“A gradual contraction into more sustainable patterns of resource use is not the norm for a society that is exploiting the environment. The norm is a last-ditch effort to maintain outward displays of power, and then a sudden, and dramatic, collapse.” That’s one of the foreboding statements with which Steve Hallett and John Wright punctuate their preview of past civilizations in the opening section of their book Life Without Oil: Why We Must Shift to a New Energy Future.

They consider we are at the peak of oil production and that we’re not facing that reality. There are late flurries to extend the discovery of further oil. Deep sea drilling, the exploitation of the Alberta tar sands and oil shale extraction are among them, the latter two causing horrendous environmental damage. But all they will produce is a temporary delay of the decline. The authors judge that around 2015 oil production will show a clear and convincing decline, and the world will be at the beginning of the end of what they call the petroleum interval. It’s an interval that will have occupied a couple of centuries in the long history of humanity. Oil has enabled the construction of a monumental global civilization in which we have become dependent on the increased productivity and efficiencies of scale it can provide. As it diminishes and disappears we require an energy transition which the book considers we are not geared to make in good time. We therefore face a long global economic contraction as the price of oil escalates, a sequence of economic slumps which will continue until fundamental problems of energy availability, food production, water supply and population control are sufficiently well corrected.

The book recognizes that we have paid only a miniscule part of the cost of fossil fuels, and the result is a huge ecological debt of which climate change is the result. Global climate change is already in full swing, with worse impacts yet to come, complicating and worsening our struggles with the end of the petroleum era. Although the book’s focus is on the end of oil it includes a clear understanding of the causes and long-lasting consequences of human-caused climate change.

The new energy future which the depletion of fossil fuels will force upon us is of course the same energy future which the mitigation of climate change demands. The book is not optimistic about our capacity to make the transition in time to meet the strains which costly oil will impose on our economies, let alone, though it doesn’t make the observation, in time to counter the mounting greenhouse gas emissions from burning fossil fuels. Indeed it concludes that renewable sources cannot possibly fill the oil void and sees nuclear power as the potential dominant energy source with hydrogen eventually used for transport. As a reader whose major concern is the mitigation of climate change I found little reassurance from this aspect of the book. The authors don’t deny the need for mitigation, but they seem to think it unlikely that we will stop using fossil fuels before they are exhausted. If that proves to be the case then coming generations will be coping with problems a good deal larger than the replacement of energy sources.

The move to new energy sources is admittedly a major one and only time will tell whether human societies will mobilize to make it at the pace required. But I thought the book’s judgment that we simply can’t find the energy we need from renewable sources was somewhat cursory alongside such careful investigations as those made by Al Gore in his book Our Choice or Lester Brown in World on the Edge or the recent WWF Energy Report.

The deep and long-lasting economic recession which the authors see ahead is premised on our economies’ deep fossil fuel dependency. Environmentalists who take comfort from the thought that running out of oil might finally reduce carbon emissions underestimate the consequences, say the writers. Oil and other fossil fuels pervade not only our transport systems but also many other aspects of the economy from plastics to computers to fertilizers. Asset inertia will delay transitions from oil to energy alternatives, and the book’s view is that alternatives will come online only when they are not alternatives at all, but the only option. The message of deeply troubled economies ahead is hammered home by a survey of many countries and areas of the world with accompanying explanations of why most of them are facing retraction. Again I found myself wondering whether the authors allow sufficiently for the possibility of renewed vibrancy in economies which rapidly embrace green energy and put adequate resources into advancing it.

But maybe I just prefer optimism and the authors are the realists. They’re not ultimately pessimists though. They look beyond the global collapse to the shape of more adequate future societies. Hallett is a botanist and ecology is the book’s key to an economic system which will recognize our interconnectedness with the natural world, curtail unsustainable resource extraction and limit damage to the environment. The protection of farmland must be a priority. Industrialized agriculture must give way to sustainable farming, undertaken without inorganic fertilizer. The rebuilding of soils and the re-diversification of the rural landscape are essential to restore farming as a true support for human societies. The place taken by oil and natural gas in current industrial farming practice can be filled by hard work and deep thinking. It’s our divorce from nature which has blinded us to the reality that we are part of nature and must respect the laws of ecology if we wish to avoid collapse.

The book’s discussion is wide-ranging, lively and interesting. The combination of scientist and journalist in the writing team works very well for the reader. The opening survey of the collapse of past civilisations following the depletion of resources and ecological damage is a haunting reminder of how easily successful human societies excuse themselves from the need to treat with respect the natural provision on which their wealth depends. The concluding argument that ecology is the proper foundation for economics is a sure delineation of any hopeful future the human race may have.

The writers have done their best to combine the anxieties of oil depletion with those of climate change. But it is difficult to fully integrate the two. The mitigation of climate change demands that we cut back drastically on the use of fossil fuels. It is not the prospect of their ultimate depletion that alarms, but the prospect of their continuing use until that time. The book gently chides environmentalists who would welcome an early end to oil, on the grounds that they don’t give full weight to the disastrous consequences. But in the matter of disastrous consequences climate change seems to me to far outweigh even the serious economic disruption the authors foresee accompanying the decline of oil. However both concerns can, and in this book do, converge in the urging of an economic system which understands and respects the natural environment which sustains human society.

Article by Bryan Walker, appearing courtesy Celsias.

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Lester Brown has for years been unwavering and persistent in drawing attention to the gathering environmental dangers humanity faces and pointing to the alternative practices which might yet save us from the worst effects. His widely read Plan B books have appeared at regular intervals throughout the last decade. I reviewed the fourth of them on Celsias in 2009. A new book now published is shorter but no less urgent, as its title indicates: World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse.

He points to three areas where the foundations of human civilisation are under severe threat, particularly because of the effects on food production. Water is being overpumped from aquifers and the world’s farmers are losing the water war, with dangerous consequences for food production as harvests consequently shrink. Soils are eroding and deserts expanding on an alarming scale, resulting in lowered soil fertility and contraction of land available for farming. Global warming is bringing a climate instability to which agriculture is not adapted, the threat of sea level rise which will shrink rice harvests in vulnerable areas, and changes to water supply from mountain glaciers already affecting farming negatively in some places.

Some consequences are selected and highlighted for a world where the human population continues to soar. The first is the emerging politics of food scarcity. We are adding 80 million people a year. Three billion of us who are already here are trying to move up the food chain, consuming more grain-intensive livestock products. The massive ethanol distillery investment in the US has added an epic competition between cars and people for grain. Some of the more affluent food importing countries are now buying or leasing large blocks of land in other countries on which to produce food for themselves. The countries doing the buying or leasing include Saudi Arabia, South Korea, China, India, Egypt, Bahrain, Qatar and the UAE. Brown writes of an unprecedented scramble for land that crosses national boundaries. A dangerous geopolitics of food scarcity is in the making.

The second consequence Brown dwells on is the phenomenon of environmental refugees, people displaced by rising seas, more-destructive storms, expanding deserts, water shortages and other environmental factors. As the impacts of climate change begin to bite it will be rising-sea refugees who will likely dominate the flow. The book details some of the places where people are already moving as refugees within their own countries and warns of the potentially massive and chaotic movement of people across national boundaries as the pressures intensify.

The third consequence he considers is the increase in the number of failing states. Virtually all of the top 20 of them are depleting their natural assets – forests, grasslands, soils and aquifers – to sustain their rapidly growing populations. Failing states not only cause misery to their citizens but also threaten the international cooperation necessary in an age of increasing globalisation. It is in all our interests that the causes of state failure are addressed with urgency.

This is the world at the edge to which our environmental heedlessness has brought us. We don’t have to go over that edge, but to avoid doing so we need a monumental effort undertaken at wartime speed. This is Plan B. It has four components: the stabilisation of the climate, the restoration of Earth’s natural support systems, the stabilisation of population, and the eradication of poverty.

To stabilise climate we need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80 percent by 2020.The first step is raising energy efficiency. This can entirely meet the projected growth in energy use between now and 2030. The second step is replacing all coal- and oil-fired electricity generation with that from renewable sources, meaning wind, solar and geothermal. Nuclear is too expensive if full-cost pricing is applied. Carbon capture and sequestration from coal-fired plants is also excluded, given the costs and lack of investor interest within the coal community itself. Brown sees wind as the early leader and calls for a crash programme to develop 4000 gigawatts of wind generating capacity by 2020. That’s 2 million wind turbines of 2 megawatts over the next ten years. Not really an intimidating target when compared with the 70 million automobiles the world produces every year. The third step is to end deforestation and engage in a massive campaign to plant trees and stabilise soils.

Brown’s writing is never just exhortation. He looks everywhere for evidence of movement in the directions we need to take, and details it. It is not the case that Plan B solutions are untried. There is a great deal to encourage the concerned reader as Brown points to hopeful developments already taking place. Whether it be Scotland announcing in September that it was adopting a new goal of 80 percent renewable electricity by 2020 and expecting 100 percent by 2025, or the explosive growth in solar cell production in recent years, or the seemingly miraculous rebirth of forests from barren land in South Korea since the end of the Korean War so that nearly 65 percent of the once denuded country is now covered by forest, or the rapid reduction in fertility rates some developing countries have shown achievable, there are many signs that Plan B is not pie in the sky.

But we have to move with speed. Brown insists that the key to restructuring the economy is to get the market to tell the truth through full-cost pricing. An honest market will reflect the full cost of burning gasoline or coal, of deforestation, of overpumping aquifers, and of overfishing. If we can create an honest market, then market forces will rapidly restructure the world’s energy economy. Wind, solar and geothermal will be revealed as much cheaper than climate-disrupting fossil fuels. At present we are being blindsided by a faulty accounting system that will lead to bankruptcy.

When Brown is beginning to feel overwhelmed by the scale and urgency of the needed changes he reminds himself of the economic history of the US during the war, when within three years from 1942 the US turned out an astonishing 229,000 aircraft and added more than 5000 ships to the American Merchant Fleet. The conversion to a wartime economy happened within months. But it took a Pearl Harbour to motivate the turnaround. He trusts a cataclysmic event on the climate front, such as the break-up of the West Antarctic ice sheet, will not be needed to galvanise action, since it might also unfortunately indicate that we were too late. He hopes rather that the rapid changes needed can result from a dedicated grassroots movement pushing for change that is strongly supported by political leadership as, for example, civil rights change in the 1960s was achieved in the US.

Brown understands well the precariousness of human civilisation as the time of environmental reckoning draws ominously closer. He expresses it in patient and telling detail that addresses the intelligence and humanity of the reader. He equally buttresses his outline of the solutions with solid information as to how and why they can work. Whether sanity and clarity carry weight in the halls of power may be moot, but Brown well represents the thinking of the substantial body of people who see the perils ahead and want their governments to mobilise to avert them.

Article by Bryan Walker, appearing courtesy Celsias.

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America’s military should wean itself off oil by 2040 in order to end the high vulnerability of its fuel supply to attack and price spikes, according to a new report. The U.S. Department of Defense currently relies on petroleum for about 77 percent of its energy needs, including aircraft, ground transportation, ships, and weapons, according to the Center for a New American Security, a non-partisan group based in Washington, D.C. That reliance makes the U.S. military vulnerable to extreme fuel price spikes as the global market competes for increasingly depleted petroleum supplies, the report said. “Ensuring that DOD can operate on non-petroleum fuels 30 years from today is a conservative hedge against prevailing economic, political and environmental trends, conditions and constraints,” the authors say.

While that shift will likely take decades, the report says the Defense Department has already established the groundwork, including significant development and testing of numerous renewable sources of energy. The report offered the military 12 guiding principles to make the transition to renewable sources of energy, including steadily increasing the use of renewable fuels at domestic military installations, improving energy efficiency, planning for an uncertain and unstable energy future, and developing new, non-petroleum fuels to use in existing equipment.

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Australian officials plan to build a 140-turbine wind farm in Victoria, the nation’s most densely populated state, by 2013, a billion-dollar project that would be the largest in the Southern hemisphere. The wind farm will provide enough electricity for 220,000 homes and is key to the nation’s new target of meeting 20 percent of its energy needs with renewable sources by 2020.

The wind farm, to be built by Australian energy retailer A.G.L. Energy and New Zealand’s state-owned Meridian Energy, would be a significant step for a nation that has yet to tap into its abundant renewable energy resources, including wind, solar, and wave energy.

Only about 6 percent of Australia’s energy comes from renewable sources. In June, however, lawmakers passed more ambitious green energy targets, earmarking about 20 billion Australian dollars ($18 billion) for clean energy technologies and a significant expansion of the nation’s electricity grid to connect solar or wind farms in the desert interior with population centers on the coasts. Officials say the proposed wind farm would reduce carbon emissions by about 1.7 million tons annually — the equivalent of taking 420,000 cars off the road.

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The U.S. and Europe added more power capacity in 2009 from renewable sources than from conventional sources such as coal and oil, and this year or next the world as a whole will add more capacity to the electricity supply from alternative energy sources than from fossil fuels, according to two new reports. The reports, issued by the United Nations Environmental Program and the Renewable Energy Policy Network for the 21st Century, said that in 2009 renewables made up 60 percent of newly installed power capacity in Europe and more than 50 percent in the U.S.

Although global investment in green energy decreased in 2009, to $162 billion, some countries, such as China, saw rapid growth; private and public investment in clean energy in China jumped 53 percent in 2009, with the country adding 37 gigawatts of renewable power capacity — nearly half of the 80 gigawatts of renewable power capacity added worldwide last year.

China surpassed the U.S. in 2009 as the country with the largest investment in clean energy. Worldwide, investments in solar power and biofuels declined in 2009, but there was record investment in wind power, totaling $67 billion, the reports said. The reports also said the number of countries with policies encouraging green energy investment has doubled in the past five years, from 55 to more than 100.

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Australia’s Parliament has passed a law requiring that 20 percent of the country’s electricity come from renewable sources by 2020, an increase from the current level of 8 percent.

The standard, which matches the European Union’s, means that the households of all 21 million Australians could be powered by renewable energy in a decade.

Green Party leaders said, however, that the standard should be 30 percent, and Climate Change Minister Penny Wong noted that even with the new renewable standard, the nation’s CO2 emissions are expected to be 20 percent above 2000 levels in 2020 because of the growth of the Australian economy.

Meanwhile, a new report shows that electricity generated by renewable sources in the U.S. reached an all-time high in May, with alternative energy accounting for 13 percent of total electrical generation. That’s 7.7 percent higher than May 2008, with most of the growth coming from wind and solar power. Hydropower remains the largest source of renewable energy, accounting for 9.4 percent of U.S. electricity production.

Appearing courtesy of Yale Environment 360.

[photo credit: Flickr]

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