Subject: [permaculture] The oil is going, the oil is going!
Date: Thu, 23 Mar 2006 08:15:02 -0800
The oil is going, the oil is going! Today's Paul Reveres of "peak oil"
aren't waiting for Washington to save us from apocalypse. They're
already planting gardens and drafting city plans for the days when oil
is gone.
By Katharine Mieszkowski
Mar. 22, 2006 | Matt Savinar, 27, once aspired to own a Hummer. He
studied poli sci at the University of California, Davis, before going on
to get his law degree at U.C. Hastings in San Francisco. He was into
bodybuilding. Today, Savinar doesn't own any car, much less a Hummer,
and he doesn't practice law, although he's licensed to do so. Frankly,
he doesn't think that driving or the legal profession, with the
exception of maybe bankruptcy law, have much of a future. Instead of
buying a car, Savinar walks, takes the bus and catches rides with
friends, but not because he's trying to save the world, he assures me.
Savinar doesn't drive because he's saving the money he'd spend on a used
car to buy land; he's not sure exactly where yet, but somewhere with a
supply of fresh water, arable soil, low population density and that's
far from military bases. He's starting to get back into bodybuilding
again, too, all the better to be healthy and in shape to till the earth
and grow food, when the time comes. "I happen to think that we're going
straight to hell, and I'm trying to figure out how to be in the least
hot place of hell," he told me recently on an incongruously balmy 72
degree February afternoon in sunny Santa Rosa, Calif., at a restaurant
just a few blocks from the apartment where he lives.
For a young, quick-witted, able-bodied man with an advanced degree,
living in the most prosperous country in the world, Savinar has a pretty
dim view of his -- and all the rest of our -- prospects. He believes
that many if not most of the trappings of modern American life are
endangered species and he's trying to figure out how not to become one
of them. So Savinar has become a full-time prophet of "peak oil,"
spreading the word about how the world's oil production will soon peak
and global demand will outstrip supply.
When that happens, he imagines that all the ways Americans now depend on
oil will become rudely apparent, as the price of everything from filling
up at the pump to fruits and vegetables in the supermarket shoots up.
Cities and towns will start to struggle to provide basic services like
police, firefighting, school buses, water and road repair. Office
workers will lose jobs because they can't afford to commute to work from
their suburban homes. Even if they could get to the office, there'll be
fewer white-collar jobs, as businesses flounder under the strain of a
flailing global economy. Yet suburbanites will be grateful for those big
backyards to support vegetable gardens, if they can just keep their
hungry neighbors from sneaking in at night and stealing their harvest.
All that is before we even consider the possibility of an oil war with
the likes of China, where, incidentally, so many of those cheap goods
that we've come to depend on are manufactured.
But here's what really drives Savinar crazy. As our whole world is about
to go hurtling, sickeningly, down the other side of peak oil, we cling
to the vain hope that better fuel efficiency, more conservation and
alternative energy will step in to save the day. He can't believe our
ignorance. Just look at his lunch: chicken fajitas with red and green
peppers, brown rice and green salad. Sound wholesome and healthy? No,
Savinar reminds me, it's brought here courtesy of cheap energy.
"It's fossil fuels -- petroleum, coal, natural gas -- that have been
converted into food," he says. Then, there's the wooden table he's
eating it on, which was built god-knows-where and likely shipped here
inexpensively courtesy of fossil fuels. Then, there's the financial
system underpinning the bank loan that the owner of this restaurant
likely got to open the joint, which is predicated on the idea that the
economy will grow in the future, not shrink precipitously when oil
prices spike. Then there's the asphalt on the four-lane of traffic
outside, and the cars, trucks and, oh yes, SUVs zipping along on top of
its smooth surface, as well as the concrete of the sidewalk bordering
the mall across the street, where Ann Taylor and Talbots sell clothes
surely imported from halfway around the world.
But Savinar isn't rollerblading while the oil burns. From his modest
apartment, about 60 miles north of San Francisco, he parses the latest
energy news and fulminates on his Web site, Life After the Oil Crash.
<http://www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net/> "Dear Reader," he welcomes
visitors to his site, "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end
soon. This is not the wacky proclamation of a doomsday cult, apocalypse
bible prophecy sect, or conspiracy theory society. Rather, it is the
scientific conclusion of the best paid, most widely-respected
geologists, physicists and investment bankers in the world. These are
rational, professional, conservative individuals who are absolutely
terrified by a phenomenon known as global 'Peak Oil.'"
Savinar has given public speeches about peak oil but he says he prefers
to do his Paul Revere-ing virtually so he doesn't have to see the look
in people's eyes when they get it. "This is like the worst news that
people have ever heard, other than maybe a death in the family, because
you're basically finding out that your entire model of the world is
based on bullshit," he says. He does not relish being the bearer of bad
news: "People who want the Hummer or the three-bedroom home, or they
want their kid to go to college, and grow up to be an attorney or a
doctor -- all that, everything that they've based their lives on --
you're telling them that that's all out the window."
Critics debate the degree of doom to attach to peak oil, but Savinar is
right: Scientists don't deny it's coming. The only question is when.
Some geologists say we're already on the downslope while others put the
peak at around mid-century. Regardless, thousands of people of various
professions aren't waiting for the exact date of the bad news to be
pinned down. They've seen the polemical documentary "The End of
Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of the American Dream," shown
at countless house parties, community centers and city halls across the
country. Or, maybe they've been frightened by truly alarmist Web sites,
such as Die Off, <http://www.dieoff.com> that predict billions -- yes,
that's right, billions -- of deaths globally because of peak oil. Or
they've read the Hirsch report,
<http://www.hilltoplancers.org/stories/hirsch0502.pdf> a paper
commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy, in which professional
energy analysts found that it would take at least a decade to prepare
for peak oil, yet they don't see their government exactly leaping into
action.
The peak oilers believe that by the time we know for sure that peak oil
has come and gone it will be much too late to prepare to live without
the 21 million barrels of oil a day that the U.S. is now accustomed to
consuming. They aren't leaving anything to chance, let alone to the
federal government, particularly with George W. Bush at the helm. To
them, real change begins at home, where they're taking matters into
their own hands. They're planning and preparing, and even lobbying their
local governments to envision life with less oil. Some are hopeful they
can make changes now in their own communities to mitigate the impact of
the oil shocks to come.
To David Fridley, a scientist who works on energy efficiency at Lawrence
Berkeley National Laboratory, and who worked in the oil industry for 15
years, the increasing concern about peak oil tells us a lot about the
shape of people's assumptions. "Those who come from an environmental
point of view see peak oil as an opportunity to disrupt the never-ending
growth of our reliance of fossil fuels," he says. "Then there are those
who see our ultra-consumerist society as flawed, and peak oil is the
disruption that will bring an end to that. Then there are the people who
believe technology can save us, who are delving more into what solar and
water power can do." It's a pretty motley crew all trying to get a bead
on the future at once. What about him? Is he part of the peak-oil
movement? The mustachioed, bespectacled scientist says, "The facts are
too compelling not to be involved."
A posh conference room on the 33rd floor of a skyscraper in downtown San
Francisco is an elegant if ironic perch from which to ponder the
uncertain future of life as we know it. One entire wall of the room is
made of glass, a giant window offering a sweeping nighttime view of the
Bay Bridge all lit up, sparkling with the orderly lights of the
post-rush hour cars and trucks streaming across the bay into San
Francisco. Yet the 20 people assembled around the golden conference
table for the February monthly meeting of the San Francisco Post Carbon
<http://www.postcarbon.org/groups/sanfrancisco> group believe that
sooner rather than later that stream of cars and trucks will falter, if
not actually stop, altogether. And as the geopolitical and economic
dominoes start to fall in the wake of climbing oil prices, some wonder
with macabre humor how long it will be before they'll have to climb 33
flights of stairs if they want to make it to this room.
Meeting in plush digs donated by a foundation for the occasion, San
Francisco Post Carbon is a kind of combination study group, support
group and citizens' action committee. Among their accomplishments is
having produced a slick poster <http://www.oilposter.org/> that depicts
the history -- and possible future -- of the oil age, which they've
distributed to every member of Congress. At least the lawmakers won't be
able to say that they weren't warned! This post-carbon group is one of
six such groups that meet regularly in the Bay Area. But it's hardly
just a California obsession. There are groups
<http://www.postcarbon.org/groups> around the world affiliated with the
Vancouver, B.C., Post Carbon Institute, <http://www.postcarbon.org/>
most of them in North America.
Over red wine and a potluck dinner of hummus and salads, the peak
oilers, who tonight include a computer programmer, a consultant, a
teacher, a retired engineer and a recent college grad, listen intently
to the first speaker: Alice Friedemann, a systems analyst for a large
transportation company. She's been studying the history of agriculture
in California and learning sustainable farming techniques.
"As energy gets more expensive, food will get more expensive,"
Friedemann says, citing a stat that's often mentioned in peak-oil
circles: In our era of industrial agriculture, it takes 10 calories of
fossil-fuel inputs for fertilizers, pesticides, farm equipment and
transportation from natural gas, oil and coal to produce one calorie of
food. The fear is that the rising price of oil will drive us to rely on
other fossil fuels, draining those as well, and destroying the
atmosphere in the process.
Friedemann remarks that there are home-court advantages to being so
close to California's fertile Central Valley. "The good news is we're
near the food," she says. "But the bad news is people are likely to come
here not just because of the food but because it will be too hot or cold
where they live." Grapes of wrath, anyone?
Still, the prospects for growing a lot of food locally, à la the victory
gardens <http://www.livinghistoryfarm.org/farminginthe40s/crops_02.html>
during World War II, in these parts don't look good to her, given the
built environment and population density. Even assuming "bio-intensive"
farming methods, where just 4,000 square feet of land can produce enough
food to feed a vegetarian diet to one person, there's nowhere near
enough land in Oakland, where she lives, that's not in the shade of
homes or buildings, covered in concrete, or on steep parkland with poor
topsoil.
How bad does Friedemann really believe things are going to get? "I
believe that we're going back to the 13th century at some point," she
tells me. Her grandfather was a geologist who knew the geophysicist M.
King Hubbert, <http://www.hubbertpeak.com/> who first posited the theory
of peak oil, predicting the peak of U.S. production in the '70s. Having
studied alternative energy for years, Friedemann says she just doesn't
believe that there is anything that's going to replace oil, or even come
close. "We won't appreciate what oil really did for us until we have to
go back to muscle power," she says. The question that clearly both
appalls and fascinates her is what happens next?
"How do you reengineer society to go backward? How do you carve up
container ships and turn them into sailboats? We can't go back to steam
engines burning wood because we burned all that wood when we were
clearing the fields for farms," she says. And even going back to beasts
of burden, using the muscle power of horses for transportation, isn't
straightforward, not when horses and people are competing for local,
arable land.
"On average, a horse needs six acres of pasture," she says. "So you
can't use that for food if you're growing the food to feed the horses."
At an upcoming meeting of the East Bay peak oil group, she'll be
teaching a class on milling your own grain and cooking it. "These are
skills that would be useful to have. I suspect that there'll be oil
shocks and food shortages but grain is something that keeps for years
and years and years. It's something that you can have at home as the
grocery store shelves empty. It's going to be more Third World-like and
people are going to need to cope."
At the meeting, it's time for a report on efforts to lobby the San
Francisco Board of Supervisors to consider what impact peak oil might
have in the city. Last year, a formal request to hold a hearing on peak
oil died in committee. In the past few weeks, some of the post-carbon
members have met with staffers from several supes' offices, some of whom
were more sympathetic to their issue than others. "They looked at us and
smiled," says Dennis Brumm, 53, a former middle manager at a produce
company, now retired on disability, who devotes himself to activism.
"Most of them didn't smile," chimes in Allyse Heartwell, 24, a recent
college grad, drawing knowing chuckles from the rest of the group. The
post-carbon group realizes that theirs is a very tough problem to get
politicians excited about, given they can't in good conscience suggest
an obvious way to fix it. "It's very difficult to go and say, 'We have a
problem that has no real solution, and we are trying to mitigate what
will happen to culture,'" says Brumm.
The group wants San Francisco to undertake a study to gauge what peak
oil will mean to the city's economy, food distribution, transportation
and tourism. "I want to see Golden Gate Park planted with community
gardens," Heartwell tells me later. Heartwell, who studied international
environmental issues in college, says that she's never been an activist
but she's recently become obsessed with peak oil and reads sites like
Energy Bulletin <http://www.energybulletin.net/> and the Oil Drum
<http://www.theoildrum.com/> religiously. "Honestly, I don't think that
it's likely that we're going to make smart choices in the next 10 or 20
years. It's hard but I personally don't see anything to be done but
keeping at it," she says of the lobbying efforts. "Five years down the
road, 10 years down the road, I would be kicking myself if I didn't do
something, unless I'm starving, in which case, I would probably be
kicking myself even more."
Some members of the group are trying to lower their personal energy
consumption -- in the peak-oil vernacular, "powering down." One man has
cut his gas consumption in half on his daily commute by buying a hybrid
car. Several don't own cars. Some have solar panels on their homes and
sensors so that the lights turn off when they leave the room. One chose
to travel by train rather than plane on a trip to visit family in Texas
over the holidays. But while they support the idea of taking individual
action, they're aware that their own efforts are drops in the global
bucket, and while they believe in setting a good example about a
lower-energy lifestyle, they know just how hard it is to get anyone to
listen when you're sounding this kind of alarm.
"The public doesn't understand how integrated oil is into every aspect
of our lives," says Richard Katz, 55, who is fond of bringing oil
industry newspaper ads to group meetings and giving a gallows-humor take
on them. "The American spin on the world is that there is always some
new technology or new answer that's around the corner. Standard
economics says that there is always something to replace whatever is
rare. But what we're talking about here -- oil -- is the product of
millions and millions of years of distilled sunlight. How do you get
people excited about living with less?"
Fridley of the Lawrence Lab rises out of his seat to tell us about "the
myth of biofuels." He argues that the likes of ethanol, fuel drawn from
crops like corn or plants like switchgrass, are not going to save the
day. "Once you get past the media hype about ethanol, the reality scares
you," he says. Fridley fears that in the search for cheap liquid fuel to
replace oil we'll end up overmining the soil. By his calculations, the
long-term potential of biofuels is low, yet it's draining federal
dollars from wind and solar, about which he's more optimistic.
Finally, a documentary filmmaker working on a project called "Everybody
Loves Oil" <http://www.pillearrings.com/oilmovie/> shows a preview and
makes a plea for funds, while everyone passes around a glass mason jar,
decorated with an apple, grapes and a pear, and filled with oil that was
pumped out of a well in Bakersfield. It's a reminder that the slimy gunk
that brought us together tonight is about to tear our whole world apart.
Plenty of social critics see the peak oilers as the latest horsemen of
the environmental apocalypse. Take "J.D." (the only name he would give
me), a 44-year-old American living in Japan who runs the blog Peak Oil
Debunked. <http://www.peakoildebunked.blogspot.com/> "Clearly, the
radical environmentalists and primativists love peak oil," he writes in
an e-mail. "It's like a dream come true for them." To the "doomers,"
peak oil is the "deus ex machina that will fulfill their long-cherished
dream of bringing down 'growth' and modern, globalized, corporate,
industrial society."
The fact is, though, the Cassandras of peak oil are not all wearing
fleece and Birkenstocks, and using peak oil as a convenient reason to
rekindle back-to-the-land fantasies. They are geologists and energy
experts in governments, universities and think tanks. And many of them
echo the core conviction of the activists: Oil-drunk America has to go
on the wagon or it will soon be heading into a dauntingly thirsty future.
Experts point out that U.S. domestic oil production peaked in the early
'70s. The world is expected
<http://www.nytimes.com/2006/03/08/business/08cnd-opec.html> to consume
85 million barrels of oil per day this year, with the U.S. guzzling some
21 million of that. Even Chevron admits <http://www.willyoujoinus.com/>
that the era of oil that's easy to extract -- "the easy oil" -- is over.
The question of when exactly global production will peak and then slide
down the bell curve, with demand outstripping supply, is disputed by
geologists, but some believe that it's already here and the world is
already experiencing the fallout.
"The World Trade Center, the first Iraq war, the second Iraq war, high
gasoline prices and enormous volatility in price," reels off Kenneth S.
Deffeyes, <http://www.princeton.edu/hubbert/current-events.html> an
emeritus Princeton professor who calculates that the world passed peak
last December -- Dec. 16, 2005, to be exact. "When supply and demand are
closely matched, something as small as two hurricanes makes the price go
wild; we saw gasoline go up almost a dollar. Political troubles in
Venezuela, labor strikes in Nigeria make the oil price flap."
If Deffeyes turns out to be anywhere close to right, this is prescient
news indeed. Even strategic advisors to the Bush administration's
Department of Energy believe it would take a good 20 years and trillions
of dollars of investment in infrastructure for the nation to avoid
liquid fuel shortages, when peak passes. A 91-page report released in
February 2005 by Science Applications International Corp.
<http://www.saic.com/> played out three scenarios for the Department of
Energy. Titled "Peaking of World Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and
Risk Management," it's come to be known as the Hirsch report,
<http://www.hilltoplancers.org/stories/hirsch0502.pdf> after one of its
authors. <http://www.d-n-i.net/fcs/hirsch_bio.htm> Those three
scenarios: Wait until the peak occurs to transition to other fuels, plan
for the transition a decade in advance, plan for the transition 20 years
in advance. In the first case, they predict significant fuel shortages
globally and economic upheaval. Only in the third scenario do the
report's writers conclude that major liquid fuel shortages could be
avoided.
The report predicts that peaking will result in much higher oil prices,
which will cause "protracted economic hardship in the United States and
around the world." Yet it argues that impact can be mitigated if efforts
are made on both the "supply and demands sides."
Deffeyes concurs. He believes that our short-term energy future would
have been different, if we'd, oh, say, listened to Jimmy Carter and
started preparing decades ago. "We'd be in great shape now. But we
didn't. We've driven off the cliff without anyone putting their foot on
the brake."
But even if Deffeyes is wrong, and peak is still 20 or 30 years off,
peak oilers are skeptical that an orderly transition to alternative
energies can be made. They worry that the alternatives to oil will not
scale up to provide the amount of energy that we're used to consuming,
and only by changing our consumption habits can we adjust. Some believe
that making the transition won't just take a rough five or 10 years, but
that it will mean a meaningful permanent decline in how much energy we use.
Richard Heinberg, author of "Power Down: Options and Actions for a
Post-Carbon World," one of the peak-oil gurus, runs down a list of
possible alternatives: coal to liquids, gas to liquids, ethanol,
methanol, bio-diesel, not to mention getting oil from tar sands, shale
oil and heavy oil from Venezuela. "Each of those alternatives has
inherent constraints in supply," he says. "You can't increase the amount
that you can produce to any arbitrary level by throwing money at the
problem. There are practical constraints."
The fear is that even if the U.S. were throwing all the billions that
we're spending on things like fighting the war in Iraq into a
moon-shot-like effort to transition to alternatives, which we're
obviously not doing now, despite the president's recent lip service
<http://www.salon.com/tech/htww/2006/02/01/switchgrass/index.html> to
ethanol, we would not be able to produce the amount of energy that we
now get from 21 million barrels of oil a day.
Like Fridley, Heinberg asserts that biofuels are not the answer. He
notes that they appeal to environmentalists
<http://www.nrdc.org/air/transportation/biofuels.asp> because they could
be produced in a carbon-neutral way, as well as to patriotic
conservatives because American farmers can help solve the problem, while
lessening our dependence on foreign oil from the Middle East. "We don't
have oodles and oodles of agricultural land that's not being used for
growing biofuels, and the energy payoff is very low compared to what
we're used to from oil," he says. "The net energy being produced is
going to be very costly."
Of course, there are always techno-optimists, and in this case they are
led by Amory Lovins of the Rocky Mountain Institute, co-author of
"Winning the Oil Endgame." <http://www.oilendgame.com/> Lovins argues
that ethanol, for instance, can be produced without using cropland, but
from woody, weedy plants, like switchgrass, on currently idle
conservation reserve land. He quotes Sheikh Yamani, a leading figure in
OPEC for 25 years, who said, "The Stone Age did not end because the
world ran out of stones, and the Oil Age will not end because the world
runs out of oil."
Lovins thinks that oil will go the way of whale oil as alternatives are
perfected. Besides, he contends, nobody knows who is right about peak
oil, given that 94 percent of oil reserves are held by sovereign
governments that have no incentive to reveal how much recoverable oil
they actually have, even if they know themselves. He says an oil
shortage is far more likely to be caused by an attack on a Saudi oil
processing plant, or a natural disaster demolishing a key refinery.
Ultimately, Lovins says, we will get much more out of the remaining oil
by tripling the efficiency of cars, trucks and planes. "The rest of the
oil," he states, "can then be displaced by a combination of saved
natural gas and advanced biofuels." So, pessimists, chill out.
At a gathering at Berkeley Ecology Center, there's a vision of Utopia
over the door. It's a painting, in which the rays of a huge sun beam
down on a dark-skinned woman on her hands and knees gardening while a
yellow butterfly flutters above her hands. A child holding a cornucopia
of fruits and vegetables looks directly out from the painting. Over this
pastoral tableau looms the slogan "Another World Is Possible."
This is a kind of community center where visitors can buy reusable hemp
coffee filters, get info on local seed swaps and learn about the best
source of worms for composting. From the magazine rack, the cover lines
on Permaculture magazine shout: "Prepare for Life Without Oil. Find Your
Own Wild Winter Food."
At the front of the room, David Room, director of municipal response for
the Post-Carbon Institute, holds up his 3-year-old daughter to a
microphone, and asks her to repeat the first word she ever said:
"Organic!" she proclaims, drawing appreciative laughs from the crowd of
80. Later, Aaron Lehmer, another post-carboner, asks the assembled: "How
many people believe in the next couple of years that we are at the
threshold of peak oil?" Half the hands in the room go up. The purpose of
this meeting is to recruit volunteers and raise money for an effort
called Bay Area Relocalize. <http://bayarea.relocalize.net/>
The goal is to do a citizen's assessment of West Oakland and a
to-be-determined neighborhood in San Francisco to see how much of the
energy and goods used there are produced locally. Likely answer: not
very much. Then, to try to determine what could be produced locally if
it had to be from food to energy to goods. Using Google Earth, and by
walking around neighborhoods, the group wants to determine: How big are
backyards? What roofs could be turned into rooftop gardens? What
resources does this community have? Bethany Schroeder, a former Berkeley
resident, who has relocated to Ithaca, N.Y., and speaks about a similar
effort <http://www.ibiblio.org/tcrp/doc/project.htm> there, explains
that everyone must understand Ithaca is way to the left of Berkeley.
"You can't get into Ithaca and buy a house without a copy of 'The End of
Suburbia' in your DVD file," she says. The Ecology Center event draws
pledges of $1,100, and signs up 30 volunteers.
Room, who studied electrical engineering at Stanford as an undergrad and
has a master's degree in engineering economic systems, used to do risk
analysis and assessment for a consulting firm. Now he's in the nonprofit
world where he believes he can help people reduce the great risks facing
them from peak oil by making their local communities less dependent on
the rest of the world.
"We believe that we're on a treadmill to tragedy," Room says. "We're
headed for disaster but we're not there yet. We don't have time to
lament about it, or to panic about it, we just need to act," he says. To
him, that means each community taking steps to reduce its own
vulnerability by "relocalizing." (He and others from the Post-Carbon
Institute have written a forthcoming book called "Relocalize Now!
Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil.")
An example of a community that's on its way is Willits, Calif., where
Jason Bradford, 36, armed with a copy of "The End of Suburbia," launched
a movement. Willits is a small town in Mendocino County, where just
5,100 people live within the city limits of 2.8 square miles. Yet there
are about 13,500 people in the surrounding area of 322 square miles.
Bradford, 36, a professional biologist, was so galvanized when he
started to learn about peak oil in early 2002 that he and his wife, a
doctor, moved to Willits with their twins in July 2004.
"I essentially wanted to find a small town where I could try to
transform it politically and the infrastructure," Bradford says. He
showed "The End of Suburbia" at the local library, at the high school
cafeteria, at the charter school. He showed it for eight months, twice a
month, at city council chambers. Thus was born the Willits Economic
Localization Project, <http://www.willitseconomiclocalization.org/> an
effort to make the whole ZIP code as energy and food self-reliant as
possible.
"We're just trying to do as much as we can as fast as we can and hope
for the best," says Bradford. Citizens have already done the kind of
assessment
<http://www.willitseconomiclocalization.org/Papers/EnergyIndependencePlan.pdf>
that the San Francisco post-carbon group is lobbying its government to
undertake, and the Bay Area Relocalize group is just beginning. The city
has put out a request for proposals asking contractors to bid to supply
all its electricity with renewables. Bradford is leading an effort to
convert one acre of the backyard of his children's elementary school
into a farm, in hopes of bringing healthy food to the cafeteria. There
are plans to put a three-acre farm next to a proposed hospital. A
gleaning club is working with local orchardists to take the fruit that
isn't market-worthy to food banks, and divide it among themselves.
Bradford is optimistic about finding local sources for electricity, like
solar, biomass such as wood, and even hydropower from creeks in the
local hills. Yet, like most of the rest of the United States, the area
consumes much of its energy in transportation. "Over 50 percent of the
energy consumed in the Willits area is in transportation -- oil and
diesel for people's cars and trucks," Bradford says. "That's a common
percentage around the country. It's very hard to replace that." And
right now the ecologist says he does not see any easy, long-term
solution for our car-mad consumption of oil.
South of Willits, the slightly larger city of Sebastopol, population
7,800, is also taking official government action to try to grapple with
the post-peak future. Already, the city gets about a sixth of its energy
from solar energy, <http://www.solarsebastopol.com/> and the majority of
the members of its city council are affiliated with the Green Party. So,
last October, a town-hall meeting starring "Power Down" author Heinberg,
discussing peak oil and energy vulnerability, drew 200 citizens, and led
to the formation of an official 11-member Citizen's Advisory Group on
Energy Vulnerability.
Gas in the area is currently selling for about $2.40 a gallon but the
group, which includes an economist and alternative energy experts, is
now trying to imagine what will happen to city services if gas goes to
$5 a gallon, $8 a gallon, $12 a gallon, as well as what if electricity
went to 25 cents a kilowatt hour, 50 cents a kilowatt hour and so on.
"We could see $5 a gallon gasoline within a year or two, or it could be
10 years off," says Larry Robinson, the former Green Party mayor of
Sebastopol, who sits on the city council. "I want to be prepared for
that, not saying: 'Oh my god, how are we going to pump water to provide
for all these households.'"
The group is working on contingency plans so that the city will be able
to maintain public safety, public facilities, streets, parks, water
delivery and sewer services should the spikes in energy prices come.
It's also exploring how the same energy increases would affect citizens,
from transportation to education, food supply and even social cohesion,
and it's arranging a meeting with pols from the four surrounding
counties -- Marin, Napa, Lake and Mendocino -- to formulate a regional
response to energy vulnerability.
"I think that a lot of people have their head in the sand about this,"
says Robinson. "Some believe that the market will solve the problem, and
ultimately, it will, but markets aren't anticipatory. They're more
reactive. If we wait for a market solution, it's going to come probably
in the midst of a lot of disruption and unnecessary suffering."
But the Sebastopol City Council member also sees some silver linings in
the slide down Hubbert's Peak. First, he believes that savvy local
entrepreneurs will be able to create new businesses and local jobs,
manufacturing shoes and clothes, when transportation costs make it
prohibitively expensive to import them from halfway around the world.
Beyond that, he sees peak oil as providing a kind of wholesale
referendum on the American way of life.
"I think that we can adapt, but our adapting may not be so much
technological, as sociological, and maybe even spiritual," Robinson
says. "It really comes down to the question of the place that we see for
ourselves in the world and what we need in order to live a meaningful
life. For quite a while now, a meaningful life in America has meant
acquisition of things and cheap energy, and we associate that with
freedom. We do not see that it's really a form of dependence and
slavery. So, I see the potential for a much greater level of freedom and
spiritual fulfillment and social cohesion, and restoration of balance
with the natural world. This is one of the great possibilities that I
see on the other side of the crisis, and whether we get to that is a
question of the choices that we make now."
-- By Katharine Mieszkowski
[permaculture] The oil is going, the oil is going!,
Saor Stetler, 03/23/2006