By Megan Quinn & Pat Murphy, The Community Solution
Community Service, Inc. is a 65 year-old organization that has advocated for small, local communities as the most ideal way for humans to live. Living in small community—that is, living within our ecosystems—is the only way we can achieve ecological sustainability, equity, democracy, and meaningful social interactions and relationships.
Unfortunately, the world went the other direction, and we have instead chosen industrialization, urbanization, and recently suburbanization due to cheap, abundant fossil fuels, particularly oil. The results are not good: environmental degradation, social alienation, and the highest inequity in history, to name a few. It is becoming clear that today we need to cultivate small, local communities as a way to live more than ever. Peak oil is an opportunity for us to do so.
THE PEAKING OF FOSSIL FUELS
The concept of peak oil does not refer to us running out of oil, natural gas, and coal, but to the point in time when fossil fuel production reaches its maximum and begins its irreversible decline towards exhaustion. This occurs when we have extracted about half the resource.
The peaking of production is really more important than when the resource runs out because what matters is how much we are producing relative to how much we are consuming. The peak will impact our society in remarkable ways. After the peak, fossil fuels will no longer be cheap and abundant, but scarce and expensive.
Peak oil is not a myth, not a theory. It is an observable geologic reality. The peaking phenomenon is being observed in every oil well, field, nation, and eventually the world. Today we are using 5 barrels of transportation oil for every barrel that we discover. In fact, world oil discoveries have been declining since the mid-1960s, despite great improvements in technology and higher prices to stimulate investment. Seventy percent of world oil production is coming from oil fields that were discovered prior to 1970. In fact, world oil production today is barely keeping up with consumption, which continues to rise about 2% per year and is expected to accelerate with the increasing demands of China and India.
While virtually all parties—including oil companies and government agencies—agree that there is eventually a peak, leading geologists, petroleum scientists, and investment banks are saying that we are at or near peak, with a growing consensus on the year 2008. Yet, there are many powerful forces denying peak oil. In August 2004, Shell Oil was fined $151 million dollars for deliberately misstating their reserves. Clearly, there are some strong political implications, and government and corporations are going to generate a lot of disinformation.
Why does peak oil matter? Because our society and way of life are entirely dependent on fossil fuel energy. For the past 150 years, we lived in an era of cheap and abundant oil, which have allowed economic growth, globalization, urban sprawl, and the development of industrial agriculture and virtually everything in our modern society.
HOW MUCH ENERGY ARE WE USING?
The simplest way to visualize the problem is to look at the graph below. The “Rest of the World” represents the 5.4 billion people that comprise 85% of the world’s population. We, in Canada and the U.S., use 8 times the energy that the rest of the world uses. Not only is this tremendous imbalance in energy consumption and the access that people have to energy going to be the source of great conflict, but our current energy consumption cannot continue in a post-peak oil world.
Our perspective is that peak oil is the turning point, and how we respond to it will determine the future of humanity. This is where the connection between peak oil and global warming comes in because sustainable solutions to global warming are the same as those to peak oil.
The implications of peak oil are so vast that people in our culture have no concept yet as to how to start dealing with the problem. People cannot conceive of the end of the North American way of life, otherwise called the consumer way of life, versus the community way of life. Lots and lots of programs are being funded to keep the fossil fuel way of life going. Huge amounts of money are being spent, but none of these are viable, and people cannot accept that yet. They actually cannot even open up to the conversation.
Yet we need to ask some honest questions: Is all of this energy consumption really making us happier? More healthy? More fulfilled? Is it making our communities stronger and safer? Is it bringing about a just and equitable world?
Mostly the opposite is the case. Our focus on consumption and materialism, made possible by cheap, abundant fossil fuels, is making us less happy, more isolated, less healthy, and less fulfilled. It is destroying local communities and local economies. It is the cause of increasing global inequity and geopolitical tensions.
As Dumbledore said to Harry Potter, “Dark and difficult times lie ahead. We must choose between what is right, and what is easy.” What is right, for us and for future generations, is conservation, the implementation of renewable energy, and decentralization into more self-sufficient regions and communities. This is the only way to avert the worst of global warming, and ensure not only a habitable future, but one that is cleaner, healthier, more equitable, and more fulfilling.
GAINING TRUE ENERGY INDEPENDENCE
Freedom from oil really means freedom from the system we have created with oil. Systems like industrial agriculture, a global economy, and an economy based on infinite growth. The implications of this freedom are profound, and represent the next chapter in the evolution of humanity.
To be free, we need to re-assess how we use energy and to what end, and how our socio-economic and cultural goals are considered within the ecological framework of our planet. Then we need to develop decentralized, locally-controlled renewable energy production for activities that further our vision of a just, sustainable world to hand down to future generations. This is freedom. Anything else is dependency.
This transition is not easy. We are all deeply entrenched in the dominant system—our incomes, our bank accounts, our increasing standards of living. We must first make the change ourselves, giving up our attachment to these unsustainable pursuits. Then we must work to create a new system, so that others can disengage from the dominant unsustainable, destructive paradigm, and connect to the new creative, sustainable, life-nourishing paradigm.
Thankfully, there are examples. Local economic development, alternative economics, local currencies, decentralized energy generation, community supported agriculture, cooperative social models, permaculture, and ecovillages are just a few.
We need to create a new kind of neighbourhood where people grow their own food, a ridesharing system that utilizes our current infrastructure, and retrofitting tools for the millions of existing buildings in this country.
The first step is to dramatically reduce our energy use at the individual, community, and national levels. Opportunities for decreasing waste and increasing efficiency are everywhere. Downscaling our economic activities to the local level will also save massive amounts of energy, especially in the production and distribution of food. At the same time, a commitment to the values of conservation, frugality, and simple living are needed.
This requires a cultural shift. We can start a movement to make conservation “cool.” Someday, instead of comparing the size of our houses and cars, transportation we will be comparing ecological footprints and average annual energy use. We will be showing off our gardens and our home-preserved foods. We will talk about how much better our lives have become since we started living with less.
BEWARE OF PANACEAS FOR PEAK OIL
It is only when we understand and accept that solutions based on increasing consumption are insufficient that we will be able to see clearly the path of viable solutions and ways of living. American writer Mark Twain once said, “It ain’t what you don’t know that gets you in trouble; it’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Today the average North American knows for sure that technology and human ingenuity will solve all of our problems and somehow keep industrial civilization going. Indeed, the belief in technology is almost a religion in our culture. These are illusions, along with the illusions of eternal progress and infinite growth.
Most solutions to the massive environmental destruction of our planet are offered as a miraculous panacea coming just in time to save us. They always depend on technology and market forces, are government and corporate-based, and usually require little if any action from individuals. The message is, “Don’t worry; scientists will come up with something.”
Our current system puts us in the role of helpless children, with experts taking care of us. This is very irresponsible. So we become increasingly dependent on centralized energy and resource production to maintain our consumptive ways. Soon we start to accept unending resource wars, oil sands development, carbon sequestration, biofuels—anything to keep the industrial system going because the fate of this system is now our fate. So instead of being treated like helpless children, we should start to be treated like adults, with the same honesty about the viability of the proposed solutions as we now are about the severity of the problems.
The issue, though, is not technology—it is really values. Our thinking has been for decades that “more is better,” and we have institutionalized the seven deadly sins, particularly greed. That has been in all our thinking and in all our values. We have had a complete disappearance of civic engagement or “social capital”— that is, a lack of involvement with friends, neighbours, and loss of community—because we drive long distances to work hard. We need to question the kind of world we have created and the kind of people we have become. When you look at the kind of monsters we are, we certainly are the kind who are not going to let anyone tell us we have to curtail.
One day we may look back and see when we had a chance to choose another future for our planet. That time is now. Peak oil is an opportunity to create a new culture that is life-nourishing instead of life-destroying, cooperative instead of competitive, based on generosity instead of greed, and values preservation rather than consumption.
“The Paradox of Our Age”
We have bigger houses but smaller families;
more conveniences, but less time;
We have more degrees, but less sense;
more knowledge, but less judgment;
more experts, but more problems;
more medicines, but less healthiness;
We’ve been all the way to the Moon and back,
but have trouble crossing the street to meet
the new neighbour.
We built more computers to hold more
information to produce more copies than ever,
but have less communication;
We have become long on quantity,
but short on quality.
These are times of fast foods
but slow digestion;
Tall man but short character;
Steep profits but shallow relationships.
It’s a time when there is much in the window,
but nothing in the room.
His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama
Megan Quinn Bachman 