(This month's essay is another chapter from the retitled book-in-progress, BLACKOUT: Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis.)

Recent reports on global coal reserves, surveyed in previous chapters, generally point to the likelihood of supply limits appearing relatively soon—within the next two decades (a contrary view is represented solely by the BGR report ["Lignite and Hard Coal: Energy Suppliers for World Needs until the Year 2100 – An Outlook," 2007]). According to this near-consensus, coal output in China, the world's foremost producer, could begin to decline within just a few years.

Since coal is the most significant source of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, releasing about twice as much carbon dioxide per unit of energy produced as natural gas, the news that there may be much less coal available to be burned than commonly thought should be heartening to climate scientists and environmental activists, and to policy makers and citizens concerned about the fate of the planet. Reduced estimates of future coal supplies should be factored into climate models—which typically assume that there is enough coal available to permit continued expansion of usage well into the next century.

At the same time, because global warming has emerged as the central environmental issue of our era, climate concerns will inevitably impact how much coal we continue to burn and how we burn it—whether these concerns come to be expressed through caps on emissions, carbon taxes, cancellation of orders for new coal-fired power plants, or the promotion of new carbon sequestration technologies. In any case, the coal industry will be—indeed, already is being—forced to change.

These two trends are surely destined to interact, and the uncertain result will shape climate and energy policy in the years to come.

A Tale of Two Crises

The idea that carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels might contribute to a greenhouse effect raising global temperatures was initially floated in the 1950s. The first evidence that global atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO₂) levels and global temperatures were both indeed increasing appeared in the early 1960s. The 1980s saw the first calls for international action to limit carbon emissions, with the first Congressional hearings held in 1988, the same year Margaret Thatcher delivered a Climate Change speech to the Royal Society. The UN's International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released its initial report in 1990. In 1992, the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro produced the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The third IPCC report, issued in 2001, stated that global warming, unprecedented since the end of last Ice Age, is "very likely," with severe surprises possible. By this time, debate among scientists over the question of whether human activities were contributing substantially to Climate Change had effectively ended. In 2003, numerous observations raised concern that the collapse of ice sheets in West Antarctica and Greenland could raise sea levels faster than most had believed possible. That same year, a deadly summer heat wave in Europe riveted public opinion on the issue. Work to retard emissions accelerated in Japan and Western Europe, and among US regional governments and corporations. In 2007 the fourth IPCC report warned that serious effects of warming have already become evident, and that the cost of reducing emissions would be far less than that of the damage they will cause. In the same year, the north polar ice cap melted to such an extent that the northwest shipping passage was opened for the first time in history.

In short, over the past 50 years anthropogenic Climate Change has evolved from a mere hypothesis to a robustly documented and widely researched phenomenon; and from a concern on the part of just a few climate scientists to a center-stage issue dominating not just environmental studies, but economic planning and global politics as well.

Yet while Climate Change is the greatest environmental crisis that humanity has ever faced, it is not the only serious challenge confronting us. Climate Change is a "sink" problem—the result of dumping into the environment a waste product from the burning of fossil fuels. But there is a simultaneous "source" problem arising from the gradual depletion of the fuels we are burning.

At about the same time the greenhouse hypothesis was first being proposed, geophysicist M. King Hubbert was publishing his first study on the phenomenon of oil depletion. Previously, supply concerns about fossil fuels had centered on the question of when they would run out, and by most estimates that would not happen for a very long time. Hubbert reframed the discussion by pointing out that the rate of extraction of fossil fuels within any given region, or the world as a whole, will reach a maximum and begin to decline long before the resource is exhausted; further, he suggested that it is this peaking of production that is critical for economic planning. By the mid-1970s, US oil production had peaked and begun to decline, as Hubbert had estimated that it would. By this time, Hubbert and a few other petroleum geologists were forecasting a peak in global oil production around the turn of the century. In 1998, Colin Campbell and Jean Laherrère published a landmark article in Scientific American titled "The End of Cheap Oil," in which they argued that oil reserves in the Middle East were overstated, and that world petroleum production would hit its maximum before 2010. At the time, the world oil price was hovering in the range of $12 per barrel. By 2000, British oil production from the North Sea had begun to fall, and it was apparent that about half the world's other oil producing nations were also in plateau or decline. In 2005, a study for the US Department of Energy concluded that the world oil production peak would have "unprecedented" social, economic, and political consequences. In 2008, the International Energy Agency warned of a severe mismatch between world petroleum supply and demand in the years immediately ahead. By this time oil's price had risen to nearly $150 a barrel, and soaring fuel costs were severely impacting the automobile industry, the airline industry, the trucking industry, and tourism.

Because natural gas and coal are also non-renewable, it is inevitable that depletion will result in peaks and declines of output for these fuels as well. However, studies—even unofficial ones—of Peak Gas and Peak Coal have lagged behind those of Peak Oil. While some awareness of coal limits can be traced back at least to the work of Andrew Crichton in 1948, the discussion of Peak Coal really started with the appearance of reports from Energy Watch Group and the National Academy of Sciences, both in 2007. A report from Energy Watch Group on global natural gas supplies is due later this year.

Meanwhile, though the timing of the global oil, gas, and coal production peaks is still controversial, the peaking concept has become sufficiently accepted that its significance for Climate Change has begun to be explored.

Climate Models and Fossil Fuel Supplies

Models for future impacts of Climate Change must be based on two essential parameters: the quantity of future greenhouse gas emissions that can reasonably be anticipated; and the sensitivity of climate to added increments of atmospheric greenhouse gases. Both of these parameters are subject to ongoing research and revision.

In its Special Reports on Emissions Scenarios (SRES), the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has published a series of 40 scenarios for the fossil fuel contribution to future Climate Change. The latest of these reports, in 2007, was a multi-year effort involving more than 1,000 authors and more than 1,000 reviewers. In the assessment modeling, limitations in fossil fuel supplies are not considered critically. For example, in 17 of the scenarios, world oil production is higher in 2100 than it was in 2000—a situation not considered likely even by OPEC.

In 1996 the European Environment Council had said that the global average surface temperature increase should be held to a maximum of 2 degrees C above pre-industrial levels, and that to accomplish this the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ will have to be stabilized at 550 parts per million (the pre-industrial level was 280 ppm and current concentration is close to 390 ppm, though the addition of other greenhouse gases raises the figure to the equivalent of 440 to 450 ppm of CO₂). The European Union has more recently adopted a target of 450 ppm of CO₂, in line with recommendations from climate scientists.

However, the IPCC scenarios suggest that if fossil fuel consumption continues to increase throughout the century, CO₂ concentrations could reach a staggering 960 ppm by 2100, which would result in six or more degrees of warming, tilting the global climate into an entirely new regime and triggering an endless list of environmental horrors.

Jean Laherrère was an early critic of the SRES, arguing in 2001 that failure to understand realistic limits to fossil fuel supplies and to incorporate these into climate models was resulting in highly unrealistic estimates of future atmospheric CO₂ concentrations, future temperature increases, and future effects on climate, ocean levels, and so on. ("Estimates of Oil Reserves")

In April 2007, James E. Hansen, head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, who has arguably done more than any other scientist in recent years to both assess and publicize the likely impacts of Climate Change, co-authored an important paper (together with P. A. Kharecha of the Columbia University Earth Institute) that discusses fossil fuel supply limits. These authors explicitly mention Peak Oil, and stress that, "[I]t is important to estimate expected atmospheric CO₂ levels for realistic estimates of fossil fuel reserves and to determine how the CO₂ level depends upon possible constraints on coal use."

In this paper, ("Implications of 'Peak Oil' for Atmospheric CO₂ and Climate,"), Kharecha and Hansen discuss five scenarios. In their Business as Usual base case, "Peak oil emission . . . occurs in 2016 ± 2 yr, peak gas in 2026 ± 2 yr, and peak coal in 2077 ± 2 yr." Most of the IPCC scenarios show far higher CO₂ concentrations than Kharecha and Hansen's Business As Usual (BAU) scenario.

The authors also discuss a "Coal Phase-out" scenario that "moves peak coal up to 2022." This second scenario "is meant to approximate a situation in which developed countries freeze their CO₂ emissions from coal by 2012 and a decade later developing countries similarly halt increases in coal emissions." This Coal Phase-out scenario shows a peak of atmospheric CO₂ concentrations at about 445 ppm in 2046.

One message from the paper is that climate mitigation efforts should not focus so much on reducing oil and gas demand, as these fuels are supply-limited. Rather, they should concentrate on reducing the exploitation of coal and unconventional fossil fuels, since these are demand rather than supply limited for the time being. This message is more explicit in Hansen's June 23, 2008 Congressional testimony:

Phase out of coal use except where the carbon is captured and stored below ground is the primary requirement for solving global warming. Oil is used in vehicles where it is impractical to capture the carbon. But oil is running out. To preserve our planet we must also ensure that the next mobile energy source is not obtained by squeezing oil from coal. Global Warming Twenty Years Later: Tipping Points Near

However, it appears that Kharecha and Hansen did not take fully into account the recent coal supply reports surveyed in this book (though they do mention the NRC report of 2007). The authors write, "[E]ven if coal reserves are much lower than historically assumed . . . there is surely enough coal to take the world past 450 ppm CO₂ without mitigation efforts such as those described here," but they do not define what they mean by "much lower." In fact, the EWG, Höök et al., Laherrère, and Rutledge forecasts cited in this book all show future coal supply limits that are roughly in accord with Kharecha and Hansen's Coal Phase-out scenario, and that achieve a target of approximately 450 ppm CO₂.

A month after the release of the Kharecha and Hansen paper, Kjell Aleklett, professor of Physics at Uppsala University and President of Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO), published an article provocatively titled, "Global Warming Exaggerated, Insufficient Oil, Natural Gas and Coal" (May 18, 2007). Aleklett's main purpose was to take the IPCC to task:

The sum of all fossil resources that the industry considers available is presented annually in BP Statistical Review. According to this rather optimistic estimate, the total energy of all oil, natural gas and coal amounts to 36 Zeta joules (ZJ), a gigantic amount of energy. This is more than what our research group considers likely, but it is still less than what do the [SRES] scenario families A1, A2, B1 and B2 require. . . . Up to 2100, IPCC prognosticates that A2 will need between 70 and 90 ZJ, that is, twice as much as the industry believes is available. . . . We need a new assessment of future temperature increases based on a realistic consumption of oil, natural gas and coal.

David Rutledge published his paper, "The Coal Question and Climate Change," cited throughout this book, in June 2007. In it, he compared the results of Hubbert linearization modeling of future coal production with the IPCC models. He concluded, "Our Producer-Limited Profile has future fossil-fuel production that is lower than all 40 of the IPCC scenarios, so it seems that producer limitations could provide useful constraints in climate modeling." More specifically, "The Producer-Limited Profile gives a peak of 460 ppm in 2070"—which is only marginally above the widely accepted target of 450 ppm. The implication is clear: sufficient greenhouse gas reductions will be accomplished by fossil fuel depletion alone, without any need for carbon emissions regulatory policy.

In short, the implication of the latest research might appear to be that Peak Oil, Peak Gas, and Peak Coal will together solve the problem of global Climate Change, without need for intervention by policy makers.

However, this could be a dangerously premature conclusion.

Climate Sensitivity

Recall that climate models depend not only on future carbon emissions (which are contingent, as we have just seen, on fossil fuel supplies as well as on energy policy) but also on climate sensitivity. How will the global climate respond to a given additional increment of carbon dioxide? In general, as observations of impacts from Climate Change are being logged, they are tending to show that past assumptions about climate sensitivity have, if anything, been too timid and conservative.

Most climate sensitivity models are now being seen as subject to three problems. First, they tend to assume a linear relationship between atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations and global temperature increase, whereas there is mounting evidence that the relationship is actually non-linear. Second, they tend to assume a linear relationship between global temperature increase and actual impacts to ecosystems and human society, whereas there is mounting evidence that this relationship is also non-linear. Third, such models have created a questionable basis for policy: it has been widely accepted that a future temperature increase of two degrees C (which is assumed to be tied to a greenhouse gas concentration of 450 ppm) must be our target limit, above which changes to the climate will be catastrophic, irreversible, and unacceptable—whereas, in fact, we may already be seeing degrees of change that are catastrophic, effectively irreversible, and unacceptable.

Non-linearity in the relationship between greenhouse gases and temperature increase was demonstrated by a 2005 study by researchers at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact in Germany, which concluded that—to keep the temperature from increasing more than two degrees C—the atmospheric concentration of CO₂ would need to be stabilized at then-current levels (i.e., 380 ppm). Among other things, the study pointed out that the biosphere's ability to absorb carbon is being reduced by human activity, and this must be factored into the equations; by 2030, this carbon-absorbing ability will have been reduced from the current four billion tons per year to 2.7 billion tons.

Non-linearity of the consequences of global warming is illustrated by several self-reinforcing feedback mechanisms that, if triggered, could result in effects spiraling far out of human control. Perhaps the scariest of these has to do with the vast amounts of methane (a greenhouse gas over 20 times more potent than carbon dioxide) locked in the ocean floor and in the frozen soils of Siberia, Northern Europe, and North America. Climate warming could trigger a rapid thawing that would release billions of tons of this stored methane into the atmosphere. More methane in the atmosphere would create more warming, which would release still more methane. The ultimate consequence might be the tipping of the planet into a new climate regime so different from the current one that many higher life forms (including humans) might find survival difficult or impossible.

The inadequacy of policies that use 450 ppm and a two degree average global temperature increase as targets or limits is illustrated by evidence that catastrophic Climate Change has already been set in motion on the basis of a mere one degree C global temperature rise. For example: Recent observations have established that oceans are absorbing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, resulting in their gradual acidification. In the last two centuries, the oceans have absorbed roughly half of the amount of CO₂ emitted by fossil fuel use and cement production. This has caused ocean pH to fall. Ocean acidity will be devastating to the marine environment within a short period of time—tens of years instead of hundreds of years. Seawater undersaturated in calcium carbonate will make it difficult for shelled organisms to create skeletons and shells. These organisms form an essential link in the aquatic food chain; thus all life in the seas will be impacted. Given that the oceans have already absorbed a substantial amount of carbon dioxide, we are already committed to an irreversible amount of ocean acidification. It is likely that rebalancing the ocean pH will take thousands, or even hundreds of thousands, of years.

Ocean acidification again illustrates the disturbing fact that very little about "global warming" is simple or linear. Instead, the consequences of greenhouse gas emissions are complex, mutually interacting, and far-reaching. Rather than merely having to accustom ourselves to winters and summers a degree or two hotter, we will see far more severe storms of all kinds, as well as rising sea levels, collapsing ecosystems, disease outbreaks, species extinctions, profound challenges to agricultural production, and more. We may already have committed ourselves to centuries of overwhelming environmental damage.

If we are already seeing fundamental changes to the world's oceanic food chain, to the Arctic sea ice, and to glaciers that feed some of the world's most important river systems, can we afford to commit ourselves to still higher atmospheric greenhouse concentrations (450 ppm instead of the current 390), and to a two degree temperature increase above pre-industrial levels instead of the single degree that has already produced these impacts?

In a recent paper, "Target Atmospheric CO2: Where Should Humanity Aim?", James Hansen, along with eight co-authors, questioned the 450 ppm target and suggested a new one:

Our current analysis suggests that humanity must aim for an even lower level of GHGs. Paleoclimate data and ongoing global changes indicate that 'slow' climate feedback processes not included in most climate models, such as ice sheet disintegration, vegetation migration, and GHG release from soils, tundra or ocean sediments, may begin to come into play on time scales as short as centuries or less. Rapid on-going climate changes and realization that Earth is out of energy balance, implying that more warming is 'in the pipeline,' add urgency to investigation of the dangerous level of GHGs. . . . We use paleoclimate data to show that long-term climate has high sensitivity to climate forcings and that the present global mean CO₂, 385 ppm, is already in the dangerous zone. . . . Ongoing Arctic and ice sheet changes, examples of rapid paleoclimate change, and other criteria cited above all drive us to consider scenarios that bring CO₂ more rapidly back to 350 ppm or less.

On the basis of this article and the recent findings that prompted it, climate activists such as Bill McKibben and George Monbiot have also begun to call for more stringent targets—350 ppm target for atmospheric CO₂ concentrations and a 100 percent reduction in carbon emissions by 2050.

This is a far more rapid and drastic reduction in carbon emissions than can be achieved by fossil fuel resource depletion alone.

Further, relying on fossil fuel depletion to safeguard the world's climate would entail a serious risk: What if the new lower estimates of coal reserves turn out to be wrong? Clearly, the world's oil and coal reserves are a mere fraction of total resources. If somehow a way were found to transform a significant portion of remaining resources into reserves, this could entail a significant increase in atmospheric carbon emissions.

This risk also extends to unconventional fossil fuels such as tar sands, shale oil, and methane hydrates. While the potential for the development of these resources is often overstated, since current technology will permit only a very slow extraction rate for tar sands and perhaps no commercial extraction at all of oil shale and methane hydrates, nevertheless there is always the possibility that new technologies will enable their exploitation on a wide scale. Without a stringent emissions policy in place, the consequences for the global climate would be profound.

In general, human society faces a conundrum: unless non-fossil sources of energy are developed quickly, or unless society finds a way to operate with much less energy, and preferably both, the depletion of higher-quality fuels (natural gas and oil) will mean that efforts to obtain more energy will entail burning ever dirtier fuels, and doing so in proportionally larger quantities in order to derive equivalent amounts of energy.

Therefore, to the question, "Will coal, oil, and gas depletion solve Climate Change?", the answer is an unequivocal no.

Will Climate Change Solve Peak Coal?

If some Peak Oil-Coal-Gas analysts suggest that depletion will stop Climate Change, climate activists look at the matter the other way around. While peaks and declines in the production of fossil fuels will undoubtedly have enormous societal consequences, these nevertheless pale compared to the potential ecological effects of Climate Change. Peak Oil may result in the collapse of the global economy; Climate Change could do so as well, while also devastating Earth's ecosystems in a way that would require millennia, perhaps millions of years, for planetary recovery.

But if we proactively deal with Climate Change by reducing fossil fuel consumption, the result will obviously be a reduction in dependence on fossil fuels—and therefore a solution to the problems of Peak Oil, Gas, and Coal. Therefore all that is needed is a clear, sustained, vigorous policy focus on reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

There is some evidence to support this argument. Efforts to reduce carbon emissions are already having an impact on the coal industry, primarily in the US and Europe (though not nearly to the same degree in China and India). In the US, nearly 90 percent of all new coal power plant projects proposed between 2000 and 2006 were delayed or cancelled, according to an October 2007 report by the US Department of Energy—many over concerns about future carbon emissions regulations. Of 151 proposals for new plants submitted in early 2007, almost half had been dropped by year's end, many blocked by state governments or delayed by court challenges. Most recently, in July 2008 a judge in Georgia threw out an air pollution permit for a new coal-fired power plant because the permit did not set limits on carbon dioxide emissions. In Europe new coal plants are faring better only because higher-efficiency power plants are being proposed.

Climate mitigation efforts typically center on "cap and trade" (or "cap and dividend" or "cap and share"—alternative regimes being proposed by a number of economic equity activists), or on carbon taxes. Any of these policies to restrict carbon emissions will inevitably reduce fossil fuel consumption, impacting coal more than other fuels simply because of coal's higher carbon content. While future coal-burning power plants could be constructed to capture carbon, which could then be permanently sequestered underground (a technology discussed in the next chapter), over the short term reducing carbon emissions simply means using less coal.

If these efforts were to pick up speed, they would reduce demand for coal (and other fossil fuels), thus heading off shortages and keeping prices lower.

But will climate concerns succeed in driving policy in the face of energy scarcity? Currently, global coal consumption is still growing—faster by volume, indeed, than the consumption of any other energy resource. Can nations experiencing shortages of oil and battered by high energy prices be persuaded to forgo the still relatively cheap energy from coal in order to avert environmental consequences for future generations?

From the perspective of climate scientists and activists, there can be no question: whatever short-term economic pain society may experience as a result of deliberately reducing fossil fuel consumption can hardly be compared with the overwhelming catastrophe that unbridled Climate Change would bring. However, policy makers may look at the evidence through an entirely different lens—one that discounts the future in favor of the present.

In financial markets, the discount rate is the rate that a stock analyst might use to discount a company's future earnings stream for the purposes of present investment. In his book Material Concerns: Pollution, Profit and Quality of Life, Professor of Sustainable Development and UK government advisor Tim Jackson describes it this way:

[F]uture costs and benefits are taken to have a lower value than present costs and benefits. We can think of the discount rate as the rate of return which is required on capital invested by the company. The higher the discount rate, the lower the value of future costs against present costs. For example, a cost of $200,000 which occurs twenty years in the future has a net present value of $44,000 at 5 percent and $10,400 at 10 percent discount rate. The further into the future costs and benefits arise, the lower their value compared with present costs and benefits.

Environmental psychologists argue that discount rates are rooted in fundamental human psychology, and perhaps even hardwired into our genes and nervous systems. We instinctively value the concrete present over the likely or hypothesized future.

The relevance for Climate Change—and other environmental issues, such as resource depletion—is clear: we tend to discount future costs (such as the impact of melting glaciers) just as we do future profits. Thus, asking society to endure present pain in order to avert more widespread suffering in the future is problematic. The present pain must be minor, and the future suffering profound and credible and not too many years distant, in order to persuade us to take an action that we will find uncomfortable or unpleasant.

In the early years of the decade, as the global economy was booming, policy makers in many nations gave considerable attention to Climate Change. Heads of state conferred, strategies were debated, and agreements were forged. Today, as energy scarcity cripples national economies with pain that is both palpable and growing, there is likely to be a greater tendency to discount the future costs of Climate Change in favor of satisfying immediate demand for fuel, no matter how carbon-intensive it may be. There is abundant evidence that this is indeed occurring.

In Europe, while top climate experts offer ever-shriller warnings about the effects of carbon emissions, Italy is planning to increase its reliance on coal from 14 percent of total energy to 33 percent. Throughout the continent, about 50 new coal-fired power stations are being planned for the next five years. The driver for this new coal boom is unequivocally clear: higher natural gas prices. In Germany, 27 new coal plants are planned by 2020, many fueled by lignite—which can produce a ton of carbon emissions for every ton of coal burned.

In the US, despite the cancellation of so many new coal plants in recent years, the National Mining Association projects that about 54 percent of the nation's electric power will be coal-fired by 2030, up from the current 48 percent.

Depletion defeats climate policy in other ways. Carbon taxes become a harder policy to sell as energy prices climb; coal cutbacks are more difficult to make when natural gas is getting more expensive and electricity grids are browning out; and using coal to make liquid fuels starts to look attractive as diesel prices escalate.

Will efforts to address Climate Change solve the economic problems arising from coal, oil, and gas depletion and increasing scarcity? It is possible in principle, but in reality the stronger likelihood is that energy scarcity will rivet the attention of policy makers and private citizens alike because it is an immediate and unavoidable crisis. The result: as scarcity deepens, support for climate policy may fade even as climate impacts worsen.

A Combined Approach

Clearly, the world needs energy policies that successfully address both Climate Change and fuel scarcity. Such policies are likely to be devised and implemented only if both crises are acknowledged and taken into account in a strategically sensible way.

If policy makers focus only on one of these problems, some of the strategies they are likely to promote could simply exacerbate the other crisis. For example, some actions that might help reduce the impact of Peak Oil—such as exploitation of tar sands or oil shale, or the conversion of coal to a liquid fuel—will result in an increase in carbon emissions. On the other hand, some actions aimed to help reduce carbon emissions—such as carbon sequestration or carbon taxes—will make energy more expensive, which, in a situation of energy scarcity and high prices, may be politically problematic and therefore a waste of climate activists' and policy makers' limited resources.

However, many policies will help with both problems—including any effort to develop renewable energy sources or to reduce energy consumption.

For strategic purposes, it is important to understand our human tendency to discount future problems. We must assess which threats will come soonest, and make sure that our sometimes frantic efforts to respond to these immediate necessities do not exacerbate problems that will show up later. Peak oil is clearly the most immediate energy and resource threat that policy makers must deal with. Peak Coal and Climate Change may seem comparatively distant. But all must be taken seriously if we are to do any better than merely to lurch from crisis to crisis, with each new one worse than the last.

If energy scarcity forces policy changes before climate fears can do so, then perhaps world leaders will find that it makes more sense to ration fuels themselves by quota, rather than the emissions they produce. In any case, it will help everyone concerned to have a clear idea of the ultimate extent of coal, oil, and natural gas reserves and future production, as well as a realistic understanding of climate sensitivity and hence the environmental and economic costs of continuing to burn fossil fuels even in depletion-constrained amounts. Otherwise, the policies pursued may simply waste precious time and investment capital while actually making matters worse.

Coal in China

China is the world's foremost coal producer and consumer, surpassing the United States by a factor of two on both scores and accounting for 40 percent of total world production. Moreover, its coal consumption has been rising rapidly, at a rate of up to ten percent per year (which translates to a doubling of demand every 7 years). While China is a significant producer of oil and natural gas, coal dominates the nation's fossil-fuel reserve base. About 70 percent of China's total energy is derived from coal, and about 80 percent of its electricity. The country has recently become the world's foremost greenhouse gas emitter due to its growing, coal-fed energy appetite.

This nation's coal-mining history is probably the world's longest, dating back up to two millennia—though modern mining methods were not introduced until the late 19th Century by European, and later by Japanese companies. Production achieved one million tons per year in 1903, growing at an average annual rate of over ten percent. Growth slowed during the civil wars of the 1920s, but resumed strongly in the mid-1930s. After the establishment of the People's Republic in 1949, coal production again slumped, then quickly increased to over 400 million tons per year by 1960, only to fall again during the turbulent years of the Cultural Revolution. Production accelerated from the 1970s on, achieving one billion tons per year in 1989. In 1996, China began addressing problems of mine safety and low productivity by closing its smallest and least efficient mines. This led to a temporary decline in production lasting until 2000; since then, production has grown with astonishing rapidity to the present annual output of roughly 2.5 billion metric tons (tonnes) or 2.7 billion US short tons.

China's coal consumption in 2000 was 30 times its volume a half-century earlier, at the time of the establishment of the People's Republic. And just since 2000, consumption has more than doubled.

China currently has roughly 25,000 coalmines, with 3.4 million registered employees. Many of these mines are small, private, local—and even illegal—operations that can respond quickly to the market; but they are less efficient than larger, centralized mines and tend to have more environmental and safety problems.

The productivity of China's coal mining is low: in 1999, 289 tons of coal were produced per miner averaged across all the nation's mines, versus almost 12,000 tons per miner in the US. This productivity rate resulted from still-low levels of mechanization within the mining industry. However, the strong trend during the past decade has been toward greater mechanization.

Thin overburden allows surface mining in some areas, but only four to seven percent of China's reserves are suitable for surface mining, and of these most consist of lignite. Today the average mining depth in China is 400 meters, a figure that is slowly increasing, and 95 percent of mines are shaft mines (compared to 48 percent in the US).

Uncontrolled underground coal fires, some of which will burn for decades, have become an enormous environmental problem in China, consuming an estimated 200 million tons of coal annually—an amount equal to about 10 percent of the nation's coal production. These ultra-hot fires can occur naturally, but most are caused by sparks from cutting and welding, electrical work, explosives, or cigarette smoking. Across the northern region of Xinjiang, fires at small illegal mines have resulted from miners using abandoned mines for shelter, and burning coal within the shafts for heat. China's underground coal fires make an enormous, hidden contribution to global warming, annually releasing 360 million tons of carbon dioxide—as much as all the cars and light trucks in the United States.

The pace of China's headlong dash toward increased coal consumption is legendary: in recent years an average of one new coal-fed power plant has fired up every week. The resulting annual capacity addition is comparable to the size of Britain's entire power grid. The price being paid in environmental quality and human health for this coal bonanza is likewise well known—to citizens and visitors alike: coal power plants emit deadly clouds of soot, sulfur dioxide, and other toxic pollutants, as well as millions of tons of carbon dioxide. As a consequence, areas in southern China such as Sichuan, Guangxi, Hunan, Jiangxi, and Guangdong have increasing problems with acid rain; many of China's cities are shrouded in a continual pall of smoke reminiscent of London or Pittsburgh in 1900; and respiratory ailments now account for 26 percent of all deaths.

China's coal is used not only for electricity generation, but also for the production of iron, steel, and building materials (primarily cement), and as fertilizer feedstock. These main drivers of increased demand are themselves powered by heavy industrial growth, infrastructure development, urbanization (roughly 300 million additional people will live in Chinese cities by 2020), and rising per-capita GDP.

All of these trends in turn emerge from China's recent history. At the end of the Communist revolution in 1949, the country was impoverished and war-ravaged; the overwhelming majority of its people consisted of rural peasants. Communist Party chairman Mao Zedong's stated goal was to bring prosperity to his populous, resource-rich nation. A period of economic growth and infrastructure development ensued, lasting until the mid-1960s. At this point, Mao appears to have had second thoughts: concerned that further industrialization would create or deepen class divisions, he unleashed the Cultural Revolution, lasting from 1966 to the mid-1970s, during which industrial and agricultural output fell. As Mao's health declined, a vicious power struggle ensued, from which emerged the reforms of Deng Xiaoping. Economic growth became a higher priority than ever before, and it followed in spectacular fashion from widespread privatization and the application of market principles. "To get rich is glorious," Communist officials now proclaimed.

During the 1950s, '60s, and '70s, the populace worked hard, sacrificed, and endured grinding poverty for the good of the nation. Now a small segment of that populace—mostly in the coastal cities—is enjoying a middle-class existence, and in some cases spectacular riches. This wealth disparity is bearable only as long as the middle class continues to expand in numbers, offering the promise of economic opportunity to hundreds of millions of poor peasants in the interior of the country.

In effect, rapid economic expansion and increasing prosperity (for a small, influential portion of the population) are being used to divert domestic attention from frustrated democratic political aspirations and regional rivalries. But China's central government has unleashed a firestorm of entrepreneurial, profit-driven economic activity, which it cannot effectively contain. China's central government and its legal institutions are relatively weak; meanwhile the uncontrollably dynamic economy is export-dependent and ill-suited to meeting domestic needs.

In short, China has encouraged rapid export-led economic growth as a way of putting off dealing with its internal political and social problems. Economic growth requires energy, and China's energy comes overwhelmingly from coal. The nation's short-term survival strategy thus centers on producing enormous quantities of coal today, and far more in the future.

However, there are signs that China's domestic coal production growth may not be able to keep up with rising demand for much longer.

As in the US, coal transport bottlenecks raise production costs and inhibit growth. Most coal transport is by rail, which has grown faster than road and water transport. But only half of China's coal production is from rail-connected mines. Lack of rail capacity is leading to increased demand for diesel fuel for coal trucks, and thus to higher diesel prices (and increasingly frequent shortages), and these in turn result in more coal delivery problems.

The lack of diesel fuel for coal transport could potentially be solved by turning coal into a liquid fuel (a process discussed in more detail in Chapter 6). China's largest coal firm, the Shenhua Group, recently opened the country's first coal-to-liquids (CTL) plant, and it plans to start seven more by 2020. Other CTL plants are also in the works—including several in Northern China that Shenhua will construct with partners Shell and Sasol, slated to open in 2012; and one being planned by the Yankuang coal group, the second-largest coal producer in China, near Erdos.

If only a few of these proposed CTL plants are constructed, China will lead the world in production of synthetic liquid fuels from coal. But even if all of them come on line, this will offset only a small portion of China's oil imports (the current goal is to produce 286,000 barrels per day by 2020, while the nation currently imports over three million barrels of petroleum per day, with that amount growing rapidly). In any case, CTL will entail substantial new coal demand as well as severe environmental consequences. According to China's Coal Research Institute, each barrel of synthetic oil produced from coal will consume at least 360 gallons of fresh water. (For comparison: 360 gallons equals roughly 8.5 barrels; thus at this ratio of CTL to water, 286,000 barrels per day of CTL would require approximately 2.5 million bpd of water.) And most areas of China are already experiencing water scarcity.

The irony inherent in China's grand experiment with CTL is that in order to solve coal supply problems stemming from diesel shortages, the country must produce even more coal.

Aside from transport bottlenecks, supply problems are also resulting from crackdowns on mines that are unsafe, polluting, or wasteful of energy.

China is producing its best coal first. The country has yet to exploit its reserves of lignite, which has high moisture and ash content and entails much higher CO2 emissions. A new technology (Integrated Drying Gasification Combined Cycle, or IDGCC) developed in Australia, and now being studied by the Chinese government, is capable of burning this coal efficiently and reducing greenhouse gas emissions; but if lignite grows as a share of total coal production, this will exacerbate transport problems, because much more material will have to be mined and moved in order to deliver the same amount of energy.

All of these difficulties with producing and delivering sufficient coal are leading to increased imports. China has been an international coal supplier since the early 20^th century, when nearly all its exports went to Japan. In 2001, China's coal exports amounted to 90 million tons—a quantity equal to the total production of Indonesia. But Chinese coal imports doubled between 2005 and 2007, making the nation a net importer of the resource. This trend toward increasing coal imports, which is driving up international coal prices and impacting the economies of other coal importers such as India and Japan, seems almost certain to accelerate.

China's electric power generation is becoming more efficient, but even an extensive rollout of the highest-efficiency plants could only dent growth in coal consumption before 2020. Meanwhile, these new power plants will impose greater up-front costs.

In sum, continually increasing coal consumption is central to China's economic existence; however there are signs that the country is already experiencing difficulty in maintaining its furious growth pace in producing the resource. The amount of coal available in the future will crucially determine the direction of the nation's economy and likely its internal social and political stability as well.

Resource Characteristics and History of Reserves Estimates

China's coal resources are concentrated mainly in the northern half of the country, with fully half of all reserves located within the three provinces of Inner Mongolia, Shanxi, and Shaanxi. Reserves comprise the complete range of coals, from lignite to anthracite, with bituminous the most abundant (according to the 1992 BP proven reserves estimate, 13.5 percent of China's coal reserves consist of lignite, 24 percent non-coking bituminous coal, 28 percent coking bituminous coal, and 18.5 percent anthracite). Locally, seam quality is highly variable, although sulfur levels are in most cases low.

While recoverable reserves are a matter for debate, China's total coal resources are clearly vast, with government figures listing a resource base of about a trillion tons. As always, location, seam thickness, quality, and depth determine how much of the resource will ever be mined. China's coal reserves to a depth of 150 meters are relatively small, with resources at depths of 300–600m forming the majority of the future reserve base.

Early reserves estimates of China's coal were imprecise, because thorough surveys were impeded by the turbulence of the nation's political history during the last century. In the 1930s, reserves were estimated at somewhat over 200 billion tons, sufficient for over 5,000 years of production at then-current levels of output.

In 1987, BP Statistical Review of World Energy listed reserves of 156.4 billion tons. In 1990, BP reported Chinese coal reserves as 152.8 billion tons. By 1992, the amount had fallen to 114.5 billion tons. Oddly, that official number has not changed in the succeeding 16 years, during which the nation has produced over 20 billion tons of coal.

There are differing opinions on this anomaly: World Energy Council politely notes that it "indicates a degree of continuity in the official assessments of China's coal reserves." However, Energy Watch Group calls that reasoning "strange," since Chinese coal reserves had been downgraded two times since 1987, evidently at least partly due to the subtraction of produced quantities.

Reserves were thrown further into question in 2002, when the Chinese Ministry of Land and Natural Resources declared that the country's proven recoverable coal reserves amounted to 186.6 billion tons. However, this large number has not been adopted by the World Energy Council, the International Energy Agency, or BP Statistical Review.

Within China, Mongolia is something of a wild card, with undoubtedly large resources but poor transport facilities and incomplete geological surveys. It is as yet unclear how much of its coal resources should be listed as reserves.

Recent Studies

1. Coal: Resources and Future Production (Werner Zittel and Jörg Schindler, Energy Watch Group [EWG], March 2007, www.energywatchgroup.org).

As noted above, the EWG authors question WEC figures for China's reserves, pointing out that these evidently do not account for amounts produced since 1992, nor for amounts lost to coal fires (EWG does not discuss the much larger reserves number published by the Chinese government). The report's authors write:

China's reported coal reserves are 62.2 billion tons of bituminous coal, 33.7 billion tons of sub-bituminous coal and 18.6 billion tons of lignite. Subtracting the produced quantities since 1992 (the latest data update) results in remaining reserves of about 44 billion tons of bituminous coal, 33.7 billion tons of sub-bituminous coal and 17.8 billion tons of lignite.

This indicates total remaining recoverable reserves of about 96 billion tons. EWG uses this updated reserves figure (which still does not account for amounts lost to uncontrolled underground coal fires) to plot a possible future production profile, using a logistic curve. Their results:

This scenario demonstrates that the high growth rates of the last years must decrease over the next few years and that China will reach maximum production within the next 5–15 years, probably around 2015. The already produced quantities of about 35 billion tons will rise to 113 billion tons (+ 11 billion tons of lignite) until 2050 and finally end at about 120 billion tons (+19 billion tons of lignite) around 2100. The steep rise in production of the past years must be followed by a steep decline after 2020.

The EWG authors restate their conclusion several times: "either the reported coal reserves are highly unreliable and much larger in reality than reported, or the Chinese coal production will reach its peak very soon and start to decline rapidly."

In addition to near-term peaking in quantities of coal produced, declining coal quality is also a problem: "projected produced quantities of coal will show a steadily declining energy content." Currently, China produces very little of its lignite. This is likely to change as higher-quality coals are exhausted. But the nation's lignite reserves are too small to have much influence on total coal production, and lignite's energy content is only about one-quarter that of high-quality bituminous coal.

The EWG report discusses China's plans for CTL development, suggesting that this will hike coal demand by "several hundred million tons per year," pushing the nation's production capacity "very fast to its limits."

2. "What is the limit of Chinese coal supplies—A STELLA model of Hubbert Peak" by Zaipu Tao and Mingyu Li, Energy Policy Volume 35, Issue 6, June 2007.

These two authors, from the Northeastern University PRC School of Business and Administration, apply Hubbert analysis (linearization and peaking) to Chinese coal production, basing their analysis on the official Chinese government proven recoverable reserves figure of 186.6 billion tons. In doing so, they use STELLA, a software platform for modeling the behavior of complex, dynamic systems.

Tao and Li write that Hubbert linearization indicates yet-to-produce reserves of 71.73 billion tons, with a maximum production rate of 1.41 billion tons/year and the all-time production peak in 2006. But this cannot be correct, as in fact the current production rate is much higher and production continues to increase. The problem, the authors suggest, is that linearization in this instance gives a false result for yet-to-produce reserves: "We know," they write, that the number should be the official government figure of 186.6 billion tons. Therefore they substitute that amount in the equations, with the result that, "According to the standard run, the Hubbert Peak for China's raw coal production appears to be in 2029 with a value of 37.84 hundred million tonnes."

The STELLA software allows for the addition of various parameters (such as annual reserves additions, growth rates, and CO2 emissions), and results in differing decline curves. Tao and Li conclude:

According to this simulation . . . the peak in China comes between 2025 and 2032 with peak production about 3339–4452 million tons. Chinese raw coal output will grow by about 3–4% annually before the peak, which probably is a good chance for the development of China's coal industry. However, the corresponding amount of greenhouse gases produced may act as an enormous obstacle to increasing the coal production. . . . To meet the increasing demand, China should consider new energy development policies related to supply diversification before the peak comes.

3. Lignite and Hard Coal: Energy Suppliers for World Needs until the Year 2100 – An Outlook (Thomas Thielemann, Sandro Schmidt, and J. Peter Gerling, German Federal Institute for Geosciences and Natural Resources [BGR], International Journal of Coal GeologyVolume 72, Issue 1, 3 September 2007, www.sciencedirect.com).

The BGR report concludes that, "from a raw-material angle in this scenario there will be no bottleneck in coal supplies until 2100." However, the assumptions and reasoning that lead to this judgment are questionable in light of considerations brought up by EWG. The BGR authors write: "Should the annual rise in output be greater than 1%/a, Asia will have to convert resources into reserves on a much larger scale than presumed here." But as noted above, China's rate of growth in coal consumption has in fact recently been closer to 10 percent per year. The BGR authors do not explain how or why that rate will slow so much. Also, the conversion of resources to reserves that the authors assume will occur in the future is not explained adequately. The historic trend has been in the opposite direction—that is, for booked reserves to be downgraded to mere resources—and it is unclear why that trend should reverse itself.

The BGR authors do note that "Since it will certainly be possible to cover some needs on the world market, the pressure of Asia, specifically China and India, on world coal supplies and world market prices will be much higher than today."

4. A Supply-Driven Forecast for the Future of Global Coal Production (Höök, Zittel, Schindler, and Aleklett;Energy Policy, in press, The Svedberg Laboratory.

As in its other country analyses, this paper's discussion of China's future coal production expands on the reasoning and conclusions of the EWG report. It concludes:

The forecast estimates that Chinese coal production will reach a peak in 2020, perhaps even earlier if the reserves are backdated to 1992, when the last actual update took place, and corrected for cumulative production. So China might be very close to its maximum coal production unless the reserves are larger than reported or a significant amount of resources can be transformed into produced volumes in the near future. Unless something dramatic happens to the Chinese reserves the future production will very soon end up under reserve constraints.

The authors offer two new charts, one based on reported reserves, the other based on reported reserves minus amounts produced since 1992:

5. Other Hubbert linearization and curve fitting (David Rutledge and Jean Laherrère).

In applying the Hubbert linearization method, David Rutledge of Caltech (http://rutledge.caltech.edu/) finds the trend-line for China's total ultimate production to be 115 billion tons, with 45 billion tons produced so far and 70 remaining. This agrees well with the result obtained by Tao and Li. Like them, he questions this result. He notes that while the trend line that now shows 70 billion tons left-to-produce has been steady for 40 years,

. . . in the last three years, production has gone through the roof. There may be a move to a new trend line underway. It is also possible that production will come back to the original trend line. During the Great Leap Forward from 1958 to 1960, reported production soared for a few years, but returned afterwards to previous rates.

Veteran petroleum geologist Jean Laherrère has charted a Hubbert curve for future Chinese coal production ("Combustibles fossiles: quel avenir pour quel monde?" aspofrance.viabloga.com), assuming an ultimate production of 150 billion tons, a figure similar to those used by the Energy Information Administration of the US Department of Energy and the BGR. This assumes 110 billion tons of remaining reserves, an amount somewhat higher than EWG but slightly lower than the WEC number and much smaller than the official Chinese government's 186.6 billion tons. Nevertheless, in this model, production peaks at about the same time as suggested by EWG and Höök et al.—that is, in 2020.

Implications

Demand for coal in China is growing so quickly that even if the high reserves estimate from the Chinese government of 186.6 billion tons proves to be accurate (as opposed to EWG's much lower estimate of 96 billion tons), this may shift the date of peak production by only about 5 to 17 years—from the years 2015-2020 (EWG) to 2025-2032 (Tao and Li). This further calls into question the BRG conclusion that "there will be no bottleneck in [China's] coal supplies until 2100," as a delay of the peak to that extent—by more than 65 years beyond the Tao and Li forecast range—would require a conversion of resources to reserves on a truly monumental scale. Such a conversion is impossible to justify by precedent, and so BRG's conclusion can only be considered realistic if China's coal demand is assumed to level off soon and perhaps fall in coming decades—in which case a production peak will have occurred in effect.

But such demand reduction is currently difficult to envision. China's economy has been, is, and will continue to be coal-powered—as long as sufficient supplies are available—since few options exist to substantially reduce its coal dependency. Offsetting one year of recent coal demand growth would require over 100 billion cubic meters of new natural gas production capacity (current total capacity is 76 bcm), 85 GW of hydropower capacity (current total capacity: 83 GW), or nearly 50 GW of nuclear power (expected total capacity by 2020: 40 GW). It must be emphasized that these offsetting amounts are required yearly additions. Even if the amount needed to offset coal growth were spread among these and other alternatives such as wind and solar, the required additions would be economically daunting if not physically impossible to achieve.

As a result, China's practical ability to make serious CO2 emissions reductions in years ahead is very low, unless energy demand and production decline sharply.

China's demand for coal will grow even faster than it has recently if CTL technologies are implemented at the scale and speed now proposed. Coal-to-chemicals plants, now being considered, would have a smaller impact, but in the same direction. Coal-to-liquids and coal-to-chemicals are projected to add 450 million tons of annual new coal demand by 2025. In this case, total demand could exceed 4.7 billion tons by 2020.

The studies cited here (with the exception of BGR) suggest that China's domestic coal production growth cannot be sustained much beyond 2020; indeed, in the most constrained case (that is, if the EWG forecast is correct) demand will outstrip domestic supply dramatically during the next ten years.

China's demand for coal imports will therefore almost certainly top 200 million tons per year by 2020, and could exceed that figure by a wide margin. This will significantly impact regional markets, leading to increased competition with other coal-importing countries (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, and India), and to much higher prices for internationally traded coal. (Currently, the total annual volume of internationally traded coal is just over 800 million tons.)

The supply problems discussed here appear already to be manifesting. During the winter of 2007-2008, power plants in many parts of the country ran short of coal due to soaring prices and transport bottlenecks, while snow and ice storms disrupted power transmission. A People's Daily article, quoting Zhang Guobao, deputy head of the National Development and Reform Commission, noted that only a "fragile balance" existed in the thermal coal market despite huge and growing coal output. During that same winter, prices for internationally traded coal climbed substantially.

China's furious pace of economic growth, which is often touted as a sign of success, may turn out to be a fatal liability. Simply put, the nation appears to have no Plan B. No fossil fuel other than coal will be able to provide sufficient energy to sustain current economic growth rates in the years ahead, and non-fossil sources will require unprecedented and perhaps unachievable levels of investment just to make up for declines in coal production—never mind providing enough to fuel continued annual energy growth of seven to ten percent per year.

If and when China ceases to have enough new energy to support continued economic growth, there are likely to be unpleasant consequences for the nation's stability. If such consequences are to be averted, the country's leadership must find ways to rein in economic growth while reducing internal social and political tensions, meanwhile investing enormous sums in non-fossil energy sources. A serious attempt to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would entail an identical prescription. It is a tall order by any standard, but serious contemplation of the alternative—which, in the worst instance, could amount to social, economic, and environmental collapse—should be bracing enough to motivate heroic efforts.

MuseLetter #194 / June 2008
by Richard Heinberg

MuseLetter #193 / May 2008
by Richard Heinberg

MuseLetter #192 / April 2008
by Richard Heinberg

Resilient Communities: A Guide to Disaster Management

Resilience: The ability to recover quickly from illness, change, or misfortune; buoyancy; the ability to absorb shocks.

The following is a proposal to help make communities better able to respond to the coming economic shocks from resource depletion, beginning with Peak Oil, and perhaps also to shocks from other causes (such as the ongoing subprime mortgage and credit collapse). In searching for a name for the strategy, I have settled on the phrase "Resilient Communities," which comes with considerable baggage—useful baggage in this instance. Once I have described and discussed the proposal, I will offer some background materials regarding the terms resilience and resilient communities, mentioning some other projects that have used the same title or that pursue similar goals.

Making existing petroleum-reliant communities truly sustainable is a huge task. Virtually every system must be redesigned—from transport to food, sanitation, health care, and manufacturing. Some fine efforts are under way in towns such as Kinsale, Ireland; Totnes, England; Portland, Oregon; and several cities in northern California to catalog the needed changes and initiate the transformative process. The Powerdown Project, Energy Descent Action Plans, and local Climate Protection initiatives are all important efforts in this direction. However, even in places that began such work two or three years ago, actual oil dependence remains largely unaffected. The transition that is required will take many years, huge shifts in both private and public investment, and fundamental changes in public policy at higher levels of government in order to succeed. Do we have enough time? Will the investment capital be available?

Meanwhile, global oil production appears already to have entered its plateau phase, with a gradually steepening decline in total production—and a much more rapid drop in export capacity among nations with any oil to spare—likely to commence within the next two or three years. It appears that the time available for adaptation is probably far too short to enable needed work to be accomplished. Meanwhile, the financial solvency crisis initiated by the US subprime mortgage fiasco threatens to obliterate trillions of dollars of investment capital, impeding whatever efforts might be undertaken toward energy conversion. Thus few if any communities—including those that have initiated worthwhile projects—will be prepared for the shocks of high fuel prices and fuel shortages that will inevitably follow in the coming years. What to do?

A few months ago, on the day following the most recent "Peak Oil and Community Solutions" conference in Yellow Springs, Ohio, some of the speakers and organizers gathered to compare notes and strategize. At some point during the lively conversation, Faith Morgan, the Director of the film The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, reminded us how, early in Cuba's crisis period, organic farming advocates had provided crucial advice that helped quickly transform the nation's food system; without the input of these previously marginalized alternatives advocates, the nation probably would not have survived. I was certainly familiar with the story: I have recounted it in print and in lectures on many occasions. Nevertheless, as Faith spoke, a (compact-fluorescent) light bulb flickered somewhere in my murky skull. Perhaps something similar could happen in other nations or communities—and not just with regard to food, but all the other aspects of modern existence. There are plenty of marginalized "alternatives" advocates who for decades have been researching and promoting low-energy ways of doing things that will make perfect sense in a post-petroleum environment. What if these folks could be mobilized and coordinated, their knowledge made readily available to local officials and the public at large, in preparation for the imminent period when existing systems start to fail in ever more obvious ways?

The notion solidified as I read Naomi Klein's recent book, The Shock Doctrine, which details how savvy politicians and business leaders have used natural disasters, wars, and economic upheavals as propitious moments for the introduction of neo-liberal economic policies—privatization, free trade, slashed social spending—that are themselves disastrous (though immensely profitable for the few), and that would normally be rejected. In the current instance, as we contemplate a global mega-disaster-in-the-making, it is not difficult to envision neo-liberal or neo-conservative power-holders licking their collective chops over the prospect of doing away with all labor and environmental regulations as citizens everywhere clamor for strong leaders who can implement bold policies to restore relative normalcy.

In other words, crisis equals opportunity—for those who are prepared to seize the day. Unless sensible plans to manage disaster are formulated and put forward now, the opportunity afforded by crisis will be hijacked by a familiar cast of characters.

What follows, then, is a strategy to take advantage of the gathering storm to steer communities in a direction that will make them more sustainable over the long run. I must emphasize at the outset that, while I am making the case for this new strategy as strongly as I can (that's a writer's job), I do not wish people already hard at work on proactive energy transition strategies through Relocalization and Transition projects to get the impression that I am saying, "Stop everything you're doing now, rush to the other side of the boat, and start doing this other thing." In fact, all I hope to accomplish with this essay is to introduce a new strategic perspective that can be useful to activists as they continue and expand the work in which they are currently engaged.

Anyone can adopt this strategy; however, existing Peak Oil response groups and networks are probably in the best position to do so. Groups wanting to explore this strategy can join the Relocalization Network (www.relocalize.net), if they are not already affiliated, and use that network for sharing information and other resources. Groups could also link Resilient Communities work with the Transition Network (www.transitiontowns.org), Step It Up, Mayors for Climate Protection Campaign, Climate Action Network, and Sierra Club's Cool Cities program.

What is needed is not just another trademark for yet another activist campaign, but an additional strategy that can be used by any existing organization.

Try This

The strategy I am envisioning might be composed of the following series of steps:

1. Establish a working group for the purpose of formulating a Community Resilience Plan. The size of the group will depend on who is available and motivated, and on the size of the community. It will be helpful if the individuals involved have experience with organizing efforts and are already trusted, active members of the community. If there is a sufficiently large pool of potential members, group membership could rotate. This could be an entirely new group, or it could be a new project for an existing group. At the very earliest stage, establish a connection with the Relocalization Network.

2. Identify organizations, businesses, and individuals in your community that have some skill or capacity that will be needed in the post-Peak Oil environment. Look for people who are already working in food production and distribution, health, transport, water delivery, waste disposal, home heating, communication, and crisis management who are able to supply goods or services in their respective field using less energy and fewer imported materials, or who have concrete proposals in this regard. Examples include organic farming and Permaculture groups; herbalists and others able to provide health care in the absence of high-tech equipment; car-share organizations; and bicycle advocacy groups.

3. Approach these people, inform them that you are formulating a Community Resilience Plan, and ask for their help and participation. Tell them about Peak Oil—if they don't already know—and help them understand the implications. Point out that their "alternative" skills and knowledge, which they may have grown weary of promoting in the face of general systemic preference for "mainstream" approaches, will soon be crucial to community survival and well-being. In effect, you must appeal to their self-interest as a way to motivate them to expend some extra effort on behalf of a Community Resilience Plan.

4. Work with these groups and individuals to develop a contingency plan in their respective areas of action and expertise. The plan should answer the question: If your community were suffering from a crisis (unaffordable energy prices, fuel shortages, and knock-on effects such as empty store shelves and rampant unemployment), how could your expertise be rapidly deployed on a large scale to help reduce the impact? What assistance and resources would you need? What steps would have to be taken, and in what order? For example, Permaculturists might have a fine way of producing food locally, but in order to expand their efforts significantly they might need to train teams of gardeners to roam the city planting garden beds on vacant lots or in the front and back yards of willing homeowners. How would these teams be financed and coordinated? How might a surge in demand for garden tools and seeds be satisfied? In each essential field, look for ways to build redundancy with regard to provision of goods and services.

5. As you are doing all of these things, also contact city disaster management officials, letting them know what you are doing and why. Ask for their input and inquire how what you are doing can be most useful to the community at large. Make sure they have copies of Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty, by Daniel Lerch (www.postcarboncities.net).

6. It might also be useful to contact leaders in some of the mainstream organizations (government agencies as well as private companies) currently responsible for food, water, transport, and energy provisioning and inquire if they have any plans for the time when fuel becomes scarce. If they perceive your project as a threat, they are likely to try to block or undermine it in various ways. However, if they see the project for what it is—an effort to enable the survival of the community in circumstances where current support systems cease functioning—they may be moved to contribute. If they simply deny that any problems are on the horizon, you may have no choice but to continue what you are doing without their input. Again, make sure these leaders have copies of Post Carbon Cities.

7. Assemble the various suggestions into a coherent Community Resilience Plan. Some sort of document is always useful as a touchstone for collective action. The plan should be comprehensive, modular, and staged. It should offer suggestions for slow-onset as well as rapid-onset disasters. It should also be consistent with proactive plans for the long-term post-carbon transition of society (such as the report of the Portland Peak Oil task force). It should be in a form that can be upgraded and revised continually. And it should be widely available to the public (i.e., published on an easily accessible web site).

8. Once a document has been formulated, go back to civic leaders and disaster management officials and present the document. At the same time, stage a public roll-out of the plan, arranging newspaper articles and radio interviews as well as a public event at which all of the contributors, and local officials, can offer brief presentations.

9. When shortages develop and the economy comes unhinged, work with contributing groups and local officials to implement the plan. Without implementation, the effort will have been wasted. This stage will no doubt entail the hardest and most demanding work. It is difficult to foresee the exact circumstances in which that work will be taking place; nevertheless, the more thorough the preparatory efforts, the more successful the implementation is likely to be.

10. Work with groups in other communities to coordinate programs across regions and nations. Again, the organizations most likely to be helpful in this are the Relocalization Network and the Post Carbon Cities program of Post Carbon Institute, and the Transition Network. Communities should be encouraged to share their experiences, and to share other resources wherever possible. At the earliest opportunity, meta-plans for resilience should be initiated at the state, national, and international levels.

11. Granted, formulating a plan along the lines I have suggested is a huge task, and the process I have described may not be robust enough and sufficiently engaged with all facets of the community in order to succeed. I welcome input on how to deal with these shortcomings. However, the general thrust of the strategy is logical and strategically sound. Obtaining local government support and public or private funding will be extremely advantageous, as attempting such a task on a purely volunteer basis will create obvious pitfalls of overwork and underperformance.

Why?-and Other Questions

Why do we need another strategy?

I have been directly or peripherally involved in many Peak Oil response efforts over the past five years. Some I would characterize as top-down (starting by trying to convince and enroll policy makers such as city officials), some bottom-up (starting from a grass-roots base of concerned citizens and activists). All begin or end with a long-range plan for reducing the community's reliance on oil and other fossil fuels—a plan that entails a redirection in investment of public funds, the shifting of priorities, changes to zoning regulations, and so on.

The Resilient Communities strategy is based on observations of what worked in those previous efforts and what didn't. It is also based on the fact that, even in situations of apparent success (where much publicity was garnered and city councils adopted Peak Oil action plans), nagging doubts remain. What if these efforts are too little, too late? What if society is broadsided by an economic collapse from other sources before the effects of Peak Oil become obvious, undermining proactive plans? When I think of my own community, I wince: despite some good activist efforts over the past couple of years, Sonoma County is really not much better prepared than it was before we started.

During these past few years, I have had opportunity to observe a few policy makers at fairly close quarters and to observe how they think, what they say, and what they do. I've concluded that (with a very few notable exceptions), regardless of lip service to sustainability, Peak Oil preparedness, or climate protection, these people's first priority is economic growth. If their attention to this overarching priority wavers, they soon find themselves out of a job. Thus as long as business-as-usual (or at least business-as-usual lite) is an option, it will be favored. However, looming environmental limits require economic contraction. Peak Oil preparedness is, in essence, the effort to controllably scale back the pace and scope of society's consumption of energy and natural resources so as to reduce the impact when inevitable shortages arise—and also, ultimately, so as to reduce society's material throughput to a level that is actually sustainable over the long haul.

Policy makers demand growth, while prudent policy (in light of resource depletion) requires voluntary contraction. This basic contradiction suggests that real change won't come about until hardship is upon us. And that judgment is in turn confirmed by the one example we have of successful adaptation to energy famine—Cuba's Special Period—which was not a proactive effort, but primarily a reactive one.

Thus as compared to other plans and strategies, Resilient Communities strategy has a more explicit focus on disaster management.

At the point when maintaining business as usual is no longer an option, there may be a chance for new strategies to be considered. Officials must face crises (whether effectively or ineptly); they cannot simply ignore obvious breakdowns in the societal support system. If a plan can be put forward that helps officials solve pressing, undeniable problems, that plan has at least a chance of being considered.

Granted, the strategies most likely to gain favor in the early stages of crisis are those that promise a return to business-as-usual (even if that promise is hollow). But as those strategies fail and crisis deepens, nets will be cast wider. At some point the Resilience Plan will become the strategy of last resort.

A useful historical example: as the Great Depression gathered gloom, the New Deal was not the US government's first response (Herbert Hoover dithered for two years); it wasn't even Franklin Roosevelt's initial strategy: only after everything else had failed during three to four long years of economic crisis and misery were more radical ideas tried.

How, exactly, is a Resilient Community different from a Transition Town or the Powerdown Project?

There certainly are similarities. Transition Towns do tend to bring alternatives movements together to design solutions, and Chapter 3 of Rob Hopkins's Transition Handbook offers an excellent discussion of "why rebuilding resilience is as important as cutting carbon emissions." The Powerdown Project (www.powerdownproject.org) did focus at least partly on disaster management. Indeed, nearly all of the individual elements of the ten-step program laid out above exist in these and other plans. The virtue of the Resilient Communities strategy as outlined here is that it puts those elements together in a new framework that explicitly takes account of the opportunities that crisis affords.

Transition and Relocalization projects tend to have a hopeful, upbeat, attractive tone, and that is one of their virtues. By contrast, disaster management is a sobering subject. Yet while hopeful visions are good and necessary for motivating communities, the real future that is now unfolding is one of crisis heaped upon crisis. Effective response strategies must respond to the facts, however unattractive they may be from a marketing standpoint. The Resilient Communities strategy faces harsh reality and makes the best of it by using it strategically.

The point must be stressed: I don't mean to suggest that proactive plans to alter energy consumption absent a crisis are a waste of effort, even if they are unlikely to be fully implemented by "business-as-usual" policy makers. The efforts of cities like Portland, Oakland, Willits, Totnes, and others deserve to be celebrated and supported.

Moreover, while a Community Resilience Plan would seek to maximize the opportunity that crisis affords, crisis management can only get us so far toward our goal of reducing and redesigning the human economy so that it does not degrade nature's carrying capacity. Broad-scale, proactive plans are still essential. Once the crisis has hit, once other remedies have been tried, once the Resilient Communities programs have been adopted, and once "alternatives" begin to become mainstream, then the long-range plans for redirecting economies toward true sustainability will become actionable. Indeed, at every stage along the way we will need some sense of what a sustainable society would actually look like and how we might bridge the chasm between the present and that distant goal.

What's in it for people in the alternatives movements?

Why should they go to the extra trouble? They are already engaged in important efforts, and are probably overworked.

Folks in the alternatives movements have in many cases been toiling for decades to research and promote sustainable practices. Where they have tried to shape public policy, they may have found themselves ignored or marginalized. The Resilient Communities strategy offers them more than a soap box: it is a chance to use their knowledge and skills in service to community during an imminent time of crisis. While previously they may have found themselves adopting an oppositional or even confrontational stance in relation to industry leaders and policy makers, this is a chance to assume the role of representatives and protectors of the community. If the strategy works, they will cease to be "alternative" and become the "new normal."

What's in it for the officials?

Won't they just ignore or undermine the effort?

Most public officials will gladly sacrifice interests of the alternatives crowd that conflict dramatically with those of the business community. But absent a direct conflict, it is in the nature of politicians to try to keep everyone happy. Resilient Community planning does not focus on conflicts between diverging interests within the community; indeed, its main goal is to improve survival prospects for everyone. If the effort is framed properly, officials should view it as a gift—an aid in solving potential problems that may actually be looming much closer than many politicians and business leaders currently realize is the case.

Resilience in Ecosystems and Economies

For those wishing to adopt the strategy outlined above, the use of the phrase resilient community is not mandatory. Nevertheless, resilience has so many useful implications that it may be useful to spend the remainder of this essay unpacking and exploring a few.

There is a sizeable and edifying literature on the subject of resilience in ecosystems; C. S. "Buzz" Holling is responsible for much of the pioneering work in this regard. An introductory summary of some core ideas related to ecological and economic resilience is contained in the entertaining essay, "Diesel-Driven Bee Slums and Impotent Turkeys: The Case for Resilience," by Chip Ward.

Briefly, resilient systems are able to withstand higher magnitudes of disturbance before undergoing a dramatic shift to a new condition in which they are controlled by a different set of processes. Reducing resilience increases vulnerability to smaller disturbances. From the website of the Resilience Alliance (www.resalliance.org):

Even in the absence of disturbance, gradually changing conditions, e.g., nutrient loading, climate, habitat fragmentation, etc., can surpass threshold levels, triggering an abrupt system response. When resilience is lost or significantly decreased, a system is at high risk of shifting into a qualitatively different state. The new state of the system may be undesirable, as in the case of productive freshwater lakes that become eutrophic, turbid, and depleted of their biodiversity. Restoring a system to its previous state can be complex, expensive, and sometimes even impossible. Research suggests that to restore some systems to their previous state requires a return to environmental conditions well before the point of collapse.

The notion that human communities can benefit from fostering resilience is far from new; when I did a Google search for "resilient communities" in preparation for writing this article, over 80,000 hits came up, including www.resilientcommunities.org—an inactive website related to an initiative in the late 1990s by Northwest Regional Facilitators and the late economist Robert Theobald). One other example worth noting: the UN has a "Resilient Communities & Cities partnership" program, which aims to "increase the resilience of a city or community to a range of shocks, crises, and disasters including environmental emergencies, industrial accidents, outbreaks of epidemics, economic shocks, natural disasters, terrorist attacks, and social conflict." I'll mention a few more examples at the end of this essay.

In their 1982 book Brittle Power, Amory and Hunter Lovins argued for the decentralization of energy production in order to foster resilience.

More recently, David Fleming—the originator of Tradeable Energy Quotas (www.teqs.net)—has written and spoken at some length about resilience in the context of preparations for Peak Oil and Climate Change. With Lawrence Woodward, Fleming has authored, "Transition, Resilience and Tradeable Energy Quotas", in which he notes that a resilient community will need to be "relatively small-scale" and "localized" so that:

• If one part is destroyed, the shock will not ripple through the whole system.
• There is wide diversity of character and solutions developed creatively in response to local circumstances.
• It can meet its needs despite the substantial absence of travel and transport.
• The other big infrastructures and bureaucracies of the intermediate economy are replaced by fit-for-purpose local alternatives at drastically reduced cost.

Once these conditions are satisfied, new possibilities open up:

• Local closed systems conserving fertility and materials will become feasible.
• Local energy production, distribution and storage can be established, linked by local grids.
• Local social capital and culture can be rebuilt as a necessary condition for the cooperation and reciprocities needed to achieve the transition.

One quality of resilience is redundancy—which is often at odds with economic efficiency. Standard economic theory tells us that if it is cheaper to manufacture a particular widget in Malaysia than to do so locally, then all such widgets should come from a factory in Kuala Lumpur. Efficiency implies both long supply chains and the reduction of inventories to a minimum. The "just-in-time" delivery of raw materials and parts for manufacturing reduces costs—but it increases the vulnerability of systems to fuel shortages.

As we pay more attention to resilience and less to economic efficiency, we begin to see redundancy and larger inventories as benefits rather than liabilities. Other resilience values include diversity (as opposed to uniformity), dispersion (rather than centralization) of control over systems, and, as already noted, the localization (versus globalization) of economies.

More notable "resilient communities" resources include:

• The organization RESET (Renewable Energy/Shelter/Environment Training) in the UK (www.reset-development.org) was recently established to increase knowledge about climate change and Peak Oil outside the OECD countries, and to provide training in practical measures to foster resilience in the face of coming transitions to soaring energy prices and rising temperatures.
• The University of British Columbia's Resilient Communities Project, a collaboration of academics, First Nations peoples, and government:
  www.resilientcommunities.ca/
• The University of Minnesota project on Resilient Communities
• Ontario Healthy Communities Project's publication on Resilient Communities
• Resilient Communities and Cities Coalition
• British Columbia's Disaster Resilient Communities Program
• ICLEI's Climate Resilient Communities Program
• The J. W. McConnell Family Foundation's program on Creating Resilient Communities

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