Transition Culture

15 Feb 2007

Aubrey Meyer on the Confluence of Peak Oil and Climate Change…

Aubrey Meyer runs the Global Commons Institute and is the creator of the approach to climate change known as Contraction and Convergence. While he was in Totnes, teaching on Schumacher College’s Climate Change course, he gave a well-attended talk for Transition Town Totnes, where as well as speaking he treated the audience to some virtuouso violin playing. Prior to that I interviewed him at length about C&C and its relation to peak oil. Here is an extract from that, which explores the link between peak oil and climate change.

How do you see the relationship between peak oil and climate change, and between Contraction and Converence and the Oil Depletion Protocol?

The Oil Depletion Protocol originated with Colin Campbell and is a very sensible idea, essentially that countries should agree not to produce above their depletion rate, so you can stabilise that over the medium terms as peak oil bites everywere. It may be that countries are going to agree to do that, OPEC doesn’t always behave itself within its own group terms, people break the quotas and so on, but the point about Colin was that he was completely disinterested in climate change because, as an oil geologist, he regarded it as something remote and over the horizon, not immediate, and as essentially an Act of God rather than an Act of Man, that there was nothing we could do about turbulence at a climatic level, it is kind of a given, regardless of what human beings do.

The real issue here is if you do the total carbon arithmetic of oil depletion and gas depletion and the non-depletion of coal, and also the emergence of these exotics, tar sands, deep water finds and so on, there clearly, in all categories, oil, coal and gas, is more than enough to fry the planet. I see now they are even talking about going into this Nazi programme, we did it in South Africa, converting coal into oil substitutes and so on. At this point, in one sense, the Greenpeace slogan comes to bear, “we’re not running out of oil, we’re running into it�, but the correct appreciation of that is that we are running out of oil but we’re not running out of it fast enough for it not to be a climate change issue.

I think a realistic reading of the future in terms of are we taking climate change seriously or not, requires an answer which says if we are taking this seriously we will have to cut through the known reserves, even the conventional crude reserves, never mind the exotics that are backing up behind it. A huge amount of money that is going to be invested in pursuing pipe dreams there could be better invested in programmes that are not contingent on the kind of growth delusion that is attached to all of that energy, frankly, fantasty, climate disaster.

That said, the confluence of the two still remains, for me, problematical, and what was Colin’s previous position is part of the problem, namely that relative to climate change, which was remote, the problem of oil depletion was immediate, in the sense that people felt the need to start planning for coping with peak more quickly than somehow taking account of planning for climate change. The psychology of preparing for peak, on the face of it, may appear similar, we’ll develop Transition Town Totnes programmes everywhere, local food, local production, local sustainable energy systems and so on, whatever it is, in the belief that doing this secures you against the consequences of oil depletion and, quote, you’re “OK�. It’s the last bit which is the problematical bit. You may be, against oil depletion, but you can definitely not make those assumptions about being OK vis-à-vis climate change.

You might for example, install renewable systems around the coast, not just dippy dodgy nuclear but wave power, and some infrastructure on the land at the tidal level, which could of course be quite easily overwhelmed not just by tidal surges but also by general sea level rise aggrevated by tidal surges.

The reason I’m saying all this is, its longwinded, but you need to come to a fundamental reading which is that in respect of climate change which is absolutely an elephant in the room as well, the watchword there is not trading/adaption versus mitigation and hoping somehow you can subdue this angry elephant, its realising you have, at all costs, to, number one, prevent the conditions for runaway climate change emerging, the edge of which we are already perilously close to.

At that point your perception of the oil depletion crisis is kind of changed, because, in a sense, it becomes your ally in the climate change debate, and you wouldn’t programme your Oil Depletion Protocol to do what Colin is actually saying, so you produce simply at the rate you are depleting, because if we burn all of that off it is quite impossible, even with that, you are running out of oil, but not fast enough not to be a climate change problem.