.

We need to redesign our communities accordingly. In order to do so, obviously, we need to know first how Nature sustains life, we need to become, as it were, ‘ecologically literate’. We need to understand the basic principles of ecology and redesign our communities accordingly. So, to get from here to there the first step would be to become eco-literate, the second step apply this ecological knowledge to the redesigning of our technological structures, our social institutions, to make them in harmony with Nature and ecologically sustainable.

Tom Paine has an article on peak oil and global warming.

One might think that a long-bearded representative of an eco-farm in Tennessee who talks about the oil addiction of America as “the karmic revenge” of Gaia and an academic who is one of the founders of ecological economics (or eco-economics) would be at opposite ends of some sort of spectrum in the green universe.

But this week was all about convergence in D.C., at least within that green universe. The weekend started with PetroCollapseDC, a public forum held at a community church in northwest D.C. Organizers from CultureChange.org papered the city with flyers and hit neighborhood email lists.

“Got cheap gas? Neither do we. But we have alternatives.”

PetroCollapse was where you might hear author Albert Bates (“The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook ”) describe the aftermath of Hurricane Wilma in Cancún—communities learning to live without major power infrastructure, relying on solar generators, and gathering each night to play music and dance. A collapse of our current civilization was the prevailing assumption—the discussion focused on how to build “lifeboats,” both metaphorical and quite physical, to survive what speakers described as almost certain catastrophe once our oil-driven economy collapsed. What speakers like Bates had to offer, though, was the theory that this would also “solve” the oil-driven problems of wars, social alienation and “political corruption and mindless intrigues.”

Right.

Hippies predict our corrupt way of life leads to certain destruction, think that complex economic conundrums like our energy dependence can be solved by eating local produce, playing guitar. Check.

Except ... except then I went over to the second event of the week in D.C. for the eschatologically-minded: the Sustainable Energy Forum 2006, titled “Peak Oil and the Environment.”

And I heard pretty much the same spiel from very respectable Robert Costanza, of University of Vermont. He started his presentation “A Framework for Understanding Future Energy Options and Opportunities,” by saying: “We could be happier by consuming less. Overproduction is like psychological junk food—it’s just making us obese, not making us happier.”

By putting it in nice, technical jargon and putting up graphs of quantifiable things like “Genuine Progress Index vs. Gross National Product”—i.e., what progressive economists have been using since the mid-1990s to explain the common sense that not all growth is good—Costanza was able to make a dent in my skeptical brain.

Tom Whipple's latest peak oil article also looks at the latest Petrocollpase conference and the wide range of views people have about the impact of peak oil (even at Petrocollapse, which might not be an entirely representative sample of attitudes towards peak oil, though at least most attendees are far more peak oil aware than the average person - to say the least).

Last weekend, I attended a conference in Washington entitled "Petrocollapse." The organizers of the conference believe at some point the price of oil suddenly will rise so rapidly and will become so scarce that much of the world's current economic system will be unable to function. A corollary seems to be that beyond that unhappy day, governments as currently constituted won't be able to do much to help the situation.

One of the speakers at the conference pointed out that it really is impossible to know where civilization is going without cheap, abundant oil. There are so many people, governments, organizations, and economic phenomena involved in the current economic order, the results of their interaction during oil depletion is impossible to foretell. This, of course, is perfectly true. There is no way of knowing how our grandchildren are going to be living 50 years from now and what they are going to be doing, but it does seem a few general observations about the early years of peak oil can be made.

Those who think, or at least write, about the future of society from the perspective of knowing that peak oil is imminent, fall along a spectrum ranging from life-as-we-know-it-with-hydrogen-cars to most-have-died-off from oil wars, famine, and disease with the remainder living in scattered tribes on subsistence agriculture.

Narrowing this spectrum a bit, we first get to the "mitigators" who believe that if we can muddle through 20 or 30 years of economic depression, perhaps severe, we can gradually emerge with a new set of sustainable energy technologies. Clustered around the other end of the scale will be the "pessimists" who believe the oil/industrial age and all its wonders has over shot and that we will be in a deep, deep hole. They believe there are no foreseeable energy technologies that can replace oil sufficiently soon to prevent a significant economic and societal collapse. Nowhere will this collapse be harder and faster than in the United States , which uses five times the average world consumption per capita and, must import, nearly 70 percent of its consumption.

As usual, the truth is likely to fall somewhere in between.

Speaking about peak oil awareness, MonkeyGrinder points to a post from Prof Goose at TOD that notes that Australians are amongst the most peak oil aware people on the planet (there is certainly no shortage of talk about it down here - both in the media and in government, though, as with global warming, it appears the Federal Government is determined to take its traditional ostrich approach to everything except sucking up to the Bush/Cheney cabal).

Mike A notices: "What is really SOBERING though, is to compare search and news volumes between 'peak oil' and 'gas prices'. 'Peak oil' hardly shows a blip compared to 'gas prices', which implies to me that most people are still not making the connection. [...] Again, check the distribution of languages - in English 'gas prices' have far, far more results, but the Europeans seem to "get it", with 'peak oil' having more responses in Swedish, Finnish, Dutch & German (in that volume order)."

Then I was playing around and made a couple more observations: 1) Portland seems to be the most peak aware city via google, followed by Austin and Seattle. 2) BUT, even more interestingly, look at the regions tab. New Zealand and Australia have more raw numbers of people (i.e., not percentages folks) searching for "peak oil" than in the United States! What's the population proportion between the US and those two countries? 20m-ish for Australia and 4m-ish for New Zealand, compared to 300m-ish for the US!

MIT Technology Review has an article on the next generation of giant wind turbines (via The Energy Blog).

Huge turbines mounted on floating platforms could make wind power competitive with fossil-fuel-generated electricity. These advanced wind turbines, which are in development, could be situated far from the shore, too, avoiding battles with onshore residents who object to the presence of large wind farms.

GE has announced a $27 million partnership with the U.S. Department of Energy to develop 5-7 megawatt turbines by 2009, each of which could power well over 1,000 homes. Supplanting the company's current 3.6 megawatt turbines, these giant energy factories should make wind power more economical, since the major cost of building and installing offshore wind farms does not depend primarily on a turbine's size, but on the number of them that need to be erected. By 2015, GE could have even bigger, 10-megawatt turbines, according to Jim Lyons, leader of advanced technology for GE's wind energy business.

Making the turbines larger, however, comes with technical challenges. The new turbines will be mounted to towers rising 90 to 95 meters and will have rotors measuring 140 meters in diameter. Imagine a structure larger than a football field rotating at a leisurely ten to twelve revolutions per minute. To decrease the weight of the massive rotor blades and tower, GE plans to use composite fibers, as well as alternatives to the weighty gearboxes now used to transfer energy from the rotor to the electrical generator.

Today's turbines compensate for changes in wind speed by actively turning their blades to catch less wind. The new turbines will adapt to gusts by using sensor-based technology that will quickly angle the blades out of the wind to reduce the wear and tear on the turbine. These sensors could include basic accelerometers, embedded fiber-optic sensors that detect shape changes in the blades in response to gusts, and forward-looking, laser-based "radar" that allows the turbine to anticipate wind-speed changes.

None of these technological advances will make a difference, however, if erecting monstrous turbines is blocked by shoreline residents who see them as visual pollution. A potential solution is floating platforms that allow the turbines to be located farther out in the sea -- and out of sight.

I've got a ton of other links to post but no more time tonight - hopefully this weekend will see another large dump of interesting stuff - in the meantime Peter from Karavans recommends this Arundhati Roy documentary (which I haven't watched yet) and commenter Michael Kiely noted the launch of the Carbon Coalition Against Global Warming and its associated blog.