The Weblog
This page contains news, event information, and other items added by Ian and Adam, the resident farmers at Old 99. We send out a message every week, but most are set with a delete date about two weeks later. I archive some of the posts if they have content other than weekly availability of produce and meat.
You can send me questions too, which if they are of a general nature, I can post to this Old99 blog.
Energy Update: 2015 could be it
Richard Heinberg has been researching and chronicling the consequences and trends of fossil fuel, Fossil Sunlight some call it, for 17 years now.
I started tuning in around 2003, when the term ‘Peak Oil’ was still new. That was 12 years ago.
Here is a recent short essay by Heinberg, posted at http://www.resilience.org/stories/2015-02-02/after-the-peak, from which I append two extensive quotes (in the likely event you don’t go read the whole thing). He poses three questions to focus our attention, included below.
Ironically, just as the rate of the world’s liquid fuels production may be about to crest the curve, we’re hearing that warnings of peak oil were wrongheaded all along. The world is in the midst of a supply glut and prices are declining, tireless resource optimists remind us. Surely this disproves those pessimistic prophets of peril! However, as long-time peakist commentator Ron Patterson notes:
Peak oil will be the point in time when more oil is produced than has ever been produced in the history of the world, or ever will be in the future of the world. It is far more likely that this period will be thought of as a time of an oil glut rather than a time of an oil shortage.Within a couple of years, those of us who have spent most of the past two decades warning about the approaching peak may see vindication by data, if not by public opinion.
If our main goal during the past 17 years was to alert the world about looming challenges, now it is to foster adaptation to fundamental shifts that are currently under way. The questions that need exploration now are:
- How can we help build resilience throughout society, starting locally, assuming we will have little or no access to the reins of national policy?
- How can we help society adapt to climate change while building a zero-emissions energy infrastructure?
- How can we help adapt society’s energy consumption to the quantities and qualities of energy that renewable sources will actually be able to provide?
We have to assume that this work will have to be undertaken in the midst of accelerating economic decay, ecological disruption, and periodic crises—far from ideal operating conditions.
On the other hand, there is the possibility that crisis could act in our favor. As their routines and expectations are disturbed, many people may be open to new explanations of their predicament and to new behaviors to help them adapt to energy and monetary poverty. Our challenge will be to frame unfolding events persuasively in ecological terms (energy, habitat, population) rather than conventional political terms (good guys, bad guys), and to offer practical solutions to the burgeoning everyday problems of survival—solutions that reduce ecological strains rather than worsening them. Our goal should not be to preserve industrial societies or middle-class lifestyles as we have known them (that’s impossible anyway), but to offer a “prosperous way down,” as Howard Odum put it, while preserving whatever cultural goods that can be salvaged and that deserve the effort.
As with our recent efforts to warn society about peak oil, there is no guarantee of success. But it’s what needs doing.