My energy-descent blog

The idea of doing an energy-descent blog came from Bilal Rehman-Furs of Transition Horsham. Transition Horsham is one of the Transition Initiatives aimed at stimulating action on a local basis to tackle the threats of Peak Oil and climate change. In this blog I hope to set out how I am reducing my carbon footprint and also my “take” on the science and economics behind my energy descent.

One purpose of this blog is to stimulate a response. I can’t speak with authority on Peak Oil or climate change – but I’m passionate about understanding the threats better and acting on them. I hope that people more knowledgeable than I am will correct me where I seem to be up the spout. I hope also that fellow activists and students of the issues will find useful pointers for their own investigations.

Let’s start with a bit of background.

Peak Oil and Gas

Until recently I was sceptical on Peak Oil. I’m old enough to remember the early days of the Club of Rome and its original report The limits to growth, first published in 1972, with its prognostications of resource depletion. The book was later discredited in the public eye – perhaps wrongly (http://www.csiro.au/files/files/plje.pdf). I became convinced by arguments that the normal price mechanism – Adam Smith’s invisible hand – would guarantee a smooth transition to a world without cheap oil. Until now this has been the conventional wisdom, but it is now being questioned by some expert opinion.

Our supply chains for oil and gas are now looking fragile and we can no longer be confident of this smooth transition. Today, much of Europe is shivering with cold because of a dispute between Russia and Ukraine, through which most of Russia’s supply of gas to the rest of Europe passes. As I write, the flow of gas from Ukraine to the EU countries is completely blocked. According to BBC News, the EU gets 25% of its gas from Russia and 80% of it passes through Ukraine. By 2010 Britain is expected to be importing about a third of its gas supply but this is expected, on present trends, to increase to 80% by 2020 as supplies from the North Sea dwindle (see the 2007 Energy White Paper). This will presumably make us as dependent on Russian gas as many other European countries are now.

The real cost of oil may be much higher than what we pay for it as consumers (see http://www.iags.org/costofoil.html). I don’t think for a moment that we would have invaded Iraq in 2003 if Iraq was not part of the oil-rich Middle East. Whilst we have paid a huge price in taxes to fight for our access to Middle Eastern oil, many thousands of Iraqis have paid with their lives, as have hundreds of British and American soldiers.

Britain faces a mounting balance of payments deficit on energy. This will now be exacerbated by the fall in the value of sterling against the US dollar. As I write, the pound stands at $1.45. A year ago it was nearly $1.96. The drop in value of the pound increases the cost of dollar-priced imports by a third. This raises interesting questions for the future of the British economy. Once we emerge from the credit crunch and the ensuing recession, will financial services go back to being a money-spinner? How is Britain going to pay its way in future? Part of the answer could be through increasing our self-sufficiency in energy – both by using less and producing more from renewable sources.

Climate change

On climate change I have never been seriously sceptical. A few climate scientists, such as Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen dispute the strength of the evidence for human-induced climate change. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) speaks in measured terms of very serious risks. James Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute, thinks that the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (FAR) is already out of date in the light of recent discoveries and that the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere is already dangerously high. James Lovelock, FRS thinks we are heading for out-and-out catastrophe involving an 80% cull of the human population.

I can’t take sides in a scientific debate – my knowledge of the climate science and science in general is too limited. From my perspective, the existence of some possibly respectable climate sceptics reduces the probability of seriously unpleasant consequences of climate change but does not eliminate it. I think Chris Rapley, former Director of the British Antarctic Survey, put it rather well just over a year ago:-

“Suppose you’re taking your granddaughter on to an aircraft and the stewardess says, “Welcome on board. By the way, there is a one-in-a-hundred chance the wings will fall off.” You certainly wouldn’t put your granddaughter on there. Well, my granddaughter sits on the planet, as we all do. If there’s a one-in-a-hundred chance that we might be inviting some pretty unpleasant climatic future, then I think we need to try and take some measures to avoid that.”

If there is even a 1% probability that things will turn out as James Lovelock predicts, then I think that calls for very serious measures to combat global warming.

Economic implications

At the moment, a battle seems to be going on in the corridors of power about the plan to build a third runway at Heathrow Airport. This issue puts into sharp focus the divide between two ways of looking at climate change.

Some people seem to regard action on climate change as a series of technical fixes around a future that looks fundamentally like “business as usual”. We may take all sorts of action – erecting wind turbines, building tidal barrages, encouraging combined heat and power, insulating lofts and so on – but, according to some Government thinking, people will be flying more than ever before and we will need to cater for that. Lifestyles will not radically change – only the technology that supports them.

The other line is that climate change poses such a serious risk that in the developed world we need quickly to cut our emissions by 90-100% and that this can’t be achieved by technical fixes alone – we need to re-order the way we run our lives and our economy.

I belong to this second school and I’ll try and justify my position with facts and figures in future posts. I can’t promise I’ll always be in this school – I may well become aware of evidence that will change my views. My beliefs are based on what I know now.

I believe that economic growth should no longer be a primary aim of economic policy. The primary aim should be to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases drastically and quickly and for most of us this will mean substantial changes in lifestyle. There will be far less motoring and flying, far less spent on consumer goods and far more investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy. Many existing jobs will disappear and new jobs will be created. Many of us will spend much more of our time growing our own food and engaging in other activities that don’t involve buying things. When we travel, we will travel more slowly.

For shopaholics and those whose egos depend on conspicuous consumption, things will look grim. Many more of us will enjoy the challenge of building a new, low-carbon lifestyle. We will feel materially poorer but happier as we discover new pleasures in a slower lifestyle that leaves us more time for our friends, families and local communities.

That’s enough for today.