Transitioning to a post-peak oil world
A Boulder, Colo., group called Transition Boulder County is helping to spread the word about what communities need to do to prepare for a post-peak oil world.
(Credit: Transition Boulder County)BOULDER, Colo.--The age of peak oil is coming, and some say we're already there. So when the effects of rapidly rising oil prices start to seriously affect the world, will your community be ready?
To Michael Brownlee, a driving force behind a nonprofit here currently known as Transition Boulder County, there is no time to lose in answering that question.
Transition Boulder County is the local outcrop of a growing international movement built around the concept of Transition, or getting ready for a post-peak oil world, and the concern that the effects of such an environment could wreak havoc on just about every facet of human life.
I visited with Brownlee on Tuesday as part of Road Trip 2009, my fourth-annual search for the most interesting stories about energy, aviation, the military, science, space, and more in the United States.
Transition got its start in 2005 when Rob Hopkins, a teacher in the small town of Kinsale, Ireland, had his students embark on a project to study how vulnerable their community would be if the world were to run out of cheap gas. The goal was to come up with ideas for how to make Kinsale more resilient and self-reliant, and to imagine what it would take to achieve self-sustainability by the year 2021.
What they came up with became the jumping-off point for what would come to be known as the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan (EDAP). And while it started as a student project, the local city council soon adopted the EDAP and is now in the process of implementing it.
For his part, Brownlee explained, Hopkins moved on to another small town, this time an English town called Totnes, and there began to prototype a 12-stage transition process that now has been adopted by 170 private community organizations in 15 countries.
At the heart of the so-called Transition movement, Brownlee explained, is a concept called re-localization. Because a massive spike in the cost of fossil fuel-based energy would drastically change most of our systems--food, energy, economy, employment, and so on--re-localization imagines a new era in which local communities work to meet their own needs rather than depending on a global infrastructure.
In May 2008, the folks at Transition Boulder County became officially affiliated with the movement, and launched the first such initiative in North America. Today, Brownlee said, there are 31 such efforts going on in the United States. And as Transition Boulder expanded its reach beyond the city and then county of Boulder, it began to get involved in Denver and other places in Colorado. Two weeks ago, Brownlee said, the organization's board decided to change its name to Transition Colorado, becoming the first statewide hub in the country.
Now the movement is picking up steam across the United States, and Transition United States is just getting off the ground.
In general, groups like these are funded through private donations and some government grants. And while the city council in Kinsale, Ireland, adopted the local EDAP, that has not been the case in the United States. The closest any municipality has come to doing that has been the effort by the town of Sand Point, Idaho, which is currently in the process of getting the local government involved.
Not demonizing fossil fuel usage
Brownlee explained that although the Transition movement is built around a recognition of the hard realities of fossil fuel depletion, the impact of climate change, and likely economic instability, it doesn't spend a lot of time saying that using fossil fuels are a bad idea. Instead, the message is that, in the not too distant future, such energy will not be as easily available or as inexpensive as it is today.
As Hopkins would say, Brownlee pointed out, "'We're going to make this transition whether we want to or not.'"
Without preparation, proponents of the movement argue, the world is likely to experience a series of "whiplash" cycles, in which energy prices spike, causing food prices to go up, which is then followed by economic distress that leads the prices to drop. And then repeat, again and again, each time getting worse.
The short-term answer, they say, is to begin raising awareness in as many communities as possible. For example, Brownlee said that one of the efforts Transition Boulder County has undertaken has been a series of classes offered to the local community teaching what he called "The Great Re-skilling." This is, essentially, a teaching of the kinds of self-sufficiency skills our grandparents had, but which have been progressively lost as society moved away from the kind of do-it-yourself ethos that has been so prevalent in the past.
Among the skills being taught are food cultivation, construction, the making and repair of clothing, keeping bees, and much more. These kinds of skills could be crucial for people to have if global supply chains were to break down.
"Communities cannot depend on globalized systems to continue to support them," Brownlee said.
He also said that while not everyone agrees on when peak oil will happen, a common theory is that the world passed the point of peak oil production in July 2008 and that "we will never produce oil at a greater rate." Yet, even as oil becomes more expensive over time, demand will continue to grow as developing countries try to build the kinds of lifestyles that the developed world built on top of our petroleum economy.
Economists may predict that there is still plenty of oil left, but people in the peak oil community aren't so sure. "The joke," Brownlee said, is "economists are somehow more successful at finding oil than geologists, but that oil never materializes."
Positives will emerge
While the scenarios spelled out by the Transition movement may sound dire, there are also some things to look forward to.
For example, Brownlee said that one casualty of the breakdown of global supply chains will likely be the global industrial agriculture system. And while that could cause crisis in unprepared communities, some people no doubt feel such a development wouldn't be the worst thing to happen. Writers and researchers like Eric Schlosser and Michael Pollan, for instance, have argued in books like "Fast Food Nation" and "Food, Inc.," respectively, that such companies are more concerned about profits than people's health.
He added that while there are plenty of areas of focus in the Transition movement, food is issue number one, and it's also where most of their work is going on today.
Still, breaking away from dependence on global systems will require local communities to learn how to take care of themselves in the absence of the kinds of food, energy, and economic networks we've all grown accustomed to.
And until local governments get on board, we won't be able to depend on them to take care of the problems that will come in a post-peak oil world, either, Brownlee argued. That was one of the chief lessons from Hurricane Katrina, he said. "It's going to come from the local level, from the citizen level."
But the good thing, he said, is that he's never seen a grass-roots movement spread at the pace he's seen with Transition. While most of the organizations have sprouted in small towns, there are currently efforts under way in cities like Denver and Los Angeles. However, in cities, he said, it is likely that work will have to be done at the community level and coordinated city-wide, rather than be driven by a top-down structure.
Raising awareness is job one
Brownlee said there are several important points the Transition movement hopes to get across. First is getting people to understand our common global predicament.
"The early part is primarily about awareness-raising about the local implications and about the economic instability" of peak oil, he said. "There is not enough public awareness. It is the key role of Transition to continue to make that kind of information available."
In addition, the Transition movement hopes to show the opportunities and the hope it offers to "people who have concluded there's no way out of the pickle we've got ourselves into."
But what's really important is that communities get going now, Brownlee said. There is little time to waste, he said, and even before new community-based organizations finish putting together their own EDAPs, they need to start the work of raising awareness and thinking about what they can do locally. And that's because the process of getting an EDAP completed takes at least a couple of years, especially when it comes to getting local government involved.
"What keeps me awake at night," Brownlee said, "is that we don't have three years...The (global) changes that four or five years ago we were expecting in the next decade are upon us much sooner than we expected."
Or, as Brownlee paraphrased Hopkins, "Transition is a social experiment on a grand scale, and we don't know if it will work. But we do know that if we wait for government it will be too little, too late, and if we rely on individuals, it will be too little. But if we come together as communities, it might be just enough, just in time."
For the next several weeks, Geek Gestalt will be on Road Trip 2009. After driving more than 12,000 miles in the Pacific Northwest, the Southwest and the Southeast over the last three years, I'll be writing about and photographing the best in technology, science, military, nature, aviation and more in Colorado, Utah, Idaho, Wyoming, Montana and South Dakota. If you have a suggestion for someplace to visit, drop me a line. And in the meantime, join the Road Trip 2009 Facebook page and follow my Twitter feed.
Daniel Terdiman is a staff writer at CNET News covering games, Net culture, and everything in between. E-mail Daniel. 
Do they have plans for self-sustaining electricity and water? I would like to continue having those utilities.
A basic plan for the electricity could involve car alternators from scrapyards + car batteries + AC inverter boxes. Just power the alternator pulleys with wind, water, etc...
First, the world is awash in fossil fuels. There is still a lot of untapped crude oil. Second, there is plenty of natural gas. Third, there is an enormous amount of coal in the world. Natural gas can be Fischer-Tropsched to a diesel/kerosene fuel, as can gas derived from coal. These gas to liquid (GTL) solutions become much more feasible as the price of a barrel of oil rises due to peak oil. As do biofuels.
The answer is not biofuels. Biofuels may play a part of the eventual answer, but alone, they are not the answer. Biofuels seem an easy answer for many because they are a simple substitute. But we saw what a disaster it was to push Ethanol in 2007 and 2008. Corn prices skyrocketed, agricultural commodities were economically linked to oil prices, and became subject to rampant inflation when a refinery lost power due to a hurricane. I mean, come on, we had microbreweries going out of business because hops was too expensive because farmers were planting corn instead of hops because the price or corn was overinflated. We had tortilla riots in Mexico City. This has to be thought out before blindly assuming burning our food will solve our fuel problems.
What is the answer? If we could generate more electricity from non-fossil methods by moving existing fossil electric generation, and net new electric generation to primarily nuclear power, augmented by solar (perfect for daytime peaks), move more heating from heating oil to natural gas in the north, and from natural gas to electric in the south, we would free up fossil fuel for transportation uses, which is what is is best suited for. Increasing available electricity brings the option of moving long-range freight trains to electric drive, freeing up more fossil fuel for other forms of transportation. Then GTL and biofuels (preferably biodiesel, not ethanol) augment declining petroleum stocks.
The reality is, you are not going to ever fly airliners on electricity alone. And if the whole country eventually goes to electric cars, trucks, and trains, you will never produce enough electricity with solar and wind. You will have to go nuclear. Or live in the dark and walk.
When I see a "Peak Oiler" with one of those "More Nukes, Less Kooks" bumper stickers, I'll know they are serious. King Hubbert, who first proposed peak oil, was pro-nuke.
Bio fuel sounds good, but reality is there is not enough crop space to both feed us, and to support Bio fuel. Last year was the perfect example.
As you have stated we have more potential oil reserves today then in the 70's. When we look at oil sands, and shale oil. The reserves are huge, and Canadian oil sands becomes profitable when oil is above $25.00, although today they say they need $50 oil to make it really profitable. But that said the reserves are huge, and the US has even larger reserves of Shale Oil, which becomes profitable in the $70 range.
The US is very dependent on Coal for Electrical generation, but that is changing, and as pointed out we can not get enough wind farms to support the US or Canada, they can supplement they can't replace. Canada gets the majority of its Electricity from Hydro Electric, but then again we are only powering the population = to California.
But, what I do see happening is the end of global industry. We know at $70 + oil long haul shipping costs starts to eat into the savings of the mega factories.
I expect we will see an end to the Trucking industry, and a reinvention of the long haul rail system. Which most likely would follow a European flavor and go Electric, instead of Diesel Electric.
Even when we look at the 40's -70's most industry in North America was regional. Yet no one suffered there was no lack of choice.
I can look at examples from my home town of Winnipeg.
During those years the city supported 3 Major Breweries, and about a dozen smaller ones. It had a huge textile industry that supported the garment industry. You had department stores, you had small scale local manufacturing, you had local produce canning, local slaughter yards...etc..etc
During the 80's the big breweries went away replaced my mega breweries, the idea that the savings from one or two huge ones, with low cost shipping made sense. So over all 15-20k in jobs where lost across the country. Local team support vanished, the local community support vanished. And the skilled workers moved or took on other jobs, most in the long haul trucking industry. But... we never saw a savings on the final product did we?
Same with the Textile industry, it became cheaper to ship raw materials to Mexico or China, then bring the product back to the garment industry, then eventually the garment industry also moved.
But as times change I see the trend reversing
Same with Cattle Swine Chicken... there use to be slaughter houses for them, but that moved to mega yards, it was cheaper with low oil to do so.
That has already reversed, and we have to just look at the price of Chicken today to see the outcome.
When these industries move back, the final product may be marginally more expensive then the cheap oil days, but you will also have more higher paid workers in the consumer market to offset the prices.
We all have been suckered in by what I call the Walmart syndrome, as we have seen a shift of the bell curve on wages meaning there is a bigger gap from the top to the bottom; we have more lower waged people buying lower priced product from Box Stores like Walmart. The Walmart syndrome at least to me, is I go to Walmart I buy a pair of shoes for $20 from an over seas manufacturer, my initial savings seam huge. But, the fact is that over the coarse of the year I may end up replacing those shoes three times as they fall apart. Did I save anything buy not buying the $40 shoes at the specialty store? Ones that 3 years later I will still wear?
So yes to me I believe we will see a shift back to the Industries of the 40's-70's. It may cause some initial sticker shock but for the G8 nations I believe we will see greater stability, only the upcoming 3rd world nations will see a drop off as less and less industry is off shored due to shipping costs.
Who would do that? Turns out a number of them were farmers that had been hard hit by the corn ethanol boom. That seemed counter-intuitive to me. "Wait a minute, guys, aren't you getting record-high prices for corn?" The problem was, the profits were all going to landlords (a lot of farmers rent the land they work, not own it), ethanol processors, and seed and fertilizer companies. As the price of corn shot up, so had the cost of growing it. Prices for fertilizer were double or more. Then speculation began to drive land prices up, and with that, rents swelled. A lot of the older guys were on the edge already trying to compete with mega-farms, and had been through the farm crisis of the 80s and weren't about to get back into bad debt situations. Renters decided to bail for a season or more. When the guys owning their land saw an opportunity to get out, they took it. But they certainly didn't make enough to retire on, and there aren't a lot of jobs in small towns on the high plains. For the younger guys, most of them couldn't even afford to get in and start farming, so they were really stuck after growing up expecting to farm.
I don't know if there's significant corn farming in South Dakota, but I wonder what you might learn about what's happened since, especially since the biofuels industry is now chasing cellulosic ethanol. Seems like losing even more small farmers is exactly the opposite of what we need vis-a-vis the needs this article highlights.
Up here in my home town, the majority of the city housing is Natural Gas, but we also have swings where the Summer highs are in the humid 90's with below -40c in the winters.
The past 4-5 years many people started moving to geothermal. And I also made the move. The difference has been huge at least for us. Our annual costs nose dived, our upfront cost was steep, but the government incentives where good so I am looking at a 5-7 year repayment period. But that aside, I no longer have the noisy outdoor compressor for my air conditioning. My place stays really cool in the summer and stays nice and warm in the winter.
Last year we put a small roof mount wind turbine up, and being out Geothermal pumps use electricity we found our annual bill to be next to nothing. I am looking to supplement in the next few years with a better turbine and solar. Which would effectively take me off the grid. I can never be 100% off grid since there are cloudy days with no wind.. and todays local power storage capabilities can not meet the demands of a 2000+ sqft 4 person house hold with 5 computers and 3 plasma TV's. But I bet in the next few years I can get my power bill to nothing or even a credit status.
Our plans are to get rid of all 3 current cars get two electric cars for local commutes, move to a hybrid van or truck for long hauls and shopping, and keeping the RV diesel for the holiday trips.
It does not take much to make a huge change in your consumption, environmental footprint.
@Argentowl
I hear you, last year in Manitoba, a lot of consumer type crops where not planted as more and more crops for the Bio Fuel industry where planted. The end result was bread costing 400% more.
These are all people that lack both the knowledge and skill to deal with the crises that are approaching because of our modern way of life. There are literally millions of people on this planet completely dependent on fossil fuels for their existence and if that was to disappear today most of those people would parish.
Business and even global market would mean little or nothing in a world where we are unable to transfer goods and resources from one country to the next. After the mass extinction of people that can't do anything but push papers around a desk, we would see the re-emergence of the local market and barting system that exists not to long ago. The majority of electricity pumped into North American's grids every second is generated by fossil fuels so yes even electricity will become scarce until Nuclear Power Plants, Wind and Water turbines are put in place (but when that happen if nothing is planned for now is anyone's guess). The economies of the western world will collapse while the people of third and second world nations which have never had the types of luxuries that exist in the west will coup and survive and likely even become the world we desire.
What to do about the old, the sick, the millions of people relying on machines to breath for them, pump their hearts for them, even eat for them? What to do about the drinking water crisis? The human population is going to collapse if all we have as a backup plan is biofuels which means we need to waste our food for fuel. You wouldn't think it by visiting America that the world is suffering from a food shortage (their upsized Happy Meal is enough food to feed 5 village men in south Asia) but the rest of the world is already experiencing a food shortage due to our massive population on one planet.
The authors of the books cited in this article refer to a time when our population was in the high millions and local communities were tribes at best. Our ancestors, our sister species, even our evolutionary cousins (monkeys... yes) survived and survive well in tribes but the massive man pile that exists in our urban centers have no hope in surviving off of local markets. The concept of going green and buying locally epically fails to deal with the issue of massive urbanization and completely ignores that their suggestion of adaptation in a place like BOULDER might work great for the time being but when the entire local market becomes overwhelmed with hungry people (there isn't enough farm land to feed all these people) then what?
This attitude is not a solution folks and not even a bandaid really. We need to seriously consider the direction our species is heading because it is heading in a direction that spells collapse. No species on this planet has left a wider ecological footprint then we have and when our resources dry up so will that footprint (due to mass extinction) the beasts the once roamed this planet freely will likely do so once again.
Some people look to the skies, some people look in their hearts, but at this point no one has a solution and likely no one ever will.
Well we know that only 40% of the worlds electricity is generated by coal, and we know your car and my car is not powered by fuel derived from coal, so those numbers are really off in left field.
The use of Coal for electricity is also odd, some countries are using more some using less. I see us moving more and more to Nuke power, we have become better at it, it has become safer, and we are getting better at dealing with the aftermath.
I do need to argue the huge man pile argument. Although populations have grown, the simple fact is even when we did not have the car like today we have mega million population cities.
And lets assume we move to a world that did not use fossil fuel for ocean transport, and we moved back to the age of sail. Yes a trip wold take longer crews would be smaller with our ability to automate, we would just have more ships in the pipeline to make up for the length of journey.
We are not going to have a melt down, we are just going to have a shift from the huge global economy the sprung up in the 80's and 90's. And, really even back then I remember people arguing that this globalization was unsustainable. So it should not come as a surprise to anyone.
I am sure local lumber/pulp/paper/steel....etc..etc workers will be dancing for joy.
And really, we have fed the flames of the people who do not like our countries, buying cheap oil adding money to there local economies, buying from mega over seas factories from countries who's global policies are against our own. We are giving money and resources to people who don't like us.
Do you really think the terrorists will have the money to cause trouble if we don't buy oil from nations that back them? Do you think the terrorists who are mad at us for exploiting there home countries for oil will still be upset at our presence when we leave?
We are moving into a new world, a new economy, and to me at least a better place.
There is nothing that prevents both processes from existing though.
For that matter, oil is still being produced via the equivalent of the 'dinosaur' method as plankton and algae settle and are covered by sediments. We just have to wait a few million years for this oil to be available.
In either instance, just because something is a renewable resource doesn't mean that you can't run out of it on a short term basis. If your rate of consumption exceeds the rate of production you will have times when you are 'out' of the renewable resource.
What I am FAR more concerned about is economic collapse and the resulting chaos. The question is really when. Are we in the start of it now... or will they fudge the numbers well enough and play with the economy enough to buy us another decade or two? I think people are just totally out of touch with how far in debt we are and the rate we're spending. We couldn't believe how much we spent on the Iraq war (how many of us can conceptualize trillions of $)... now we're eclipsing that by how much we're rewarding failed companies for their crazy-poor performance (do people realize we gave GM alone like 1/10th of what we've spent in Iraq?). When our cash runs out (which is already just artificial), the infrastructures collapse, etc.... things are going to get bad. I suppose this could be corrected if people are willing to change... and the government can regulate things to let the air out slowly. BUT, the the article is dead on about one thing... we have a couple generations of people who aren't likely to work on the fix, and are just expecting the government to fix it. If that doesn't change, this is truly not going to be pretty.... and it has very little to do with oil.
I think you're spot on the money, pun intended, and I don't believe we have more than a few years... This year, in a few months, we will see the first REAL fall of the US economy. It ill recover for a bit, and then suffer yet another fall. By this point we'll be drowning in inflation and the end of the economy will be at hand. Before or during 2012, it's all over rover.
If you feel it is all about you, then do not complain when you are the target of attacks. One goes with the other.
But I'm really disappointed that they didn't look at Toshiba's micro-nuclear reactor as a power solution. Its designed to provide power to small towns.
And we should also keep in mind that even if we ween ourselves off oil as a fuel, its just too useful as substance, we'll still need it for plastics etc.
http://www.realclearpolitics.com/articles/2009/06/24/could_australia_blow_apart_the_great_global_warming_scare_97148.html
Peak oil is a lie. Look at the evidence and refute it if you can.
http://tinyurl.com/peakoilisalie
This lie along with the global warming scam are being used to wage war on the people of the world.
http://tinyurl.com/globalwarmingisascam
Next you will be crying about the overpopulation myth..
http://tinyurl.com/overpopulationisamyth
Why not talk about something real?
http://tinyurl.com/aerosolcrimes
Too hot to touch!?
We have only used oil for 100 years. we will invent something new for teh next 100. Just keep government planning far far away. If government planning was a good idea there would still be a USSR. If centralized planning was a good idea there woudl still be a British Empire.
And somebody stifle the greeers before they all force us to drink their KoolAid.
1. There is no way that such a switchover could happen overnight. Even if it started in earnest today, a switchover to EVs would take years at minimum, decades probably. That is just how national economies work. The intervening years allow a good amount of time to improve the electrical infrastructure in anticipation of a greater load from the needs of transportation.
2. Using Concentrated Solar Plants (CSPs), at which light is concentrated through reflectors onto a boiler that proceeds to generate electricity with common steam turbines, and assuming the employment of molten salt heat storage for use during cloudy intervals and at night-time, a "solar farm" of just 100x100 miles (or, if you prefer, 400 farms of just 5x5 miles each, scattered throughout the several States) in the desert Southwest could power the entire US personal vehicle fleet, if it were converted to EVs, allowing 20,000 miles per year per vehicle on average. Since the conversion to EVs must be gradual, a continuous program of building "5x5" CSP installations could add power to the grid on a "pay as you go" basis, matching the pace of growth in demand for EV recharging. The biggest trucks or other very large vehicles could continue to burn diesel, biodiesel, or be converted over to CNG or other alternative fuels.
3. We will be able to make even more -- and more efficient -- use of solar and other renewables, as the technology for power storage and supply buffering (aka, frequency regulation) improves during that same long period of transition.
I don't know if, all things considered, we will get behind a massive push for solar energy, but if we did, it looks from here as if the project would be entirely feasible and ultimately practical. Go visit some CSP plants in the Mojave Desert area of California and Nevada and talk to the engineers and project managers there. We have the necessary technology and know-how now. If developed even further over the course of a massive push, the cost-effectiveness, ease of construction and maintenance, and reliability of such plants can only increase.
I?m working on a campaign called the Drive Smarter Challenge, which is designed to let everyday folks know about the myriad of ways they can cut down on their gas expenses by following some easy tips like not idling their vehicle, properly inflating their tires, and not going over 60 on the freeway. You can learn more tips and read a ton of driving myths at http://drivesmarterchallenge.org/
Holler back and let me know what you think. Peace to the folks in Boulder and across the U.S. Keep spreading the knowledge on energy!
- by June 28, 2009 2:41 PM PDT
- The key to reducing dependance of oil is to cut back on miles driven every day. This means cutting back on the daily commute for most americans.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(26 Comments)Telecommuting has been around for years, but is only used by a small percentage of the workforce.
One way to get more people to telecommute is to provide different options. For example, many workers (and employers) would be more willing to telecommute if the workers had facilities that mirrored their traditional office facilities. The solution is for workers to work from remote office located near where they live.
Remote Office Centers lease offices, internet and phone systems to workers from different companies in shared centers located around the city and suburbs. This is a simple solution for workers who want to telecommute, but do not have adequate facilities at home (or do not like the feeling of isolation that comes from spending all day in a home office).
ROCs are fairly new, but can be found by searching the internet for "Remote Office Centers".