The case against growth, and other stories

The case against growth: Ted Trainer (UNSW) makes the case that very few people are taking seriously the full economic and political implications of the concept of limits to growth: "The growth problem is not just that the economy has grown to be too big, now depleting resources and damaging ecosystems. The more central problem is that growth is integral to the system. Most of the system's basic structures and mechanism are driven by growth and cannot operate without it. It is not that this society has a growth economy; it is that this is a growth society. Growth cannot be removed leaving the rest of the economy more or less as it is. Unfortunately people in the current 'De-growth' movement tend to think growth is like a faulty air conditioning unit on a house, which can be taken away and the house will function the way it did before."

Peak stuff? Fred Pearce investigates the claim that consumer societies are becoming post-industrial. Based on various metrics that have actually started to decline in many rich countries (for example, car use is waning in most developed countries), some commentators look forward to the "dematerialisation" of the economy proving the silver bullet that saves us from ourselves. As others note, however, such evidence is patchy, and fails to account for the fact that we've still got decades of massive consumption growth if the developing world is to approach our present consumer lifestyles. Even if there is a point at which such development reaches a natural plateau in per capita consumption, it is not at all clear that reaching that plateau won't involve massively overshooting various planetary boundaries (as outlined effectively in the "case against growth" above).

How I Stopped Worrying and Learned to Love Climate Change: Brad Littlejohn offers some dark humour reflecting on our obsession with novelty. Discussion in the comments ponder further about the place of novelty and humour in our ecological deliberations.

Fossil fuel glut: Much noise has been made about developments in the fossil carbon extraction business that ensure these companies are not about to go out of business anytime soon, with claims that "peak oil" is disproved or that the US will lead a fossil fuelled renaissance. The reality is that these non-conventional carbon pools are only now economically available due to a high oil price, and that unless the price stays high, they will not be extracted. So we have indeed very likely seen the end of rising production of cheap, easily accessible conventional oil. That doesn't mean we run out of oil, just that energy gets expensive, which still has all kinds of economic implications. And if we insist on remaining addicted to fossil carbon, pursuing non-conventional sources is leap out of the frying pan of energy insecurity into the fire of climate chaos.

Economic growth and ecological health: It has become popular in certain circles to argue that as countries get richer, they clean up their environmental problems and that therefore the solution to our ecological woes is to grow the global economy as fast as possible (sometimes called an environmental Kuznets curve). This piece is a sustained critique of that idea.

How Money Makes People Less Humane. Some really interesting research on the effects of money (either having it, wanting it, thinking about it or even having it subconsciously suggested) on empathy. The upshot is that, statistically speaking, money functions to disconnect us from those around us, making us less caring, less sensitive, more suspicious and more individualistic. Or, as the scriptures would say: "the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil" (1 Timothy 6.10).

Good news, bad news

SMH: The good news is that the US National Intelligence Council thinks "a water-related, state-on-state conflict is unlikely during the next 10 years". The bad news is that after ten years, all bets are off: "as water shortages become more acute beyond the next 10 years, water in shared basi[n?]s will increasingly be used as leverage [...] The use of water as a weapon or to further terrorist objectives also will become more likely beyond 10 years". Full report here.

CP: March Madness. The recent North American heatwave is breaking a record-breaking number of records. Between the 9th and 19th of March more than 4,000 US heat records were broken, and only something like 113 cold records, a ratio of about 35 to 1 (the average ratio since 2000 in the US is 2.04:1). Some places set March records higher than April records, some had daily low temperatures that broke previous daily highs, and some had old records broken by as much as 17ºC.

HuffPo: 21stC oil will break the bank and the planet.

Asian Development Bank Says Climate Migration Poses Growing Threat: "In a new report, the bank says more than 42 million people in the region were displaced by environmental disasters over the past two years alone. In 2010, it said, more than 30 million people were displaced, some permanently, primarily by devastating floods in Pakistan and China."

NYT: OECD warns of ever-higher greenhouse gases. This is what we're headed towards without a significant change of direction.

CP: Do trees have rights? Revisiting The Lorax.. In a certain sense, they already do, at least under US law.

SEI: Valuing the oceans: "climate change alone could reduce the economic value of key ocean services by up to 2 trillion USD a year by 2100". I'm more than a little sceptical about such attempts to place an economic value on ecological realities, since they obscure the fact that the economy is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the environment. The damage we are doing to the oceans is not simply to be measured in missing dollars, but in broken lives, lost species, a weeping Creator.

Wit's End: Tropospheric ozone - blighted trees, breathing difficulties and pernicious corruption of science. The atmospheric pollution you probably haven't heard much about. This is not the "ozone layer" (stratospheric ozone), in which ozone molecules are precious and save our bacon from frying, but surface level ozone, which is an altogether different and nastier beast: "health costs due to global ozone pollution above pre-industrial levels by 2050 will be US$580 billion (year 2000$) and that mortalities from acute exposure will exceed 2 million."

Peak when? We've already passed it

ArsTechnica: When is peak oil? We've passed it. Welcome to the downslope.

CP: How much of recent global warming has been caused by human activities? Most likely more than 100%. How can we have caused more than 100% of something? Without human activity, it is likely that we would have experienced a slight cooling trend and so our activities are primarily responsible for both overcoming this natural trend and the observed warming.

NYT: A case study in overfishing - the collapse of jack mackerel in under a decade. A single super-trawler theoretically has the capacity to catch more jack mackerel annually than the most optimistic estimate of the global sustainable catch. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization estimated (based on 1998 data, now hopelessly out of date) that global fishing fleets "are 2.5 times larger than needed." The latest estimate of total global subsidies for fishing fleets (back in 2003) was US$25 billion to $29 billion per annum (mainly in fuels). Let us therefore choose between fish and the fishing industry; we cannot save them both.

Physorg: Wheat can't stand the heat. A new study published in Nature Climate Change found that "a 2.0 Celsius increase above long-term averages shortened the growing season by a critical nine days, reducing total yield by up to 20 percent."

NASA: Greenland, the world's northern mirror, is rapidly growing dimmer, with some areas seeing a drop in reflectivity of almost 20% in a few years.

Stephen Leahy: Toxic pollution is a public health problem on a similar scale to malaria. A new study claims that more than 100 million people have their productive life span shortened by an average of 12.7 years. Some of the causes may be encircling your finger, resting in your pocket or illuminating your eyeballs right now, though the victims may well live on the other side of the world.

Onion: Scientists reveal how to achieve sustainability overnight, though wisely leave open the policy questions.

Worship of a pedestrian god: seven reasons to ditch the car

Perhaps the most memorable phrase in the quirky maritime novel The Life of Pi is when the eponymous narrator observes that Christians worship "a pedestrian god". Jesus, God amongst us, lived his entire life within the ambit of distances capable of perambulation, travelling at speeds commensurate with his gait, and never learned how to reverse park. Of course, with cars not being invented for another nineteen hundred years, it would be odd to draw a preference for pedestrianism from Jesus' example, yet he nonetheless demonstrates that a blessed and god-honouring human life can be lived on two feet (and perhaps the occasional donkey or boat). Humans are made from the dust (even the word human is etymologically related to humus, i.e. soil, a pun that also works in Hebrew), and part of humility (another related word) is to stay in touch with the ground. Perhaps if our habitual mode of transport makes us forget that we are bipedal, we may be tempted to arrogant flights of fancy concerning our fitting location.

We have become accustomed to the convenience and ease of traversing great distances with relatively little effort or cost in a tonne of steel moving with as much momentum as a speeding bullet (and capable of similar damage upon impact with a body of flesh). This hyper-mobility affects our perceptions of distance, our assumptions about location and our expectations of what is and ought to be possible. We generally deem it of little import that we live many days walk from our place of employment and feel no strangeness at the great distances travelled by the food on our plate prior to its final brief journey down our oesophagus.

Cars make us feel powerful; it is no accident that certain versions of masculinity in our culture have idolised these machines. Car ownership becomes status symbol, rite of passage and - in a contemporary landscape designed for drivers - right of passage, since there often is no other practical way to get between locations. This power to pick a destination and arrive at great speed is a powerful symbol of autonomy, of individual freedom. And so the odd thing about those who are so proud to declare that they stand on their own two feet is that these days they so rarely do so. Individualism has for the last few decades found perhaps its most powerful symbol in the private automobile (hidden from view are the myriad social relations embodied in our complex system of mechanised transport).

Like most of those around me, I got my license when I was sixteen, which means I've been a driver for longer than not. Yet I have never owned a car. Over the years, I've had various cars on loan for a couple of days or a couple of months (in one case, a couple of years). But since getting married, we have chosen to live in walkable urban areas with decent public transport. We currently live 193 steps from my workplace and within a couple of hundred metres of dozens of bus routes.

My adult life has almost exclusively been lived in an urban context. Outside of well-designed (which often means pre-20thC) urban spaces, the tyranny of the automobile is woven into the fabric of most suburban and rural life.

I am not saying that all cars are evil or that there is no place for advanced technology in travel. Nor is the combustion of fossil fuels in itself wrong. But with the level of car use in our society, we are like twenty-drink drunks about to pass out in the gutter trying to defend the goodness of alcohol. Wholesale rejection of useful technologies is not currently our temptation. And there is plenty of room for smarter and more responsible use of the technology we already have.

Since I promised in the title, let me conclude this slightly aimless reflective ramble with seven reasons to ditch your car (or at least consider using it less):

1. Doing so in many cases will save money. For instance, see this account of living without a car in Edinburgh, which has a great deal of resonance for us; it is one of the many reasons we love this city. Cars bring expenses at every point: purchase, petrol, insurance, registration, parking. Of course there are costs associated with other kinds of transport, but have you tried doing the sums? Both our apartments in Sydney had a secure parking space that we were able to rent out, which came in handy. If you are someone who begrudges the taxwoman her pound of flesh, then carlessness will also mean you can avoid a range of taxes, fees and tolls.

2. Leaving footprints cuts your carbon footprint. For many people, a car represents a significant slice of your carbon pie. Not just the petrol exploding in the engine and sending out its fumes, but the embodied emissions released during construction. The various metals and plastics and other materials that comprise a car take a lot of energy. For more efficient cars, this can be up to half the overall carbon emissions associated with the vehicle (and so, it is often better from a carbon perspective to run an old bomb into the ground rather than continually upgrading to slightly more efficient models).

3. Becoming less reliant on a car is good preparation for peak oil. Not driving saves a little petrol, delaying (very slightly) the peak and, more importantly, doing so is a good way of weaning yourself off relying on cheap petrol, which won't be around forever. Such behaviour also sends a message to politicians and policy makers that walkable public spaces and good public transport are desirable and desired. Poor town planning has a lot to answer for as we have invested trillions and trillions in infrastructure based on cheap petrol. But the good news is that it can also make a very significant contribution to a better world. Well-designed walkable urban spaces are safer, cleaner, more enjoyable and can foster stronger communities.

4. Walking is considerably healthier than sitting on your backside pumping the accelerator, even when you factor in the extra calories you burn during road rage. I discussed this at greater length back here in relation to this fascinating little book.

5. More drivers means more cars means less appealing footpaths and a greater perception of danger to pedestrians. Driving can thus become a self-perpetuating cycle where walking (or riding a bicycle) becomes less desirable the fewer pedestrians (or cyclists) there are. Choosing to break this cycle will make it that little bit easier for others.

6. Walking is wearing on the sole, but good for the soul. It slows us down a little, and makes us less ambitious about how much we try to get done. There is more opportunity to smell the roses, or sit on doorsteps, which is what our daughter currently loves doing while we're out walking. It is not that she is tired; she just likes to stop and take in the view. While walking, there is more chance of interacting with those who share your space, more opportunities to notice your environment (which can be dangerous if done too enthusiastically while driving).

7. If walking was good enough for Jesus, it's good enough for me.

If Brazil has to guard its rainforest, why does Canada/U.S. get to burn its tar sands?

Bill McKibben: If Brazil has to guard its rainforest, why does Canada/U.S. get to burn its tar sands? McKibben has joined with ten other prominent US and Canadian activists and scientists in calling for large-scale civil disobedience over a proposed new pipeline to deliver Canadian tar sands oil to the US.

SMH: The deadliest form of food fight, perhaps the best short piece in a mainstream media outlet on this topic. The Carbon Brief has a useful list of links on climate change and food security (more links are here).

Guardian: At the same time as they put forward a "what peak oil?" report, the UK Government had a second, far less rosy, peak oil report compiled a few years ago. It was not published, until now.

Scientific American: a three part series on the links between climate change and extreme weather. Part One. Part Two. Part Three. Politicians and pundits may pontificate and procrastinate, but the insurance industry takes this very seriously, with more places becoming uninsurable.

Oxford University: Elephant numbers have halved in the last forty years across protected areas in West and Central Africa.

Climate Central: Extreme events related to climate change threaten three US nuclear facilities. Of course, the usual caveats apply to attribution, but the point remains: nuclear has been widely touted as a low-carbon baseload energy solution, yet we are entering an increasing unstable world (climatically, ecologically, and most likely economically and politically). Is it really so wise to build nuclear plants that require rich, stable governments and predictable weather?

CP: Senator Inhofe, perhaps the most outspoken critic of climate science in US politics (a stiff contest), was forced to cancel his appearance at the flagship denier conference due to being "under the weather" after swimming in a blue-green algae bloom exacerbated by drought and a heatwave in Oklahoma. I hope he gets better soon.

Telegraph: warming oceans cause largest marine migration in two million years.

BBC: World's oceans in "shocking" decline. I recently attended a popular open-air lecture by a marine biologist who was presenting unusual creatures from the Norwegian Sea. It was a lighthearted lecture illustrated with a variety of critters and curios in small tanks. During question time afterwards, I asked what changes were evident in the ecosystems she studied. Within seconds of beginning to answer, she was fighting back tears and had to cut short her response.

ABC Catalyst: The Oil Crunch

This is a couple of weeks old now, but I've just come across it. Opening with the price of petrol is where the popular imagination usually goes, but will not be where the effects of declining access to cheap energy are most dramatic. Watch food prices and the global economy. And watch the increasing rush to drill in ever more inaccessible places (the Arctic) and for ever less useful forms of fuel (tar sands).

No way out? Peak oil will not save us from climate change

You may not be able to take it with you, but you can take it down with you. Remember, George Monbiot is sometimes regarded as one of the more optimistic voices on ecological issues.

"The problem we face is not that we have too little fossil fuel, but too much. As oil declines, economies will switch to tar sands, shale gas and coal; as accessible coal declines, they'll switch to ultra-deep reserves (using underground gasification to exploit them) and methane clathrates. The same probably applies to almost all minerals: we will find them, but exploiting them will mean trashing an ever greater proportion of the world's surface. We have enough non-renewable resources of all kinds to complete our wreckage of renewable resources: forests, soil, fish, freshwater, benign weather. Collapse will come one day, but not before we have pulled everything down with us.

"And even if there were an immediate economic cataclysm, it's not clear that the result would be a decline in our capacity for destruction. In east Africa, for example, I've seen how, when supplies of paraffin or kerosene are disrupted, people don't give up cooking; they cut down more trees. History shows us that wherever large-scale collapse has occurred, psychopaths take over. This is hardly conducive to the rational use of natural assets.

"All of us in the environment movement, in other words – whether we propose accommodation, radical downsizing or collapse – are lost. None of us yet has a convincing account of how humanity can get out of this mess. None of our chosen solutions break the atomising, planet-wrecking project."

- George Monbiot, "Let's face it:
none of our environmental fixes break the planet-wrecking project".

While discussing such matters with my supervisor a few months ago, he wryly observed, "You know you are in trouble when you say, 'Only the Black Death can save us now'".

Monbiot points out in the full article that Fatih Birol, the chief economist of the International Energy Agency, admits that peak oil passed in 2006. Yet this hasn't lead to economic collapse (yet) because the shortfall in liquid conventional oil has so far been filled by tar sands and liquid methane. The pursuit of such resources to avoid a shortage of oil is taking us directly into the vast carbon reserves of non-conventional and alternative fuels, illustrating the Scylla and Charybdis of peak oil and climate change. Some commentators have expressed the hope that peak oil may save us from climate change by limiting the amount of carbon available to be burned. Unfortunately, there is plenty for us to ensure the long term destruction of the only climate under which human society has thrived.

Pity none of these are April Fools' jokes

AAAS conference: 50 million environmental refugees by 2020. This is a connection that we've been seeing in the Middle East and North Africa and is only likely to continue to grow in importance. Climate and ecological damage combine with political and economic conditions to cause food insecurity, leading in turn to political instability in nations closer to the edge and these problems are then exported through migration. Such migrants won't always be labelled ecological or climate refugees, since the proximate causes will include political and economic factors, often focalised or triggered through food issues.

Physorg: Some Greenland glaciers have doubled in speed over the last decade.

Science Daily: Higher CO2 means less transpiration as plants reduce their pores.

Coral reefs are the canaries in the global coal mine. It is likely most won't survive above 350 ppm CO2 for more than a few decades. We're at 390 and rising.

Guardian: Wasting water in a throwaway society. In the UK, "we throw away, on average, twice as much water per year in the form of uneaten food as we use for washing and drinking."

The Australia Institute: Hiding the unemployed (and underemployed), or why the official unemployment rate is the tip of the iceberg.

Shell says we are entering a zone of uncertainty over oil supply. A clever ploy to keep the prices high or a frank admission that the future of oil is declining global production?

One of the most useful pages on Skeptical Science is Ten Indicators of a Warming World (and Ten Indicators of a Human Fingerprint on Climate Change). But this may be an eleventh: wave height.

Guardian: Time to pledge our "full-throated" support for the monarchy.

OK, so one of them is.

Tunisia, Egypt and the food in your shopping trolley

Popular uprisings as seen recently in Tunisia and currently underway in Egypt usually have a complex network of contributing and enabling causes. One of the triggers in both cases may well have been a spike in food prices. Both Tunisia and Egypt import much of their food and have large segments of the population for whom food purchases comprise a hefty chunk of the weekly budget. A similar price spike in 2008 likely contributed to protests, rioting and unrest in at least sixteen countries.

Why the spike in food prices? That too is complex, but significant elements in the present mix include speculation, high oil prices and a string of weather-related disasters affecting crop production around the globe. Why speculation? Partially because of the cheap money being poured into major economies (or rather, into the financial system) and the unattractiveness of some alternatives in a downturn, that is, such speculation is one manifestation of the ongoing debt crisis that first publicly reared its head in 2008. Why high oil prices? Again, partially due to financial speculation, but this coming on top of long-term supply issues related to the peaking of conventional oil. Why crop failures? Many reasons here too, but among them are a string of destructive weather events consistent with predictions of climate change.

Yes, there are many other causes: repressive governments, rising economies shifting the balance of economic and political power, trends in global consumption patterns, biofuel and agricultural policies, local population growth and migration patterns, corporate interests, and of course the particular contours of various national histories and the actions and beliefs of certain influential individuals. But the triple converging crises of debt, depletion and degradation (also known as economy, energy and ecology) are likely to continue to contribute to these kinds of headlines.

So if you've noticed that some of the food in your shopping trolley has jumped in price recently, don't neglect to join the dots. What is a mild frustration to me in my wealth can mean the straw that breaks the camel's back for a nation closer to the edge. What can you do about it? All kinds of things, because it doesn't have to be this way.

Things may unfold faster than you think

Nicole Foss, one of the authors at The Automatic Earth, on the triple challenges of economy, energy and environment (especially climate in this case). She sees energy as the most significant driver of where industrial civilisation heads next, though economics is the way that it will manifest itself with most speed and violence in a debt-driven economy. Her analysis of the effects of peak oil as being an exacerbation and acceleration of economic swings is an important corrective to those who imagine that peak oil simply means ever increasing price spikes. I think she underestimates the long term significance of climate, but her points about resilient communities of trust and the importance of forward thinking prudence in order to avoid toxic and violent responses are well made. Whether she is right about deflation as the way in which the next financial crisis (the continuation of the present financial crisis, depending how you look at it) is above my pay grade (which, given that it is almost zero, isn't saying much).

In short, she thinks it is very important to get out of debt as soon as possible, to prepare mentally for a different and more difficult world within the next few years and to invest in local relationships of trust. As a Christian, I don't see much to disagree with in this advice.

Peak oil in politics

I've just discovered that the UK has an All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas, with twenty MPs and one Lord participating. It was set up in 2007 and has just released a report recommending a form of energy rationing, called Tradable Energy Quotas (TEQs) (here is Jeremy's summary of the idea) to be introduced within the next ten years.

Finding equitable and workable ways to reduce energy consumption is an important component of responding well to our present situation through a planned energy descent. I haven't had a chance to chase up this suggestion in detail but the outline looks promising.

After being ridiculed for more than a decade, the idea of peak oil continues to become mainstream.

The vulnerable future of large cities

"We often think of future wars in apocalyptic terms - nuclear weapons slamming into city centres and such like. But our modern cities are so brittle that far less spectacular attacks could bring them to ruination. In this they are very different from the London that withstood the blitz. Today's cities rely upon highly sophisticated and easily disrupted technology to deliver water, goods, fuel and power to populations of ten million or more, in a just-in-time manner. Imagine a city like New York or London without a functioning electricity grid. People living in high-rise buildings would probably be trapped. With water pumps not working, both the removal of sewage and the supply of clean water would immediately become problems. Communications would be cut, traffic flows and rail services paralysed, and with no refrigeration food would quickly spoil. At night the streets would be plunged into darkness. Local generators might keep hospitals and other vital infrastructure going for a while, but within weeks the city would have to be abandoned. Where would the millions go? If the disruption were sufficiently prolonged it's fair to question whether the city would ever be reoccupied."

- Tim Flannery, Here on Earth: An argument for hope
(Melbourne: Text Publishing, 2010), 230.

Having rejected the apocalyptic image of the nuclear device detonating over a city centre, Flannery nonetheless indulges in an equally apocalyptic image of an immediate and irreversible cessation of an entire megacity's electrity grid lasting weeks or longer. While his point about the vulnerability of large modern cities with complex supply chains is probably quite valid, his example is far-fetched and insufficiently justified. What could cause such an event? As far as I am aware, no megacity is supplied by a single power station. No megacity grid has a single central and irreplaceable piece of infrastructure. No megacity with a major blackout would not have an army of hundreds or thousands of workers to attempt to fix such a problem as soon as it arises. Most high-rise buildings have fire stairs and emergency exits. Even the bleakest (non-nuclear) post-apocalyptic future would see the ruins of the great cities as vast depositories of resources. Medieval huts were built amongst (and from) the ruins of ancient Rome.

Flannery's illustration itself illustrates a lack of imagination in contemplating a more difficult future. Very large cities already face a range of problems in which they struggle under the weight of their own complexity and this is highly likely to increase in the bumpy decades ahead. No city prior to the widespread exploitation of fossil fuels supported a population much above a million. The fate of megacities in a world of increasingly expensive energy is unclear. However, the kind of scenario that Flannery paints is a lazy shorthand for the incredibly complex series of questions faced by political authorities, communities and individuals as our largest infrastructure investments - our cities - become increasingly problematic. The staggering sunk cost that cities represent means that decline or abandonment will likely be piecemeal rather than sudden.

Sunk costs of existing infrastructure also provide a very high incentive to make things work. For instance, in a future where just-in-time agribusiness-to-supermarket supply chains become less reliable and so threaten food security, I doubt it would take long for suburban lawns to be converted to gardens.

Even great catastrophes such as that experienced by New Orleans in 2005 do not suddenly wipe a city clear of inhabitants. It may well be the case that the population never recovers to pre-Katrina levels as the cost of building levees will rise faster than sea levels, making more and more of the city uninhabitable. And the precise conditions faced by each city are unique. Not every coastal city is as threatened as New Orleans by rising seas.

Whether it is wise to live in a very large city is a complex question. Yet such judgements are not aided by visions of the future based on simplistic assumptions or apocalyptic nightmares.

"The next twenty years will be completely unlike the last twenty"

This is the first of six videos taking a total of 45 minutes to outline the ideas in Chris Martenson's "Crash Course". I don't agree with everything he says (for instance, he reduces "the environment" to "resources", making no mention of climate change or biodiversity decline) and some of the analysis is simplified (what do you expect in 45 minutes?), but this isn't a bad summary of the three interlocking crises on the horizon: economy, energy and ecology (I prefer the term ecology over "the environment").

I would love an economist to evaluate his analysis of debt and how money is created (which he skims over in this short version, but spends twenty minutes on in the full version, available here). This is the area with which I am least familiar and I have heard others characterise our money system in a similar way, but I wonder whether this is how experts would put it.

Transition: from oil dependence to local resilience

The Transition Movement (a.k.a. Transition Towns) is a grassroots international social movement whose tag line is "from oil dependence to local resilience". In the light of the twin challenges of climate change and peak oil, this movement works at the local level to build networks of trust and skills to face a bumpy future. The goal is not to make the present society sustainable (a likely impossible task), but to prepare local communities for the shocks ahead, and to make them resilient to those shocks through increasing local food, energy and water production, raising awareness and building relationships between neighbours prior to events that could shrink the trust horizon.

Transition is a movement that began in Ireland, but has spread around the world and is particularly strong in the UK. I've mentioned these guys before a few times, but raise them again now for two reasons. First, I realised that I'd never explained who they are, for those who might not have heard of them. Second, this weekend, Jessica and I will be at the international Transition conference, which is very conveniently being held here in Edinburgh. I may have more to report by the time it is over, but for now, here's a video introducing the key concepts of Transition.

In Transition 1.0 from Transition Towns on Vimeo.

Things are worse than you thought: links to brighten your day

Why things are worse than you thought: Peak oil might not be a slope, but a cliff.
H/T Sam.

Guardian: the next food crisis?

BP gives 148 of its Alaskan pipelines an "F", meaning that they there are in critical danger of rupture.

CP: “There are very strong indications that the current rate of species extinctions far exceeds anything in the fossil record”.

Lake Chad down 90% since 1960.

Pacific fisheries face collapse by 2035: study.

Reuters: First generation biofuels worse for the climate than fossil fuels.

Michael Hudson: The end of the US dollar as reserve currency.

Independent: Climate disruption to bite into China's food supply over the coming decades.

Guardian: Tobacco companies put in charge of UK smoking policy. No, that would be silly. Instead, let's allow McDonalds, KFC and PepsiCo to help write government policy on obesity.

And for a laugh: Why we have nothing to fear from melting Arctic sea ice.

The Onion: Report: Global Warming Issue from 2 or 3 Years Ago Could Still Be a Problem.

The End of Growth

"Economic growth as we have known it is over and done with.

"The 'growth' we are talking about consists of the expansion of the overall size of the economy (with more people being served and more money changing hands) and of the quantities of energy and material goods flowing through it. [...]

"[T]here are three primary factors that stand firmly in the way of further economic growth:

• The depletion of important resources including fossil fuels and minerals;
• The proliferation of environmental impacts arising from both the extraction and use of resources (including the burning of fossil fuels)—leading to snowballing costs from both these impacts themselves and from efforts to avert them and clean them up; and
• Financial disruptions due to the inability of our existing monetary, banking, and investment systems to adjust to both resource scarcity and soaring environmental costs—and their inability (in the context of a shrinking economy) to service the enormous piles of government and private debt that have been generated over the past couple of decades. [...]

"[W]e are seeing a perfect storm of converging crises that together represent a watershed moment in the history of our species. We are witnesses to, and participants in, the transition from decades of economic growth to decades of economic contraction. [...]

"It is essential that we recognize and understand the significance of this historic moment: if we have in fact reached the end of the era of fossil-fueled economic expansion, then efforts by policy makers to continue pursuing elusive growth really amount to a flight from reality. World leaders, if they are deluded about our actual situation, are likely to delay putting in place the support services that can make life in a non-growing economy survivable, and they will almost certainly fail to make needed, fundamental changes to monetary, financial, food, and transport systems.

"As a result, what could have been a painful but endurable process of adaptation could become history’s greatest tragedy. We can survive the end of growth, but only if we recognize it for what it is and act accordingly."

- Richard Heinberg, "The end of growth".

This article is well worth reading in full. Although Heinberg emphasises peak oil a little more than I do and ecological degradation a little less, it is a good summary of the three interlocking challenges (economy, energy, ecology) that will define the next few decades (even if they are manifest first for some people through secondary effects). If you're not thinking about these issues and how they will (and already are) affecting almost every aspect of your life and the lives of those you know for the foreseeable future, you're not really paying attention.

We live in interesting times.

The fossil fuel roller coaster: a brief history

A presentation this brief is of necessity something of a caricature, but it gives a decent overall picture in five minutes.
H/T Milan.

Forgive us our debts

Australian economist Steve Keen predicted the global financial crisis years ahead of when it broke, and doesn't think it is over yet, not by a long shot. He has given a somewhat lengthy and graph-heavy interview over here, in which he doesn't have a great deal of good news to offer.

For those without time to read it, he thinks the government response to the crisis (throwing lots of stimulus money at it) has mainly just masked the underlying debt problems (or rather deferred and increased them). America is already in a depression (hidden by misleading unemployment figures). A significant further period of deflation is inevitable. Australia (largely) avoided the bullet in 2008-09 through propping up a speculative property bubble which will come back to bite us (as speculative bubbles are wont to do). And he claims that the only responsible mitigation policies at this stage would be perceived to cause a crisis when really they would simply be unmasking the crisis that is currently ongoing. Here is his graphic analogy:

"[I]f my preferred remedies were enacted now, they would be blamed for causing an ensuing crisis, when in fact all they would do is make the existing crisis more obvious. I make the analogy between my situation and that of a doctor who has as a patient a comatose mountaineer who climbed too high without sufficient insulation and now has gangrene. If you operate before he regains consciousness, he might only lose a foot, but he’ll blame you for making him a cripple. If you wait till he regains consciousness and sees what the alternative might be, he’ll thank you for saving his life when you remove his leg.

"America in particular — but also much of the OECD — has substituted essentially unproductive Ponzi speculation for real productivity growth in the last four decades, which the rising debt bubble has obscured as it simultaneously allowed Americans to live the high life by buying goods produced elsewhere using borrowed money. There’s no way to come to terms with that without suffering a substantial fall in actual incomes."

He's a cheery chap. But then we get to the kicker: "I regard Peak Oil and Global Warming as far greater challenges to our species than the financial crisis — which I refer to sometimes as Peak Debt".

Keen is articulating something similar to the idea I put (briefly) here, namely, that of the three crises of economy, energy and ecology, the first is most immediate temporally, but is actually a smaller threat than the second, which in turn is closer to us but likely less significant in ultimate ramifications than the third (which, I would argue, is broader than climate change).

Fasten your seatbelts.

And then there were 306...

NOAA: “August 2010 was the 306th consecutive month with a global temperature above the 20th century average. The last month with below average temperatures was February 1985.” Any day the temperatures for September will be in. It's a safe bet to expect they will make it 307.

The most commonly cited target in international climate negotiations is that we ought to limit warming to an average of 2°C. However, that may already be too high.

How to shrink a city: this will become an increasing issue in many parts of the world due to likely demographic and economic changes of the next few decades.

Peak oil and healthcare, a UK perspective.

Terminological clarification: irreversible vs unstoppable.

Hot Topic: On giving up non-essential flying.

The health benefit of more ambitious emissions targets. If Europe raised its sights from 20% to 30% emissions cuts by 2020, then it could be saving an extra €30 billion per year in health costs. This saving alone would account for a significant portion of the estimated €46 billion p.a. the higher target would require.

Twenty-two percent of the world's plant species are threatened with extinction and another thirty-three percent have an unknown status. The main culprit? Land use changes associated with agriculture.

Rivers in peril worldwide: study in Nature claims that eighty percent of the world's population (nearly 5.5 billion people) lives in an area where rivers are seriously threatened. "[S]ome of the highest threat levels in the world are in the United States and Europe." See also here a graphic of the threat distribution.

Oceans acidifying much faster than ever before in Earth's history.

Soil degradation, erosion and desertification continues in many places around the world, reducing the amount of arable land.

On average, every single man, woman and child on the planet is US$28,000 in debt.

Speaking of money, a new study has estimated that the cost of vanishing rainforest each year is approximately US$5 trillion (with a "t". i.e. US$5,000,000,000,000).

However, the real issue is that each of these crises are not isolated, but are all converging on similar time scales.

Where peak oil meets climate change

Unconventional fossil fuels are the great unknown area of overlap between the irresistible force of energy security and the immovable object of climate disruption. If we don't leave the vast majority of the tar sands, oil shale and methane clathrates buried, then we can pretty much kiss any chance of a stable and livable climate for the next few decades, centuries and millennia goodbye. If we don't exploit them as fast as we can, then we're likely find the global economy increasingly squeezed by significant shortages in liquid fuels within the next decade.

It is of course massively oversimplified, but which would we prefer: driving into the side of a cliff, or falling off the edge of one?
NB My analogy with a car crash is intended to signify that these issues are not merely inconveniences, but will likely affect many aspects of the lives of many people on the planet. Not every car crash is fatal, of course, so I'm not saying that we're "doomed". Indeed, that was the point of originally reaching for this analogy. There is a big difference between the necessity of facing the issues (and the likelihood of some significant losses) and the impossibility of doing anything worthwhile.