[Originally written for The Ecologist.]

Climate Change is the worst environmental crisis ever. It is a problem of fossil fuel dependency, and solving it requires reducing that dependency quickly and dramatically.

But from a policy standpoint, Climate Change is hard to address. Because the worst of its impacts may come decades from now, its solution is framed as a moral imperative: we should reduce fossil fuels for the environment and future generations. Many policy makers genuinely want to do the right thing, but when a choice arises between climate protection and economic growth, growth wins nearly every time. Because 85 percent of world energy comes from fossil fuels, it is hard to find a way to quickly end their use without a severe reduction in available energy, and a resulting contraction of the economy. Any politician campaigning for economic contraction faces a tough battle.

The peaking in production rates of oil, coal, and natural gas presents a different problem. Again, it is one of fossil fuel dependency; but in this case, instead of a sink (or pollution) dilemma, it is one of source (or scarcity). Fossil fuels are finite. Depletion ensures that the rate of extraction of these substances will soon start to decline, wreaking havoc on industrial economies, perhaps leading to societal collapse.

Will peak oil solve the climate problem? No! It is true that most models of future carbon emissions overestimate the fossil fuels that can be extracted in coming decades. Indeed, peaking studies suggest that depletion will hold carbon emissions to a level such that atmospheric CO2 concentrations won’t significantly exceed 450 parts per million—the target often mentioned by IPCC. However, recent climate research shows that climate sensitivity has been underestimated, so our target should be 350 ppm—a level surpassed decades ago. This means that, if we are to avert climate catastrophe, we must reduce fossil fuel use more quickly than depletion alone can effect.

Will addressing Climate Change mitigate the impact of Peak Oil? Not unless extremely stringent emissions policies reduce consumption rates ahead of depletion. But, as noted, such policies are a tough sell on the basis of moral argument alone.

Depletion adds more economic weight to the necessity of addressing Climate Change. Consider future supply scenarios for coal: if, as studies indicate, world coal production will start falling within two decades, this means coal will soon become much more expensive. New coal power plants thus become a bad bet for purely financial reasons. And renewable energy sources and conservation start to look much more attractive.

Peak oil kicks the discussion into overdrive. Petroleum prices are already soaring, creating crises for the trucking, airline, and automobile industries, and contributing to rapidly rising food costs. These impacts rivet the attention of policy makers. Reducing oil dependency is increasingly seen as a matter of economic survival.

Taken together, Climate Change and oil/coal/gas depletion form an airtight argument for rapidly weaning society from fossil fuels. Maintaining dependency on these fuels is not an option; our only choice is whether to reduce it proactively and intelligently, or let dire events drive reactive policies.

[Originally written for The Ecologist.]

As the urgent necessity of our transition away from fossil fuels becomes plain, it’s inevitable that some of us will take that necessity seriously enough to explore the edges of “normal” behavior. On the post-carbon frontier, the hardiest pioneers are those willing not only to apply ingenuity and make personal sacrifices, but also to look downright silly to the mainstream.

These trailblazers of sustainability tend to come in two shades: Techno-Green or Gandhi-Green. The former hue belongs to the individual who hopes to save the world with eco-gadgets; the latter to the saintly soul passionate about ceasing to do fuelish harm.

I know a brilliant Techno-Green engineer who has every imaginable energy-saving, non-hydrocarbon-based home accoutrement—solar PV and hot water panels, a ground-source heat pump, an electric car, solar cookers—plus power monitors everywhere that feed data into a laptop recording a second-by-second readout of energy expenditure.

Gandhi-Green is the tint of another pioneer who comes to mind—an earnest young woman who insists on walking everywhere she goes (No motored rides, thanks! How and where was that bicycle made?), refuses to heat her cabin in the winter (which is easier here in California than in many places), eats mostly food she’s grown or foraged, buys nothing new, and eschews hot showers.

If there were a post-carbon contest, I’m not sure which of these extremists would win. Fortunately, there is no contest: we need both kinds of people willing to turn their lives into laboratories to test strategies that get us off fossil fuels fast.

The majority of people in our high-tech, commerce-driven society are likely to be more comfortable contemplating the Techno-Green solution. Going without anything is just not cool; indeed, it’s exciting to think that Peak Oil and Climate Change might offer excuses to buy new and better toys. Anyway, if technology helped get us into the mess we’re in, surely it can help get us out.

However, the reality is that, as the era of cheap energy sputters, we’ll all be doing without a lot of things. It will be essential to know how to be frugal with intelligence and good cheer.

Most of us on the post-carbon path find ourselves hesitating between these extremes. We use computers and other tools made of depleting metals and minerals, powered by electrons from who knows where, hoping that by doing so we are moving in the right direction in other respects. We experiment with hydrocarbon asceticism, knowing that our very existence is still enabled by a complex society running on oil, coal, and gas—a society vulnerable to convulsive failure, with endless casualties, unless we find ways to help it power down in a planned program that will doubtless depend on the services of wind turbines, smart grids, and other high-tech wonders.

We need both approaches, and we need people quirky enough, and courageous enough, to stake out territory on their fringes. Going to extremes may make one a curiosity, but in this instance it also makes one useful to our collective survival.

[Originally written for The Ecologist.]

Take relentless population growth. Add decades of expanding per-capita resource consumption. Simmer slowly over rising global temperatures.

What do you get?

Traumatic information: that is, information that wounds us through the very act of obtaining it.

Everyone knows things are going wrong. But if you understand ecology, you know this in a way that others don’t. It’s not just that the current crop of world leaders is idiotic. It’s not just a matter of a few policies having gone awry. We’ve been on a perilous track since the dawn of agriculture, capturing more and more biosphere services for the benefit of just one species. Fossil fuels recently gave our kind an enormous economic and technological boost—but at the same time enabled us to go much further out on an ecological limb. No one knows the long-term carrying capacity of planet Earth for humans, absent cheap fossil fuels, but it’s likely a lot fewer than seven billion. The implication is not just sobering; it’s paralyzing.

So what to do with such traumatic knowledge? An argument can be made for denial. Why ruin people’s day if there’s nothing they can do, if it’s too late to unseal our fate?

But we don’t know that it’s too late.

As hard as it is to get up every day and remember, "Oh yes, that’s right, we’re headed toward systemic collapse," in fact we can’t afford to forget it, if there are in fact measures to be taken to save a species, an ecosystem, or a human community.

To be sure, some of us are better able to handle the information than others. Many fragile psyches come unhinged without constant doses of hope and assurance. And so for their sake we need continuing positive messages—about a project to make a village sustainable, or about a new coal power plant halted by protest. Some will cling to these encouraging news bits, believing that the tide has turned and we’ll be fine after all. But as time goes on, collapse becomes undeniable. Limits to growth cease to be forecasts; instead, we see daily proof that we’re hitting the wall. As this happens, those who can handle the information spend more of their time managing the fraying emotions of those around them who can’t.

Strategy shifts. We move from rehearsing "Fifty simple things you can do to save the Earth" to discussing global triage.

As the Great Unraveling proceeds, there may in fact be only one occupation worthy of our attention: that of identifying the qualities that make our species worth saving, and then celebrating and exemplifying those qualities. If we concentrate on doing that, perhaps we win no matter what. Outwardly, it will probably look a lot like what many of us are already doing: working to save a species, an ecosystem, a human community; to make a village sustainable, or to halt a new coal power plant.

Taking in traumatic information and transmuting it into life-affirming action may turn out to be the most advanced and meaningful spiritual practice of our time.

When MuseLetter started in January 1992, it was a one-person operation. I wrote and edited every word of text (with the exception of one short essay in one issue), did the layout/typesetting, stuffed envelopes, and maintained the mailing list. It was a small list, and there was only a print version (I barely had email at the time, and this was before the World Wide Web existed as anything more than a concept). I enjoyed complete freedom to write on any topic, and to express any opinion, led only by my Muse.

As the years went by, volunteers began to help with mailings. Then I added the option of e-mail subscriptions. By 2006, Post Carbon Institute was generously aiding me with a paid part-time assistant who handled most of the administrative aspects of publication. Also by this time, the subject matter dealt with in MuseLetter had become focused almost entirely on issues related to energy and the environment. As of this writing, four books on Peak Oil and related topics have emerged through monthly MuseLetters: The Party’s Over, Powerdown, The Oil Depletion Protocol, and Peak Everything.

This January I was offered, and happily accepted, a paid position with Post Carbon Institute as Senior Fellow. The mission of Post Carbon Institute is exactly congruent with the work I have been doing independently for the past five years, so the match could not be better. If you are not already acquainted with the organization, please explore the web site, www.postcarbon.org.

Post Carbon Books is now handling production and administration for MuseLetter, thus enabling me to focus more on writing and public speaking.

Because MuseLetter serves the educational and research purposes of Post Carbon Institute, we have decided to make e-mail subscriptions free from now on. The print version will continue, with subscription costs unchanged, and likely improvements in the offing (larger print). Revenues from print subscriptions will support the Fellows program of Post Carbon Institute.

Current e-mail subscribers will of course have their subscriptions continued. With regard to the fees they have paid, they have three options:

• A pro-rated refund (one dollar per month of remaining subscription time)
• Application of remaining pro-rated e-subscription fee to a postal subscription (for example, a US e-mail subscriber who has just sent in a check for $12 would be able to switch to a print subscription for an additional $8)
• Donation of remaining e-subscription fee to the Post Carbon Institute’s Fellows Program. If we do not hear from you, we will assume that this is your preference.

Contact Post Carbon Books with your preference: store (at) postcarbonbooks.com.

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The Soil Association's Lady Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture 2007 was given by Richard Heinberg and chaired by Anna Ford, BBC Newsreader. The title of this year's event was ‘What will we eat when the oil runs out?’

Audio links:
broadband - high quality audio
dial up - faster download audio

A short summary of the event is available on YouTube.

Richard is interviewed in Leonardo DiCaprio's "The 11th Hour" a documentary concerning the environmental crises caused by human actions and calls for restorative action through a reshaping of human activity.

From Leonardo DiCaprio's 11thHourAction.com website:
"The mission of our community is to inspire action at every level: from individual action, up through our communities, to the state, national and international level. The actions are all shifting our civilization to a sustainable future. Let's work and take action together. The time is now. The hope is you. Let's begin."

Richard is a featured speaker in Crude Impact, an award-winning documentary film which Chris Vernon of TheOilDrum.com called " a terrific film... the best documentary I have seen on the subject." This feature film explores the interconnection between human domination of the planet, and the discovery and use of oil.

Go to www.CrudeImpact.com to read highlights and view trailers.

Richard Heinberg has been honored with the M. King Hubbert Award for Excellence in Energy Education by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (USA). The other recipient of the award this year was Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, chair of the Peak Oil caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Former US President Bill Clinton was reading about peak oil this summer, specifically, Richard Heinberg's book The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies.

This week in the New Yorker, David Remnick profiles Bill Clinton. Here, with Blake Eskin, Remnick discusses the ex-President’s legacy and Hillary Clinton’s political future. Specific excerpt posted below:

 

You write that Clinton rejected Gerald Ford as a model for the post-Presidency. But is Clinton at all a man of leisure?

He plays a hell of a lot of golf and he’s a voracious reader. His library’s got a lot of books about policy, a lot of history, a lot of Presidential biography, and a lot of books on religion—that’s a sincere interest. His taste in fiction, although I don’t think it’s limited to this, seems to be of a lower brow: he loves thrillers and police novels and stuff like that. I borrowed a book from him that he had just read—“The Party’s Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies,” by Richard Heinberg, not exactly summer reading—and it was full of underlinings and what looked like the most serious undergraduate’s markings, with lots of exclamation points.