Peak Oil Activists Remain Optimistic Despite “Scary” Halloween Conference

ROCHESTER, Michigan – Peak oil activists from across the nation gathered on a college campus over the Halloween weekend to confront the scary prospects of declining worldwide oil production – and to focus on how they and their communities can cope.

Despite grave reports of imminent and permanent falloffs in oil production, combined with financial meltdown and climate instability, participants at the Fifth U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions left Oakland University with strategies to dramatically cut energy use – plus the optimism that they can accomplish much.

“People can find ways to lead happy, fulfilling lives even as this doomed system crumbles all around them,” Russian immigrant writer Dmitry Orlov told the 250 conference attendees at the longest running annual Peak Oil conference in North America, this year a joint effort of the Yellow Springs, Ohio-based Community Solutions and the Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center outside Detroit.

Other speakers offered ways to make needed lifestyle changes – from creating household self-reliance to securing water supplies and increasing soil fertility, to saving gasoline with innovative ridesharing solutions using cell phones and the internet, to cutting utility bills by retrofitting homes to use 80 percent less energy and installing solar hot water systems. Community-level strategies were offered with presentations on creating resilient communities and forming Transition Towns, a community process for economic re-localization which started in England.

Pat Murphy, executive director of Community Solutions, said that cooperating, sharing and curtailing in community must triumph over competing, hoarding and consuming. “Consumerism took our souls, but community will return them,” Murphy said.

Murphy, author of Plan C: Community Survival Strategies of Peak Oil and Climate Change, focused on our severe economic challenges. He said that while Peak Oil could mean a slow decline in our standard of living and climate change could eventually make the planet uninhabitable for humans, we now also face a financial crisis that may require involuntary and immediate curtailment of energy and resource use.

Orlov described the five stages of economic collapse underway in America today. He noted that the financial collapse has already begun with the disintegrating credit pyramids and the bailout treadmill, in which foreigners either buy our debt or its monetized causing hyperinflation. He said the signs of commercial and political collapse are also becoming clear, as global shipping slows and big box retailers struggle, and states experience major budget shortfalls and slash programs.

“Customer service comes to mean that customers must provide a service,” Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects, said of a fast approaching time when skills mean more than money. He also foresees shifts in consumption from “all you can eat” to “all you can scrounge” and from buying new products to the mantra of “keep it running.”

Orlov touched on the importance of community in concluding that we can avoid social and cultural collapse, but it will require that people extend personal virtues of generosity, compassion, and charity beyond family and friends to a wider circle “who matter to us, and we to them.”

Author John Michael Greer suggested to participants that a “window of opportunity” was opening for the Peak Oil movement, in which we can re-define what’s practical, possible, and necessary for survival. He said that similar opportunities arose during the Great Depression and in the 1970s oil crises.

He said that this led in the 1930s to the government adopting previously radical ideas, such as government insurance of bank deposits, social security, and legalized labor unions, and in the 1970s to recycling, organic agriculture, appropriate technology and alternative energy.

Greer, author of a just-released book, The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age, argued that highly volatile oil markets with record high price spikes has helped to shift the energy discussion. He quoted former US Energy Secretary James Schlesinger’s famous comment that America has only two modes of response to energy issues – complacency and panic. He said that Peak Oil activists have gotten use to complacency as a way of life and forgot, “how quickly panic can take hold and get very large numbers of people thinking about the unthinkable in a hurry.”

Greer ended his talk with an inspiring possibility: “The grandchildren of our grandchildren will tell their grandchildren stories about this time, the time when everything changed. And what each one of us does this weekend, and in the months and years that follow, has the power to shape those stories far into the future.”

Peter Bane, editor of Permaculture Activist, advised how to increase household and community self-reliance, such as by securing and storing water supplies, using humanure to increase the fertility of depleted soils, utilizing weeds for medicinal purposes, and sharing our houses. “The quickest way to reduce our ecological footprint is to share things,” he said, adding that while the previous period in human history was about moving away due to the availability of cheap energy, the next period will be about returning home, where “your help and warmth is needed.”

Food activist Chris Bedford talked about how to get communities to use local, organic food as an economic development strategy and persuade schools to purchase healthy, local food. He stressed the importance of organic agriculture, which is equally productive as conventional agriculture in good times, but twice as productive during droughts. He foresees organic farming as the high knowledge job of the 21st Century, and a coming identity crisis for conventional farmers when they realize they don’t know how to grow food without fossil fuels.

John Richter, from the Institute for Sustainable Energy Education, gave an overview of renewable energy. He said that despite great potential, renewable energy constitutes only a small percentage of US energy production, is more expensive than fossil fuels, and provides only intermittent power. Richter cited subsidies misdirected into fossil fuel production as a continuing challenge and concluded that renewable energy is only a partial solution. “Curtailment, or at least serious conservation, is also needed,” he said.

Passive House specialist Katrin Klingenberg discussed her vision for reducing home energy use by up to 90 percent through continuous insulation, air tightness, optimal solar orientation and shading, and the use of thermal breaks, which reduces heat loss through highly conductive materials. “These create steady indoor temperatures that won’t drop below 50 degrees without a heating source,” she said, explaining that her own Passive House is so efficient that she can heat it with a hairdryer.

Several innovative post-Peak Oil transportation schemes were proposed at the conference. A short-term solution, which uses the existing infrastructure of roads and cars, was the “Avego” shared transport system, a new service that aims to fill empty car seats through GPS technology, cell phones and web services. Sail boating was presented as a long-term utility which requires little maintenance or industrial infrastructure, and since its energy source is wind, is truly sustainable.

Localization activist Michael Brownlee presented the Transition Towns model as a way for people to work in their communities towards re-localizing production of food and other goods, plus services. He quoted Transition model creator Rob Hopkins, who defined the Transition movement as a “creative, engaging, playful process, wherein we support our communities through the loss of the familiar and inspire and create a new lower energy infrastructure which is ultimately an improvement on the present.” Among the “resilience indicators” for communities that he proposed were the percentage of food produced locally, the ratio of car parking space to productive land use, and the number of 16-year-olds able to grow 10 different varieties of vegetables.

Community Solutions Outreach Director Megan Quinn Bachman described her vision of a community economy, in which essential needs are met close to home and security is not defined by how much money we accumulate, but in the acquisition of valuable skills, the support of neighbors, and the maintenance of healthy, diverse, and productive habitats. Voluntary changes and sharing resources will be critical, she said, warning of the dire implications of fierce resource competition during an energy decline.

Author and Peak Oil educator Richard Heinberg, speaking via webcast, said it was important to act from the bottom up because power holders enthralled to their vested interests won’t lead the transition to lower energy use. He called for developing crisis management and disaster response programs and contingency plans to deal with coming economic hardship. “We need a way to circumvent political polarization and revitalize culture while addressing the immediate economic crisis,” he said. “Now is the time for alternative movements to stop being alternative,” Heinberg concluded. “We need to become the mainstream.”

Participants left Oakland University inspired to put what they had learned to cut energy use to work. One described the conference as a “kick in the butt” to get moving and another said, “I realized the power that resides in my own choices and the decisions of my own community.”

George Perkins, a participant from Louisville, KY, echoed a similar view of the need for both personal and community empowerment. “This conference reinforced a sense of urgency to make significant personal changes and raise awareness in my community,” he said.

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Peak oil activists gather, plan for hard times, will lead the way

YELLOW SPRINGS, OHIO – Former professor and author David Korten told close to 300 applauding peak oil activists that they are not a fringe minority but the leading edge of a super-majority “and it’s time we start acting like it.”

Korten issued his rallying call in October at the “Fourth U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions” where activists from 30 some states discussed ways to respond to declining oil production and other coming planetary woes. Korten joined a dozen other speakers in “Planning for Hard Times,” the theme of the three-day conference sponsored by Community Solution at Antioch College.

“The day of reckoning for our profligate ways has arrived,” Korten said. “Peak oil, climate chaos, exhaustion of freshwater, species extinction, financial collapse, and social disintegration are causing a great unraveling.” Now is the time, Korten said, for a great turning from a 5000-year history of empire, driven today by a suicidal competition over the earth’s remaining resources, to a cooperative earth community which shares resources to maintain healthy communities, families and natural systems.

Korten, author of The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, said that empire “elevates the most power-hungry and ethically challenged to the highest positions of power.” And the former Harvard University business professor, also author of When Corporations Rule the World, said the corporations that perpetuate this empire system are best described as “gigantic pools of money with artificial legal personalities and required by law to behave like sociopaths.”

Korten cited opinion polls showing 90 percent of Americans believe that large corporations have too much power and more than 80 percent want to see greater priority given to the needs of children, family, communities, and a healthy environment. And he described economic growth as an engine of environmental destruction which also increases the income gap between rich and poor, with the need instead to focus on living better with less (negative economic growth) and moving toward equality through redistribution of wealth from rich to poor.

Other speakers promoted cooperation and community to create local sustainable businesses, turn millions of Americans into local farmers, and find ways to reduce energy use in housing, transportation and food production.

“It’s about creating a new society, and it begins with us,” said Pat Murphy, executive director of Community Solution, which organizes the annual conference. This need for a societal transition was a continuing conference theme.

“During the lifetime of the boomer generation, roughly half the world’s important non-renewable resources will have been used up…forever,” said Richard Heinberg, a leading peak oil educator and author of The Party’s Over, Powerdown and more recently Peak Everything. Heinberg said this will lead to less available energy, more labor needed in agriculture, widespread relocation of people and a massive replacement of infrastructure.
And he asked: “How do we accomplish this enormous societal reorganization without chaotic breakdown?”

Start with personal solutions, Heinberg said, adding “adjust your own oxygen mask before helping others.” He suggested working locally and regionally because “higher levels of administration may not be in a position to help much with local needs.”
But, he warned, without national and international agreements, irreversible ecosystem collapse is likely.

“There is no hope for a soft landing, business as usual…normal life as we’ve come to know it,” Heinberg said. “So get ready for hard times,” he said. “If it’s not too late,” Heinberg concluded, “what we do now will determine whether the outcome is desirable or merely survivable.”

Homeowner Larry Halpern’s personal account of dramatically curtailing his energy use illustrated this potential. “I don’t wish to see other people suffer because I was unwilling to be inconvenienced and I don’t wish to suffer later because I didn’t have the time for an inconvenience now,” he said.

After learning about peak oil in 2004 and being disillusioned with traditional activism, Larry said he and his wife, Gail, decided to “take a time out trying to change the world, and focus a little more on trying to change ourselves.”

Thanks mostly to behavior changes and do-it-yourself projects in their Springfield, Ohio home, over the next four years they reduced electricity use from around 400 kilowatt hours per month to 36 kWh, cut natural gas use by a third, and lowered water use by a factor of five.

Halpern observed “no electricity days” and removed his energy-guzzling air conditioner and refrigerator. He then replaced some of his appliances with low-energy alternatives, including a solar cooker, an LED reading light, solar battery re-chargers and a composting toilet.

The couple, both professional musicians, also ate exclusively from their own garden, a Community Supported Agriculture subscription farm, the local farmers’ market and a food cooperative.

“When people are presented with the big picture of peak oil they often get overwhelmed and close off,” Halpern said. “I’ve decided to focus less on trying to get people to see things my way and more on just trying to help them live more sustainably and cooperatively.”

Another speaker with a post-peak oil way of life was Judy Wicks, restaurant owner and co-founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and the Sustainable Business Network of Philadelphia. Her Philadelphia restaurant, The White Dog Café, is a model for just, local, sustainable business.

The café sources all produce in season from local organic family farms, uses only humanely raised meat and poultry and gets all fish and seafood from sustainable fisheries. Wind power generates much of the cafe’s electricity, the first business in Pennsylvania to do so. Entry-level employees make a minimum living wage.

“Business is about relationships with everyone we buy from and sell to, and work with, and about our relationship with Earth itself,” Wicks said. “We’ve become disconnected from each other and from our places and without direct relationships, few of us think about the consequences of our economic transactions.”

Wicks said that “business has been corrupted as an instrument of greed rather than one of service to the common good. Yet we know that business is beautiful when we put our creativity and care into producing a product or service needed by our community.”

Sharon Astyk, author of the forthcoming book A Nation of Farmers, shared Wicks’ vision of creating sustainable local food economies. She said the United States needs 50 million farmers and 200 million home cooks. “We need to get everyone back in the kitchen,” Astyk said, citing statistics that show one out of every three meals in the U.S. is from a fast food place and only 80 percent of Americans own a frying pan.

Murphy, from Community Solution, also went on to emphasize eating a low-energy diet, including less grain-fed meat and manufactured foods, where 15 to 30 calories of fossil fuel energy are used to produce each calorie of food energy.

Among the other detrimental effects of our industrial food system, according to Murphy, are poor health, tortured animals, lack of crop diversity, deteriorating soil, poisoned waterways, and the drawdown of “fossil” water. He compared this to a more agrarian country, China, where 38 percent of the people are in agriculture, and where they generate six times the amount of calories per acre compared to the United States while conserving their soil.

Murphy also discussed lifestyle changes in transportation and housing, pointing out that Americans annually generate 20 tons of carbon dioxide per person while the International Panel on Climate Change estimates the limit should be one ton per capita.

Bob Steinbach, a Dayton-area transportation planner shared ways to reduce transportation fuel through ridesharing while Linda Wigington of Affordable Comfort, Inc. explained how to reduce the energy use of existing buildings.

With suburbia’s low population density, motor vehicles are the most viable short-term transportation option, Steinbach said. He added that Community Solution’s “Smart Jitney” proposal, a ridesharing scheme using cell phones, is important because, “fuller cars mean fewer cars, which means less oil is needed.”

Steinbach discussed the biggest obstacle to the success of ridesharing programs –willing passengers. “The mindset has to change,” said Steinbach, noting that the privacy and flexibility of driving alone currently trump the environmental and financial benefits of sharing rides.

Wigington discussed “deep retrofit” strategies for existing homes to cut their energy use by 80 percent, using a standard called the “Passive House.” The principles of this German-based model include tight, super-insulated homes, with a thick building “envelope” and high performance windows and doors.

“Our housing is facing a crisis of obsolescence,” Wigington said, “and we have a lion share of existing houses that need to be dealt with to reduce energy in the near term.”

Wigington said home energy use is not just a function of appliances or the structure. “How a family lives in a house has a major impact on it,” she said.

Another speaker who emphasized a fundamental societal change was Thomas Princen, author of The Logic of Sufficiency. “One of the dominant principles of our economy, efficiency, is not up to the task of dealing with peak oil and climate change,” he said.

Princen described efficiency as the basis of an economic order where raw materials are extracted rapidly and thoroughly, converted into products people buy, and disposed of in the least costly and visible manner possible.

In contrast to claims that we can “grow our economy with green products and pollute more efficiently” Princen said that efficiency too easily leads to more consumption, not less, and sufficiency, which is geared toward curtailing excess, would be more useful.

Participants returned to their communities with both a framework for widespread change and the practical strategies to reduce their personal and local energy use. “This has become a special core community to serve the formation of the new world that’s being created next in the midst of total breakdown and crisis around us,” said participant Peter Jones of nearby Dayton.

Eric Morrison of Battle Creek, Michigan, said, “Now I have a path to take and…to show others the way too.”

Read at Energy Bulletin

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Peak oil meeting looks at local level

By Lauren Heaton

As major contributors to world oil depletion and climate change, Americans eat more, drive more and demand more living space than any other society. By learning how to eat locally, ride-share more efficiently and live in less energy-consuming spaces, individuals as well as communities can become part of the answer to these problems. “Planning for Hard Times,” the fourth U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions to be held at Antioch College this Friday to Sunday, Oct. 26 to 28, will explore how the small community can model massive lifestyle change in the areas of food, housing and transportation.

The critical nature of the small community as a solution to the fuel and climate change crises becomes clearer each year, at least to those at The Community Services, Inc., who sponsor the annual Peak Oil conference. When the conferences began in 2004, the focus was on what peak oil was, when it would occur and how it might affect the country and the world.

But events in recent years, according to Community Solution outreach director Megan Quinn Bachman and representative Faith Morgan, have revealed a more dire picture of the decline in world oil reserves, evidenced by the rise in oil prices, which hit an all-time high of 89 dollars per barrel this month. The pollution caused by the world’s rising use of fuel has led to a climate change crisis that has already manifested in the monstrous hurricanes in 2005 and the melting of the polar ice caps, they believe.

According to figures from the Community Solution, while the production of just one ton of CO2 emissions per person each year in the U.S. would be sustainable, currently the U.S. produces 20 tons of CO2 per person.

“‘Planning for Hard Times’ is stating boldly that we are facing some challenging times ahead, and we need to develop practical skills to change the way we approach food, housing and transportation,” Quinn said. “We’re going to need drastic cuts, on the order of 90 to 95 percent reduction in energy use, in order to avoid the kind of crisis that is consuming.”

By preparing now, said Morgan, creator of the film The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, communities can avoid what will be a devastating collapse of the worldwide manufacturing and transportation systems we currently rely on for nearly all of our needs. We will also need to reduce our carbon emissions by 90 percent by 2050 to avoid the climate change that also threatens us.

The change will involve moving the institutions that ground the current American lifestyle. Regarding the way we eat, according to the Community Solution Web site, the average American is accustomed to being able to choose from 300,000 food and beverage items based in large part on manufactured variations of wheat, corn sweeteners, hydrogenated soybean oil and a spectrum of artificial flavors. The current food industry, for every one calorie consumed, requires 10 calories of energy to process and transport the food from the manufacturing site to its destination.

The Community Solution’s new food model, which would alleviate dependence on fuel, includes rebuilding local agriculture into the community, through local crop fields, orchards and vegetable gardens, as well as reinstituting canning and saving for the winter months.

As for housing, homes are the biggest single source of energy consumption, and given the 100 million homes that already exist, retrofitting by installing energy-efficient windows, reinforcing insulation, damming air leaks and installing energy-efficient appliances is the more effective way of reducing energy consumption in the home. Transportation too must embrace a new system known at the “smart Jitney,” or ride-share system coordinated through cell phones, the Internet and GPS and utilizing private vehicles, according to the Web site.

Speaking at the conference this year is internationally known author David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule the World and more recently The Great Turning: From Empire to Earth Community, a look at how corporate consolidation models the rise of empires, which create “fortune for the few and misery for the many,” according to Korten’s personal Web site.

Korten will give the keynote talk on Friday evening, from 7:30 to 9 p.m., on The Great Turning, which outlines the morally imperative choice people have to transition from a dominator society to one that functions through partnership and cooperation. According to Quinn, that way of living would necessitate more sustainable practices and a return to the local community.

Thomas Princen is associate professor of natural resources and environmental policy at the University of Michigan and the author of The Logic of Sufficiency, his second publication about seeking enough when more is possible. The book addresses how to live well when resources are running low without sacrifice or suffering by relying on group principles. Princen’s first book, Confronting Consumption, won the 2003 International Studies Association Award for best work in international environmental politics. He will give Saturday night’s address from 7 to 8:30 p.m.

Returning to the conference this year to speak is world-renowned peak oil educator Richard Heinberg, a research fellow of the Post Carbon Institute and faculty member of New College of California where he teaches a program on “Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community.” Other speakers include Linda Wigington, Affordable Comfort Inc.’s manager of program design and development, Judy Wicks, founder of the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies, author Sharon Astyk, and area residents Bob Steinbach and Larry Halpern.

The cost to attend the conference (after the early registration discount) is $200 for Community Solution members, $225 for nonmembers and $145 for students, all of which includes Saturday’s lunch and dinner and Sunday’s lunch. Yellow Springs residents are also invited to attend single sessions for $10 per session.

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Proposing Plan C: Report on the Third US Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions

Yellow Springs, Ohio – Participants at the Third U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions learned how they must use less energy, save and share resources and grow food in their communities.

This response to the coming peak and permanent decline of global oil production, dubbed “Plan C: Curtailment, Cooperation, and Community,” was a major theme at the conference last month in this small southwestern Ohio town, the epicenter for a growing national movement.

More than 300 activists, educators and others from 33 states attended the three-day conference at Antioch College to hear from nationally-known experts on ways to meet food, housing, transportation and other needs in an energy-starved world through lifestyle changes – not promised technologies.

At the conference, participants learned energy-saving tips, other practical strategies and new perspectives and visions of a post-Peak Oil world.

“The food to feed the world is not going to come from farmers — it will come from everyone,” said Peter Bane, an expert in designing sustainable food production systems, including food gardens and edible landscapes.

Other experts included simple living guru Vicki Robin, author of the best selling Your Money or Your Life, who talked about living fully on far less energy; Oberlin College Professor David Orr, who discussed the obstacles posed by corporate power in confronting Peak Oil and climate change, and Peak Oil educator Richard Heinberg, who talked about his latest book, The Oil Depletion Protocol, a plan to avert oil wars and economic collapse.

The conference, subtitled, “Beyond Energy Alternatives,” was organized by The Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, a non-profit organization based in Yellow Springs which promotes local, low-energy solutions to Peak Oil and climate change.

Pat Murphy, the non-profit’s executive director, spoke about Community Solution’s Plan C, contrasting it to more traditional efforts which focus on competition over remaining resources and more technology as a way to try to maintain increasing energy consumption and economic growth.

“We are no longer attracted by the siren singers of breakthrough technologies that promise us we can continue living in a manner that denies a future for our children,” Murphy told conference participants.

“The solutions are not going to come from the same people who created the problem,” Murphy said. “The answers are not in the corporations of technology but in the villages and neighborhoods.”

Murphy’s theme was echoed by Bane, who zeroed in on the need for local, low-energy food production and consumption to replace energy-devouring long-distance transport of processed and packaged food. “Who feeds you and who do you feed will be the central questions for the next few decades,” said Bane, publisher of the quarterly magazine, Permaculture Activist.

“Going beyond conserving, permaculture aims to turn people who are now consumers into producers, making them independent of a centralizing authority that is increasingly derelict,” Bane said.

Bane estimated that lawns in the U.S. could feed 70 to 150 million people, and would “pull the guts out of agribusiness.” He emphasized “top-down thinking and bottom-up action” to take the economy back into the household and become domestically self-reliant.

Bane expounded on the tremendous opportunity to use the remaining finite fossil fuels to build a sustainable low-energy infrastructure, and give a lasting gift to future generations.

Sharon Astyk, a back-to-the-land activist known through her posts on the Yahoo internet discussion group “Running on Empty,” shared Bane’s vision of a local agricultural revolution.

“Before the industrial revolution it took six people farming full time to support one person doing something else. If fossil fuels and industrial agriculture aren’t going to feed the world … how are we going to feed them?” Astyk said.

“I felt if not me, who? If not now, when? And if we need a 100 million new farmers, I guess I’d better be one,” said Astyk, who runs a Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) subscription farm in upstate New York which delivers vegetables weekly to its members.

Astyk called on participants to see themselves as part of a revolution. “Most revolutions start with many fewer people than are gathered in this conference hall,” she said. Coming out from behind the lecturn, she said, “I am not thin, I am not athletic. If I can do it, every one of you can do it!”

“We can’t just consume our way out of this one. You can’t just join the CSA, you can’t just buy organic. More is going to be asked of every single one of us,” Astyk said.

Simplicity movement leader Robin encouraged participants, in the words of Mahatma Gandhi, “to be the change they wish to see in the world.”

“Simplicity is about having enough and living frugally with a high joy to stuff ratio,” Robin said. “It is living a life that is outwardly simple, and inwardly rich and where we live simply so that others may simply live.”

Of those in the Peak Oil awareness movement, Robin said, “You are the people who are engaging the conversation of our time. Even though the critique is very severe there is a background sense of delight that we’re up against it, that we can do better than before.”

“Some people call this the ‘doom-and-gloom crowd,’ but I haven’t seen that. I call it the ‘creative engagement with the ultimate limits’ crowd,” Robin said. She described limits as the shaping tools of freedom, even though many Americans think that freedom is having no limits.

Robin claimed that 25 percent of Americans want to live a more simple life. She suggested that those in the Peak Oil awareness movement appeal to people’s desire for self reliance, not be afraid to talk about values with them, and work to solve systemic problems in such sectors as the “sickness care industry,” that hinder efforts to live simply.

In the conference’s opening talk, Professor Orr, a pioneer of environmental literacy and ecological design at Oberlin, focused on the risks of inaction in the face of Peak Oil and climate change. He discussed the melting glaciers and ice sheets that foretell of rising global sea levels by up to 20 feet in the next few decades and the rising global temperatures that suggest a rapidly unstable and unpredictable climate. He cited a World Health Organization statement that global climate change now causes more than 150,000 deaths per year.

Orr said the challenge is to reduce global carbon emissions from 8.5 billion metric tons of carbon per year to less than 3 by 2050 — which he described as a daunting task for a growing global population with an ever-increasing appetite for energy.

Still, according to Orr, there remains another major challenge in dealing with climate change and Peak Oil: confronting corporate power. He quoted Thomas Jefferson as saying, “I hope we shall crush in its birth the aristocracy of our moneyed corporations which dare already to challenge our government to a trial of strength.”

As Orr sees it, despite Jefferson’s hope, today’s corporations, now blessed with personhood and citizenship rights granted by the U.S. Supreme Court, have immense power over government and society. With nearly total control over the major media, corporations, Orr said, manipulate the public to overconsume through advertisements which appeal to infantile self-gratification.

Orr proposed to re-frame political dialogue from liberal and conservative. “The real dividing line is how we relate to future generations,” Orr said. “Those on the left and right of the political spectrum need to work together.”

“The challenges of Peak Oil and climate change aren’t just a matter of technology or politics,” Orr said. “They are a test of our heart and our goodness. When we get to the post-peak world after we’ve stabilized carbon and protected the rights of future generations, it needs to be a world of compassion and joy, a lot better than it has been.”

Murphy, Community Solution’s executive director, said in his talk, “Plan C: Curtailment, Cooperation, and Community,” that the solution to Peak Oil is to conserve, share and save resources — not compete for them, hoard them and overconsume them. He contrasted “Plan C” with what he described as Plan A and Plan B.

“Plan A is to find alternative fuels like clean coal, tar sands, and oil shale. Plan B is to use wind, solar, and biofuels,” Murphy said. “Both assume technology will save us and that we must increase economic growth by increasing energy consumption.”

“Yet the results of an economic model based upon increasing consumption aren’t good,” Murphy said. “With high crime rates, record high incarceration, continuing environmental degradation, soil depletion, growing inequity, deteriorating health, and the loss of civic engagement and community, we need a better way.”

Murphy gave strategies for a Plan C lifestyle in the key areas of food, housing, and transportation. For food, he suggested participants eat less, avoid manufactured food and industrial meat, and grow, prepare, and store their own food. For transportation, he recommended buying more efficient cars, including hybrids, and sharing rides. Housing strategies included living in a smaller space, retrofitting homes by increasing insulation and replacing or covering windows, and upgrading to more energy-efficient lighting and appliances.

Peak Oil educator Heinberg noted that oil production is now in decline in 33 of the 48 largest oil-producing countries and that Chris Skebrowski, editor of the highly respected UK Petroleum Review, now says it is his gut feeling that worldwide oil production may peak in 2008.

Heinberg then criticized the much-touted anti-Peak Oil argument that there have been many incorrect predictions of oil production crashing throughout the 20th century. “In fact, false predictions of abundance have been much more common,” Heinberg said.

Heinberg cited as an example the U.S. Department of Energy’s International Energy Outlook 2001 which stated,  “The United Kingdom is expected to produce about 3.1 million barrels/day by the middle of this decade (~2005), followed by a decline to 2.7 mb/d by 2020.” But, Heinberg said, the actual production peak was in 1999 at 2.68 mb/d, which fell to 1.65 mb/d by 2005.

Heinberg dismissed the idea that Peak Oil is a fringe concept, noting recent comments by former President Bill Clinton on Peak Oil and a New York Times associate editor stating, “The concept of Peak Oil has not been widely written about. But people are talking about it now. It deserves a careful look–largely because it is almost certainly correct.”

Heinberg also talked about his most recent book, The Oil Depletion Protocol: A Plan to Avert Oil Wars, Terrorism and Economic Collapse. “We need an agreement to gradually reduce oil consumption in order to discourage competition, stabilize prices, aid with planning and preparation, and protect the resource base,” he said.

Heinberg compared the emphasis today on developing alternative energy sources such as wind and solar power to heroin addicts lining the shelves with methadone instead of reducing their heroin use.

“How about if we just start using less oil? That’s the only thing that’s going to make any difference, because as long as we’re lining the shelves with alternatives we’re going keep increasing our oil consumption,” Heinberg said.

“So the Oil Depletion Protocol goes straight to the problem and says that each nation shall aim to reduce oil consumption by at least the world depletion rate,” Heinberg said. He explained that the protocol can be implemented by organizations and individuals who assess their current oil consumption and plan to reduce the total by three percent per year.

“I realized the best way for me to feel less fear about the coming crisis is to follow the ideas of the Oil Depletion Protocol as an individual,” conference attendee Kelley O’Connor of Sterling, Massachusetts said. “In a way, I have already been following it, I just haven’t been measuring it,” she continued, “and if I can see a number, I can feel like I’m making progress towards using less energy.”

Julian Darley, founder and director of the Vancouver-based Post Carbon Institute, offered strategies at the community level for “global relocalization” as a response to Peak Oil. Darley summarized his strategy as “Reduce Consumption: Produce Locally.”

“All civilizations are built on surplus.” Darley said. “What happens as that surplus reduces or even becomes non-surplus?” he asked. He described humanity as being in ecological overshoot of the earth’s carrying capacity, and suggested that relocalization will help humanity return to a “safe carrying capacity” well within its ecological limits. “We need to move from great surplus to sufficient — from, abundance to enough,” Darley said.

Post Carbon’s Relocalization Network, with 122 “outposts” throughout the world, offers support, knowledge, and tools for communities to produce more food, energy, and other necessities locally, move from a fuel to a foot economy, and relocalize currency, governance, and culture.

Darley highlighted other Post Carbon initiatives, including an energy farm, its internet broadcasting station Global Public Media, a proposal for community supported manufacturing and energy, and a citizens toolkit to work with municipalities to pass a Peak Oil resolution, form a Peak Oil task force, and sign on to the Oil Depletion Protocol.

Going deeper into the details of Plan C, Community Solution board member and University of Dayton physics professor Bob Brecha described his recently-built straw bale house. The Yellow Springs house has a solar hot water heater, radiant floor heating system, earth plaster, and passive solar features. “Straw bale construction has low operating energy use, low embodied energy because of using waste, local and recycled materials, and involves the community,” Brecha said.

Brecha gave participants practical tips for saving energy in housing. Along with building low-embodied energy buildings such as straw bale houses, he suggested, “Insulate, insulate, insulate, use renewable energy, build smaller and fewer houses, change lighting, and heat and cool to less extreme temperatures.”

“Setting back by 2°F during the day and 10°F during the night would save approximately 15 percent on heating energy,” Brecha said. He urged participants to get a home energy audit from a growing field of “home energy doctors” to help them retrofit for energy efficiency.

Housing expert Jeff Christian of the Building Technology Center at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee explained his experience with five “zero energy” homes and dozens of different kinds of construction materials. “Each home has a simple house plan, is 50 percent more energy efficient than the typical home, includes a two-kilowatt solar array for electricity, and is constructed using structurally-insulated panels,” according to Christian. Other energy saving features include geothermal heat pumps, high performance windows, and air-tight houses.

For retrofitting existing homes, Christian encouraged participants to get a home energy inspection. Because the largest energy use in a home is space heating, which uses 30 percent of the total energy, Christian suggested adding insulation in the attics, walls, and floors, caulking and weather-stripping windows, sealing all ducts, setting back thermostats and considering window replacements. He also suggested upgrading appliances to energy-efficient refrigerators, front-loading washers, and compact fluorescent light bulbs.

Richard Olson, an environmental studies professor at Berea College in Kentucky, shared the energy-saving strategies of the Berea College Ecovillage which include a community-wide sewage processing plant called an “ecological machine,” an underground rainwater collection cistern and community composting. The homes were built with structurally-insulated panels utilizing a passive solar design. One residence, the Sustainability House, has an attached greenhouse to treat water from the sinks and showers, maintains a composting toilet, and gets all of its electricity from solar photovoltaic panels. “If we’re to have a future economy, the primary energy source will be the sun,” Olson said.

Olson talked about other sustainability initiatives at the college, where, he said, “students, staff, and faculty are transforming their campus into an institution that can survive the coming perfect storm of Peak Oil and climate change.” He said they are retrofitting campus buildings for energy efficiency, developing a local food initiative to promote a sustainable food system in Berea, and creating educational programs on sustainability.

Olson also emphasized personal responsibility. “We need to start looking at what we can control and how our actions as consumers impact other people,” he told conference participants. “Unless you translate what you learn here into action, then it wasn’t worth the fossil fuels used to get you here.”

Olson left participants with a quote from 19th century nature writer Henry David Thoreau as they contemplated returning to their communities to integrate the conference’s lessons into their lives and work: “Though I do not believe that a plant will spring up where no seed has been planted, I have faith in a seed. Convince me that you have a seed there, and I am prepared to expect wonders.”

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Hundreds come to village for 2nd peak oil conference

By Diane Chiddister

Over the weekend Yellow Springs hosted the largest conference on peak oil in the world to date, according to Pat Murphy, executive director of Community Solution, which sponsored the second “U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions.” The conference took place Friday through Sunday in Kelly Hall on the Antioch College campus.

“The knowledge of peak oil has arrived and is spreading through the country like wildfire,” Murphy said on Monday. “People are no longer talking about what it is. They’re forming activist groups all over the country.”

Peak oil is the point when world oil production begins to decline. Estimates vary as to its probable date, but they currently range from the end of this year to 2015, with a likely date of around 2007, according to Megan Quinn, outreach director of Community Solution, which is a program of Community Service, Inc. Experts estimate that peak oil, with declining fuel supplies and resulting instability in prices for oil and gas, will lead to significant disruption in the American lifestyle. Increased fuel prices, government reports acknowledging the likelihood of peak oil and concern over the effects of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on oil supplies have sparked new interest in the topic, Quinn said.

The conference attracted almost twice as many participants as last year, Murphy said. The 360 participants hailed from 39 states and five foreign countries. Some participants are already involved in the sustainability movement, in areas such as intentional communities or co-housing, but most represented a broad spectrum of society, Murphy said.

“It was a tremendous mix of people,” Murphy said. “There were teachers, professors and in general a wide mix of concerned citizens at professional and activist levels.”

People who attended the conference do not think that government will respond in a timely way to the pending crisis, according to Murphy. “People think they have to fix it themselves,” he said.

One first-time participant, Phillip Bogdonoss of Washington, D.C., said he came to the conference because he has become increasingly interested in the peak oil issue, and the Yellow Springs conference is the only one that focused on community-based solutions to the issue.

An obvious response to a decline in fuel supplies is that more people will choose to live in smaller communities to decrease the amount of money they spend on transportation to work, school or shopping, Murphy said. That likelihood has given a spotlight to the benefits of living in a small community, and fits in well with the philosophy of Arthur Morgan, who founded Community Service in 1940 to promote small community living, Murphy said.

“That message resonates with the people who came to our conference,” Murphy said.

The value and necessity of living in a small, self-sustaining community when oil supplies decline was one of the messages presented by Jan Lundberg, who gave a talk on “Changing Our Lives and the Direction of Society” on Saturday afternoon. Lundberg, the former editor of “The Lundberg Letter,” an oil industry analysis, is the director of the nonprofit organization Culture Change, which publishes a newsletter on the collapse of petroleum civilization.

Lundberg, who lives in California, forecast a “complete economic collapse” after peak oil hits, because “energy dependency is shot through our daily lives.”

“It will amount to a new culture,” he said of the post-peak oil society. “There will be a lot of upheaval and painful change.”

Lundberg described the projected energy crisis not as peak oil but as “petro-collapse.” Lundberg said that he foresees a sudden societal disruption as fuel supplies dwindle, along with public disorder, failure of goods and services and economic collapse.

“The transition may be rapid,” he said.

Those who fare best will be people who have prepared for the fuel shortage by living together in small communities, growing their own food and becoming self-sufficient to meet their daily needs, he said.

“We’re going to have to relocalize and contract,” he said.

As part of his talk, Lundberg presented a short film, “The Synthetic Sea,” about the effects on wildlife of small pieces of plastic that have been dumped, or found their way, into the ocean. Fish and birds often eat the plastic, which they may mistake for plankton, the film said. Recent research has shown that there are six pounds of plastic pieces in the ocean to every one pound of plankton.

Fish and birds that consume plastic have high levels of TCBs in their tissues, which cause illness and a disruption in reproductive systems, according to the film.

“We have a public health catastrophe that people don’t want to face,” Lundberg said after the film.

Other conference speakers included Richard Heinberg, author of The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies; Michael Shuman, the author of Going Local: Creating Self-Reliant Communities in a Global Age; Steve Andrews, cofounder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil; Diane Leafe Christian, the editor of Communities magazine; Murphy, Quinn and Faith Morgan, a member of the Community Solutions/Community Service, Inc. board of trustees and producer of the film Peak Oil, Cuba and Community, which was shown at the conference.

According to Murphy, Community Solutions has identified seven target areas in which to implement strategies for addressing the peak oil problem. At the conference, organizers requested that interested persons volunteer to take leadership roles in addressing the target areas. The seven areas are:

• agraria, the development of neighborhoods designed for a post-peak oil world in which residents integrate housing, work and food growing

• ride sharing, in which people carpool to cut down on the use of gasoline

• window covers, a strategy for reducing the more than one million barrels per day of energy lost through poorly insulated windows

• energy budgeting system, a data base that allows people to understand the energy use associated with everyday purchases, services and fuel usage

• appliance analysis, an effort to determine energy usage of different kinds of appliances

• an energy coaching program, which would train people to advise those who want to make rapid energy changes in their lives

• and peak and post-peak oil trainers, the development of a group of local trainers who can teach people and communities about changes needed to address peak oil.

Those interested in volunteering for any of these target areas, or those who want more information, should contact Murphy at 767-2161.

http://www.ysnews.com/stories/2005/09/092905_peakoil2.html

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Housing model solution to peak oil

By Lauren Heaton

Organizers at Community Solution, which organized last weekend’s peak oil conference, are following their own advice by trying to grow a sustainable, energy-efficient community in Yellow Springs. The organization’s proposed community, Agraria, was the subject of a presentation given by Megan Quinn at the second U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solution, which took place at Antioch College’s Kelly Hall from Sept. 23 to Sept. 25.

Though the concept of Agraria has not changed much since it was first introduced at the beginning of this year, Quinn, who is the project manager for Agraria and also Community Solution’s outreach coordinator, said that Yellow Springs is an ideal place to generate a model community to use in educating others about the importance of a low-impact, energy-efficient lifestyle.

“We talk about the community as the solution to peak oil, and we empowered a lot of people over the weekend to get active locally,” Quinn said after the conference.

http://www.ysnews.com/stories/2005/09/092905_peakoilhousing.html

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