Eat The Suburbs! » Peak Oil

Future Scenarios book launch

adam — Wed, 29 Jul 2009 02:20:22 +0000

I’m launching a book by the highly respected co-founder of permaculture, David Holmgren, which delves into various possible futures, and ways to prepare for them: Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change.

Saturday 1st August 2009, 11:30am

CERES Environmental Park, Lee St, Brunswick

In the Multicultural Classroom

From the press release:

First a website, now a book by David Holmgren, Future Scenarios: How Communities Can Adapt to Peak Oil and Climate Change will be launched by Adam Grubb, founding editor of Energy Bulletin, an online news list on Peak Oil and Energy related issues, and Permablitz pioneer.

In Future Scenarios, co-originator of the Permaculture concept and leading sustainability innovator David Holmgren shows us what the future might look like in the generations-long era of energy descent that faces us – and also tells us how to adapt to the cultural, political, agricultural, and economic implications of two forces that will shape that future: peak oil and climate change.

Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Probably futures, explains Holmgren, range from the relatively benign “Green Tech” scenario to the near catastrophic “Lifeboats” scenario.

“These aren’t two-dimensional nightmarish scenarios designed to scare people into environmental action. They are compellingly fleshed-out visions of quite plausible alternative futures, which delve into energy, politics, agriculture, social, and even spiritual trends. What they do help make clear are the best strategies for preparing for and adapting to these possible futures.” – Adam Grubb

For more information phone 5348 3636 or email info@holmgren.com.au

Eat The Suburbs: the film!

adam — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 00:52:25 +0000

Eat the Suburbs: Gardening for the End of the Oil Age

A film by Tanya Curnow, 2006.

EAT THE SUBURBS takes the oil debate from the bowser to the backyard and follows Melbourne’s “permablitzers” as they prepare for the end of the oil age… one garden at a time.

Made 2006 but online for the first time now.

It’s an excellent 9 minutes, the only short film I know of which deals specifically with peak oil and food issues. Eat The Suburbs received its world premiere at the 2007 Hot Docs International Film Festival which is one of the most prestigious in the world. I got undue credit at the end, as other people speak a lot more than me including the uncredited, and most wonderful, Megan Floris and Matt Daniele.

My only minor misgiving is that Tanya happened to film it at the first young activist crowd dominated permablitz, whereas usually there isn’t a single culture or age group that dominates the blitzes. One of the things I like about them is that they do get you out of cultural ghettos and meet people from lots of backgrounds and ages. Not that I have a problem with youngish activisty crowd, some of my best friends etc etc…

Note: The film happens to take its name from this blog, and I helped Tanya a little bit develop the idea but there’s no formal connection.

Links:
Richard Heinberg: www.richardheinberg.com
Permablitz: www.permablitz.net

Conflict of Interest

adam — Thu, 17 Jul 2008 04:00:08 +0000

I was a guest this week on Channel 31’s Conflict of Interest, hosted by Peter Farris QC and Greg Barns. The topic was “petrol prices and where they are heading”.

The format of this show is that Greg and Peter argue about various issues (Greg from a more liberal perspective, Peter from a more ‘conservative’) and in a middle section a guest is thrown in the middle. Peter’s dismissive references to the CSIRO come from the fact that he is a climate change skeptic and believes the institution has a political agenda. My train of thought gets derailed a couple of times, and I probably come off as a bit of a cultural snob refering to McMansions. This was my first time interviewed on TV without having my identity hidden with backlighting.

I also got quoted in parlaiment last month.

There have actually been some really good interviews on Australian TV lately with regards peak oil, far better than mine. Check out Phil Hart on ABC Stateline talking about the Future Fuels Forum report, and Richard Heinberg on ABC Lateline and the 7:30 Report with the PM!

Crikey! Oil Futures: A series on oil, the future, and you

adam — Fri, 30 May 2008 02:51:02 +0000

Crikey, the popular online politics magazine is running a series on oil futures, and I was the first interviewee.

The high price of petrol today is causing discomfort among motorists. So much so that our federal politicians have spent almost a week haggling over whose scheme is best suited to knocking a few cents per litre from the pump price.

But in a world where oil is increasingly scarce, where the security of supply remains a problem, and where the environmental cost of using fossil fuels to power your car is soon to be factored into the pump price, is that the right response? What are the long terms solutions to our oil dependence? And is this the beginning of a new era of high-priced oil? Crikey asked a panel of experts to answer questions on the good old days of cheap oil, what the politicians should really be arguing about, and how our economy will look when petrol costs many dollars per litre.Today, Adam Grubb, the Australian editor of Energy Bulletin, answers Crikey’s questions.

Have we entered a new energy era of high-priced oil? Are the days of $1/litre petrol gone for good?

Yes, the fundamentals would suggest so. We appear to have reached the peak in oil production. Global conventional oil production peaked in May 2005. Australia as a net importing nation is particularly vulnerable. Our internal oil production peaked in 2000, as shown in this US Department of Energy graph.

Australian oil production

Most of the major countries we depend on for imports are themselves past their own peaks of production: Vietnam, PNG, Malaysia, New Zealand and Indonesia. Internal affluence and oil consumption is increasing in most of these countries such that exports are falling far more rapidly than actual oil production. Of the major countries we depend on, only the UAE has not been decreasing exports in recent years. (See this article on The Oil Drum.)

This is a trend we are seeing globally. Competition for increasingly scarce oil exports will make procuring replacement oil an expensive exercise, perhaps one sometimes resulting in conflict. Only a fairly severe global recession is likely to make oil a less scarce commodity, and then only temporarily.

As a policy response, how useful is lowering the fuel excise in combating the rising price of oil, both in the short and long term?

Of course there may be some short term relief for struggling families. However we need to face the reality that oil is never going to be as cheap again as it was in the late eighties and nineties. As global oil exports continue to fall, prices will continue to rise in real terms. So we would merely be delaying the inevitable, while reducing government revenue which might be better spent helping those in need with more long term strategies and preparing the country for a leaner, and greener, future.

Peak oil and climate change present us with an unprecedented challenge: how to begin consuming radically less fossil fuels while maintaining dignified lifestyles and essential services. At a personal and national level we need to be investing much of the remaining fossil fuel energy into sustainable infrastructure, research and behaviour change. Electrifying transport, building renewable capacity, restructuring university courses, energy retrofitting buildings, relocalising economies; these are major investments, and they require energy. We simply won’t be capable of making the investments on the scale necessary if we wait until we no longer have access to cheap energy.

It’s also worth considering just how cheap oil is in energetic terms. A litre of petrol contains the energetic equivalent of a worker performing three weeks of hard manual labour. Might you not consider that cheap, even at $20 or $200 a litre? Sadly, we’ve built an economy, housing, food and transport systems dependent on extraordinary amounts of cheap energy, such that someone commanding enough energy to put an Ottoman sheik to shame can be just barely getting by, working two jobs and paying back a mortgage.

What sort of policies should Australia be developing to cope with high-priced oil?

We need to radically increase investment in renewable energy technology; implement a Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) system for allocating personal carbon allowances; adopt the Oil Depletion Protocol on top of the Kyoto Protocol; encourage in every way urban and small farm organic food production; extend public transport services; promote suburban mixed-use planning, to allow people to work near where they live; encourage the rebuilding of local industries, with an emphasis on the small scale production of reliable, repairable essential items; develop sustainable forestry practices; stop all new freeway development; produce public education campaigns directed at the understanding of the issues and resulting in behavioural change.

For all this we need a strong sense of purpose and common goals. The collective history of all Australians must be drawn upon, we must feel ourselves part of a story, as a nation that rises to challenges with good humour and that values self reliance and the land we live on. We must be made to feel we are going forward into a healthier, earthier, more community oriented future. The suburban dream didn’t work out that well for most people. There is much to be gained by the challenges ahead of us. The government must provide the leadership necessary to bring the nation together for these challenges within a spirit of good will.

Sketch a picture of the Australian economy when petrol is $5/litre and rising, considering things like food, infrastructure, the family budget and inflation?

The McMansion suburbs are likely to fall into disrepair as the price of commuting and mortgage repayments cause many houses to be completely abandoned and stripped for copper wiring and other resources. Many formally middle class people who have lost their homes will be living out of their cars, perhaps even in gated car camps as are already being set up in the US. Many adult children won’t be able to afford moving out of home, and many households may take in boarders and relatives, creating larger households.

Repair and reuse industries will flourish, many based in garages and sheds. Urban and peri-urban food production will increase and vacant lots will be turned into food gardens. The streets will be more lively, with ad-hoc markets in used goods and home produce.

Use of foot transport, bicycles and public transport will increase. Street crime will not necessarily increase in direct proportion to economic hardships, as greater social use of the streets, due to less cars and the presence of walkers may provide a level of surveillance.

Some infrastructure and centralised social services may be slowly beginning to break down. Important phone lines will be left unanswered more often, unfilled potholes will be more prevalent. Many services of the welfare state may be withdrawn, depending on the political climate.

Restaurants, tourism, recreation, personal services and electronics are likely to be some of hardest hit industries. The cheap airline industry will collapse.

There may be food rationing of basic items.

Despite rapidly rising input prices, farmers, where the season is kind, will once again be making fair returns on their efforts, and will be able to employ some of those moving from the cities.

Those with strong community or family bonds will fare better than new immigrants and the otherwise socially isolated. Adaptability and resilience will be key personal strategies. Those too institutionalised by schooling and wage work, and those who consider high consumption lifestyles a birthright and the alternatives unthinkable will have a psychological struggle to adapt. Ecologically inspired strategies such as permaculture design will move from being an environmentalist hobby to a core economic strategy.

Those who are looking for solutions which simultaneously tackle environmental impacts, build social bonds, save money and increase health and wellbeing, will find ideal solutions in local food production and a network of manufacture and repair microindustries.

Original article: www.crikey.com.au

From Gardener to Futurist

adam — Sun, 25 May 2008 07:23:16 +0000

Co-Founder of Sustainable Design Movement Illuminates our Uncertain Futures

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Date: 26 May 2008

The Australian co-founder of the permaculture concept David Holmgren has today launched a new global scenario planning website, Future Scenarios: www.FutureScenarios.org.

Holmgren says his future scenarios will help both policy makers and activists come to terms with the end of the era of growth.

While the end of growth is so unthinkable to many policy makers and economists that they use the term ‘negative-growth’, Holmgren says we are already entering a generations-long era of ‘energy descent.’ We now face less and less available energy each year, coupled with a destabilised climate.

“The simultaneous onset of climate change and the peaking of global oil supply represent unprecedented challenges for human civilisation. Each limits the effective options for responses to the other,” writes Holmgren on www.futurescenarios.org.

Holmgren uses a scenario planning framework to bring to life the likely cultural, political, agricultural and economic implications of peak oil and climate change.

“Scenario planning allows us to use stories about the future as a reference point for imagining how particular strategies and structures might thrive, fail or be transformed,” says Holmgren

Future Scenarios depicts four very different futures. Each is a permutation of mild or destructive climate change, combined with either slow or severe energy declines. Scenarios range from the relatively benign Green Tech to the near catastrophic Lifeboats scenario.

“Many futurists are looking at Facebook, robot pets and other i-fads, whereas David has been studying a much bigger picture. He works from the fundamental resource and environmental constraints, and I’m convinced that he’s got his assumptions right where others have them very wrong. He has followed through with unusual insight, drawing on 30 years of permaculture thinking, which I would say makes him the most important futurist in the world right now,” said Adam Grubb founder of Energy Bulletin (www.energybulletin.net with over 400,000 visitors a month.)

“These aren’t two dimensional nightmarish scenarios designed simply to scare people into environmental action. They are compellingly fleshed out visions of quite plausible alternative futures which delve into energy, politics, agriculture, cultural and even spiritual trends. They help us reconcile our own competing fears and hopes for the future, and to consider the best strategies for adapting to a changing world,” says Grubb.

Holmgren says “we will need resilience and adaptability in the face of radical change.”

‘Energy Descent’
Holmgren coined the term ‘energy descent’ in 2005 as a less negatively loaded way than ‘decline’ or ‘collapse’ for describing a future defined by constantly diminishing energy production.

“I chose the word ‘descent’ because it implies a long and sustained process through which it is possible to survive and even thrive. While energy descent does suggest the demise of globalised industrial civilisation, that process will play out over many decades, if not centuries. For individuals, households, organisations and communities focused on socially and ecologically adaptive design, energy descent is as much an opportunity as an obstacle. Realistic assessment of the larger forces at work in the world helps empower us to better refine our strategies.”

About Permaculture
Permaculture is an environmental design framework modelled on the patterns and relationships found in nature, yielding an abundance of food, fibre and energy for provision of local needs.

About David Holmgren
Holmgren co-wrote the first permaculture text Permaculture One in 1976 with Bill Mollison (published in 1978). With his 2002 book Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability David re-emerged from the relative shadows as the leading intellectual force of the permaculture movement. Rob Hopkins, founder of the popular Transition Towns initiatives in the UK, described Principles and Pathways as “the most important book of the last 15 years.”

David, his partner Su Dennett, and their son Oliver live at ‘Melliodora’ a small permaculture demonstration property in central Victoria, Australia where they are self sufficient in fruit, vegetables and animal products and provide most of their own energy needs.

Futher info:

David Holmgren
+61 3 5348 3636
info@holmgren.com.au
www.futurescenarios.org
www.holmgren.com.au

The Endurance of Suburbia

adam — Mon, 03 Dec 2007 09:30:33 +0000

Back in 2004 I interviewed permaculture co-originator David Holmgren about a whole manner of things relating to peak oil and permaculture. This was before the release of the breakthrough peak oil documentary The End of Suburbia: Oil Depletion and the Collapse of The American Dream. Before the interview I suggested to David that he read some of the writing of James Howard Kunstler, who is the central figure of the film. And so this snippet below turned out to be a good counterpoint to the film, as David briefly outlined his vision of an organic post-peak suburban retrofit.

Rob Hopkins explained it neatly in an interview earlier this year:

Well, I think although “The End of Suburbia” is a fantastic film and really totally transformed my way of thinking about this, I think the title is somewhat misleading. Suburbia, as James Kunstler says, is ‘the greatest misallocation of resources in the history of the world’ but, at the same time, it’s there. It’s what we have. David Holmgren’s approach, rather than being about the end of suburbia – or as the sequel is called “The Escape from Suburbia” – it’s more about retrofitting suburbia, redesigning suburbia, and rethinking suburbia.

David’s paper Retroffing the Suburbs for Sustainability goes into more detail.

x
The rest of the interview is available here: http://www.globalpublicmedia.com/interviews/106

John Anderson on food shocks, oil dependency and drought

adam — Sat, 29 Sep 2007 07:16:40 +0000

John Anderson is the former leader of the National Party, Deputy Prime Minister and Federal Minister for Primary Industries and Energy. He’s retiring at the coming election to go back to the farm. As Deputy Prime Minister in 2004 he was one of the first significant politicians globally to acknowledge peak oil. He’s now making the links between climate change, peak oil and food security, and made the following comments on ABC Radio National, Sept 26 2007:

“It’s not beyond the realms of possiblity that we’ll see a food shock in the next few years. We talk about oil shocks, but we go on assuming that the supermarket shelves will be loaded.”

“The global situation is a serious one… We’re pouring as much oil into refrigerators as we are into our cars. Now, oil and energy dependency for the production and distribution and preparation of our food is really very worrying.”

Download the full interview [mp3 / 2.4MB]

Note: Anderson promotes GMOs as part of the solution — but we should be dubious about this as it puts control of solutions into multinational corporations, is inherently dangerous, and the industrial model of farming associated with GMOs is much less effective than small scale biodiverse permaculture systems with water harvesting systems. Because of the clumsyness of GMO technology, basically every cell in the body of the GMO produces proteins from the introduced gene, even in areas where they are not needed, or indeed may be toxic to the plant. This represents a metabolic overhead unsuited to tough conditions such as drought.

Food and agriculture – essential reading

adam — Tue, 19 Sep 2006 01:17:25 +0000

From the Energy Bulletin archives – some essential reading:

‘The Oil We Eat’ Following the Food Chain back to Iraq
Richard Manning, Harper’s Magazine
The journalist’s rule says: follow the money. This rule, however, is not really axiomatic but derivative, in that money, as even our vice president will tell you, is really a way of tracking energy. We’ll follow the energy.
first published January 31, 2003.
(A true classic article which might change the way you think about food.)

Eating Fossil Fuels
Dale Allen Pfeiffer, From The Wilderness Publications
As Peak Oil and its effects become a raging national controversy it’s time everyone reads the story that puts the most serious implications of Peak Oil and Gas into perspective. Your biggest problem is not that your SUV might go hungry, it’s that you and your children might go hungry.
first published October 2, 2003.

Peak Oil and Permaculture: David Holmgren on Energy Descent
Adam Fenderson, Global Public Media
David Holmgren, co-originator of the permaculture concept and author of Permaculture: Principals and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, speaks with Adam Fenderson from www.energybulletin.net about permaculture and its role in an energy constrained world.
first published June 6, 2004.

Is Sustainable Agriculture an Oxymoron?
Toby Hemenway, Permaculture Activist / Energy Bulletin
Jared Diamond calls it “the worst mistake in the history of the human race.” Bill Mollison says that it can “destroy whole landscapes.” Are they describing nuclear energy? Suburbia? Coal mining? No. They are talking about agriculture.
first published August 16, 2006.

Some recent articles on urban and sustainable agriculture:

Don’t be Wasted on Grass! Lawns to Gardens!
Heather Coburn, excerpted from the forthcoming Food Not Lawns (Chelsea Green 2005).
French aristocrats popularized the idea of the green grassy lawn in the eighteenth century, when they planted the agricultural fields around their estates to grass, to send the message that they had more land than they needed and could therefore afford to waste some. Meanwhile, French peasants starved for lack of available ground, and the resulting frustration might have had something to do with the French Revolution in 1789.

Today, 58 million Americans spend approximately $30 billion every year to maintain over 23 million acres of lawn. That’s an average of over a third of an acre and $517 each. The same size plot of land could still have a small lawn for recreation, plus produce all of the vegetables needed to feed a family of six. The lawns in the United States consume around 270 billion gallons of water a week—enough to water 81 million acres of organic vegetables, all summer long.
(Cheers to Brad for sending us this one.)

Social Fertilizer: The big growth potential of urban agriculture
Amanda McCuaig, The Tyee

Community gardens are primarily hobbies here in Vancouver, but internationally they are known for their ability to feed entire cities.

Berkeley: Urban farmers produce nearly all their food with a sustainable garden in their backyard
John Fall, San Francisco Chronicle
An approximately 6,000-square-foot yard provides generous space for a bustling urban farm. From the street it is impossible to tell that the property holds everything from apple trees to tomato vines, rabbits to goats, and chickens to domesticated pigeons.
first published April 25, 2005.

Sustainable agriculture in CSIRO newsletter (584-Kb PDF)
Elizabeth Heij (editor), CSIRO Sustainability Network Newsletter
Includes two great features:
Soil fertility management for more sustainable farming systems;
Sustainable agriculture and the challenge to make it pay.

See Food & Agriculture news at Energy Bulletin for more:

http://www.energybulletin.net/news.php?cat=37