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

At this moment, after Obama’s election and before choices or decisions are made that begin to foreclose other options, all seems possible. Letters of advice to the president elect proliferate, projecting the hopes and aspirations of the writers onto the blank slate of as yet unknown and unbounded journey.

Rather than add to a mountain of unsought advice doomed to be ignored, I think it more valuable to take stock of this moment in history and consider where we must go, whether Obama leads us in that direction or not.

Our current economic collapse is unlike any that we’ve seen before, our dream of progress (enabled by a one-time exploitation of fossil fuels) turned into a nightmare of a plundered and broken Earth. The national epiphany that peak oil will precipitate will be the beginning of the great transition that will dominate the U.S. government and the world in the years to come. The reality of peak oil will force a massive overhaul of our economy, including transportation, lifestyles, jobs, agriculture, and industrial production.

The job we have assigned economists is to maintain economic growth. But that’s a limited and twisted understanding of what an “economy” is. The word economy can be traced back to the Greek word oikonomos, “one who manages a household.” We need to establish new “rules for the house” -  a new culture – based on a sustainable economy. A sustainable economy, rather than hubristically seek unlimited growth, would recognize and respect the limits and constraints imposed by the “household” that is Earth. Rather than infinite monetary wealth, it would value community, economic justice, and sufficiency.

The overhaul is already in its incipient phase. Al Gore is calling for investment in energy efficiency, renewable power generation – including public investment in wind, solar and geothermal technology – and the creation of a unified national smart grid. Chinese and U.N. officials are calling for the U.S. and other western nations to change their profligate lifestyles and tackle climate change.

The journey before us is ours. As we have learned from hard experience, a leader may help or hinder us along the way. This time, we hope and pray we have chosen well.

This is a guest post by John Foster.

Corvallis has embarked on a community wide sustainability project that could serve as a model for other communities. The Corvallis Sustainability Coalition seeks to:

• Reduce waste and end fossil fuel dependence.
• Eliminate the use of persistent chemicals and synthetic substances.
• Ultimately eliminate the community’s contribution to encroachment on nature.
• Support people’s capacity to meet their basic needs.

The coalition is supported by about 90 organizations including the City government.  It is not, however, a government body.

At the coalition’s first Town Hall meeting, on 31 March, about 600 participants, meeting in small groups, discussed more specific goals for the community.  During the following weeks volunteer working groups held meetings  to refine these goals.   There were 12 groups covering subjects ranging from Cultural Diversity to Waste Disposal.

Read the rest of this entry »

The Sustainable Development Commission, whose members are appointed by the city of Portland and Multnomah County, are asking that planners take a second, harder look at the proposed CRC (Columbia River Crossing) – a $4.2 billion project that includes a new 12-lane toll bridge.

The commission points out that people already are driving less because of rising gas prices and that the need to address climate change is urgent. They want an updated traffic analysis using current gas prices and considering other factors, with review by an independent panel with expertise in climate policy, greenhouse gases and oil price and supply volatility.

Jeffvail at The Oil Drum attacks our enshrinement of “growth” from a novel direction.

“My approach to the problem of growth is to stop trying to address its symptoms—overpopulation, pollution, global warming, peak oil—and attempt instead to identify and address the underlying source of the problem.”

And what is that “underlying source”?

“[T]he hierarchal structure of human civilization. Hierarchy demands growth. Growth is a result of dependency. The solution to the problem of growth, then, is the elimination of dependency.”

He points out that the notion of perpetual growth is predicated on perpetual increase in resource consumption. This growth in resource consumption causes problems: it brings civilization into direct conflict with our environmental support system. Growth isn’t a problem that can be solved through a new technology – all that does is postpone the inevitable reckoning with the limits of a finite world.

The fact that surplus production equates to power, across all scales, is the single greatest driver of growth in hierarchy. And the structure of human society selects for growth – any group that did not create surplus – and therefore grow – would be out-competed by groups that did. As political entities became more sophisticated, they began to consciously build institutions to enhance their ability to grow. Hierarchies must grow, and human dependency is what sustains these hierarchies. Dependency, then, is the root cause of the problem of growth.

His solution? The “rhizome”: Read the rest of this entry »

John Michael Greer at his site The Archdruid Report (also available at Energy Bulletin) has a thoughtful piece titled “Pieces of the Puzzle,” pondering the uncertainties in our future. He begins by thinking about agriculture, then wanders into energy. He quite reasonably concludes that we’ll feel our way to the future through a process of trial and error.

“. . . nobody alive today has the least idea how an ecotechnic civilization – a society that can maintain relatively advanced technology on the basis of sustainable resources – might best be constructed. All the experience of the last three centuries has focused on the opposite end of the possible spectrum of technic societies, where you’ll find the civilizations that burn through nonrenewable resources at the fastest pace they can manage. We’ve followed that road just about as far as it can go, far enough that the dead end at its terminus should be visible to anyone who is willing to notice it. . .

“In energy, just as in agriculture and in many other fields, all we have are pieces of the puzzle. It will likely take ruthless sorting and a great deal of trial and error to make those pieces fit together in any sort of meaningful way.”

His advice that we not be “fixating on a single response” is both modest and wise. Achieving it will require that we rediscover within ourselves the ancient and universal spiritual practice of letting go of attachment.

A new report by the environmental group Pacific Environment finds that greenhouse gas emissions from LNG, when considering the entire life cycle of production, transportation, and combustion, can be as bad as coal.

The report is titled “Collision Course: How Imported Liquefied Natural Gas Will Undermine Clean Energy in California.” The executive summary contains important findings that are applicable to the ongoing LNG controversy in Oregon, including:

• Building new fossil fuel infrastructure to supply LNG commits us to a multi-billion dollar investment. This investment requires a minimum 20-year commitment of fuel purchases by utilities, and likely longer. LNG is not a transition fuel to renewables; rather, it will heighten dependence on foreign fossil fuels for at least another generation.
• LNG will compete directly with, and likely undermine, renewable energy and energy efficiency programs.
• Meeting the state’s renewable and energy efficiency goals requires that all additional electric generation built between now and 2020, including replacing aging generators, come from renewable sources.
• The scale of financial commitment implied by LNG is similar in size to what is required to meet the state’s clean energy goals, but LNG carries much higher environmental, financial, national security, and public safety risks.

Thomas Prugh writes at WorldWatch Institute the fundamental ideas of mainstream economics – including reliance on GDP as the key index of general well-being – have outlived their time and usefulness. But these ideas still dominate assumptions and thinking about economic matters in academia, the media, governments, businesses, and popular consciousness.

In recent decades, economic thinkers have suggested ways to make economics truer, greener, and more sustainable. A “green” economics would consider:

• Scale. How big is the global economy relative to the global ecosystem? This is crucial, because the economy resides totally inside the global ecosystem. Economic activity is basically converting bits and pieces of the ecosystem to human uses: trees and forests into lumber and houses, grasslands and other habitats into farms to feed the billions of humans, and so on. Our focus on economic growth has resulted in exceeding ecosystem limits. Symptoms include climate change, species extinctions, dwindling rainforests, water shortages, etc.
• Stress development over growth – that is, make the economy better at satisfying human needs, not simply bigger. The global economy simply cannot keep growing forever. And, beyond a certain and fairly modest point, there’s no correlation between material wealth and happiness. There is a correlation between happiness and things like social relationships, family life, and a sense of community.
• Make prices tell the ecological truth. The reform would be actually applying this rule to the ecosystem through measures such as carbon taxes. Other ecosystem services we’re not accounting or paying for include such things as the pollination performed by honeybees, air and water purification, soil generation, pest control, seed dispersal, and nutrient recycling. Not properly accounting for these services results in destruction of ecosystems and the undermining of these services.
• The precautionary principle. This is just the age-old wisdom of “first, do no harm” and “look before you leap.” It’s just good risk management.
• Commons management. People generally believe that there are only two workable regimes for managing resources: private property or government control. But commons management regimes are a third way, one that taps the strong human impulse toward cooperation and the common good. Commons management has proven itself over centuries of experience.
• Value women. All over the world, women earn less than men for equivalent work, they lack access to land and credit, and they do more than their share of child- and elder care, volunteer work, and other unpaid labor. This gender bias actually suppresses economic activity.

Ugo Bardi at The Oil Drum: Europe has a post comparing the “Hubbert modeling” used by the peak oil community and “world modeling” used to produce the first “Limits to Growth” study in 1974 and its 2004 update.

Unlike the Hubbert model, the authors of the LTG studies always emphasized that their models were not “predictions” but rather scenarios and that their purpose was understanding what policies should be implemented for avoiding collapse.

Unfortunately the first LTG study was very effectively demonized and marginalized. Rather than follow any of the policy prescriptions, we continued blithely along our unsustainable path.

The LTG “world model” took into account many more elements than resource depletion models. One element of the LTG model was called “pollution” – something that we can now see as mainly related to global warming. Depending on the input parameters chosen, the collapse that the LTG world models generate may be caused mainly either by resource depletion or by a runaway climate change.

Bardi asks if the current creaking of the world’s economic system is a sign of the collapse foreseen by the LTG model. His answer?  We may soon find out.

“If global warming hits us first, our worries about resource depletion are of little importance and the reverse is also true. At present, we can’t say which problem is the more immediate one. What we can say is that fossil fuels (and crude oil in particular) are the crucial resource of the world’s economy. In the hypothesis that resource depletion is a more pressing concern than global warming, the vision of impending “peak oil” and “peak fossils” is equivalent to that of the “base case” model of the LTG studies. In both cases, we see the collapse of the industrial society due to resource depletion.”

In response to an economic downturn caused by excesses of debt run up in pursuit of over-consumption, the Fed has slashed interest rates and Washington is  offering tax rebates in hopes that people will spend more on stuff and services and thereby boost the economy back to full-throttle growth.

“It’s crazy, insanity,” says Robert Costanza, director of the Gund Institute for Ecological Economics at the University of Vermont.

Costanza and other eco-economists challenge the accepted economic wisdom which holds that the measure of a nation’s economic health and well-being of its society is a steadily growing gross national product. Traditional economic accounting doesn’t factor in the cost of resource depletion and environmental damage involved in sustaining a perpetually burgeoning GNP.

The production of ever more “goods” is actually not a good thing. Rather, it could lead to the end of the world as we know it.

He maintains that the general quality of life hasn’t significantly improved over recent decades of GNP growth during which only the relatively few really rich got a whole lot richer and the rich-poor gap steadily widened.

Costanza argues that we need a quality of life stimulus package, not an economic growth stimulus package.

The temptation to inject a faltering economy with a shot of conventional growth stimulant is hard to resist. York University economist Peter Victor uses the analogy of a drug addict who needs a fix.

“The short-term problem for drug addicts is they need more of what they’re addicted to, even though it’s what’s killing them in the long run. But it’s hard to hold it back from them because it’s the obvious short-term cure.”

The system in its present configuration is broken and needs a different and more fundamental kind of fixing.

A report from the Sustainable Development Vision Team is on the agenda for tonight’s meeting of the Eugene Budget Committee is meeting tonight.

Following are my comments on the Vision Team report.

The Report identifies three “Primary [Sustainability] Factors” at p. 3 – but the discussion is so limited or whacked out it’s hard to come to grips with it.

Factor 1: Natural Resources are Managed Responsibly

Five sub-factors are identified 1) climate change mitigation; 2) decreased rate of resource consumption; 3) clean water and air; 4) effective growth management [!!!]; and 5) maximized biodiversity.

The only one of these factors even pretending to be addressed in the “indicators” [discussed below] is “climate change mitigation” – and as I said before, it doesn’t look like the city is really serious about this. “Effective growth management” as a “sustainability factor’? Who are they kidding? Where are indicators that would measure resource consumption, water and air quality, and biodiversity? Where are measures that would ensure that these are not degraded over time?

Factor 2: People have the Ability to Meet their Basic Needs

“Meeting basic needs” could be a sustainability factor only if it relates to meeting people’s needs in a manner that does not degrade other people’s ability to do the same in the future. There’s no mention or recognition of this crucial component of the definition of sustainability.

Factor 3: Livability is preserved and enhanced.

The “team” actually points to the fact that population is increasing as evidence that livability is being enhanced! Ohmygod! Read the rest of this entry »

William Kötke’s book The Final Empire (first published in 1993) is now available in new hardback and paperback editions. The book’s republication has prompted Carolyn Baker to write a review which she calls perhaps “the most important article I’ve ever written in my life.”

Kötke rails against what we have been taught all our lives: that materialistic values of civilization and the accumulation of wealth is progress. The material wealth of the civilization is derived from the death of the earth, the soils, the forests, the fish stocks, the “free resources” of flora and fauna. The ultimate end of this is for all human species to live in giant parasitical cities of cement and metal while surrounded by deserts of exhausted soils.

Kötke traces the environmental scars of civilization through the ages. Empire after empire, desertification of the top soil winds its way around the globe in an erosive helix from China to India to Mesopotamia to Italy to North America.

You may ask what relevance Kötke’s book and Baker’s review have to do with land use. What got my attention was that the attitudes of empire as described by Kötke are embedded in Oregon’s land use planning statutes and goals. Resources exist for no other purpose than to be exploited for economic gain.

“No one in the empire advocates long-term gain in soil fertility when the short-term gain of profit margins or production quotas are the whole point of the effort. This is the reason that nothing real will be done to avoid the final collapse of civilization. The structure of empire is to enrich the emperor/elite at the expense of the earth and society, not to manage affairs for the benefit of the whole life of the earth.”

Kötke’s book is a direct challenge to humankind – a demand for radical change a primer for the recovery of the planet. Read the rest of this entry »

Please join us next Tuesday at Goal One Coalition’s First Annual Event for an evening of socializing and of exploring the impact of land use practices on energy, climate, and Earth’s ecological systems.

John Miller of Salem will give the keynote address on his sustainable development work in China and in Oregon. His company, JD Miller International, is currently part of an international group including “Cradle to Cradle” visionary William McDonough working to develop sustainable designs for villages and New Towns in China. John is also president of Wildwood Inc., an urban design and development firm in Salem; and Mahonia Vineyards and Nursery, a grower of grapevines, wine grapes, and native plants.

The Event will be February 5 from 6:30 – 8:30 PM at Campbell Center, 155 High Street, Eugene. Campbell Center is located along the Willamette River at northeast edge of Skinner Butte.

Map of 155 High St Eugene, OR 97401-2305, US

For more information call 541-484-4448 and talk to Jason, Jan or Lauri.

In this 22-minute film architect and designer William McDonough asks what our buildings and products would look like if designers took into account “all children, all species, for all time.” He explains his philosophy of “cradle to cradle” design, which bridge the needs of ecology and economics. He also shares some of his most inspiring work, including the world’s largest green roof (at the Ford plant in Dearborn, Michigan), and the entire sustainable cities he’s designing in China.

What’s the most frequent advice dispensed to people trying to behave more responsibly? Buy green. It’s advice that encourages still more consumption as means to address the problem of over-consumption.

Annie Leonard’s short film The Story of Stuff takes on the shop/consume/dispose culture.  It’s ruining the world – while capturing us in a cycle of dissatisfaction.

Her message is that we can step off the work/consume treadmill and change toward a fair, sustainable society.  We’ll be happier, to boot.

This short film has gotten a lot of critical acclaim. Take twenty minutes and watch The Story of Stuff.

As readers this blog and the Goal One Coalition news are aware, one of the priorities for Goal One over the last couple of years has been to raise awareness of the energy and climate crises that confront us. Land use – where and how we live within the landscape – has played a dominant role in creating the problem, and land use will have to play an important role in forging a solution.

Goal One is now ready to move beyond talk to action. The Goal One Institute, a project of the Goal One Coalition, will work with citizen groups and community leaders to devise and implement ground-up, local community-based strategies to reducing fossil fuel based energy usage and resultant greenhouse gas emissions.

As I argued in a couple of recent posts, Oregon’s planning program actually prevents us from doing good things while failing to prevent sprawl. It’s time for a fresh look at what we’re doing, and why.

The Goal One Institute will continue to advocate for a big picture strategy to address our energy and climate challenges while at the same time working identify specific actions that can be taken on a local or statewide level to eliminate the roadblocks to good land use and to craft ordinances and legislative proposals that take energy and climate considerations into account in our decision making. Read the rest of this entry »

Jared Diamond, the author of Guns, Germs, and Steel and Collapse, argues in an op-ed piece in the L.A. Times that rising population alone isn’t the main challenge facing humanity. People are a problem only insofar as they consume and produce.

What really matters is total world consumption, the sum of all local consumptions, which is the product of local population times the local per capita consumption rate. The estimated one billion people who live in developed countries have a relative per capita consumption rate of 32. Most of the world’s other 5.5 billion people constitute the developing world, with relative per capita consumption rates below 32, mostly down toward 1.

Cornucopians promise that developing countries could achieve a first-world lifestyle if they only would install honest governments and adopt free-market economies. But this is impossible, a cruel hoax. We are having ever-increasing difficulty supporting a first-world lifestyle even now for only one billion people, and at the cost of threatening  climate and ecosystem stability.

Americans would object mightily to sacrificing our living standards for the benefit of people in the rest of the world. Nevertheless, whether we get there willingly or not, we shall soon have lower consumption rates, because our present rates are unsustainable.

But living standards are not tightly coupled to consumption rates. Much American consumption is wasteful and contributes little or nothing to quality of life. For example, per capita oil consumption in Western Europe is about half of ours, yet Western Europe’s standard of living is higher by any reasonable criterion, including life expectancy, health, infant mortality, access to medical care, financial security after retirement, vacation time, quality of public schools and support for the arts.

Diamond concludes:

“Just as it is certain that within most of our lifetimes we’ll be consuming less than we do now, it is also certain that per capita consumption rates in many developing countries will one day be more nearly equal to ours. These are desirable trends, not horrible prospects. In fact, we already know how to encourage the trends; the main thing lacking has been political will.”