22 Aug 2006
Notes from my recent talk at the Leading the Way conference, Dartington.
*Earlier in the year I spoke at the [Leading the Way](http://transitionculture.org/?p=295″LTW”) conference at Dartington which was organised by the Totnes Sustainability Group, and which launched DARE’s report on renewable energy for the South Hams. It was well received, and I was recently sent a transcript of some quite detailed notes of my talk taken by Dr. Carol Wellwood. I thought you might find it interesting, so here it is. It begins with the Chairman’s (David Radford) introduction… You can also download the Powerpoint presentation I used [here](http://susweb.net/tc/Climate-Changes-Twin-Sister-by-Rob-Hopkins.ppt”PPT”) and use it to accompany the notes below.*
“David Radford then introduced Rob Hopkins, founding director of the Hollies Centre for Practical Sustainability in Ireland, where he’s lived and worked for the last ten years; as a Permaculture teacher, he has lectured and taught widely and set up the first two-year full-time Permaculture course in the world at Kinsale Further Education College; in his last year there, he developed a process called Energy Descent Action Planning which looks at how settlements can collectively design strategies for making the transition beyond Peak Oil. The Kinsale Energy Descent Plan has gone all around the world and inspired many similar initiatives; Rob is now researching a Ph.D. at Plymouth University on designing the transition to life beyond oil and developing an energy descent planning process for Totnes and Devon.
Rob talked about Peak Oil, described as climate change’s twin sister, as they are two parts of the same problem. He pointed out that we live in an extraordinary time, when as ‘energy emperors’, we have access to cheap oil and energy equivalent to about 40 slaves working for each of us, and we’ve got very used to it. Each tank-full of petrol for our cars is about a year’s worth of manual labour. Having cycled up to the conference, he thought that if someone paid him to cycle them up the particularly steep hill just before the hall in a rickshaw, he would charge a lot more than the 5 pence worth of oil that his car would have used!
He said that we don’t necessarily see the perspective of the Petroleum Interval, the results of which Sheila talked about, because it encompasses our lifetimes. It has been a minor blip or aberration and we are fortunate to be living at the peak, able to do more, see further and have more options than anybody in history has ever had. Rob hoped to distil the essence of Peak Oil in ten minutes, despite it being quite complicated, and then look at some of his work on trying to look beyond it.
He used to think that oil in the economy worked like petrol in a car, in that the car runs exactly the same on a completely full or almost empty tank. The theory of Peak Oil is that the pivotal point comes when we’ve used up half the resource. The idea originated in the 1950s with M. King Hubbard, an American geologist who worked for Shell. His prediction, at a big conference in 1956, that US oil production would peak in 1970, was thought completely mad. In 1970, more oil was produced than ever before, but by 1972, he was proved right. The term energy descent refers to the downward half of the oil curve, after the peak. We’ve had energy ascent since the industrial revolution and we’re now looking at the process of energy descent, which is how we get from the top down to the bottom again. Lots of people are writing about the peak but there’s not much work on managing this descent in a productive, positive way.
There are two ways that people calculate when the peak might be. Colin Campbell, of the Association of Study of Peak Oil, took the world’s total endowment of oil, calculated as 2 trillion barrels, and the amount we have produced so far, roughly half the total. The important feature of the peak is that, during energy ascent, demand has driven supply, meaning six billion people have been calling the shots; once we start descent, supply will control demand, leaving about six people in command. The price will start to rise exponentially. The other way of working out the peak is done by Petroleum Review magazine, who look at all the upcoming projects in terms of oil production, as oil projects take a long time to get onstream, and they calculate 2007-2008 as when we hit the peak.
The figures provided by the oil companies are profoundly unreliable. In the 1980s all the OPEC countries miraculously doubled their oil reserves overnight, without proof. This happened to coincide with new OPEC regulations, stipulating that the greater the oil reserves, the more a country was allowed to pump out and the more money they could generate.
Rob provided a few indicators that we are at or very, very close to the peak. The International Energy Agency’s figures show that world oil production has not increased since 2004. The average daily production of most OPEC countries is in decline. Venezuela recently announced that it had to import 100,000 barrels of oil a day from Russia in order to fulfil contractual obligations. The key state is Saudi Arabia, called the swing producer because it can pump a bit more oil out whenever world needs it. After Hurricane Katrina it was unable to do so and it is clear that it has much less oil than stated.
A graph from the Energy Information Administration, the US government’s energy advice organisation, showed that Saudi Arabian production has levelled out and is already in decline. All major oil companies are also in decline, apart from BP who recently bought a Russian oil company, which improved their figures. Oil prices are very volatile, hitting a record of $75 a barrel in April, and any big shock could start prices rising very, very sharply. Despite great efforts being made to discover fresh oil, they’re not finding any. The magazine World Oil said that 2005 was the poorest year for exploration success in both oil and gas since World War II, despite record amounts of funds being ploughed into exploration, production and capital spending.
The UK’s problem may well turn out to be peak gas; we scraped through by the skin of our teeth this winter, when the Russians shut off supplies to the Ukraine and the natural gas from the North Sea was depleting far, far quicker than was thought.
Tony Blair tried to buy gas from Europe unsuccessfully, even though we were prepared to pay far more than anybody else, so he accused Europe of protectionism. When the Russian company Gazprom tried to buy the British gas company Centrica, he vetoed it, in the name of protectionism. Newspapers argued at the time that we need to diversify our sources of gas from but very few mentioned that maybe we should be using less. Apart from Russia, we can get a lot of gas from the Caspian Sea (Azerbaijan) and Iran, which is rather interesting in the light of international geopolitics.
So what do the oil companies have to say about this? Lord Browne, of BP, claims we have 30 years of oil left and therefore the world isn’t running out, which is true, but what is left is very hard and expensive to extract, like tar sands, where you probably have to use more energy extract the oil than it would yield. Chevron ran a series of adverts last summer, basically saying, “We’ve peaked. Any suggestions?� which was a fantastic bit of corporate spin on something they had seen coming for a long time. Exxon Mobil, despite adverts proclaiming that Peak Oil is nonsense, recently produced figures that indicated that, in order to maintain current rates of supply, we need to find four new Saudi Arabias by 2015. Rob quoted George Monbiot: *“Our hopes of a soft landing rely just on two propositions: that the oil producers’ figures are correct and that governments act before they have to. I hope that reassures you.�*
The Hirsch Report came out last year in America (recommended reading; find it online via Google), commissioned by the US Department of Energy to look at the impacts of Peak Oil and what could be done to mitigate it. It concluded, *“The peaking of world oil production presents the US and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically and without timely mitigation, the economic, social and political costs will be unprecedented. Viable mitigation options exist on both the supply and demand sides but to have a substantial impact they must be initiated more than a decade in advance of peaking�*.
David Holmgren, one of the co-founders of Permaculture, summarised our options as “Techno-fantasy�, with unlimited cold fusion, holidays in space, food grown in genetic tanks etc, “Green tech stability�, with business as usual but using a few green ‘clip-ons’ like biofuels, solar panels, hydrogen cars, “Earth Stewardship� adjusting the way we live to fit within the depleting energy curve and looking at it as a positive challenge rather than a terrifying calamity, or “Atlantis�, which is always a possibility for a civilisation so dependant on oil that we use 10 calories of fossil fuel energy to produce one calorie of food and 2.5 litres to build each square metre of wall in a house.
Rob’s interest is the energy descent scenario. We certainly shouldn’t continue wasting a depleting resource like oil by burning it in centralised heat generation systems, where 66% is lost as waste heat up the chimney, another 10% in transmission and only 22% gets to our house. We shouldn’t continue a food system that sells 150,000 tons of potatoes to Germany and imports exactly the same amount. We’re dependant on a transport and ‘just-in-time’ food supply system where our supermarkets have just three days’ worth of food at any one time, and we’ve spent the last fifty years busily dismantling all of our localised food production systems, leaving us incredibly vulnerable. We’ve taken all the resilience and strength out of the system.
A recent report from the Times said, “Transport experts have seen the future and it’s got pedals�, about a study of all transport options in the Peak Oil scenario. Hydrogen cars won’t be ready in time; we need to cease being such a transport dependant civilisation. David Fleming, a London economist, argues “localisation stands at best at the limits of practical possibility, but it has the decisive argument in its favour that there will be no alternative�. When you take the transportation out of an economy, it becomes profoundly local; the big question is getting there from here.
Rob is intrigued that as a civilisation, we are unable to visualise a future without ‘Techno-fantasy’. In imagined futures, even in the 1930s, we all run around with space helmets and having robots shopping for us. Trying to think of a Hollywood film that showed the kind of future under discussion, which has more local, organic food, decentralised energy etc., Rob and his colleague Naresh realised that our culture finds it easy to imagine a horrendous future. They couldn’t find anything until “Wallace and Gromit in ‘The Curse of the Were-Rabbit’�, which is fantastic. Everybody grows vegetables and is very proud of their produce, the houses are all close together, very energy-efficient; Wallace is always making inventions that run off a single candle, so they found one example, anyway!
Over the last couple of years Rob has been involved in working on the Kinsale Energy Descent Action Plan, where, for the first time in the world, they asked how the predictions of Peak Oil would affect the town, how it could adapt rather than having it unfold as a series of mini-calamities that they have to respond to. Last December, the Town Council passed a motion saying “This Council supports the efforts of the not-for-profit company Transition Design in its initiative to act as process leaders in Kinsale’s transition to a lower energy future, and in developing the concept of a Transition Town, i.e. a town making a transition from fossil fuel dependency to a state of energy independence�.
The Town Council has now adopted this plan and communities all over the world are taking the Kinsale version as a template. It involves looking at local building materials, which interests Rob. He has been involved in building using local materials like clay, straw, hemp and so on, with Rob McLeod, who’s researching a Master’s Degree on building a Totnes Passivhaus, which is a house that doesn’t require any space heating, using materials from within ten miles.
Cuba is the best example at present of a country that has responded to Peak Oil. In downtown Havana they grow a huge amount, about 90,000 tons of food, and the example of how they’ve responded is very inspiring. We should be looking at bringing urban agriculture back into Totnes. The DARE report is particularly important to this because it shows that ‘maxing out’ on all the renewables would supply 30–40% of what we currently consume, so we need to conserve 60% of that consumption. How we make that a positive process is very powerful and the DARE report has done a huge amount of very important work in setting out some of the baseline data we will need.
Conservation is the number one requirement. The second practical structural change is relocalising the economy and all the infrastructure needed to facilitate that. Then renewable energy and tradable energy quotas, a nationally driven form of carbon rationing that Rob thinks we’ll see before too long, are needed. Rob sees the energy future for Totnes being a decentralised system of smaller pieces, running on a palette of renewable energy techniques. The key piece of the jigsaw puzzle will be an ESCO, a community-owned Energy Service Company, of which there is a very good model in Woking, run by the council, which puts parts of the town into mini-grids.
The clever bit is that, if we set up an ESCO, we start to keep money in the community. The amount of money Totnes must spend on energy bills is enormous. That could be cycled back into the town and used to take parts of it, incrementally, off the [national] grid. Once the ESCO is generating about 20% of energy needs, it can be used to back a complementary currency, which will be of use to businesses and to everybody. In effect the local energy company would be a relocalisation agency, quite an exciting model.
Rob recommended the book [Energy Beyond Oil](http://transitionculture.org/?page_id=21″EBO”) by Paul Mobbs, the UK’s first Peak Oil book, which concludes with two scenarios. The first Mobbs calls “burn everythingâ€?, where we struggle to keep business as usual going for as long as possible, burning all the coal, gas and extracting all the uranium, despite the fact that, as Sheila said, we would render our planet utterly uninhabitable. By 2125 we would actually have between 3 and 4 extra joules of energy at our disposal.
The other scenario he calls “reduce and renewables�, with a strong, rigorous programme of energy conservation and building up renewables to about the 30 or 40% level, which echoes the DARE findings. By 2125, we would have the same amount of energy available but with a habitable planet. People think we could just ‘burn everything’ and then just switch to renewables, but it doesn’t work like that; it takes a lot of oil and a lot of resources to create this new way of doing things.
Rob is involved in a programme starting in September and October, called “Transition Town Totnes�, which will be looking at creating an energy descent process for Totnes, and will involve a variety of things, including ‘open space’ and community think tanks. He highly recommended a fascinating film called “The Power of Community�, about how Cuba survives Peak Oil, and concluded with a saying by Indian novelist Arundhati Roy: *“Another world is not only possible, she is on her way. On a quiet day, I can hear her breathing.�*