Transition Culture

30 Oct 2006

Exclusive to Transition Culture! An Interview with Paul Mobbs

**“Less is a Four Letter Word�. An Interview with Paul Mobbs. Friday October 13th 2006.**

The morning after Paul’s recent talk in Totnes, I met him in the Barrel House café in town and interviewed him over a morning cup of coffee before he headed off to catch his train home. Paul is the author of [Energy Beyond Oil](http://www.transitionculture.org/?page_id=21″EBO”) and of the forthcoming “Less is a Four Letter Word”. The previous evening Paul had spoken at St. John’s Church in Bridgetown to an audience of around 100 people. We explored peak oil and what its impacts might be, as well as Paul’s thoughts on some of the preparations we can begin making now.

**I wonder if you could outline your argument as to why peak oil means less?**

It really comes down to the laws of physics. The first law of thermodynamics says that the activity in any system is proportional to the energy flowing through it. So if we reduce the amount of energy the activity must decrease, which is less. The argument against that is that we will increase efficiency. Then you hit the second law of thermodynamics which says that energy must flow downhill.

So, OK we can reduce the level of the downhill, but going from 50-60% efficiency is easy, going from 60-70% is quite hard, going from 70-80% can be damn nigh impossible. So we can’t keep increasing efficiency. Efficiency is a one-time hit. Once you have done it that’s it. So if you want to keep growing the economy, you find that OK, your low energy bulbs might take four and a half percent off your household energy consumption, but in 6 or 7 years you are back to where you were because of growth.

We really have to say the only way forward is less, because if you have less energy you are going to have less activity, and those savings that you can realistically make will be a one-time saving that cannot be carried on into the future forever.

**So does less inevitably mean a contracting economy, and what is the difference between a contracting economy and collapse?**

The problem with an economy is it values everything in terms of financial value. It doesn’t value it in terms of energy, energy is purely a commodity. So you have to say, “is that a valid measure�. I can’t remember his name, the bloke who thought up GDP in 1927. He never intended it to be used as a measure of economic well-being. He saw it as a measure to compare economies, not to value them, but we use it as a measure of how well we’re doing, quite meaninglessly.

So OK, in GDP terms, we are going to have a contracting economy, we are going to have inflation running away, because commodities are going to cost more. In some ways that might be good because a lot of people are loaded with debt and runaway inflation might actually make their debt disappear eventually, as it did in the 1970s. In the long term you have to say that we’ll have to contract because we literally we won’t be able to buy all those commodities. It doesn’t matter how much inflation goes up, if we just can’t go out and buy the flash new car, we can’t go out and buy the new sofa and the £4000 new kitchen makeover, then the economy will contract in GDP terms.

If you value the economy terms of personal well being, in terms of, “are you warm?�, and, “do you have enough food?�, then probably that economy, that personal economy, won’t contract. We will still be able to feed ourselves, but very differently. We will still be able to keep warm, probably in smaller houses and very differently. So that economy, the economy of well-being, won’t contract, but the GDP economy, the modern globalised economic economy, that must contract.

**What will happen to those with huge debts?**

It is interesting to read Stephen Leeb’s stuff about the 70s oil crisis and the effects that that had on the economy. In many ways, although it reduced earnings and created hyper inflation, it meant that the present generation of people retiring bought houses and then had the value slashed by 10 or 20% because inflation eroded the value of their debt.

What we have at the moment is a Government that is allowing inflation to rise, because if they were to dare to stop it by putting up interest rates the economy would collapse because we are so indebted. We have about £1.2 trillion of debt in this country. About £300-400 billion of that is unsecured debt. The average person owes £4000 on their credit card, and what is going to happen to that debt?

If it does happen that prices suddenly spike because commodity prices are affected by gas and oil supplies, people just won’t buy stuff and the economy will collapse, and people will just lose their jobs. What influences me a lot is that I remember, where I live, the downturn in ‘81-‘82. That was a manufacturing decline, but what’s going to happen if we have a recession due to peak oil in this country is that it’s going to be a service industry decline. That’s going to be deeper and more widespread than the manufacturing decline was in the early 80s. That’s going to be pretty gross.

I don’t really want to predict what’s going to happen because you can’t, but a lot of people I think will just go bankrupt. There is no other way. But bankruptcy isn’t the end of the world, and actually the people who go bankrupt, because they can’t automatically go and get cheap loans and cheap credit, I think it helps them in the long term because they don’t just go and start buying money again. They actually have to think ahead, and plan how they spend their money in the future.

**Much of the Peak Oil literature comes from the States, and has a very particular take. What do you think is unique to that challenge of the UK? How do the challenges differ?**

I actually tend not to mix with the mainstream peak oil crowd. There are a lot of people who actually like the doom and gloom. They like the idea that it’s all going to come to an end and we’re going to have this new apocalypse. The Americans are slightly different in that a lot of them are concerned about how they will maintain their standard of living – and if you look at the solutions people in America, they are all about “well we’re going to buy huge amounts of PV, huge amounts of solar and huge amounts of biodiesel, to maintain that standard of livingâ€?.

I tend to come at this more from a Deep Ecology, you know, deep green side of things, that says we just need to have less. Unfortunately a lot of the people in the peak oil brigade in Britain aren’t really into that. A few are, but most aren’t. Certainly a lot of my old friends in the environmental movement are not into using the ‘L’ word in public.

It’d be really nice to have a debate about energy, not about peak oil. Actually in terms of Britain, oil is about 36% of what we use, gas is about 40%. Peak gas is far more relevant than peak oil. Gas is far harder to predict than oil. The estimates of peak gas at the moment vary from 2015 to 2025, perhaps 2030 at the latest. After gas peaks, that’s it. After oil peaks, you can carry on sucking the gas out and still grow the energy economy somehow, but once gas peaks, that’s it. There are no more dense sources of fossil fuel energy.

Unless we have a proper debate about energy, not oil, which is one thing I’m struggling to have at the moment, I don’t think we’re going to have a proper dialogue on where we’re going to go.

**You said that peak gas is more of a problem, but doesn’t peak oil affect the transport economy and therefore that our dependence on centralised transportation means that things will start to unravel before peak gas?**

Oil is important because it is a very user friendly commodity. It is liquid at room temperature, it doesn’t explode unless you are really silly, it is damn useful. If we didn’t have oil, there are many other ways that we could make vehicles move. There are many ways we could reorganise our distribution systems to use less oil but still carry the same tonnage. So the actual availability of mobile fuel isn’t as critical as the energy it provides in total.

So peak gas is the significant one, because 70% of houses on average get their energy from gas. In terms of what will really hit people it’s not peak oil – it’s not being able to buy the paraffin to put in your central heating, its not having the gas, or not being able to afford to buy the gas to put into your central heating. In the longer term you have to say that gas is the ultimately critical one.

What do you do about that? In the short term I think the Government will go back to the wonderful 19th century technology of carbonisation, and we’ll suddenly find that you get coal fired gasworks again. But in this country we don’t have that much coal, relative to the world coal stock, so we are still importing coal and the world coal price is going up, and you have to say 30-40 years we really have to decide what to do.

In the book, “Energy Beyond Oilâ€?, I talk about the ‘burn everything’ solution – and literally, they are so fixated by the growth economy that they will burn everything, but that can’t keep you going beyond 2040, 2045, at the longest, because you just can’t dig the stuff out of the ground fast enough. At some point we have to have a serious debate – do we have less, or are we just going to try and keep the fires going, which in terms of the physical laws that underpin all or our scientific understanding on this planet, is impossible. I see it as a very rational argument. Unfortunately a lot of people have faith that we will be able to do something.

**What do you see as the role of communities in relocalising and exploring that process?**

A community is a strange term. I go around the country a lot and in bits of rural Wales and Scotland you have community, real communities – everyone knows each other, there’s a whole informal economy of bartering and doing free work for each other. That for me is community. It is that sort of community that I think in the beginning will effortlessly glide over these problems. They will be able to make do. If you go the stock broker belt of Surrey and Kent, they don’t have a community. They have communities, they go to the local church hall and do stuff together, but it is not a community of people.

I think the major thing we have to do in this country is re-learn “community�, in the sense that a lot of communities today are very transient, particularly in the South East. People don’t identify with their community. They live there, but they don’t have an identification. You have to have that identification in order to externalise, to have empathy with that and actually put some effort into doing something about it. When you have that, then you can start doing some interesting things.

When people ask me “what can you do in the short term?�, things like co-operative buying, setting up a co-op, you can buy food in bulk, costs you less, produces less waste, actually uses less transport, so there are very short term solutions. In the long term, you can then jump that very small scale co-operative buying of your immediate food into perhaps working with a local farmer to perhaps develop a food box system, but you have to have that initial seed and start small and grow it. I think that would be the best way forward for a community.

In terms of energy, in the short term a lot of the small community schemes I see don’t get into energy unless they are forced into it by circumstance. The usual circumstance is poverty. In the longer term I think small community schemes for energy could be really useful as a way of sharing skills. People talk about consumerism having given us more and more selection. What it has actually done is deskilled us relative to our grandparents and great grandparents, and so we have to relearn those skills.

What community can be very valuable as is a skill transfer mechanism. We can have grand ideas that we are going to do this and that, but if we don’t have the skills it’s not going to happen. In the short term an active community somebody knows something so they will do it for everybody else, but in the longer term that is a process of teaching those skills to other people in the community and then grow the knowledge base of the community as a whole.

Unfortunately, going back to the peak oil crowd, I see lots of debate about alternative energy, but not about skills. Until you get people seriously asking “OK, what skills do we need to achieve this outcome?�… I trained as an engineer not a scientist, which makes me think “how will I build it�, not “how does it work?�. You really have to go and look at what skills do people have.

In the 80s I got involved with LETS schemes, and they always collapse because there are 2 gardeners and 50 shiatsu consultants, and that just can’t work. In a proper LETS scheme you have a balance of providers and service givers.

**So you could argue that LETS schemes have become a reflection of how useless we have become?**

Yes. If you really want an active community you need a set of people with practical skills, a set of people with organisational skills, perhaps a few people happy to kick in some of the money they’ve got to get things rolling, and it is all about social networks. Things happen because people know people.

I have worked on a lot of community projects, in this country and in Eastern Europe and Jamaica, and it happens because somebody knows somebody, and they could get an old hot water tank from somewhere for nothing, and if we are looking at an increasing expense as commodity prices are driven upwards by energy prices then we are talking about reusing junk. So by and large you are looking to people who have the network where they can get a piece here and a bit there, and get together the necessary components to do these alternative schemes.

**For a project like Transition Town Totnes what would you see as being its priorities?**

The first phase has to be, “what is the scale of the problem?� You have to sit down and look at how much energy are we using, what kind of energy are we using. Energy is energy, but if it is mostly gas based energy your solutions will be different to if we are using mostly electricity based energy. By and large, particularly in a gas area like this, most of the energy will be gas, only the minority will be electricity.

So instantly “we can have some PV, we can have some windâ€?, yeah but its not going to do what you need. So we have a gas economy – a heat economy. 80% of what the average house uses is heat. So then you say well rather than producing it we need insulation. There are different ways to do insulation. Some makes of insulation actually takes 10 to 20 years to pay back, in the energy they save, to equal the amount of energy they took to make in the first place. Then you get into what is the most appropriate kind of insulation. Then you might find, “well hang on, why don’t we find a way of reprocessing our old rags into some form of cellulose insulationâ€?.

So you really have to sit down and work out what you need, an “information phase�. With that information phase you can raise awareness about what can be done, of the issues, and then when you actually come to do it that will help, because people will have the information and people will know why. If you don’t know why you won’t have the motivation to actually go and make the change.

Initially I would say it is all about characterising what the problem is. When you have done that and you have the detail: you know in Bridgetown we have say 1400 houses with say very poor insulation, we could do X to them, X will reduce the energy consumption by Y, we then have to provide Z. When you have done that analysis you can go out and get what you need. Unless you get what you need you are going to have to do a bit here and a bit there, you are going to be continually reinventing the wheel and it is going to be very inefficient.

One of the Norfolk councils got together 60 or 70 houses, and bought in bulk solar hot water systems for them, and it cost 30-40% less because they bought in bulk. If you could get 300 or 400 households across Totnes who say “we are going to install solar�, you then go to all the various solar providers. Not the service contractors locally but the actual wholesalers, who import the stuff as they don’t make much of it here. You say, “we want enough for 400 houses�. You then go to a local plumber and electrician and say “how much to put in all this stuff?� As a one off project, the cost savings could be major. Then what was a 16 year payback on solar hot water becomes a 10 year payback. Really what the project can do is group together people according to what they need and then find ways of meeting that need for the lowest cost possible.

**Some argue, such as the Greenpeace report “Decentralising Power� that we need to break the grid down, others argue that we need the grid as a really useful sink for surplus energy. In your opinion does the grid have a future?**

There are two competing ideas:

There is decentralisation, where you have less big power stations and more small local power stations, and more embedded generation, which is things like solar PV on the roof, small wind turbines, perhaps a local factory would install a CHP system and dump some of their excess electricity into the grid when they aren’t using it. Another stem of this now is dynamic demand. The idea of dynamic demand is that you have intelligent household devices that switch themselves on and off when there is a big demand on the grid.

These are still a productionist approach. It is still, “let’s produceâ€?, rather than saying, “let’s start by seeing what we can get rid of first, and then when we have got rid of that, produce what’s left.â€? So decentralisation is fine. In theory I have no problem with it, but distributed generation, decentralising the grid, dynamic demand, without that first phase of reduction – of getting rid of all the transformers on standby, all that sort of thing – is meaningless, because you are going to be using energy for energy’s sake. The problem with dynamic demand, distributed generation, on average electricity is only 20% of what the country uses, it is a lot of effort into 20% of the problem that ignores 80% of the problem. We really need to look at the whole energy problem, and yes, electricity is a part of that, but what our houses most use is heat.

The other major use of electricity is lighting, and lighting is highly inefficient, not just because we have old incandescent bulbs, but because we have all those makeover programmes with wonderful ways of doing your home up which make them light traps – not in that they hold the light, but that they absorb the light. So we actually need to rethink interior design in such a way that it maximises light. Not necessarily white paint, but light paint. Also the design of curtains and windows in such a way as to maximise the inputs of light. One of the things that I do when I do an energy audit, if you have a north facing room, it is very dark. If you have a fence outside and you paint it white, the amount of light in the room goes up because you are diverting that light into the room. There are all sorts of ways but you have to take this very integrated approach, to say what do I need, where is it, and bit by bit, just eliminate different certain uses which either aren’t necessary or can be done with a lot less.

**So when you look forward over the next 20 years do feel optimistic or not?**

I’m really lucky because I was looked after by my grandparents, as my parents went out to work. They gave me all those skills like cooking and gardening because that’s what happened to them. For that reason I am really lucky. I’m passing those skills and more on to my children. In many ways they are my insurance policy because I don’t think people will be collecting pensions in 30 or 40 years time, so I will have these 2 insurance policies called Emma and Wilf. I am making sure that they are practically trained, so that no matter what happens they will be able to do something.

In terms of what is going to happen, I have enough problems planning what is going to happen next year. “Energy Beyond Oil� was the result of 3 years of workshops working with communities on energy issues. The book wasn’t an intended outcome, it just sort of happened. I sat down one day and hey, six weeks later, I’ve got a book, just trying to write up what we’d been doing for three years.

That has since mutated in this new work called “Less is a Four Letter Word�. What I found doing “Energy Beyond Oil� was that I would go to certain kinds of places and instead of saying “less� I could have said other four letter words and got the same response. We have a whole problem around this “less� word. Most of the major environmental groups and definitely politicians, are afraid to say the word “less�.

If you are a physicist and you look at how energy works in the Universe, you have to say that at some point we will have to have “less�. What it comes down to is how much resources are left. If there were plenty of resources, the “less� issue would never arise. OK, there are other issues like climate change that are a result of energy policy, but the “less� issue would never arise.

We are about to hit a ceiling – it seems like peak oil is a ceiling. We have problems with copper at the moment. We have problems with silver production. Even gold production – they are now going back to the tailings of old gold mines and working those because gold is getting hard to find.

There are various resource limitations which make us have to use “less�. Efficiency can’t cut it any more. We have done all of those efficiency measures, and now they are done we’re stuffed. If you look at climate change, we then have limitations on agricultural land, on water supply. That’s going to be really difficult, so we have to use the “less� word. A lot of what we’ve been doing is trying to understand this “less� concept. As I look forward what I see for me personally is many years of work, unfortunately, talking to people about something they don’t want to talk about! I think if people can get their heads around the “less� idea.

What I think will happen overall is that the system overall cannot change quickly enough to assimilate the idea that there are limits. Gordon Brown lives for growth, partly because if the country didn’t grow we’d fall apart because of the amount of debt we have. The country, the whole system, lives for growth, and it cannot change quickly enough to realise that’s a physical impossibility in the face of these resource constraints.

What will happen I think is that we will hit the buffers, there will be a crunch of some sort, and at that point people will have to make their minds up. If by that point we have a network of people throughout the country who are doing “lessâ€?, who are doing small scale community based food systems, energy systems, commodity systems, informal economies – a bit like after the Argentine economy crashed, all the money and the rich people left, and within 4-6 months you had a whole informal economy that sort of organically arose among everybody else… they just found ways to solve the problems.

If you have those people out there and doing it visually… One of the things I’ve been doing in the last few years is tracking down all those people who dropped out in the 70s who are still out there – if they are still out there they are obviously doing it right! I’ve been trying to document what they do, so if we can around the time of the crash have a network of people who are out there doing it, and are doing it visibly, people will have a straightforward choice: “Well the guys over there in the suits are telling me to keep working, and have less and drive less and whack up my debtâ€?; or, “all those people over there who seem to be doing quite well seem to be telling me to grow some food, and to join in their co-op, and recycle some stuff to help insulate my house…â€? Well who am I going to listen to? Who looks like they are having a more comfortable time, and a more fun time?

Various people ask what will a low energy world look like, and it will look like a Third World country. I went to the former Soviet Republics not long after communism crashed, and it was dire, but people had fun. They knew how to have fun with very little. The whole point about modern society in Britain is that the only way we know to have fun these days is to expend energy. We need to relearn all those skills our grandparents had for having fun with very little. That’s what its really going to be about. If you look at human history, we can bear anything, so long as we have a bit of fun at the same time. The fun bit is what we really have to work on.

**Thank you.**