ONE TOWN SQUARE: at the intersection of peak oil, climate change, and land use

Postings have been slim (like totally absent) over the past week. This wasn’t planned. It’s just that everybody seems to have shut down over the holidays. There’s been nothing that seemed important enough to report on or react to.

The down time and the days absent of rain (albeit cold and mostly foggy) gave me time to finish pruning the vineyard.

I also took the opportunity to  do a little work in the cellar. A bit of hydrogen sulfide suddenly showed up in the barrels of ‘09, necessitating racking and aeration.

The hours spent pruning and winemaking offered plenty of time for reflection. Events and developments over the past year have made clear the futility of current approaches to “the economy” and to climate change.

The current great recession is the result of a crisis of the global financial system triggered by spiking oil prices, and is but a preview of the troubles ahead for an economics based on exponential growth when the underpinnings of that expansion – cheap and abundant energy – have vanished. We have seen that in our present economic system the absence of growth results in financial crisis, which in turn threatens the entire economic edifice with collapse.

Obama’s economic policy – and the ability to repay the trillions of dollars of debt taken on to bail out the financial system – is predicated on a return to robust economic growth.  How’s that likely to work out?

Global warming is similarly but a symptom of a more basic predicament: ecological overshoot of a population that has, due to its sheer numbers and to its impacts on ecological systems, overtaxed both the sources necessary to sustain itself and the environmental sinks which absorb the wastes that would otherwise kill it off. This condition of global ecological overshoot is what makes our current predicament unprecedented in human experience.

In an overshoot situation, traditional policy responses not only fail to work. They make the situation worse because they increase rather than decrease the degree of overshoot. Peak oil and global warming are predicaments that cannot be “solved” through more of the economic growth that caused them. Our situation demands not only the end of growth – it demands that the human footprint shrink, dramatically and quickly.

The approach to global warming embodied by the Kyoto accord – which finally blew up at Copenhagen – was a futile attempt to retain the objective of  industrial development of the world’s poor countries and growth in the rich countries, all the while imagining that the consequences of growth could somehow be made to disappear.  At Copenhagen, the world’s biggest polluters made it clear that they would have none of any effort which might stifle growth.

At least the nonsense that we can have growth without its consequences is no longer on the table. Forget targets, even the ambitious targets floated at Copenhagen of limiting atmospheric CO2 to 350 ppm or limiting the global temperature increase to 1.5 degrees C. The target is not important. What is important is what must be done to avoid dumping so much carbon into the atmosphere that runaway global warming becomes inevitable – and that is, leave coal (and tar sands) in the ground.  We can’t wait for consensus among governments dedicated to sustaining economic growth at any cost. We is needed is direct action by people, everywhere and around the globe. No more coal-fired power plants. Phase out existing plants, the sooner the better. No more coal mining. No more coal trains. No more tar sands or other unconventional oil. No more pipelines stretching from Athabasca to fill gas tanks in Canada, the U.S., or anywhere else.

Peak oil and global warming demand that we craft a new economics, one that is capable of recognizing and valuing ecological reality. Every species has its economics, a way of living within its environment. Humans are no different. It should be obvious that an economics that destroys its environment and the ability to continue to exist is not one that produces prosperity. Prosperity, not growth, must be the goal and measure of a new economics: enough to eat, enough to drink, adequate shelter, loving and enriching community, within a stable and beautiful ecosystem, all imbued with a sense of the sacred.

All species survive by tapping energy available in the environment. Again, humans are no different. Over the last two centuries, tapping millions of years of ancient sunlight has fueled an explosion in both human numbers and human impacts. As the days of ancient sunlight draw to a close, even the best of us dream of new stores of unlimited power, waiting to be tapped.   We’re willing to trade our souls for nuclear, bequething upon the grandchildren of our grandchildren the burden of dealing with deadly waste and with dangerous facilities that will need tending for tens of millennia. This would require that a stable, complex, wealthy, and energy-intensive society also endure for tens of millennia – a feat never before accomplished, in all of human history. What hubris.

What’s needed is a rediscovery of humility. If we begin the work now, we may be able to put in place the infrastructure to enable the future to maintain some of the comforts of the present, as the foresighted leadership of Aruba has done in building a windfarm that will provide a very substantial portion of the island’s electricity. Solar thermal offers promise in sunny locations – Europe is betting its future on it.  Solar photovoltaic keeps looking more and more promising.

We can’t have it all, not without destroying ourselves and the Earth itself (at least the Earth as we know it). If we lower our sights, get to work, and do our best, we may be able to have enough.