(Draft)

Section #3 “The End of the Era of ‘Cheap Energy’” (particularly in reference to Peak Oil)

(“Statistics and Observations” piece)

Part of a larger project “The IPCR Critical Challenges Assessment 2011”

which will be

a list ranking ten critical challenges which are destabilizing efforts for quality of life and basic human needs worldwide and organized so that there are two sections for each critical challenge identified “Statistics and Observations” and “Commentary”

[Note: current Table of Contents included in this paper as Appendix]

by Stefan Pasti, Founder and Outreach Coordinator The Interfaith Peacebuilding and Community Revitalization (IPCR) Initiative (www.ipcri.net )

(July--September, 2011)

Contact Information:

Stefan Pasti, Founder and Outreach Coordinator The Interfaith Peacebuilding and Community Revitalization (IPCR) Initiative P. O Box 163 Leesburg, VA 20178 (USA) [email protected] (703) 209-2093 3) TheEndoftheEra of “Cheap Energy” (particularly in reference to “Peak Oil”) [Note: This is a draft version of Section #3 of a larger project: “IPCR Critical Challenges Assessment 2011”. This writer invites comments, questions, suggestions, and recommendations in the hopes of improving the final version, so that it can be as useful as possible to the work ahead.]

Statistics and Observations

•a) From poster titled “The Oil Age: World Oil Production 1859-2050” by SF Infomatics (from December 2010 edition available from the Post Carbon Institute (at http://www.postcarbon.org/book/40610-the- new-oil-age-poster-dec )

“Oil was created from the remains of plants and animals distilled over millions of years. The source of most oil found today can be traced to two brief periods of global warming some 90 to 150 million years ago, and to the shallow seas teeming with algae that covered much of the earth at the time. As generations of sea life settled to the bottom, a unique carbon-rich sedimentary rock was formed. Over time, some of the rock sank deep beneath the surface, where the earth’s natural heat gently cooked the rocks organic fraction, transforming it into a dark liquid. Petroleum—literally ‘rock oil’—was born.”

•b) From introductory information to the book “The Coming Oil Crisis” by Colin J. Campbell Multi- Science Pub. Co. & Petroconsultants, 1997 (at google books) (see http://books.google.com/books?id=OXrtAAAAMAAJ&q=the+coming+oil+crisis+colin+campbell&dq=the+ coming+oil+crisis+colin+campbell&hl=en&src=bmrr&ei=_E1aTpWPMKH40gHE6tGUCQ&sa=X&oi=book_r esult&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA (confirmed August 28, 2011)

“The history and current status of the important oil industry are reviewed in this study of the geological origins of oil and gas. Assessed are how much oil and gas has been produced, what remains in known fields, and what is yet to be found, revealing how to properly interpret published numbers, many of which are false or distorted by vested interests. The contention is made that the growing Middle East control of the market is likely to lead to a radical and permanent increase in the price of oil before physical shortages begin to appear within the first decade of the 21st century. The book further argues that the coming oil crisis will create economic and political discontinuity of historic proportions as the world adjusts to a new energy environment.”

•c) From article “The End of Cheap Oil” by Colin J. Campbell and Jean H. Laherrere, Scientific American, March 1998 (article accessible at http://dieoff.org/page140.htm ) (confirmed August 28, 2011)

(from paragraphs 20-22)

“For the purposes of calculating when oil production will crest, even more critical than the size of the world’s reserves is the size of ultimate recovery—all the cheap oil there is to be had. In order to estimate that, we need to know whether, and how fast, reserves are moving up or down. It is here that the official statistics become dangerously misleading.

“According to most accounts, world oil reserves have marched steadily upward over the past 20 years. Extending that apparent trend into the future, one could easily conclude, as the U.S. Energy Information Administration has, that oil production will continue to rise unhindered for decades to come, increasing almost two thirds by 2020.

“Such growth is an illusion. About 80 percent of the oil produced today flows from fields that were found before 1973, and the great majority of them are declining.”

(from paragraphs 38-40)

“The switch from growth to decline in oil production will thus almost certainly create economic and political tension. Unless alternatives to crude oil quickly prove themselves, the market share of the OPEC states in the Middle East will rise rapidly. Within two years, these nations’ share of the global oil business will pass 30 percent, nearing the level reached during the oil-price shocks of the 1970s. By 2010 their share will quite probably hit 50 percent.

“The world could thus see radical increases in oil prices. That alone might be sufficient to curb demand, flattening production for perhaps 10 years. (Demand fell more than 10 percent after the 1979 shock and took 17 years to recover.) But by 2010 or so, many Middle Eastern nations will themselves be past the midpoint. World production will then have to fall.”

“With sufficient preparation, however, the transition to the post-oil economy need not be traumatic….”

•d) From the article “The Oil Crash and You” by Bruce Thomson (as representative of the “Running on Empty” discussion forum at yahoo.com) (No publication date for this article, but this writer’s estimate is 2000-- 2001) There is a link from the below mentioned www.oilcrash.com to the article “The Oil Crash and You”, but only the shorter version of the article seemed accessible. However, the shorter version (at http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/running.htm ) did include the following notes in the section “Author of the Convince Sheet….” at the bottom of the article. The longer version is still accessible at http://greatchange.org/othervoices.html

“Bruce Thomson, who is a technical writer in Palmerston North, New Zealand, and is the moderator of that RunningOnEmpty2internet forum. Members of that group have assisted in the research. There is no institutional financial sponsoring or influence of this web page or the forum.

“Some moral authority to expose the Convince Sheet to the public was gained. After weeks of debate (3,100 forum message) there was a poll of 280 members. We all knew the announcement would be disturbing, with possibly serious impacts on the public, the stock market and general business and personal confidence. Of those 280 polled, 62 members responded, and over 85% of them voted in favor of exposing the truth.”

The longer version is still accessible at http://greatchange.org/othervoices.html and includes the following (in the “By Products of Oil” section):

“Many people associate gasoline or diesel fuel with crude oil, but not the huge number of products that are used everyday. The items produced from crude oil are astounding and number in the thousands. Scientists have identified at least 500,000 different uses of oil. “Examples: Saccharine (artificial sweetener), roofing paper, aspirin, hair coloring, heart valves, crayons, parachutes, telephones, bras, transparent tape, antiseptics, purses, deodorant, panty hose, air conditioners, shower curtains, shoes, volleyballs, electrician's tape, floor wax, lipstick, sweaters, running shoes, bubble gum, car bodies, tires, house paint, hair dryers, guitar strings, pens, ammonia, eyeglasses, contacts, life jackets, insect repellent, fertilizers, hair coloring, movie film, ice chests, loudspeakers, basketballs, footballs, combs/brushes, linoleum, fishing rods, rubber boots, water pipes, vitamin capsules, motorcycle helmets, fishing lures, petroleum jelly, lip balm, antihistamines, golf balls, dice, insulation, glycerin, typewriter/computer ribbons, trash bags, rubber cement, cold cream, umbrellas, ink of all types, wax paper, paint brushes, hearing aids, compact discs, mops, bandages, artificial turf, cameras, glue, shoe polish, caulking, tape recorders, stereos, plywood adhesives, TV cabinets, toilet seats, car batteries, candles, refrigerator seals, carpet, cortisone, vaporizers, solvents, nail polish, denture adhesives, balloons, boats, dresses, shirts (non-cotton), perfumes, toothpaste, roller-skate wheels, plastic forks, tennis rackets, hair curlers, plastic cups, electric blankets, oil filters, floor wax, Ping-Pong paddles, cassette tapes, dishwashing liquid, water skis, upholstery, chewing gum, thermos bottles, plastic chairs, transparencies, plastic wrap, rubber bands, computers, gasoline, diesel fuel, kerosene, heating oil, asphalt, motor oil, jet fuel, marine diesel, butane " Dr. Gary L. Stringer Northeast Louisiana University

•e) From “Statement” at www.oilcrash.com Homepage of www.oilcrash.com includes introductory comments made by Robert Atack and dated January 12, 2003 This website also includes an extensive links section. (below excerpt is concluding section of “Statement”, at http://www.oilcrash.com/articles/statemnt.htm ) (confirmed August 28, 2011)

“We call on all governments of the world to recognize the gravity of the oil peak problem.

“Oil peak is an inevitability. The first warnings were made public nearly half a century ago, and were largely ignored. Increasingly since that time, the oil geology community has expressed concerns about global oil supplies. Since 1995, a group of veteran geologists has been issuing highly specific warnings based on exhaustive analysis. It is well past the time to hear their call.

“Oil peak is the most pivotal challenge ever to face human civilization. To address it, we must join together in acknowledgement of our collective vulnerability, and work together on changes to the structure of our culture and civilization never attempted before. We do not underestimate the magnitude of the task, nor the low likelihood of its being achieved without far reaching consequences. The consequences of a failure to act, however, are beyond comprehension.

“Please join us by adopting this statement and becoming part of the community working to develop responses at every level.”

•f) From article “Peak Oil Primer” by Adam Grubb (archived January 1, 2004 at http://www.energybulletin.net/node/36422 and last updated February, 2008) Note: The most current “Peak Oil Primer” is at http://www.energybulletin.net/primer ; the archived version is cited here to indicate a starting point for the Energy Bulletin website. Adam Grubb (writing as Adam Fenderson) and Liam Cranley of Melbourne, Australia, founded Energy Bulletin in 2004. The site attracted a community who submitted articles and suggestions.Since 2004, Energy Bulletin has served as a clearinghouse for information regarding sustainability, resource depletion and the peak in global energy supply. Its online archives contain several thousand articles available to the public. On January 14, 2009, Energy Bulletin was adopted as a core program by the Post Carbon Institute. Additional excerpts from the most current “Peak Oil Primer” are in entry m)

(from paragraph 1)

“Peak oil is the simplest label for the problem of energy resource depletion, or more specifically, the peak in global oil production. Oil is a finite, non-renewable resource, one that has powered phenomenal economic and population growth over the last century and a half. The rate of oil 'production', meaning extraction and refining (currently about 85 million barrels/day), has grown almost every year of the last century. Once we have used up about half of the original reserves, oil production becomes ever more likely stop growing and begin a terminal decline, hence 'peak'. The peak in oil production does not signify 'running out of oil', but it does mean the end of cheap oil, as we switch from a buyers' to a sellers' market. For economies leveraged on ever increasing quantities of cheap oil, the consequences may be dire. Without significant successful cultural reform, severe economic and social consequences seem inevitable.”

•g) From the introduction to “The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies”, by Richard Heinberg (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2003; Note: access to the introduction and many sections of the book may be possible through google books at http://books.google.com/books?id=XIsfb8CN6qkC&printsec=frontcover&dq=the+party's+over&hl=en&e i=f2haTo7TKePD0AHLwNGTCQ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1&ved=0CCoQ6AEwAA#v=on epage&q&f=false

(from the first two paragraphs of the introduction)

“The world is changing before our eyes—dramatically, inevitably, and irreversibly. The change we are seeing is affecting more people, and more profoundly, than any that human beings have ever witnessed. I am not referring to a war or terrorist incident, a stock market crash, or global warming, but to a more fundamental reality that is driving terrorism, war, economic swings, climate change and more: the discovery and exhaustion of fossil energy resources.

“The core message of this book is that industrial civilization is based on the consumption of energy resources that are inherently limited in quantity, andthat are about to become more scarce. When they do, competition for what remains will trigger dramatic economic and geopolitical events; in the end, it may be impossible for a single nation to sustain industrialism as we have known it during the 20th Century.”

(from p. 4 of the introduction)

“The message here is that we are about to enter a new era in which, each year, less net energy will be available to humankind, regardless of our efforts or choices. The only significant choice we will have is how to adjust to this new regime. That choice—not whether, but how to reduce energy usage and make a transition to renewable alternatives—will have profound ethical and political implications.” •h) From review (dated July 19, 2004) by Publisher’s Weekly (Reed Business Information) of “Blood and Oil: the dangers and consequences of America’s growing petroleum dependency” by Michael T. Klare Metropolitan Books August, 2004 (at http://www.publishersweekly.com/978-0-8050-7313-3 ) (confirmed August 30, 2011)

The world's rapidly growing economy is dependent on oil, the supply is running out and the U.S. and other great powers are engaged in an escalating game of brinkmanship to secure its continued free flow. Such is the premise of Klare's powerful and brilliant new book (following Resource Wars). The U.S.-with less than 5% of the world's total population-consumes about 25% of the world's total supply of oil, he argues. With no meaningful conservation being attempted, Klare sees the nation's energy behavior dominated by four key trends: "an increasing need for imported oil; a pronounced shift toward unstable and unfriendly suppliers in dangerous parts of the world; a greater risk of anti-American or civil violence; and increased competition for what will likely be a diminishing supply pool." In clear, lucid prose, Klare lays out a disheartening and damning indictment of U.S. foreign policy. From the waning days of WWII, when Franklin Roosevelt gave legitimacy to the autocratic Saudi royalty, to the current conflict in Iraq, Klare painstakingly describes a nation controlled by its unquenchable thirst for oil. Rather than setting out a strategy for energy independence, he finds a roadmap for further U.S. dependence on imported oil, more exposure for the U.S. military overseas and, as a result, less safety for Americans at home and abroad. While Klare offers some positive suggestions for solving the problem, in tone and detail this work sounds a dire warning about the future of the world.”

(from Amazon.com page for Michael T. Klare)

[Note: Michael T. Klare is a Five Colleges professor of Peace and World Security Studies, whose department is located at Hampshire College, defense correspondent of The Nation magazine, and author of Resource Wars and Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America's Growing Petroleum Dependency (Metropolitan). Klare also teaches at Amherst College, Smith College, Mount Holyoke College, and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Klare also serves on the boards of directors of Human Rights Watch, and the Arms Control Association. He is a regular contributor to many publications including The Nation, TomDispatch, Mother Jones, and is a frequent columnist for Foreign Policy In Focus.]

•i) From the keynote speech “Beyond the Peak” by Richard Heinberg at the “First U.S. Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions” in Yellow Springs, OH (November 12-14, 2004)[sponsored by Community Solutions (the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions)]. Text of Richard Heinberg speech at http://richardheinberg.com/152-beyond-the-peak (confirmed August 28, 2011) More information about the conference at http://www.communitysolution.org/04conf.html

“Even though this conference is spectacularly well attended from the standpoint of the expectations of the organizers, we are comparatively few. And the message we are communicating is not being heard by the great majority of our fellow citizens. It is probably optimistic to think that it will be understood by more than one or two percent of the population. However, if that seed nucleus of the total citizenry really gets it, we may have a chance. We all know what seeds are capable of.” (10th paragraph from the end) •j) From the “Hirsch Report” [“The Peaking ofWorld Oil Production: Impacts, Mitigation and Risk Management”—Project Leader: Robert L. Hirsch (SAIC) Commissioned by the Department of Energy, and dated February, 2005] [Accessible at the website of Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD)(USA) at www.bartlett.house.gov/EnergyUpdates/ ] (see http://www.bartlett.house.gov/uploadedfiles/hirschreport.pdf )(confirmed April 3, 2011)

(in “Summary and Concluding Remarks”)

“Over the past century the development of the U.S. economy and lifestyle has been fundamentally shaped by the availability of abundant, low-cost oil. Oil scarcity and several-fold oil price increases due to world oil production peaking could have dramatic impacts.” (see Point #2: “Oil Peaking Could Cost the U.S. Economy Dearly”, p. 64)

“The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary.” (see Point #3: “Oil Peaking Presents a Unique Challenge”, p. 64)

(in “Executive Summary”)

“The peaking of world oil production presents the U.S. and the world with an unprecedented risk management problem. As peaking is approached, liquid fuel prices and price volatility will increase dramatically, and, without timely mitigation, the economic, social, and political costs will be unprecedented.” (see paragraph 1, p. 4)

•k) About www.theoildrum.com (Note: The Oil Drum is published by the Institute for the Study of Energy and Our Future, a 501(c)(3) non-profit corporation.)

(from the Wikipedia entry for The Oil Drum at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oil_Drum ) (confirmed August 28, 2011) (see paragraph 3)

“The Oil Drum was started in March 2005 by Kyle Saunders (username "Prof. Goose"), a professor of political science at Colorado State University, and Dave Summers (username "Heading Out"), a professor of mining engineering at Missouri University of Science and Technology (then known as University of Missouri-Rolla). The site first rose to prominence following its coverage of the impact of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita on oil and gas production. Since then, the staff has grown by dozens and the site has become well-known for rigorous, quantitative analysis of energy production and consumption. A notable example is former editor Stuart Staniford's analysis of the depletion of Saudi Arabia's Ghawar oil field (‘Depletion Levels in Ghawar’)”

(from the “Mission Statement” section of www.theoildrum.com )

Mission Statement

“Conventional political, economic, and media institutions have yet to recognize energy’s role as a key contributor to society, and its importance as a driver for all of our physical processes and economic transactions. The Oil Drum seeks to facilitate civil, evidence-based discussions about energy and its impacts on the future of humanity, as well as serve as a leading online knowledge-base for energy- related topics.” 1. Raise awareness

“Most people are not aware of society’s profound dependency on energy and the magnitude of the problems we may face if energy becomes either too expensive or scarce. Politicians and the traditional media have tended to overlook these issues, out of ignorance or due to conflicts of interest. We seek to fill this information gap, disseminating under-reported facts and analysis and providing an educational forum for those interested and engaged in energy’s role in society.”

•l) Interview with Roscoe Bartlett on Peak Oil by David Room of Global Public Media on April 27, 2005 Accessible at the Energy Bulletin website (at http://www.energybulletin.net/node/5790 ) (confirmed August 28, 2011) (see first question, fourth question, and last question)

[Note: Elected to serve his tenth term in the United States House of Representatives, Roscoe G. Bartlett considers himself a citizen-legislator, not a politician. Prior to his election to Congress, he pursued successful careers as a professor, research scientist and inventor, small business owner, and farmer. He was first elected in 1992 to represent Maryland's Sixth District.]

Description: “Maryland Representative Roscoe Bartlett speaks with David Room of Global Public Media about his special order speeches to the United States Congress. Mr. Bartlett discusses the response to his speeches and his plans for educating the public. He also discusses ramifications of oil peak, the responsibilities of leadership, and the need for a change in how we define success. “

“David Room: ….Tonight you’re going to deliver your third special order speech, how did this come about?

“Roscoe Bartlett: I have been concerned for a number of years that there will be an end to high-quality readily-available oil; that the United States in particular and the world in general ought to be posturing themselves for a transition. This, of course, has been largely totally ignored. It’s not like we shouldn’t have seen it coming because, as you know, M. King Hubbert predicted in ‘56 that we would peak in about 1970 in the United States. We did, right on target. So by 1980 we were ten years down that slope, producing less oil than we had produced in 1970. By 1985 we absolutely knew that M. King Hubbert was right about the United States. He predicted that the world would peak in about 2000—that slipped a little because of the Arab oil embargo, oil price spike hikes and a worldwide recession (which he, of course, couldn’t have foreseen). So it’s very probable that the world is peaking in oil about now. If the first time that you recognize that we have peak oil is when it’s peaking, then it’s too late for many things that you should’ve been doing long before you’ve reached peak oil. The world in general, and the U.S in particular, has pretty much blown 25 years of time that we had, but no longer have, for preparation for the necessary transition….”

“….DR: Could you explain, for our audience, how these special order speeches work?

“RB: After the close of business, there are two kinds of opportunities for special order speeches: one is five minutes and you can get up and, as long as you’re not obscene or betraying your country or something, you can talk about anything that you wish to talk about. Following those, there are hours; you can claim sixty minutes. Leadership on each side has the first sixty minute hour, and sometimes we get the leadership hour, sometimes we don’t. Following that anybody can claim sixty minutes of special order. This is very important particularly to the minority. I’m fortunate, now I’m not in the minority. It’s very important for the minority because they don’t have any other way of getting their message out. This was really used by Republicans in all those many years that the Democrats were in control. Now it’s very important to Democrats because it gives them an opportunity to their message out…they don’t have the Presidency now and they don’t have the Committee Chairs. This gives them an opportunity to get your message out. So this is a unique way of communicating with the public. On average, probably about a million and a half people listen to this at any one time. That audience varies, depending on the time of day and so forth. When we do this several times we’re talking to, not the same audience, but to somewhat different audiences. In a former life, I was a teacher and I understand that repetition is the soul of learning. I don’t mind repeating it. I try to do it in a somewhat different way so that it will be new and still stimulating to the people that are hearing it. Even if the basic message is the same message, you use different charts and different facts and a different approach.”….

….DR: I have one last question, I really appreciate the time you have been giving this. How did you find out about peak oil and when was this?

RB: Probably 30 years ago I was concerned about this. In another life, I was teaching school and all the textbooks came over my desk. I was teaching the biological area, I taught human anatomy and physiology and I taught a basic biology course, too. All the books would come over my desk to see if I would use them for my class so they could sell some books. They sent me at least one of every new textbook. I always turned to the environmental chapter and the energy chapter and read. It’s not that people didn’t know this was coming. We certainly did know, we’ve known for a very long time. I’m very privileged to have a staff member who has been concerned about this. We’ve been friends for 25-30 years probably. He is great — Dr. John Garnell, he is very knowledgeable in this. There’s no other combination in the Congress where they had a Congressman who was himself interested in this and had a staff member that is knowledgeable in it and has a background in it. We’re kind of in a unique position, and we’re trying to exploit that position to be useful to our country and to try and get this word out. And I was a teacher in a former life but this is kind of the role we’re playing now. It’s kind of like teaching and it’s kind of fun. You have an audience out there and I can’t see them (a million and a half people), but I’m used to teaching and it’s a matter of educating. I believe that repetition is the soul of learning, so I don’t mind saying the same thing in different ways over and over again. I’ve had students who have had difficulty in some concepts, but boys who go over it often enough, by-and-by, they get a bright look on their face and they finally got it. We’re trying to do that with our people.”

•m) From article “Review: ‘Twilight in the Desert’” by Frank Kaminski (posted December 15, 2010 at the Energy Bulletin website [Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy by Matthew R. Simmons 448 pp., hardcover. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. – June, 2005.] (from paragraphs 2- 4 and 9, at http://www.energybulletin.net/stories/2010-12-15/review-twilight-desert-matt-simmons )

“It has been said of Simmons that no one in America was more influential in warning of the coming oil crisis, and that's surely true enough. Appearing in documentaries and in frequent TV and radio spots, he was a vital go-between for journalists reporting on the ever-escalating cost of fuel and a pained, bewildered public. He had even been a presidential energy advisor. But that description of Simmons only scratches the surface, for he did far more than simply raise awareness of oil depletion. Above all, he was the voice of informed reason in debates over whether Saudi Arabia, long the world's oil producer of last resort, could indefinitely continue to provide whatever quantities of oil the global economy may need.

“His controversial bestselling book Twilight in the Desert represents the seminal attempt to answer this question. He began writing it in 2003, following a visit to the headquarters of Saudi Arabia's state-owned oil company, Saudi Aramco. Simmons was then chairman and CEO of Simmons & Company International, an investment banking firm that he'd founded in 1974 and that has since acted as financial advisor on more than $134 billion in transactions within the oil and gas services industry. During the visit, a Saudi Aramco senior manager explained that the company used "fuzzy logic" to maximize recovery from the nation's oilfields. That term didn't sit well with Simmons, and for the first time he became skeptical of Saudi Arabia's alleged oil potential.

“His skepticism was confirmed when he came across an extensive collection of technical papers from the Society of Petroleum Engineers (SPE) offering an in-depth look into Saudi oil production over the past 40 years. This collection, containing more than 200 papers, documented a decades-long saga of technical difficulties that had taxed the talents and ingenuity of some of the world's foremost oil engineers. The picture that these documents painted was a far cry from the boastful claims long made by Saudi officialdom regarding the supposed robustness of its oilfields.”....

….”Twilight is organized into a neat, easy-to-follow structure with four main sections. Parts one and two supply background information that is crucial to understanding the technical discussions in parts three and four. This background includes an account of Saudi Arabia's brief national history and how it came to dominate the world oil market, a detailed run-down of Saudi Aramco's operations and a basic primer on the steps involved in discovering and developing oil reserves. The book’s third part is an exhaustive assessment of each of Saudi Arabia’s dozen or so major fields and their unique technical challenges. And finally, the last section of the book explores at length the social, institutional and economic implications of the waning of Saudi Arabia's oil bounty.”

•n) From newspaper advertisements which were part of Chevron’s initial “Will You Join Us?” campaign

(from the December 20, 2005 issue of the Washington Post; pages A16 and A17)

“The world consumes two barrels of oil for every barrel discovered. So is this something you should be worried about?”

“The fact is, the world has been finding less oil than it’s been using for twenty years now. Not only has demand been soaring, but the oil we’ve been finding is coming from places that are tough to reach. At the same time, more of this newly discovered oil is of the type that requires a greater investment to refine. And because demand for this precious resource will grow, according to some, by over 40% by 2025, fueling the world’s growing economic prosperity will take a lot more energy from every possible source.”

(from the May 1, 2006 issue of the Washington Post; pages A10 and A11)

“Russia, Iran, and Qatar have 58% of the world’s natural gas reserves. The U.S. has 3%. So what does that mean for us?” “As demand for power and fuel grows steadily in the coming decades, we must consider every viable energy source at hand if we’re to meet the world’s needs. And because clean natural gas is found in abundance there is little doubt that it will play a major role on the world energy state in this century, much like oil did in the last. But, like oil, gas reserves are concentrated in just a few places in the world, usually far from where they’re needed most. And that’s only part of the challenge. The world has had well over 100 years to search for oil and to build the necessary infrastructure to bring it to market; the natural gas infrastructure, particularly when it comes to liquefied natural gas (LNG), is not nearly as developed.”

(from the November 13, 2006 issue of the Washington Post; pages A10 and A11)

“There are 193 counties in the world. None of them are energy independent. So who’s holding whom over a barrel?”

“The fact is, the vast majority of countries rely on the few energy-producing nations that won the geological lottery, blessing them with abundant hydrocarbons. And yet, even regions with plenty of raw resources import some form of energy. Saudi Arabia, for example, the world’s largest oil exporter, imports refined petroleum products like gasoline.”

“So if energy independence is an unrealistic goal, how does everyone get the fuel they need, especially in a world of rising demand, supply disruptions, natural disasters, and unstable regimes?”

•o) From an Army Corps of Engineer’s Report (Engineer Research and Development Center) titled “Energy Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations” Donald F. Fournier and Eileen T. Westervelt September 2005 Accessible from the energycrisis.org website (in section “Issues” subsection “Security” of the “Executive Summary” (p. 5); see http://www.energycrisis.org/us/army/EnergyTrends2005.pdf ) (Confirmed April 3, 2011)

[Note: quoted by Roscoe Bartlett, Congressman, House of Representatives (R-MD) (USA) in his March 14, 2006 special presentation) (see http://www.xecu.net/thorn/PO/PO-March14-2006.html ) (Report “Energy Trends and Their Implications for U.S. Army Installations” also accessible from the website of Congressman Bartlett (see http://www.bartlett.house.gov/uploadedfiles/U.S.%20Army%20Corp%20of%20Engineers- Energy%20Report.pdf ) (Confirmed April 3, 2011)]

“The United States currently has 5 percent of the world’s population, but uses 25 percent of the world’s annual energy production. This disproportionate consumption of energy relative to global consumption causes loss of the world’s good will and provides a context for potential military conflicts, at the cost of lives, money, and political capital. A more equitable distribution of resources is in our best interest for a peaceful future. “

•p) From article “Unleashing Abundance as a Community Response to Peak Oil: Designing Energy Descent Pathways” by Rob Hopkins in Issue #59 of Permaculture Activist magazine (Spring, 2006) (at http://permacultureactivist.net/articles/EnergyDescent.htm ) (see paragraph 1 and 2) (confirmed August 28, 2011) “There is an emerging consensus now that we are either very close to or have passed the peak in world oil production. As someone who has been involved in environmental issues for 16 years, and permaculture for 13 years, I have to ask myself how I didn't see this one coming (although I know some of you did!). The implications are profound. No longer is it in any way appropriate to say 'we need to recycle,' when the processes of recycling require transporting recyclable waste long distances. We have to look much deeper at the whole waste question. An excellent recent report by Tim Lang and Jules Pretty, 'Farm Costs and Food Miles: An Assessment of the Full Cost of the UK Weekly Food Basket,' argued that food could only be called sustainable when it is grown and consumed within a 20-mile radius. We have to build a local food economy from an almost totally non-existent base. There has been no time in history when anything less than 70% of the population were involved in some way in the production of food. Nowadays it is more like 6% (here in Ireland, for example), and of those, a high proportion would have lost much of that knowledge. "Green" building that relies on imported "ecological" materials from other countries will no longer be viable, leading to our needing to rethink how we will actually construct energy-efficient shelter in a lower energy near future. We are looking at the need for a rapid process of re-localisation, of looking at what is essential to our lives (food, warmth, shelter, water) and rebuilding the local economy in such a way that it is actually able to supply these. The process of dismantling our diverse and complex local economies over the last 50-60 years was a disastrous one. It was easy to take apart but it will be incredibly hard to rebuild.”

“The recent award winning film The End of Suburbia (reviewed in the Activist issue #58) takes a very sobering look at the whole peak oil issue. It makes very clear that the problem is of a scale that is almost unimaginable, and that the solutions are really not in place at all, or indeed anywhere near being so. We are so dependent on oil for every aspect of our lives, that its gradual (or rapid, depending on who you listen to) but steady disappearance from our lives will force us to redesign everything about our communities and our own lives. We need to relearn the skills that sustained our ancestors: crafts, local medicines, the great art of growing food. This is the biggest challenge.”

•q) From the final report of the Portland Peak Oil Task Force (March, 2007) titled “Descending the Oil Peak: Navigating the Transition from Oil and Natural Gas” (at http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/index.cfm?c=42894&a=145732 ) (in “Executive Summary”, p. 2 and 3)

“Recommendations: Act Big, Act Now

“The Task Force findings illustrate the profound economic and social vulnerabilities that could result as fuel supplies cease to be abundant and inexpensive. The magnitude of this issue led the Task Force to explore bold and far-reaching solutions. The Task Force is unified in urging strong and immediate action.

“The Task Force recommends preparedness on two different levels. Most of the recommendations seek to reduce Portland’s exposure to rising fuel prices, anticipating the economic and lifestyle adjustments that will be needed in the future. Other recommendations prepare Portland to maintain community stability as volatile energy markets trigger conditions ranging from emergency shortages to longer-term economic and social disruption.

“Reduce Portland’s exposure: The Task Force proposes cutting oil and natural gas consumption in half, transforming how energy is used in transportation, food supply, buildings and manufacturing. It proposes strategies to maintain business viability and employment in an energy-constrained marketplace.

“Strengthen community cohesion: However well Portland succeeds in its energy transition, it will not be able to isolate itself from global energy crises or the resulting economic implications. The Task Force sees the potential for profound economic hardship and high levels of unemployment, and it recommends having plans in place to adapt social and economic support systems accordingly. Similarly, contingency plans are needed for fuel shortages that may last for months or years, well beyond the time considered in existing emergency plans.

“The Task Force recommends a comprehensive package of actions, proposing strategies to initiate institutional change and to motivate action by households and businesses. The recommendations propose major changes for Portland, but the Task Force believes their implementation can have a positive social and economic impact as local residents and businesses spend less on imported fuels and redirect dollars into the local economy. This presents a significant economic development opportunity for Portland.

“While all the recommendations are important, achieving a significant reduction in oil and natural gas use is a necessity for easing the transition to an energy-constrained future.

“1. Reduce total oil and natural gas consumption by 50 percent over the next 25 years.

Leadership builds the public will, community spirit and institutional capacity needed to implement the ambitious changes. Leadership is needed to build partnerships to address these issues at a regional and statewide level.

2. Inform citizens about peak oil and foster community and community-based solutions. 3. Engage business, government and community leaders to initiate planning and policy change.

Urban design addresses the challenge at a community scale.

4. Support land use patterns that reduce transportation needs, promote walkability and provide easy access to services and transportation options. 5. Design infrastructure to promote transportation options and facilitate efficient movement of freight, and prevent infrastructure investments that would not be prudent given fuel shortages and higher prices.

Expanded efficiency and conservation programs shape the many energy choices made by individual households and businesses.

6. Encourage energy-efficient and renewable transportation choices. 7. Expand building energy-efficiency programs and incentives for all new and existing structures.

Sustainable economic development fosters the growth of businesses that can supply energy efficient solutions and provide employment and wealth creation in a new economic context.

8. Preserve farmland and expand local food production and processing. 9. Identify and promote sustainable business opportunities. Social and economic support systems will be needed to help Portlanders dislocated by the effects of fuel price increases.

10. Redesign the safety net and protect vulnerable and marginalized populations. Emergency plans should be in place to respond to sudden price increases or supply interruptions. 11. Prepare emergency plans for sudden and severe shortages.

Each of these 11 major recommendations is accompanied by a series of action items detailing how it can be implemented.”

[Note: as an update to this information, here are references from the current Portland Online website

From the website for Bureau of Planning and Sustainability--City of Portland, Oregon (at http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/index.cfm?c=28534 ) (confirmed September 3, 2011)

(from “Biography for Susan Anderson” (Director) (at http://www.portlandonline.com/bps/index.cfm?c=42756& ) (paragraph 2)

“BPS is the lead agency (with 110 staff) for development and implementation of the Portland Plan — including a 25 year strategic plan and five year action plan to make Portland a thriving and sustainable city that is equitable, prosperous and healthy.”

(from homepage; in left sidebar)

“To create and enhance a vibrant city, BPS combines the disciplines of planning and sustainability to advance Portland’s diverse and distinct neighborhoods, promote a prosperous and low-carbon economy, provide a forum for community engagement and education and help ensure that people and the natural environment are healthy and integrated into the cityscape.”] (end of update)

•r) From an interview of Albert Bates (Director of The Farm’s Ecovillage Training Center since 1994) for the Spring, 2007 issue of New Southerner magazine (interview by David M. Buchanan) (Note: no longer accessible at the New Southerner magazine website, but still accessible from the following blogspot http://cantate-domino.blogspot.com/2007/05/new-southerner-interview-of-albert.html )

Interview Title: “The Good News about Oil Depletion: Albert Bates discusses how life can be simpler and happier for generations to come”

“Bates has been director of the Global Village Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and The Farm's Ecovillage Training Center since 1994, where he has taught sustainable design, natural building, permaculture and restoration ecology to students from more than 50 nations.

“We sat down in his one-room home, constructed of straw bale and plastered with stucco, to talk about his new book, The Post-Petroleum Survival Guide and Cookbook: Recipes for Changing Times (New Society Publishers, 2006). “David Buchanan: Rather than treat oil depletion as an apocalypse, you take a positive approach in your book, embracing what you call "The Big Change." When and how did you decide this could be a positive thing for society?

“Albert Bates: It's the product of a lifetime experience. Over the last 30 years, I‘ve been living a much simpler lifestyle, and I've found it better in a variety of ways for a lot of different reasons. I've found that living simpler is actually more pleasurable, more enjoyable than the frenetic pace of life that most people live today. As we move from a society based on intensive use of energy to one that has to live within a resourced budget, we will find that we can go to more elegant styles of living that consume much less but are also much more fun.”….

….”DB: Your book says we're reaching critical mass with the oil issue. However, some analysts say the peak-oil theory is flawed. Some claim global oil production will not peak before 2030, and with the technology and opening of new frontiers, it's unlikely that oil production will peak in the next 60 or 70 years. How do we know who to believe?

“AB: Yeah, we heard this about tobacco, and we heard this about radioactivity. And we heard this about climate change. I think the number of experts keeps going down — the ones that say we don't have a problem here. We have a problem. We have reached a point now at 85 million barrels a day in production … and despite the best efforts of Saudi Arabia to push that up, they've not been able to. We've seen the decline of Mexico's largest oil field, which is now dropping 15 percent per year in production. This is happening all over the world . We're getting to the stage now where, with the demand up from China and India and others, we should be producing more oil, and we're not. We're producing less. That's going to begin to change things. It's going to change the prices, and it's going to change the availability of a lot of consumer goods that we take for granted.”….

….“DB: Why should people even care about it?

“AB: It's going to affect us. But more importantly, it's going to affect our children and our grandchildren. There's a proverb in Saudi Arabia: My grandfather rode a camel. My father drove a car. I ride a jet plane. My son will ride a camel. I think that's indicative of what we need to think about in the near future. What's life going to be like for our children? We've grown up with a paradigm of constant growth, constant expansion, things always getting bigger and better. Now we have to change paradigms. We need to think about shrinking, about having a smaller world population, about having limits on how much we can travel and how expensive things are. We're going to be going through a change and our children are going to go through a change, and we all need to be preparing for that, not just some of us.

“DB: How do local economies fit into this picture, and why is supporting local economies such a good thing, particularly for a world without oil or other natural resources?

“AB: You might be getting your food from 3,000 miles away. You might be getting your shoes from Italy or your belt from Brazil. So you need to think about how these things come to you and how long a distance they travel. It might be more effective and efficient to have production locally, like belts and shoes in your town. You might find that there's a lot of time and money to be saved by repairing old things rather than buying new things. I think that as we go through the coming years, life will actually become better. We'll find that we have more time for the kinds of things that we enjoy than we currently spend in traffic jams waiting to get to work. Or in various different pursuits that are necessary to produce an income to pay off a mortgage, to pay back college loans and so forth. What we really need is to be able to garden and grow our own food and have our own local economies.

People sometimes hold out places like the Farm as a model. I don't think we see ourselves that way. We're just normal folks. We're living with one foot in the last century and one foot in the next century. We're having to buy stuff at big-box stores just like everybody, and we have to try to adjust and make changes as we can afford them, just like everybody. Not everybody can afford to have solar cells on their roof or rooftop water catchment. But as you can invest in that, you try. I don't think there's any need to hit people over the head for their slowness or their lack of greenness. Whether you're muddy brown or iridescent green hardly matters in the scheme of things. What you really need to be doing is trying to improve your footprint to be lighter on the planet.

“DB: What do you say to a generation of young people who pooh-pooh the move toward more self- sufficient living and environmentally sustainable practices — who see these ideals as old-fashioned and repressive?

“AB: I don't know if you can categorize all young people that way because a lot of young people come to us to see how we do things. In fact, that's part of the main solution to the problems that lie ahead: Changing the attitudes of youth, looking at the ways we educate our children. What needs to happen now is that the grownups need to catch up to some of the ideas that the kids have about how things should be. We can live on a planet that has a carbon balance so we're not increasing global warming. We can live on a planet that has a resource balance so we're not emptying the seas of fish and the soils of nutrients. I think the kids have an intuitive understanding of this, and we just need to be able to follow that intuition and help them do what they're going to need to do.

“DB: Do you think it's possible for our current global economy and transportation system to survive in the face of oil depletion? Or is it inevitable that these systems will collapse and everyone will be forced to start over? How do you see this whole oil depletion situation panning out? What kind of scenario might we see, and when do you think it might start?

“AB: It's very difficult to predict how this will all unfold because so little is know about what the actual resource in the ground is or how soon or how easily it can be brought to market. I see four possible scenarios. Plan A is business as usual, and to some extent that involves a global strategy of last one standing, the idea being that we will just dominate the world and take over whatever resources we need to feed ourselves. I don't think that's viable. That's not going to last. Plan B is something you might hear from Al Gore or Amory Lovins or some of the advocates of green technology. I think Lester Brown is a good example of that. That you have technologies that will come along and enable us to maintain our lifestyle with very little change. I don't think that's very realistic either because that still assumes this exponential growth, which is never sustainable. So then Plan C is more like the Amish. It's curtailment. It's living more simply, using less resources. Plan D is what we're trying to avoid — that's the die-off. It's nuclear war. It's the idea that James Loveluck propounds that the world is getting so hot in such a short amount of time that we'll soon become warring tribes fighting over the last habitable areas of the arctic. I don't foresee that either. I categorize myself as somewhere between Plan B and Plan C. I see us finding elegant ways to simplify, reduce our consumption and scale down.”

•s) From article “Our World is Finite: Is This a Problem” by Gail the Actuary on April 30, 2007 at The Oil Drum website (at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2510 ) (Discussion Questions 1-7 at the end of the article)

“Discussion Questions

1. What are five things that might improve after world oil production begins to decline? (Hint: Consider exercise, weight problems, family situations, etc.)

2. If there is a decline in oil and gas production, how do you expect the large amount of debt outstanding to resolve itself? Do you think there will be monetary collapse, hyper-inflation, or some other solution?

3. Do you expect that families will have more or fewer children after oil and natural gas production begin to decline? Why?

4. How can businesses prepare for interruptions in electrical service?

5. What types of buildings are best adapted to frequent outages of electrical service? Which buildings are likely to have the most problems?

6. What vocations appear to be most likely to be useful for supporting a family, after oil and gas production begin to decline?

7. What changes might a college make to its curriculum, to better prepare students for the changing world situation expected after production of oil and natural gas begin to decline?”

•t) From article “Can We Be Happy Using Less Energy? Uhhh.... YES!” Posted by Nate Hagens on June 21, 2007 at www.theoildrum.com (see http://www.theoildrum.com/node/2671 )

“In discussions about the impacts of Peak Oil, it is sometimes implicitly assumed that we NEED to replace the energy lost from the coming liquid fuels decline with other energy sources in order to maintain our way of life and our happiness. Indeed, it seems that much of the current effort is focused on comparing/discovering the best energy alternatives with respect to EROI, environmental impact and scalability/timing. In addition, demand experts also look at efficiency, carpooling, 4 day workweek, living locally type solutions, etc. In this post, I look at Peak Oil from a broader context: the necessity and purpose of continued increases in demand for energy.”….

In an initial exercise towards some longer term research, I looked at data of subjective well-being from a large multinational study done bywww.worldvaluessurvey.org. This study, done in 4 waves over the last 15 years, measured dozens of demographic indicator variables, one of which was subjective well-being. Below is one of their better known graphs showing the relationship between GNP per capita and % of population in each country that is `satisfied' or `happy' with their lives. “It can be seen, that at low levels of GNP, happiness is lacking, but once a certain level of GNP is reached, incremental income per capita adds very little to subjective well being.

“Since GNP and energy use are correlated, I was curious what the link would be between happiness and per capita energy use. Using the `very happy' percentage from the 1999/2000 wave of international tests from World Values Survey, I compared them to all countries that www.bp.comhad primary energy data for (primary energy is a broader measure than just oil) and then divided by 2000 population census. The results are in this graph: “As can be seen, there is little correlation at all between subjective well being and energy use. (The actual r2 is 14%). Of note is the United States uses 39 times the primary energy as the Phillipines yet the percentage of the population that is `very happy' is about equal. While there is a low r2, this does not mean there is not a relationship. The graph shows that all high energy users are happy. But it also shows you don't need high energy to be happy.”

[Additional Note: EROEI and The Second Law of Thermodynamics

“In physics, energy economics and ecological energetics, EROEI (energy returned on energy invested), ERoEI, or EROI (energy return on investment), is the ratio of the amount of usable energy acquired from a particular energy resource to the amount of energy expended to obtain that energy resource.”

The second law of thermodynamics efficiency is often defined as follows: “the efficiency is equal to the ratio of the least available work that could have done the job to the actual available work used to do the job.”]

•u) From “A View from Oil’s Peak”, entry #184 posted on August 1, 2007 in the “Museletter” section of Richard Heinberg’s website (currently accessible at his wordpress webpage http://heinberg.wordpress.com/2007/08/01/184-the-view-from-oil%E2%80%99s-peak/ ) (from the last five paragraphs in the section “2. What might happen in the next decades absent policies to address Peak Oil?”—and from the concluding paragraph) (confirmed August 28, 2011)

“The global transport system is almost entirely dependent on oil—not just private passenger automobiles, but trucks, ships, diesel locomotives, and the entire passenger and freight airline industry. High fuel prices will thus impact entire economies as travel becomes more expensive and manufacturers and retailers are forced to absorb higher transport costs.

“Conventional industrial agriculture is also overwhelmingly dependent on fossil fuels. Artificial ammonia-based nitrogenous fertilizers use natural gas as a raw material; modern farm machinery runs on petroleum products; and oil provides the feedstock for making cheap pesticides. According to one study, approximately ten calories of fossil fuel energy are needed to produce each calorie of food energy in modern industrial agriculture. With the global proliferation of the industrial-chemical agriculture system, the products of that system are now also traded globally, enabling regions to host human populations larger than local resources alone could support. Those systems of global distribution and trade also rely on oil. Within the US, the mean distance for food transport is now estimated at 1,546 miles. High fuel prices and fuel shortages will therefore translate to higher food prices and could even cause food shortages.

“A small but crucial portion of oil consumed globally goes into the making of plastics and chemicals. Some of the more common petrochemical building blocks of our industrial world are ethylene, propylene, and butadiene. Further processing of just these three chemicals produces products as common, diverse, and important as disinfectants, solvents, antifreezes, coolants, lubricants, heat transfer fluids, and of course plastics, which are used in everything from building construction materials to packaging, clothing, and toys. Future oil supply problems will affect the entire chain of industrial products that incorporate petrochemicals.

“Economic impacts to transport, trade, manufacturing, and agriculture will in turn lead to internal social tensions within importing countries. In exporting countries the increasing value of remaining oil reserves will exacerbate rivalries between political factions vying to control this source of wealth. Also, increased competition between consuming nations for control of export flows, and between importing nations and exporters over contracts and pipelines, may lead to international conflict.

“None of these impacts is likely to be transitory. The crisis of Peak Oil will not be solved in days, weeks, or even years. Decades will be required to re-engineer modern economies to function with a perpetually declining supply of oil.”….

….”The human community’s central task for the coming decades must be the undoing of its dependence on oil, coal, and natural gas in order to deal with the twin crises of resource depletion and climate chaos. It is surely fair to say that fossil fuel dependency constitutes a systemic problem of a kind and scale that no society has ever had to address before. If we are to deal with this challenge successfully, we must engage in systemic thinking that leads to sustained, bold action.”

•v) From article “How To Get A Pipeline Built” Posted by Jerome a Paris on August 29, 2007 at The Oil Drum: Europe website (at http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/2918 )

(from paragraphs 5 and 6) (taking the example of providing a pipeline for natural gas….)

“…the components of a pipeline:

A supply of gas A supplier of gas A market for gas A purchaser of gas An entity operating the pipeline Government authorisations for pipelines crossing their territory -for each country A price for gas transport An entity (or more) building the pipeline An entity (or more) paying the pipeline

“The fundamental point is that all of the relevant components and parties need to be present at the exact same time for the project to exist. And by "being present", I mean "irrevocably making binding commitments, representing large sums of money." And it is a surprisingly difficult job to bring all the parties to the table in that way at the right moment - which is why fewer pipelines than one would expect are built, and why few entities are actually able to pull it off. And, as we will see, being able to pay for the pipeline is not quite enough.” (from paragraphs 7-10)

“Let's take a look again at the criteria for attractiveness:

The resource base

“Enough gas must be available from the production area to fill up the pipeline. Filling it up means using up the capacity for at least 20 years. A 10 bcm/y (billion cubic meters per year - 10 bcm/y is almost equal to 1 mmcfd - one million cubic feet per day) pipeline will thus require a resource of at least 200 bcm (or 7 Tcf - trillion cubic feet) that needs to be transported.

“This is not a trivial issue: many gas fields are called "stranded reserves" because they are not big enough (or too far away) to justify economically the construction of a pipeline to bring them to market.

The need for transport capacity

“The gas resource must not have any other existing or obviously cheaper transport alternatives to be brought to market.”….

Basic economics look acceptable

….”This will come from a combination of the price of gas (production costs plus taxes) and the distance it needs to be transported, compared to the expected price on the destination market - which itself depends on whether the pipeline connects to a liquid market/network, to a single client or to other transport facilities (LNG terminal, more pipeline transit) which impose additional costs before the gas is actually sold.” “What's needed at that point is an entity able to drive the project to fruition. Such an entity has to have a direct interest in getting the project done (any of the above can play that role), but it needs something more, which is a lot rarer, and which explains why so many pipeline projects don't become reality: that entity needs tobe able to credibly convince others that the project will happen and thus that they can actually make their own commitment to it in the certainty that it's not one-sided. In other words, that entity needs to be an acceptable counterparty to all the other participants to the project - all those listed above.

“That argument is enough to kill the notion that "China has billions of dollars, it can pay to build a pipeline (from Turkmenistan or elsewhere)". Money is not enough. China cannot credibly convince the Turkmens that it will pay for the gas even if Kazakhstan blocks transit for some reason. It cannot credibly promise to the Kazakhs that it will pay the transit fees even if gas is not delivered. Because the amount at stake is not just the cost of the pipeline, it's potentially the value of gas sales over 20 years. And, more importantly, the Chinese themselves cannot trust the Turkmens to deliver the gas even if they have built the pipeline.”

(from last two paragraphs)

“Thus, as long as one of the big Chinese energy companies is not willing to say "I'll buy x bcm/y of gas at market prices (whatever the domestic price)", no gas pipeline will be built to China. And, as long as domestic gas prices are constrained by both price gaps and the competition from cheap coal, no commitment of the sort will be made (nor should be). As long as Pakistan is not seen as an acceptable credit risk for several billion dollars worth of gas per year, no pipeline will arrive to that country from Iran, Turkmenistan or anywhere else. And, as long as Nabucco supporters cannot credibly say where they intend to buy the gas needed to fill that pipeline, it just won't get built. No pipeline will cross the Caspian for as long as the existing pipeline going to Russia is not full. And Gazprom will continue to succeed in building its export pipelines underpinned by existing or future exports until Western buyers have doubts that the Russian giant no longer has the reserves to actually fill these pipelines.

“As a final comment, let me note here briefly that LNG is fundamentally similar to pipelines in that respect. Replace the image of a pipeline by that of a liquefaction terminal, a dedicated tanker fleet, and a regasification terminal, and the exact same requirements apply. If anything, LNG contracts bind buyers and sellers even more tightly because the export infrastructure and the import infrastructure must be available at the same time, and the commitments to invest billions have to come from both sides - one is not enough on its own. Thus the dominance of Western oil majors in that business, as they are the only ones which can manage investments in both producing and consuming countries, and have the discipline and management depth to push these projects forward on all fronts at the same time.”

•w) From preconference (September, 2007) borchure for a “Teach In: Confronting the Global Triple Crises—Climate Change, Peak Oil (The End of Cheap Energy), and Global Resource Depletion and Extinction” (September 14-17, 2007 at The George Washington University Lisner Auditorium in Washington D.C.) Sponsored by The International Forum on Globalization (www.ifg.org) and The Institute on Policy Studies (preconference brochure at http://www.ifg.org/events/Triple_Crisis_Speakers.pdf ) (see p. 2)(confirmed August 28, 2011) “The planet’s ecological systems are on the verge of catastrophic change for which few societies are prepared. So far, responses by governments to this emergency are inadequate, or counterproductive. We call it the “Triple Crisis,” the convergence of three advancing conditions:

1) Planet-wide climate chaos and global warming 2) The end of the era of cheap energy (“peak oil”) 3) The depletion of many of the world’s key resources: water, timber, fish, fertile soil, coral reefs; and the expected extinction of 50% of the world’s species.

“All are rooted in the same systemic problem—massive overuse of fossil fuels and the Earth’s resources; all driven by an economic ideology of hyper growth and consumption that’s beyond the limits of the planet to sustain.”

•x) From the introduction to “Peak Everything: Waking Up to a Century of Declines” by Richard Heinberg New Society Publishers October, 2007

(from page 2)

“…as one contemplates how we humans have so quickly become so deeply dependent on the cheap, concentrated energy of oil and other fossil fuels, it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that we have caught ourselves on the horns of the Universal Ecological Dilemma, consisting of interlinked elements of population pressure, resource depletion, and habitat destruction—on a scale unprecedented in history.”

(and from a “Publisher’s Weekly” review of “Peak Everything…”, at the amazon.com webpage for the book-- http://www.amazon.com/Peak-Everything-Century-Declines-Publishers/dp/086571598X)

“Although Heinberg attempts to inject some optimism, the intersection of peak oil and climate change- not to mention overpopulation, water scarcity, a clueless ruling class and a citizenry largely unaware of the problem's magnitude-is not a hopeful vantage point, and readers may not want to tackle this downer without other works on deck to provide plans for action.”

•y) From Special Order speech on floor of House of Representatives February 28, 2008 by Rep. Roscoe Bartlett (R-MD) Transcript at http://www.xecu.net/thorn/PO/PO-Feb28-2008.html [the xecu.net link also provides a listing of links to special order speeches on peak oil and energy by Rep Bartlett—from March 14, 2005 to July 17, 2008 (35 different special order speeches) (see http://www.xecu.net/thorn/PO/ ) (confirmed August 28, 2011)

“Mr. BARTLETT of Maryland. Mr. Speaker, I believe that this is the 38th time that I've come to the floor to talk to my colleagues and, through the miracle of television, to the American people about a phenomenon that is becoming more and more apparent and more and more important to us.

“This phenomenon is what we call peak oil. When I first started talking about this, I wasn't even sure what we were going to call it, the great rollover at that point in time when we've reached our maximum production to produce oil and we're rolling over to slip down the other side of that slope, or peak oil. We decided to call it peak oil, and now that is a pretty well-known terminology around the world….” ….”And America doesn't seem to be responding. I asked one of my colleagues why, and he said, well, it's a problem of addiction. We're addicted to oil. The President appropriately said that in one of his State of the Union messages. He said, when you're addicted, what it costs really doesn't matter. If you're addicted to alcohol or cocaine, if it costs you your marriage, your job, your house, meeting the demands of the addiction is the important thing….”

….”That's the amount of energy that we get from these fossil fuels. One barrel of oil has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year, 25,000 man hours of effort. When I first saw that, I thought that can't be true. Just 42 gallons of oil and has the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year? And then I thought about my Prius car and how far that gallon of gasoline, still cheaper than water in the grocery store if you buy it in the little bottles, how far that takes my Prius, 47 miles averaging now over the last 15,000, 20,000 miles.

“Now, I could pull my Prius 47 miles, but it would take me quite a while with come-a-longs and using the guard rail and trees and so forth to pull my Prius 70 miles. So I thought maybe that is true. And that is true, that each barrel of oil contains the energy equivalent of 12 people working all year. So our use of this fossil fuel energy has produced for us an incredible quality of life.”….

….”Here we are with 2 percent of the oil in the world, and the yellow indicates that we use a whole lot. Why, we are the only yellow one in the world, aren't we? We have 2 percent of the oil. We use 25 percent of the world's oil. This is a shocking picture.

“The next chart shows the concerns of some of our leading thought people in our country on the implications of this for national security. Jim Woolsey, McFarland, and Boyden Gray and 27 other prominent Americans, several Four Star retired admirals and generals among them, about 3 years ago wrote a letter to the President saying, ‘Mr. President, the fact that we have only 2 percent of the world's reserves of oil and we consume 25 percent of the world's oil and import almost two-thirds of what we use is a totally unacceptable national security exposure. We really have to do something about that.’ The President mentioned that in his State of the Union that we were addicted to oil, much of it coming from people, as he said, that don't even like us very much. And we really need to do something about that. Tragically, we have not done much about that.”….

….”With some confidence, I can tell you that the age of oil out of 8,000 years of recorded history will occupy about 300 years. As Hyman Rickover noted, this is but a blip in the long history of man. He said, ``Fossil fuels resemble capital in the bank. A prudent and responsible parent will use this capital sparingly in order to pass on to his children as much as possible of his inheritance. A selfish and irresponsible parent will squander it in riotous living and care not one whit how his offspring will fare.'' I have 10 kids, 16 grandkids, and two great grandkids. I am really concerned about their future relative to energy.

“Do you know what we should have done when we found this incredible wealth under the ground, a barrel of which equaled the work output of 12 people working all year? We should have stopped to ask ourselves, what can we do with this to provide the most good for the most people for the longest time? That clearly is not what we did. With no more responsibility than the kids who found the cookie jar or the hog who found the feed room door open, we have just been pigging out.”…. ….”What we need, and I will close with this brief statement, what we need is a program that has a total commitment of World War II, the technology focus of putting a man on the Moon, and the urgency of the Manhattan Project. We are the most creative, innovative society in the world. We are up to the challenge. We need leadership. We can do it.”

•z) From the updated and current “Peak Oil Primer” at the Energy Bulletin website (see http://energybulletin.net/primer.php First “Peak Oil Primer” at the Energy Bulletin was last updated February 24, 2008. Thus, an estimated beginning date for this updated and reposted “Peak Oil Primer” might be March, 2008. [Note: Since 2004, Energy Bulletin has served as a clearinghouse for information regarding sustainability, resource depletion and the peak in global energy supply. Its online archives contain several thousand articles available to the public. On January 14, 2009, Energy Bulletin was adopted as a core program by the Post Carbon Institute ] (from paragraphs 3, 5, 6, 10, 19—and from first paragraph in “What Can Be Done?” section)

“In the 1950s the well known U.S. geologist M. King Hubbert was working for Shell Oil. He noted that oil discoveries graphed over time tended to follow a bell shape curve. He supposed that the rate of oil production would follow a similar curve, now known as the Hubbert Curve (see figure). In 1956 Hubbert predicted that production from the US lower 48 states would peak between 1965 and 1970….As it happens, the US lower 48 oil production did peak in 1970/1.”….

….”In retrospect, the U.S. oil peak might be seen as the most significant geopolitical event of the mid to late 20th Century, creating the conditions for the energy crises of the 1970s, leading to far greater U.S. strategic emphasis on controlling foreign sources of oil, and spelling the beginning of the end of the status of the U.S. as the world's major creditor nation. The U.S. of course, was able to import oil from elsewhere. Mounting debt has allowed life to continue in the U.S. with only minimal interruption so far. When global oil production peaks, the implications will be felt far more widely, and with much more force.

“Our industrial societies and our financial systems were built on the assumption of continual growth – growth based on ever more readily available cheap fossil fuels. Oil in particular is the most convenient and multi-purposed of these fossil fuels. Oil currently accounts for about 41% of the world's total fossil fuel consumption [PDF], 33% of all global fuel consumption, and 95% of global energy used for transportation [PDF]. Oil and gas are feedstocks for plastics, paints, pharmaceuticals, fertilizers, electronic components, tyres and much more. Oil is so important that the peak will have vast implications across the realms of war and geopolitics, medicine, culture, transport and trade, economic stability and food production.”….

….“As represented in the following figure, global oil discovery peaked in the late 1960s. Since the mid- 1980s, oil companies have been finding less oil than we have been consuming. Of the 65 largest oil producing countries in the world, up to 54 have passed their peak of production and are now in decline, including the USA in 1970, Indonesia in 1997, Australia in 2000, the UK in 1999, Norway in 2001, and Mexico in 2004.”….

….”To evaluate other energy sources it helps to understand the concepts of Net Energy, or the Energy Returned On Energy Invested ratio (EROEI). One of the reasons our economies have grown so abundant so quickly over the last few generations is precisely because oil has had an unprecedentedly high EROEI ratio. In the early days of oil, for every barrel of oil used for exploration and drilling, up to 100 barrels of oil were found. More recently, as oil recovery becomes more difficult, the ratio has become significantly lower. Certain alternative energy 'sources' may actually have EROEI ratios of less than one, such as many methods of industrially producing biodiesel and ethanol, or extracting oil from shale. That is, when all factors are considered, you probably need to invest more energy into the process than you get back.”….

….“Peak oil presents the potential for quite catastrophic upheavals, but ultimately also some more hopeful possibilities: a chance to address many underlying societal problems, and the opportunity return to simpler, healthier and more community oriented lifestyles.”

•aa) From Dr. Fatih Birol (Chief Economist and Head of the Economic Analysis Division of the Paris- based International Energy Agency) Interview with Astrid Schneider (Internationale Politik) Posted at www.relocalize.net “News Postings” section on May 3, 2008 (accessible at http://old.relocalize.net/fatih_birol_interview_leave_oil_before_it_leaves_us (begins with question 23 by Schneider) (confirmed April 3, 2011)

“Schneider: If I understand you correctly, you say that the demand for oil could rise 3 % globally every year, while we have to expect a decrease of 4 % in oil production in the time from now until 2015. That would be 7 % each year which are missing.

“Birol: The demand might increase a little slower. But there could be a large gap between what should be there and what actually will be there, especially if we do not put massive efforts into improving the efficiency of cars or change to other transportation systems. If we don't take measures on the consumer side, the consumption will continue to grow. And if we have not invested enough into oil production, we will flounder.

“Schneider: But when you think of the life cycle of goods, of the long investment cycles of machines, power stations or air conditioning systems: do you think an adjustment of the consumer side to a lower supply path could be done that fast?

“Birol: No, but I don't think that prices will go up that rapidly. We can see a gradual incline and that will give the people some time to adapt. But on the long run it has to be clear: if oil will be gone by 2030, or in 2040 or 2050 does not change much.

“Schneider: You really say that?

“Birol: Yes, one day it will definitely end. And I think we should leave oil before it leaves us. That should be our motto. So we should prepare for that day - through research and development on alternatives to oil, on which living standards we want to keep and what alternative ways we can find.”

•bb) From an article titled “The Green New Deal” by Richard Heinberg , published on the website of Energy Bulletin on October 20, 2008 (at http://energybulletin.net/node/46934 ) (see paragraph 3) (confirmed April 3, 2011)

“Peak Oil and Climate Change present threats and imperatives of a scale unprecedented in human history. By taking up these imperatives through a de-carbonized retrofit of the nation’s (and ultimately the world’s) transport, food, and manufacturing systems, policy makers can address a number of crises simultaneously—environmental decline, resource depletion, geopolitical competition for control of energy, unemployment, balance of trade deficits, malnutrition and food related health problems, and more.”

•cc) From article by this writer titled “A Greater Force than the Challenges We are Facing” (in the Fall, 2008 issue of The IPCR Journal/Newsletter (at http://www.ipcri.net/The-IPCR-Journal-Newsletter-Fall- 2008.pdf ) (see p. 11-12) (confirmed July 21, 2011)

“Earlier in this (article), this writer stated the following:

‘… true confidence is built up because people believe that the efforts of everyone working together is a greater force than the challenges they are facing. In accordance with this point of view, confidence is dissipating rather than being built up—particularly in the United States—because our public discourse does not honestly and truthfully identify enough of the actual challenges we are now facing for all of us—collectively—to know that our efforts will be enough to overcome them.’

“The above challenges identified by this writer may or may not be the challenges other people would identify as the…challenges most in need of urgent resolution, but the most important points to be made here are as follows:

1) if public discourse does not honestly and truthfully identify enough of the actual challenges we are now facing for all of us—collectively—to know that our efforts will be enough to overcome them—how will it ever be possible to build true confidence? 2) if our public discourse does succeed in bringing to the forefront enough of the actual challenges we are now facing—and also contributes to the creation of a greater force (in the form of high levels of citizen participation in local, regional, national, and international action plans) than the actual challenges—then we will have established a high degree of true confidence about what institutions will be more likely to be solvent in the future (i.e. the ones which will be most helpful to us in overcoming the challenges ahead).

“What then do we need to do? We need our public discourse to be as honest, responsible, and transparent as possible, so we can identify, nurture, support, and sustain ways to build a collective force greater than the challenges we are now facing.”

•dd) From article “Happy Fourth (Birthday that is)” Posted by Heading Out on March 22, 2009 at The Oil Drum website (at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5218 )

(from paragraphs 3-6, 10 and 14)

“Kyle was, from the beginning the brains behind the organization, not only creating the site and doing all the management, but also writing posts, sending out links and drawing attention to the site from all those other sites, such as The Energy Bulletin that gave us the early publicity that helped us grow. Me, I just wrote.

“The introductory story actually compresses time a little, since in the early days it was Kyle that did the site work, and it was not until after Ianqui joined us in June, 2005 after Prof had invited her to give a guest post, that she in turn brought in Super G, the following month. And he has managed the structure of the site since. It would never have worked without him.

“As the Prof said early in the game:

One of the goals HO and I have for this blog is to build a community that builds on itself with knowledge and purpose with regard to this ridiculously complex and salient topic. I would like to think we're moving toward that goal.

“It is one of the unrecognized, and just darn hard and time consuming things, to market a new site, and he persisted, and should be given all the credit for bringing us the readership, and the interest, as quickly as he did. After 3 months we had already reached 1400 visits and 2300 page views a day.”….

….”All-in-all we have had 35 folk write regular pieces (as opposed to single guest posts). Most start as did Stuart Staniford who joined us after Super G, with a guest post, that Kyle lined up, and then started contributing regularly. Stuart wrote a total of 205 posts, the last in August of 2008. Other than Kyle and myself, he has been the most prolific and popular of the writers of individual pieces. Except, that is for Leanan, who far surpassed us all, and has become the rock, around which the whole site revolves. The Drumbeat itself began on May 13th, 2006, and Leanan began getting the credit for it on January 26th, 2007. Hers has been a stalwart effort, and in toasting the site she surely deserves a separate raising of the glasses on her own. Thanks again, Leanan”….

….”Total number of posts on the site (up until the end of yesterday) was 3,778. There have been posts by 22 or more individuals in a month, instead of just the two of us when it began. We have thus, I believe, met that initial goal of the Prof’s. There have been regular contributors to the comments too many to mention, but even when we disagreed, that was why we are here, so keep writing there please, it’s how we all learn.”

•ee) From article “The Oil Intensity of Food” by Lester R. Brown (Founder and President of the Earth Policy Institute) on July 4, 2009 at The Oil Drum website (at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5533 ) (paragraphs 8-14)

“Although attention commonly focuses on energy use on the farm, agriculture accounts for only one fifth of the energy used in the U.S. food system. Transport, processing, packaging, marketing, and kitchen preparation of food are responsible for the rest. The U.S. food economy uses as much energy as the entire economy of the United Kingdom.

“The 14 percent of energy used in the food system to move goods from farmer to consumer is equal to two thirds of the energy used to produce the food. And an estimated 16 percent of food system energy use is devoted to canning, freezing, and drying food–everything from frozen orange juice concentrate to canned peas.

“Food staples such as wheat have traditionally moved over long distances by ship, traveling from the United States to Europe, for example. What is new is the shipment of fresh fruits and vegetables over vast distances by air. Few economic activities are more energy-intensive. “Food miles–the distance that food travels from producer to consumer–have risen with cheap oil. At my local supermarket in downtown Washington, D.C., the fresh grapes in winter typically come by plane from Chile, traveling almost 5,000 miles. One of the most routine long-distance movements of fresh produce is from California to the heavily populated U.S. East Coast. Most of this produce moves by refrigerated trucks. In assessing the future of long-distance produce transport, one writer observed that the days of the 3,000-mile Caesar salad may be numbered.

“Packaging is also surprisingly energy-intensive, accounting for 7 percent of food system energy use. It is not uncommon for the energy invested in packaging to exceed that in the food it contains. Packaging and marketing also can account for much of the cost of processed foods. The U.S. farmer gets about 20 percent of the consumer food dollar, and for some products, the figure is much lower. As one analyst has observed, ‘An empty cereal box delivered to the grocery store would cost about the same as a full one.’

“The most energy-intensive segment of the food chain is the kitchen. Much more energy is used to refrigerate and prepare food in the home than is used to produce it in the first place. The big energy user in the food system is the kitchen refrigerator, not the farm tractor. While oil dominates the production end of the food system, electricity dominates the consumption end.

“In short, with higher energy prices and a limited supply of fossil fuels, the modern food system that evolved when oil was cheap will not survive as it is now structured.”

•ff) From article “Is Peak Oil Real? A List of Countries Past Peak” Posted by Praveen Ghanta July 18, 2009 at The Oil Drum (at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/5576 ) (paragraphs 1-3)

“Only 14 of the 54 oil producing nations in the world are still increasing their oil production. The era of cheap oil is definitively over, as shown below.

“Is peak oil real? The BP Statistical Review of World Energy provides the data needed to answer this question. Using the 2009 edition, I have compiled a list of all oil producing countries and regions in the world, along with the production status of each, ordered by year of peak production. BP groups minor producers into categories like "Other Africa", and "Other Middle East", and that notation is used here. All production numbers are quoted in thousands of barrels/day.

….”Put another way, peak oil is real in 61% of the oil producing world when weighted by production.”

•gg) From Interview with Sadad al Husseini—“The Facts Are There” by Dave Bowden and Steve Andrews (Note: Sadad al-Huseini was the former head of exploration and production at Saudi Aramco) (Archived at the Energy Bulletin website September 28, 2009; see http://energybulletin.net/node/50234 ) (see questions/responses 1 and 3)(confirmed April 3, 2011)

(Excerpt)

“Question: Assume for the moment that declines in demand have flattened and that we resume modest growth in demand in a year or so. Are there adequate new oil projects in the pipeline to meet rising demand for a few more years? Sadad: I’ve been tracking the number of projects, globally, for a long time both in the Middle East and elsewhere—Russia, Brazil, west coast of Africa, and others. A lot of this information is in the public domain, so there is no mystery there. The International Energy Agency recently reported on the same numbers. The bottom line is that there are not enough projects. There is not enough new capacity coming on line, within say the next five to six years, to make up for global declines. And that’s assuming a very moderate level of declines—6% to 6.5% for non-OPEC, perhaps a 3.5% to 4% decline rate for OPEC. Even at these modest decline rates, we are basically going to see a shortage of capacity within two to three years. We’re being lulled by this current excess capacity, which has more to do with lower demand than anything to do with supply. So we do have a problem in the near term. In the longer term it’s even worse because in the longer term the lead time to discover, develop and put on line production runs into 10 years. And there isn’t enough being done in the long term as well. So it’s both a short and a long-term problem….

….Question: Why do you think there is so much denial that world oil production is approaching or has reached a plateau?

Sadad: There is a push-back to the notion that there is a plateau in world oil supplies which is largely based on lack of information or lack of research. In fact, if you look at published information—for example, British Petroleum’s annual statistical report—it very clearly shows that from 2003 forward, oil production has hardly increased. So the information is there. If you look at some of the advertising that Chevron has been putting out for years now, they clearly say we’re half-way through the world’s reserves. The information is there. The facts are there. Oil prices did not jump four-fold over a three- or four-year period for any reason other than a shortage of supply. Yes, there may have been some recent volatility in 2008, but the price trend started climbing way back in 2002-2003. So, these are realities and the push-back is a sense that somehow the market is not able to deal with these realities, that somehow people can’t cope with these realities. On the other hand, if you don’t talk about them, you never will fix the situation. This is not going to get any better. This is going to get worse because you have population growth all over the world, you have a standard of living that is improving all over the world, you have aspirations across the globe for a better quality of life, and people want energy, so it’s actually important to talk about the facts and come up with solutions rather than act as if these issues don’t exist and then wait for some solution to materialize out of nowhere. That’s a role of government—to highlight these issues and to fix them, or at least take a stand and try to fix them. So I think the push-back is probably ill-advised.”

•hh) From article “Reflections from Colin Campbell on Peak Oil and ASPO” by Dave Bowden (On September 23, 2009 Dave Bowden video-taped Colin Campbell at his home on the southwestern coast of Ireland. Excerpts of that interview make up the article) at the Energy Bulletin website on October 19, 2009; see http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50427 ) (Excerpts from that video tape make up the article) (confirmed April 3, 2011)

[Note: “Colin J. Campbell, Ph.D. Oxford, (born in Berlin, Germany in 1931) is a retired British petroleum geologist who predicted that oil production would peak by 2007. The consequences of this are uncertain but drastic, due to the world's dependence on fossil fuels for the vast majority of its energy. His theories have received wide attention but are disputed by some in the oil industry and have not significantly changed governmental energy policies at this time…. Influential papers by Campbell include The Coming Oil Crisis, written with Jean Laherrère in 1998 and credited with convincing the International Energy Agency of the coming peak; and The End of Cheap Oil, published the same year in Scientific American…. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, founded by Campbell in 2000, has been gaining recognition in the recent years. The Association has organized yearly international conferences since 2002. The most recent was in Denver, Colorado on 11-13 October 2009.” (From Wikipedia entry for Colin J. Campbell; at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colin_Campbell_(geologist) ) (confirmed April 3,2011)

(from last exchange in the article)

“Question: What about the notion of making America energy independent?

“Campbell: It can’t be done voluntarily. To make America energy-independent is not something I think any government can achieve. But within 50 years that’s what nature will deliver. Countries will have to be energy independent. They have no alternative. Some may get there quicker than others, but it’s not something some government will say, well this is our plan of action. It will delivered to them by the force of nature. So America will indeed be energy independent and probably quite soon if these imports dry out. What that means and how they react to such a situation is another day’s work.”

•ii) From the “Peak Oil Task Force” section of the City of Bloomington (Indiana)(USA) website (see http://bloomington.in.gov/peakoil ) (paragraphs 1-5) (confirmed September 3, 2011)

[Note: Final Report of Task Force titled “Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience” published October, 2009 (more below)]

“On December 5, 2007, the Bloomington Common Council passed Resolution 07-16: Establishing a Bloomington Peak Oil Task Force (PDF 12.21 KB). Sponsored by Councilmember Dave Rollo, the purpose of the Task Force is to assess Bloomington's vulnerability to changing energy markets and to develop researched and prudent strategies to protect our community.

“The City of Bloomington first formally recognized that the City must begin preparing for peak oil in July 2006, with the adoption of Resolution 06-07: Recognizing the Peak of World Petroleum Production (PDF 10.19 KB). With the support of the Mayor, the Environmental Commission and the Commission on Sustainability, the Task Force shifts this recognition to action.

“It is widely acknowledged that the global supply of petroleum is finite and that production will peak at the mid-point of extraction and decline thereafter. With most forecasts locating peak production within the next 14 years and a report commissioned by the U.S. Department of Energy advising that communities implement mitigation strategies at least 15-20 years in advance of peak oil to offset and largely avoid the implications of a liquid fuels shortage, Rollo states that now is the time to start planning for a community shift away from reliance on petroleum and other fossil fuels.

“According to Rollo: "Peak global petroleum production is on the horizon, and society has no ready substitutes for this energy source. This means that we are nearing the point of crossover - that point where the supply of energy fails to meet demand. We are tremendously vulnerable to energy supply disruption and price volatility if peak comes soon." “In establishing this Task Force, Bloomington joins scores of other cites who have begun to address the challenges of peak oil, such as: Portland, Oregon; Willits, California; Tompkins County, New York; Denver, Colorado; San Francisco, California and Austin, Texas to name a few.”

From the Bloomington, Indiana (USA) Peak Oil Task Force report titled “Redefining Prosperity: Energy Descent and Community Resilience” (October, 2009) (at http://bloomington.in.gov/media/media/application/pdf/6239.pdf ) (confirmed September 3, 2011 [Note: A recent Peak Oil report by the Futures Analysis section of the German Military cited this Bloomington, Indiana report in a footnote, and quoted much of the same material this writer has from the “Executive Summary”] (see

(from “Conclusion”, p. 218, paragraphs 1-3)

“The peaking of production in liquid fuels and other energy sources in the near future will reshape our everyday lives. It will profoundly affect our community most in the areas of sustenance, transportation, land use, housing, and municipal services. We must all begin now to build other, more resilient supports for our common life. These supports will consist of understandings, agreements, assumptions, physical structures, and cultural practices that will recognize lower energy availability not as a problem, but as an opportunity and a condition to which we must adapt ourselves individually and collectively.

“Many of us need to become part-time farmers and water harvesters, to learn some effective health practices, and to notice and become responsible for collecting and conserving organic matter everywhere. Many of us must learn how to insulate our homes better. Many of us will have to learn how to better navigate public transit. Many of us will ride our bikes to work and carpool with neighbors to the grocery. Many of us will be required to continue on the path of vigilant resource conservation. The City of Bloomington will have to intensify its already-active efforts to foster sustainable community well-being by re-thinking the way it provides services to residents.

“Some of these forms of adaptation will be familiar or recognizable from past eras. Others have never been applied. In all cases, the answers require us to take greater responsibility for self-provision, for thoughtful cooperation with those around us, and for greater attention to the resources and possibilities of our homes, our neighborhoods, and our community.”

(from “Executive Summary”, p. iii-vi)

“The following is a representative, but not exhaustive, review of vulnerabilities and strategies identified by the Task Force:

Economic Context. Bloomington and Monroe County are clearly part of both national and global economies and our reliance on a steady supply of inexpensive goods from as far away as half-way around the world makes us vulnerable to a decline in inexpensive oil.

Mitigation: • Promote economic relocalization through “Buy Local!” initiatives; encourage a Local Exchange Trading System and cooperate with Transition Bloomington. • Examine sector dependence on oil. • Develop and deploy sustainable forms of energy. • Develop and promote green jobs.

Municipal Services. As the price of oil both becomes more volatile and more expensive, so too will the price of electricity, natural gas, and other energy resources. It will become more expensive for the City to: treat and pump drinking water; treat its wastewater; provide fuel for law enforcement and fire protection; heat and cool municipal buildings; and pick up trash and recycling. Similarly, the City will also experience a general increase in cost of just about anything that relies on energy to produce and transport it.

Mitigation: • Explore hybrid energy (hydroelectric-solar) generation to complement existing power at the water treatment plant. • Encourage more rainwater capture by residents and the City. • Offer energy efficiency and water conservation incentives to residents. • Expand water storage capacity. • Transition all back-up generators to renewable sources of energy. • Develop a community compost program. • Establish waste reduction goals -- Zero Waste Bloomington by 2040. • Explore sludge-to-biogas energy generation at the wastewater treatment plant. • Develop a fuel allocation plan wherein, in the event of a fuel shortage, the Police and Fire Departments are given greatest priority. • Replace patrol cars with electric vehicles. • Investigate police pursuit vehicles that do not rely on fossil fuels and transition over to such vehicles as this technology improves. • Explore alternatives to asphalt. • Offer carpooling incentives to employees. • Reduce the size of the City fleet though partnerships with car sharing groups.

Transportation. Of all sectors, transportation is the most petroleum dependent and the most vulnerable to a disruption resulting from declining world petroleum supplies. Ninetyseven percent of transportation energy is reliant on fossil fuel. In Monroe County, we drive approximately 2.8 million miles per day. That’s like driving one car around the Earth at the equator 112 times in one day.

Mitigation: • Bring daily necessities closer to where people live. • Establish ride and car sharing programs. • Increase connectivity & the number of planned “lengthy corridors” for bicyclists. • Make bus transportation faster and more attractive. • Seek funding improvements for Bloomington Transit. • Encourage Bloomington Transit to transition its bus fleet from one relying on diesel fuel to one relying on locally-produced biogas. • Work toward a regional Comprehensive Land Use and Transportation Plan involving the City of Bloomington, Monroe County, and Indiana University that fosters bicycle, pedestrian, and transit-friendly changes in land use. • Encourage commuter rail between Bloomington and other cities. • Encourage bus service between Bloomington and downtown Indianapolis. Land Use. When it comes to land use, the physical separation of where we live from where we carry out the activities of everyday life – work, food, school, health care, and community – is by far the biggest threat posed by the end of cheap oil.

Mitigation: • Through zoning and other land management tools, encourage the redistribution of land to bring about denser living arrangements, and a closer integration of residential and commercial activity, thus reducing the total amount of intra-city transportation required. We must restructure our community to provide highdensity, multi-use arrangements friendly to transit, bicycles, and pedestrians. • Update the City’s land use documents with an eye to peak oil. • Target public transit routes to help shape neighborhood development.

Housing. An aging grid, paired with the likelihood that more and more people will turn to electricity to power their cars, means that the grid will be increasingly taxed. In Indiana, the grid is powered by coal-generated energy. Coal relies on oil for extraction and transportation. Absent efficiency improvements, it will be ever-more expensive to heat ourhomes.

Mitigation: • Engage in outreach to reduce energy demand through conservation. • Work to retrofit 5% of homes for energy efficiency per year. • Explore the possibility of local power generation from renewable sources. • Establish loans and incentives for installation of renewable energy. • Create incentives to make rental units more energy efficient.

Sustenance can be understood as the maintenance and nurturance of health and life. The elements of sustenance include: food, water, waste handling, and health care. At present, these elements are provided by private companies, government, and publicly-owned corporations and are entirely dependent on petroleum. Indeed, less than 2 percent of the food consumed by city residents is produced within the city, its surrounding region or the state.

Mitigation: • Work closely with the private sector and Indiana University to outline a detailed plan for community food security. Adopt a Food Security Resolution. • Plant edible landscapes on public property. • Organize City-led horticultural services to include the collection, processing, and distribution of organic waste. • Increase local food storage. • Train and deploy more urban farmers. • Remove or reduce legal, institutional, and cultural barriers to farming within and around the city, and open institutional markets to local food. • Establish food-business incubator programs with access to community kitchens. • Dedicate public land to intensive gardening and farming. • Work toward a year-round regional farmers’ market. • Work toward the establishment of a local land trust for the banking of farmland. • Work toward providing more local or regional organic food to Monroe County Community School Corporation, Indiana University, Ivy Tech, and Bloomington Hospital. • Create a local, publicly-controlled seedbank. • Encourage water conservation through outreach and incentives. • Create community composting sites. • While the City has little direct influence over health care, it can work with stakeholders to advocate for a health care system that is resilient even in the face of peak oil. Specifically, as a community we should: encourage a mobile medical corps for house calls; encourage more neighborhood health clinics and doctors’ offices; and support a concentration of essential medical services to remain in the central city location accessible by public transit and pedestrians.”

•jj) From the “Ecological Sustainability” description in the IPCR document “Brief Descriptions of The Eight IPCR Concepts” (December, 2009) [also in The IPCR Journal/Newsletter (Winter 2010-2011 issue)]

(Note: see original source for footnotes within text below)

“The energy invested in a particular thing, during its life from cradle to grave, is called the ‘embodied energy’ of that object. The amount of embodied energy that an item contains depends on the technology used to create it (the origin of materials inputs, how they were created and transported, etc.), the nature of the production system, and the distance the item travels from inception to purchase.”19 “By supporting items and processes that have lower embodied energy, as well as the companies that produce them, consumers can significantly reduce society’s energy use.”20 “If many people can learn to find contentment and quality of life while consuming much less, this limiting of desires at the ‘root’ will save much trouble trying to respond to the symptoms as they materialize worldwide. This is part of the ‘spiritual teachings’ element which often gets overlooked….”21

•kk) From Footnote 3) f) v) to Section 3 “An Assessment of the Most Difficult Challenges of Our Times” in “The IPCR Workshop Primer” (421 pages) (by this writer) (February, 2010) (at http://www.ipcri.net/The_IPCR_Workshop_Primer_Feb_2010.pdf )

“This writer understands peak oil in the following sense: the increasing awareness that the era of ‘cheap oil’ is over is one element among many (including global warming, widespread resource depletion, ecological footprint analysis, etc.) which are pointing to the need for much less energy intensive human settlements in the future. As high level investment portfolios shift in response to these indicators, the likelihood that the vast sums of investment necessary to produce ‘very costly oil’—and the likelihood that there will be customers willing to pay a high price to use it—will very likely diminish, and continue to diminish, as more and more people discover that it is possible to have high quality of life while using much less resources. Thus, while there may yet be more oil on this planet than we have used thus far, it is becoming more and more likely that we have arrived at a ‘peak’ in terms of how much oil we— collectively—will use in one year.”

•ll) From article “Was That Really Five Years?” Posted by Prof. Goose on March 26, 2010 at The Oil Drum website (at http://europe.theoildrum.com/node/6328 ) (paragraphs 1-14)

“Dear readers, Monday, March 22 marked the 5th full of year of the existence of The Oil Drum. “Our durability is because of you, the readers. We wouldn't—couldn’t—do this if we didn't think people were listening, helping us spread the word, and participating in and advancing the conversation. So, I offer you, our readers, a sincere thank you from all of our staff.

“A summary and some thoughts lay below the fold.

“In our fifth year, we had over 6M visits and increased our historical number of visits and views by 35%. While the traffic to a lot of the peak oil-related sites has waned a bit in the face of ‘stable’ oil prices and an economy that seemingly makes no sense to anyone, we are doing all right. Much more importantly than traffic, while we have no easy way to measure the quality of our, or our readers’, impacts on policy or their own communities, we cannot but hope that we are a part of positive change.

“At The Oil Drum, we have always tried to be the bridge between the doomers, the technopians and the cornucopians, to present as many sides of the myriad arguments as we can, so that we do not become too rooted in any mode of thought. This allows us to be nimble, to test raw ideas through your eyes and critical thinking in a way that doesn't happen most places. We really try not to tell you what to think, we just ask that you actually do so—and do so critically and empirically. As this post of Nate's points out so eloquently, WE DON’T KNOW, but we can learn. I remain proud of this site for its perspective and willingness to take on these immense topics.

“This is not easy to do, folks. It is not easy at all. I have made mistakes, but in that I am only reassured by the fact that no one gets them all right; in the end, all we can do is try to do what we think is best as our inner spirit dictates. If one thinks about it, SO much has changed since we started: the oil run-up, hurricanes, the economic debacle, the dynamic climate debate all have added even greater complexity to an already overwhelming topic. It is hard to take it all in and digest to any comprehensive conclusion-- which is why we keep doing what we are doing. Not only do we still aspire to make sense of it all, but we also know that it is going to take as many good minds dedicated to the task as we can possibly put together.

“These are just some of the many reasons I am thankful for and care deeply for every single person on this staff--they are an amazing collection of people: diverse, intelligent beyond bound, hard-working, personable and engaged. The people of this group may not agree on everything, but we do understand that this site is something special that must be maintained for as long as it can be.

“The efforts of Gail, Leanan, SuperG, and Nate (and his recent absence is a loss to this community) should be especially noted, as they are the folks who are here most days, slogging it out, making it work. Without them, this site would not have persevered over the past months.

“I don't think many understand the cumulative toll that these people pay each day to keep this unique space up and running--and they do so with only the compensation of attempting to do the right thing. We are all fortunate for this.

“I have never shared anything more than an email conversation with some of these people, but they have all joined together in this fight—all of them for their own reasons, all of them with their own perspectives. When oil was rising in price, it became a signal that conventional thinking could accept as an indicator of scarcity. Despite different skill sets, ultimate goals, pet concerns, etc., our union of purpose remains a shared one. In this period where demand for energy is outpacing geologic depletion, our interests, expertise and worldviews have become more disparate. And that's ok. “In this struggle to discuss energy and our future, the issues are likely to grow even more tense, more vitriolic, and tougher to handle, with all of the situations we face in this world, economic, political, energy, and otherwise. I therefore ask that you, our readers, make every effort to treat each other with respect and understanding when these polemic topics arise.

“I am compelled to remind you of one of my favorite quotes from someone I think a lot of, Jerry Michalski; he shared a mantra with me a while back, which he learned from Quaker meeting: "Speak only if it will improve upon the silence." We thank you for continuing to improve upon the silence here at The Oil Drum.

“No one knows what the future holds, no one holds all of the keys. All we can do here is try to help educate and make that future a better one for as many people as we can, for as long as we can. It is a unique model, based on social and community capital, and in turn it is itself a social experiment of the highest order—and one we need your help in perpetuating its norms, its impact, and its existence.

“I hope that you will continue to join us in that purpose.”

•mm) From article “Systemic Risk Arising from a Financial System that Requires Growth in a World with Limited Oil Supply” Posted by Gail the Actuary on September 21, 2010 at The Oil Drum website (at http://www.theoildrum.com/node/6958 ) (from paragraphs 3, 7, 15, and 17)

“The conflict of these two forces – a need for economic growth in a world that can no longer provide growing oil supply – sets the financial system up for a systemic risk of collapse. Furthermore, there is significant evidence that the financial problems of 2008 were early signs of this systemic risk affecting the financial system. If oil supply should actually begin to decline in the future, we can expect financial problems of 2008 to return and worsen.”….

….”It should noted that the problem with oil supply is really an economic one. There is a huge amount of oil theoretically available—in the oil sands in Canada, for example, and in the oil shale in the US west, and perhaps in the Middle East. But in order for this oil to be available now, huge investments would need to have been made starting at least 10 years ago. Also, in order to justify this investment, the cost of the finished oil products would need to be very high—high relative to the energy required to extract the oil, and high relative to people’s salaries. At some point, limits are reached in the amount people can afford to pay for oil, and we may already approaching those limits.”….

….”The US economy has been growing for many years, with only brief interruptions, so nearly all of our experience with borrowing money, and paying it back with interest, has been during periods of economic growth.”….

….”But what if we start encountering a very different kind of world, one with a decline in oil supplies? If oil resources constrain economic growth, debt defaults can be expected to rise, and the whole debt system underlying our financial system is at risk. Insurance companies are very much at risk too, because many of their assets are bonds. In the past, these bonds would have been repaid with interest, but in a world with little economic growth, and perhaps economic decline, the risk of default becomes much higher.” •nn) From article “Community Education for a Full Range of Peacebuilding Roles” by this writer (October, 2010) (at http://www.ipcri.net/Community_Education_for_a_Full_Range_of_Peacebuild.pdf ) (paragraphs 1, 2 and overview of “Design for Sustainability Training of Trainers”--an advanced training course based at the Findhorn Ecovillage, and scheduled for October, 2010)

“There are many resources available to assist in the transformation to more peaceful ways of life. Educational opportunities made accessible at the local community level can become a point of entry for many people. The IPCR Initiative (the initiative this writer is building) advocates for “Community Teaching and Learning Centers” (concept created and developed by ‘Teachers Without Borders’), which can, in turn, provide key support for carrying out Community Visioning Initiatives. [The IPCR Initiative also advocates for ongoing use of questionnaires at the local level, as ‘Organizations and communities of people often use questionnaires and surveys to identify problems and solutions, and to build consensus for collective action’.]

“In a post I made in the “Peace Educators” group (discussion on curriculum, February 28, 2010 at Peace and Collaborative Development Ning Platform), I quoted from the Beyond Intractability website as follows: “Efforts to limit the terrible destructiveness commonly associated with intractable conflicts ultimately depend on the ability of people in a full range of conflict roles to successfully play their part in a broad peacebuilding effort.” This writer feels it is relevant to successful peacebuilding for educators to gain a deep appreciation for how broad peacebuilding efforts can be-- and the Ecovillage Design Curriculum is one way educators can gain such an appreciation.”

From an introduction to “Ecovillage Design” coursework at the Findhorn Foundation website:

(from the Ecovillage/Gaia Education Design section of Findhorn Foundation website (specifically http://www.findhorn.org/programmes/programme353.php )

“Gaia Education Design for Sustainability - Training of Trainers - Incorporating Transition Towns Training

Saturday 2nd October, 2010 (presented by the Findhorn Foundation in partnership with Global Ecovillage Network and Gaia Education)

Based on the Ecovillage Design Curriculum - an official contribution to the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development

Facilitated by: Pracha Hutanuwatr - Director, Wongsanit Ashram, Thailand May East - Director, Gaia Education Jonathan Dawson - Senior Lecturer, Findhorn College Michael Shaw - Director, Ecovillage International and Findhorn Ecovillage experts”

“You are invited to join this four-week comprehensive training of trainers based on the four core pillars of the Ecovillage Design Curriculum: the social, worldview, ecological and economic dimensions of sustainability. The curriculum draws on the experience and expertise developed in a network of some of the most successful ecovillages and community projects across the Earth. “Design for Sustainability Training of Trainers is an advanced training course based at the Findhorn Ecovillage providing a practical forum for learning and developing skills needed to work effectively with design for sustainability at all levels. It comprises four separate week-long modules, which may be attended as a whole or separately.”

“Social Design - Week 1: Oct 2 - 8 Building Community & Embracing Diversity Communication Skills and Feedback Facilitation and Decision-Making Processes Conflict Facilitation Personal Empowerment and Leadership Celebrating Life: Creativity and Art

Economic Design - Week 2: Oct 9 - 15 Shifting the Global Economy to Sustainability How Money Works: Community Banks and Currencies Right Livelihood Social Enterprise Legal and Financial Issues

Ecological Design - Week 3: Oct 16 - 22 Whole Systems Approach to Ecological Design Appropriate Technology: Water Organic Agriculture and Local Food Appropriate Technology: Energy Green Building & Retrofitting

Worldview - Week 4: Oct 23 - 29 Holistic Worldview Listening to and Reconnecting with Nature Awakening & Transformation of Consciousness Personal Health, Planetary Health Socially Engaged Spirituality and Bioregionalism”

[Commentary (by this writer):

Everyone is involved when it comes to determining the markets which supply the “ways of earning a living”.

The ways we “invest” our time, energy, and money have a direct impact on the “ways of earning a living” that are available.

All of us have important responsibilities associated with resolving a significant number of very serious challenges ahead.] •oo) From poster titled “The Oil Age: World Oil Production 1859-2050” by SF Infomatics (from December 2010 edition available from the Post Carbon Institute (see http://www.postcarbon.org/book/40610-the-new-oil-age-poster-dec ) (Note: Since this writer considers the challenges of adopting to the realities of “Peak Oil” to be of critical urgency, he has made use of this copyrighted material for educational purposes. If proprietary concerns should outweigh the educational intent in this matter, he will delete this material from the document.)

Commentary [from item jj) above]: “By supporting items and processes that have lower embodied energy, as well as the companies that produce them, consumers can significantly reduce society’s energy use.” “If many people can learn to find contentment and quality of life while consuming much less, this limiting of desires at the ‘root’ will save much trouble trying to respond to the symptoms as they materialize worldwide. This is part of the ‘spiritual teachings’ element which often gets overlooked….” •pp) From poster titled “The Oil Age: World Oil Production 1859-2050” by SF Infomatics (from December 2010 edition available from the Post Carbon Institute (see http://www.postcarbon.org/book/40610-the-new-oil-age-poster-dec ) (Note: Since this writer considers the challenges of adopting to the realities of “Peak Oil” to be of critical urgency, he has made use of this copyrighted material for educational purposes. If proprietary concerns should outweigh the educational intent in this matter, he will delete this material from the document.)

Commentary [from item o) above]: “The United States currently has 5 percent of the world’s population, but uses 25 percent of the world’s annual energy production. This disproportionate consumption of energy relative to global consumption causes loss of the world’s good will and provides a context for potential military conflicts, at the cost of lives, money, and political capital. A more equitable distribution of resources is in our best interest for a peaceful future. “ •qq) From the “List of Countries by Oil Production” page at Wikipedia (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_production )

(from the first paragraph)

“This is a list of countries by oil production mostly based on CIA World Factbook data.”

Country Production (bbl/day) Share of World % — World 87,500,000[3] 100% 2011 — Arab League 24,171,503 29.71% 2009 1 Russia 10,540,000[4] 12.01% 2011 2 Saudi Arabia 8,800,000[5] 11.59% 2011 3 United States 7,800,000[6] 10.75% 2011 4 Iran 4,172,000 4.95% 2009 5 China 3,991,000 4.74% 2009 6 Canada 3,289,000 3.90% 2009 7 Mexico 3,001,000 3.56% 2009 8 United Arab Emirates 2,798,000 3.32% 2009 9 Brazil 2,572,000 3.05% 2009 10 Kuwait 2,494,000 2.96% 2009 11 Venezuela 2,472,000 2.93% 2009 12 Iraq 2,399,000 2.85% 2009 — European Union 2,365,000 2.81% 2009 13 Norway 2,350,000 2.79% 2009 14 Nigeria 2,211,000 2.62% 2009 15 Algeria 2,125,000 2.52% 2009 16 Angola 1,948,000 2.31% 2009 17 Libya 1,790,000 2.12% 2009 18 Kazakhstan 1,540,000 1.83% 2009 19 United Kingdom 1,502,000 1.78% 2009 20 Qatar 1,213,000 1.44% 2009 21 Indonesia 1,023,000 1.21% 2009 22 Azerbaijan 1,011,000 1.20% 2009 •rr) From the “List of Countries by Oil Consumption” page at Wikipedia (at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_oil_consumption )

(from paragraphs 1-3)

“In 2010, world energy consumption of refined products increased 3.8%, this is the first increase since 2004, the last year with prices below US$50/bbl.

“According to Enerdata, this trend was supported by fast-growing demand for road and air transport, particularly in developing countries. In China, demand for refined products surged by 12% due to increasing needs. Asia accounted for more than 40% of the overall increase in consumption. In Latin America, demand rose sharply by 5.7%, representing 13% of the increase. In CIS, consumption grew by 7.3% (8.9% in Russia), while rising 4.2% in the Middle East (driven by Saudi Arabia and Kuwait). Each region contributed 8% to the overall increase.

“This is a list of countries by oil consumption mostly based on The World Factbook.”

Oil - consumption Date of ank Country/Region (bbl/day) information - World 85,980,000 2008 est. 1 United States of America 18,690,000 2009 est. - European Union 13,680,000 2007 est. 2 China 8,200,000 2009 est. 3 Japan 4,363,000 2009 est. 4 India 2,980,000 2009 est. 5 Russia 2,740,000 2009 est. 6 Brazil 2,460,000 2009 est. 7 Germany 2,437,000 2009 est. 8 Saudi Arabia 2,430,000 2009 est. 9 Korea, South 2,185,000 2009 est. 10 Canada 2,151,000 2009 est. 11 Mexico 2,078,000 2009 est. 12 France 1,875,000 2009 est. 13 Iran 1,700,000 2009 est. 14 United Kingdom 1,669,000 2009 est. 15 Italy 1,537,000 2009 est. 16 Spain 1,482,000 2009 est. •ss) From the “Energy Issues” section of Chevron’s “Will You Join Us?” website; (Index/Basic Facts About Energy/Energy Supply/Limitations to Growing Supply); subsection “Limitations to Growing Supply”; subtitle “2008 Largest International Oil and Gas Companies” (at http://www.willyoujoinus.com/energy.issues/basicfactsaboutenergy/energysupply/limitationstogrowin gsupply/ )

“In terms of future production and supply, a substantial amount of oil and gas reserves are controlled by a small group of national oil companies (NOCs) with the private oil companies holding only 5% relative to national oil companies. (this writer’s italics)(See table below) Given this characteristic of supply, national oil companies and energy ministries will play an increasingly important role in the future development of supplies.”

2008 Rank Company Country State Ownership (%)*

1 Saudi Aramco Saudi Arabia 100

2 NIOC Iran 100

3 Exxon Mobil US

4 PDV Venezuela 100

5 CNPC China 100

6 BP UK

7 Royal Dutch Shell UK/Netherlands

8 ConocoPhillips US

9 Chevron US

10 Total France

11 Pemex Mexico 100

12 KPC Kuwait 100

13 Sonatrach Algeria 100

14 Gazprom Russia 50.0023

15 Petrobras Brazil 32.2

16 Rosneft Russia 75.16

17 Lukoil Russia

18 Petronas Malaysia 100

19 Adnoc UAE 100

20 Eni Italy 30

21 NNPC Nigeria 100 2008 Rank Company Country State Ownership (%)*

22 QP Qatar 100

23 INOC† Iraq 100

24 Libya NOC Libya 100

25 Sinopec China 75.84

26 EGPC Egypt 100

27 StatoilHydro Norway 65

28 Repsol YPF Spain

29 Surgutneftegas Russia

30 Pertamina Indonesia 100

•tt) From the “Energy Issues” section of Chevron’s “Will You Join Us?” website; (Index/Basic Facts About Energy/Energy Supply/Limitations to Growing Supply); subsection “Limitations to Growing Supply”; subtitle “Energy Supply and Social Development” (at http://www.willyoujoinus.com/energy.issues/basicfactsaboutenergy/energysupply/limitationstogrowin gsupply/ )

“Natural resource extraction involves large capital projects, processing facilities, pipelines, and infrastructure which means the ‘footprint’ associated with these projects is typically significant. While the presence of energy resources can bring benefits of employment, local spending, and substantial tax contributions, countries that are disproportionately reliant on natural resource revenues and do not have diversified economies can face ‘boom and bust’ effects when energy prices fall or production starts to decline. These effects on the economic and social well-being of communities and countries can in turn lead to unreliable energy production and generation or alternatively cause disruptions in the overall energy supply chain. In countries that produce energy, transparency and strong governance to ensure equitable distribution of natural resource benefits throughout society has helped improve the reliability of supply.”

•uu) From the “Energy Issues” section of Chevron’s “Will You Join Us?” website; Index/Basic Facts About Energy/Demand for Energy/What Drives Demand?; (see Table “Major Energy Used Within the World Economy”) (at http://www.willyoujoinus.com/energy.issues/basicfactsaboutenergy/demandforenergy/whatdrivesdem and/ ) Major Energy Uses Within the Global Economy

Sector of the Share of Energy Economy Main Types of Energy Used Used (2007) Gasoline (petroleum) for cars, motorcycles and light trucks

Diesel (petroleum) for heavier trucks, buses and trains

Jet fuel (petroleum) for airplanes

Bunker Fuel/Fuel Oil (petroleum) for ships Transportation 20% Diesel (petroleum) for stationary equipment

Petroleum for heating and chemical manufacture

Natural gas for boiler fuel and process heat

Coal for boiler fuel

Electricity for lighting, appliances, refrigeration and some Industry & types of heating and cooling Manufacturing 50% Natural gas for space heating

Electricity for lighting, appliances, refrigeration and some types of heating and cooling

Home heating fuel (petroleum) for space heating Residential Buildings 18% Electricity for lighting, appliances, refrigeration and some types of heating and cooling

Natural gas/fuel oil (petroleum) for space heating Commercial Buildings 12%

•vv) From “World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse” by Lester R. Brown Earth Policy Institute W.W. Norton and Company New York 2011 Accessible for free at the website of the Earth Policy Institute (see http://www.earth-policy.org/books/wote ) (Confirmed April 19, 2011)

“Food price stability now depends on a record or near record world grain harvest every year. And climate change is not the only threat to food security. Spreading water shortages are also a huge, and perhaps even more imminent, threat to food security and political stability. Water-based ‘food bubbles’ that artificially inflate grain production by depleting aquifers are starting to burst, and as they do, irrigation-based harvests are shrinking. The first food bubble to burst is in Saudi Arabia, where the depletion of its fossil aquifer is virtually eliminating its 3- million-ton wheat harvest. And there are at least another 17 countries with food bubbles based on overpumping.” (p. 13-14)

“Further complicating our future, the world may be reaching peak water at more or less the same time that it hits peak oil. Fatih Birol, chief economist with the International Energy Agency, has said, ‘We should leave oil before it leaves us.’ [Note: for excerpt from that interview, see z)]. I agree. If we can phase out the use of oil quickly enough to stabilize climate, it will also facilitate an orderly, managed transition to a carbon-free renewable energy economy. Otherwise we face intensifying competition among countries for dwindling oil supplies and continued vulnerability to soaring oil prices.” (p. 14-15)

“Once the world reaches peak oil and peak water, continuing population growth would mean a rapid drop in the per capita supply of both.” (p. 15)

“We are facing issues of near-overwhelming complexity and unprecedented urgency.” (p. 15)

“Among other things, the situation in which we find ourselves pushes us to redefine security in twenty- first century terms. The time when military forces were the prime threat to security has faded into the past. The threats now are climate volatility, spreading water shortages, continuing population growth, spreading hunger, and failing states.” (p. 15)

•ww) From a blog entry titled “Fracking Culture” by Albert Bates at his blog titled “The Great Change” on June 30, 2011 (at http://peaksurfer.blogspot.com/ )

Note from Wikipedia page for Albert Bates—(from paragraphs 1 and 3 at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Bates )

“A lawyer, author and teacher, he has been director of the Institute for Appropriate Technology since 1984 and of the Ecovillage Training Center at The Farm in Summertown, Tennessee since 1994.”

“Bates has played a major role in the ecovillage movement as one of the organizers of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN), and served as GEN's chairman of the board (from 2002 to 2003) and president (from 2003 to 2004). He was also the principal organizer of the Ecovillage Network of the Americas and served as its president (from 1996 to 2003). In 1994 he founded the Ecovillage Training Center, a "whole systems immersion experience of ecovillage living." He has taught courses in sustainable design, natural building, permaculture and technologies of the future to students from more than 50 nations.”

(the blog entry “Fracking Culture”)

“We are right at that spaghetti junction where all the lines converge with population and resources, food supply, energy, water and the rest. We’re at that point right now, in exactly the decade The Club of Rome predicted we would arrive here. We have to somehow get through this collapsing passageway and into the next paradigm.” This past week, before leaving to attend the gathering of the Ecovillage Network of Canada at La Cité Écologique in Quebec, we were asked to speak at a forum hosted by Nashville Peace and Justice Center concerning hydrofracking, mountaintop removal, and nuclear power in Tennessee. This is a rough transcript of those remarks.

“First I want to start with setting a context, because usually you begin with a problem statement. A lot of what we address at the Ecovillage Training Center and in our curricula for trainings and workshops are methodologies for a switch — a massive transition — from the past paradigm that is failing us now to something entirely new that has the potential for success — to make us successful as a species in partnership with all the other species on the planet.

“To do that, you have to understand the need for a realistic framework to get us from where we are to where we are going, and to, in some sense, reverse engineer it, seeing where we want to be and then backcasting to see what steps are necessary to get us where we want to be within a reasonable time frame.

“Phasing out of emissions from coal, oil and natural gas — particularly methane — is an enormous challenge. To change over the entire fossil fuel paradigm to a post-petroleum paradigm is an enormous challenge. You have to think about how such a transition is even possible. The current administration’s plan — the Obama/Boehner/Bachmann drill baby drill menu — is all about Canadian tar sands, a pipeline from Canada, the Marcella Shale, the Bakkan and various other plays, offshore deep wells and ways to accelerate the fossil end game. If that succeeds, it is essentially game over. There is no way we are going to take all that carbon dioxide back out of the atmosphere in the timeframe that we need to. We’re going to get runaway warming, the methane clathrates bubbling up from the bottom of the oceans, and various other nightmare scenarios.

“Nuclear power has been held out as a carbon-free alternative source of energy, but that is the same PR bull we have been handed since Our Friend The Atom was foisted upon innocent schoolchildren, and was also given to the Japanese schoolchildren, by the way. If you look at the entire nuclear fuel cycle, nuclear is black carbon dirtier than natural gas and not quite as dirty as coal. Coal is more radioactive than natural gas but not as radioactive as nuclear. All of them kill people in order to do what? Boil water. They kill unborn children in future generations, and expose them to horrible birth defects and cancers in order to brew coffee and dry hair.

“We are all the victims of TVA’s efforts to feather its own nest at our expense. This goes back a century to the battle between George Westinghouse and Thomas Edison for control of the electricity market in New York City. Westinghouse won, and what we got was energy that was ever more expensive every year, non-renewable, and unsafe at every turn. Those are the people who built the Fukushima nuclear plants, as well as the reactor that is getting flooded in Nebraska now. They are the mountaintop removal cabal.

“The grid was created to suit itself, not the people it was supposed to serve. Edison wanted to charge people by the number of lights they had. Instead, George Westinghouse charged people by the kilowatt- hour and sold them the most inefficient lightbulbs he could make. And so it went for 100 years – they encouraged people to add more and more gadgets to their homes, and to buy appliances with planned obsolescence, and to then make you need a bigger house to store all that stuff. It was a sales campaign dressed up as labor saving, or civilized living. What we got was an unhappy, disastrously wasteful and soon-to-be-extinct culture. Coal, gas, and nuclear — they are part of that same paradigm. It is a huge conspiracy being foisted on us by the best government corporations could buy. It is all suicidally insane. TVA is clinically insane. What do you call someone who keeps doing the same thing over and over, never proving what they claim they are doing, getting the exact opposite result, but telling you this time the result will be different?..... Clinically insane. That’s clinically insane.

“And so, if you look at where are we now, we are right where Dennis and Dana Meadows said back in 1972 we would be in the Limits to Growth study. We are right at that spaghetti junction where all the lines converge with population and resources, food supply, energy, water and the rest. We’re at that point right now, in exactly the decade they predicted we would arrive here.

“We have to somehow get through this collapsing passageway and into the next paradigm. And so what we do at the Ecovillage Training Center — what ecovillages around the world are all trying to do — is to provide models, transition pathways, to get us to that next step, to get us to where we are going. And some of that is food supply, some of that is energy, some is building materials and how we get our buildings, some of that is microeconomics, like complimentary currencies. Some of that is new methods of social networking and alternative education and midwifery and alternative health care and doing things in ways that we have known for hundreds of thousands of years and we need to get back to. Show of hands: how many people here either saw the sunrise this morning or were up at that time? (some laughter, about 20% raise their hands). That’s pretty good. Your average audience – none. But in point of fact, that’s when the light came on. And you could get up and do chores and it was still cool for several hours. And we’re going to be here until after that light goes out tonight. We’ll be here after dark, and we will spend coal energy getting home, feeding our family, putting ourselves to bed, whatever, which we could do without all that dirty power if we just got up earlier.

“So ecovillages are about that. They are trying to find ways that are relatively painless, in comparison to the kind of pain that civilization is about to experience — to lead the way, so that people can jump into these new models and start doing it for themselves and avoid the shock that comes of collapse. Because that is where this previous paradigm is heading us, and taking along a lot of other species, too.”

•xx) From report “Armed Forces, Capabilities and Technologies in the 21st Century Environmental Dimensions of Security: Sub-study 1 Peak Oil--Security Policy Implications of Scarce Resources” (112 pages) The study was produced by the Future Analysis department of the Bundeswehr Transformation Center, a branch of the German military (Lead Author: Lt. Col. Thomas Will) Bundeswehr Transformation Centre Future Analysis Branch Prötzeler Chaussee 25 15344 Strausberg November 2010 www.zentrum-transformation.bundeswehr.de [email protected] [Special Note:“The original German document (125 pgs) was approved for public release last November, yet neither the complete German version nor the partial English translation has attracted interest from mainstream media.” From article “Complete English translation of German military analysis of peak oil now available” by Rick Munroe Published Aug 30 2011 by Energy Bulletin (see http://energybulletin.net/stories/2011-08-30/complete- english-translation-german-military-analysis-peak-oil-now-available ) (confirmed August 31, 2011) ]

• Access to complete English translation pdf file provided in “Complete English translation…” article by Rick Munroe at Energy Bulletin website (at http://energybulletin.net/stories/2011-08-30/complete- english-translation-german-military-analysis-peak-oil-now-available ) • From the “Foreword” (p. 3) of the “Armed Forces…” report: “…the studies carried out by the Future Analysis Branch do not generally reflect any official views held by the Federal Ministry of Defence. Any specific conclusions, analysis requirements and recommended actions that are of relevance to the armed forces, i.e. internal conclusions, are drawn up in parallel and are only published internally within the Federal Ministry of Defence.”

The following are excerpts selected by this writer from the report “Armed Forces, Capabilities and Technologies in the 21st Century Environmental Dimensions of Security: Sub-study 1 Peak Oil--Security Policy Implications of Scarce Resources”. i) From introduction (p. 9) and Footnote #6 (p. 9)

Figure 1: The Strategic Ellipse “The Strategic Ellipse is an area that extends from the Middle East via the Caspian Region to the far north of Russia. This area encompasses approximately two thirds of the natural oil and gas deposits that are known globally and can currently be recovered at reasonable costs (reserve). This specifically concerns countries such as Saudi Arabia, Russia, Iran, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Iraq, Kuwait and Kazakhstan.” ii) from Introduction (p. 8, paragraph 3)

“In the past already, numerous conflicts were linked to various kinds of raw material deposits. Literature relating to this subject is extensive, and the topic finds broad interest within the security policy community. In most cases, however, such resource conflicts have been restricted to specific regions and have only been of limited relevance to international security policy. In the light of global peak oil, this could change in future with regard to oil as a natural resource: Firstly, a global lack of oil could represent a systemic risk because its versatility as a source of energy and as a chemical raw material would mean that virtually every social subsystem would be affected by a shortage. Secondly, the primarily geographical concentration of the oil deposits and transport infrastructures in the "Strategic Ellipse" (see Figure 1) could lend greater relevance to security policy and generate increased global interest, which amongst other things could result in a shift in geopolitical power.” iii) From introduction (p. 11, paragraph 1)

“The precise global peak oil date is controversial and can only be determined with certainty in retrospect. Available data on global oil reserves vary considerably and hardly provide any scope for outsiders to make an independent assessments.” iv) From Introduction (p. 11, last paragraph)

The main objective of the study is to raise awareness about the systemic importance of oil and, in turn, the derivable significance to security policy if peak oil is exceeded. The findings and results are expressly not meant to imply that resources will necessarily have to be secured with military assets. Rather, the study is to be understood as an appeal to think things through at an early stage (this writer’s italics) and to develop both preventive and responsive courses of action. v) From Chapter 2 “The Importance of Oil”; Section 2.1 “Oil as a Determining Factor of Globalization” (p. 12, paragraphs 2 and 4)

“As the source material for various types of fuels, oil is a basic prerequisite for the transportation of large quantities of goods over long distances. Alongside information technology, container ships, trucks and aircraft form the backbone of globalisation. International division of labour, to which many countries owe their wealth, would not be possible without today’s volume of cost-efficient goods transport. Oil-based mobility also significantly influences our lifestyle, both regionally and locally. For example, living in suburbs several kilometres away from their workplace would be impossible for many people without a car. To a certain extent, the classical suburb thus also owes its existence to oil.”

“A considerable increase in the oil price would pose a systemic risk because the availability of relatively affordable oil is crucial for the functioning of large parts of the economic and social systems.” vi) From Chapter 2 “The Importance of Oil”; Section 2.1 “Oil as a Determining Factor of Globalisation” (p. 14, last paragraph) “It can therefore be stated that against the backdrop of the ever-decreasing availability of fossil fuels, the challenge of ensuring long-term energy supply is reflected in national strategies worldwide, leaving no doubt as to the vital importance attached to this issue. In this context, the fact that energy supply aspects occupy an increasingly important place in the national security strategy documents of various countries is an indication of the increasing securitisation of this area – a process that, as is explained below in Chapter 2.2 – is likely to have consequences on the nature of future energy relations. The above-mentioned strategy documents explicitly emphasise a principally peaceful method of securing energy supplies. Whether and how efforts towards secure energy supply can be designed conflictively or cooperatively in the face of potential peak oil consequences depends on a number of different conditions, which will be addressed in the following chapters.” vii) From Chapter 2 “The Importance of Oil”; Section 2.2 “Oil as a Potential Conflict Factor” (p. 16, paragraph 1)

“The necessary infrastructure to recover, transport, refine and sell oil calls for a relatively stable (state) environment. The control of an oil field alone is not sufficient, transport routes and possible transshipment centres such as seaports must also be freely accessible.” viii) From Chapter 2 “The Importance of Oil”; Section 2.3 “Oil and Aspects of German Energy Security” (p. 17, paragraph 1)

“These definitions refer to the ‘triangle of political goals comprising supply security, cost-efficiency and environmental compatibility’, which is what the term ‘energy security’ actually means.” ix) From Chapter 2 “The Importance of Oil”; Section 2.3 “Oil and Aspects of German Energy Security” (p. 20, paragraph 1)

“Table 1 shows that more than 90% of all oil imports to Germany come from countries that reach or have already exceeded their national peaks during the study’s period of review. Various expert analyses assume that it is very likely that peak oil has already occurred for Russia, Norway and Great Britain, for example. These three countries alone currently supply 60% of Germany’s total oil import volume.” (this writer’s italics) x) From Chapter 2 “The Importance of Oil”; Section 2.3 “Oil and Aspects of German Energy Security” (p. 20, paragraph 3 and Footnote #45)

“A reliable estimate of Saudi Arabia’s potential is regarded particularly difficult. There are indications, however, that suggest an unfavourable development for the kingdom.45 This is extremely relevant because ultimately the point at which global peak oil occurs is likely to be determined primarily by Saudi Arabia’s oil production potential.”

Footnote #45: “The most important and partly contradictory bases for this possible development are:that first of all, Saudi Arabia’s production rate has been on the decline for the last five years, but at the same time it is emphasised that increases are possible at any time; that secondly ‘Ghawar’, the biggest oil field in the world, could have exceeded its peak; that thirdly, King Abdullah announced publicly in 2007 that: ‘The oil boom is over and is not going to return’, and: ‘All of us must get used to a different lifestyle’; fourthly, for the period of review covered by this study, it is necessary to take into account that global oil supplies from Saudi Arabia might decrease due to an increase of 40% in the country’s own demand. Cf. ibid., 48; Andreas Postner and Willi Sieber, Peak Oil. Die internationale Diskussion und mögliche Auswirkungen auf Vorarlberg (Bregenz, November 2008), 271, http://www.vorarlberg.at/pdf/peakoilstudie.pdf (accessed on 11 October 2010).” (Bregenz, November 2008), 271, http://www.vorarlberg.at/pdf/peakoilstudie.pdf (accessed on 11 October 2010). xi) From Chapter 2 “The Importance of Oil”; Section 2.3 “Oil and Aspects of German Energy Security” (p. 22-23, last paragraph)

“Ultimately, it is hardly possible to calculate from today’s perspective how suppliers and consumers will respond to global peak oil. Against this backdrop, the continuous assessment of diversification opportunities seems equally necessary and difficult, particularly with regard to the ousting or competition effects with other oil-importing countries that such efforts would bring about in the face of declining production rates. Generally, an increasing importance of the countries of the Strategic Ellipse for Germany’s oil imports becomes apparent.” xii) From chapter 3 “Possible Developments after Global Peak Oil” (p. 24, paragraph 3)

“However, future analysis must also cover unexpected and undesired futures of which no more than the first indications can be analysed. Chapter 3.2 therefore looks into a special possible peak oil scenario in which a so-called ‘tipping point’ is exceeded where linear developments become chaotic and finally result in a worst-case scenario in terms of security policy. For example, if the global economy shrinks for an indeterminate period of time, a chain reaction that might destabilise the global economic system is imaginable. Depending on point in time and the level of dependence of the affected society, such a peak-oil-induced, economic tipping point might have such severe systemic implications that only a few general statements as to economic, political, and social developments beyond the tipping point can be made. This will clearly change the analytical framework for all other security policy conclusions. Because of the widely unexplored ‘tipping point’ phenomenon, it is impossible to conduct a comprehensive analysis of possible effects of such a trigger element. Rather, this study is designed to raise awareness of a possible nonlinear economic development due to peak oil and of the related risk of a severe system crisis.” xiii) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.1 “Oil as an Important Factor Shaping International Relations”; subtitle “Greater Difficulties in Diversifying Sources for Importing Countries” (p. 27, paragraph 1)

“Due to the future concentration of essential oil reserves in the Strategic Ellipse in conjunction with a more intense competition between importing countries, it will become increasingly difficult to diversify sources. As a result, the regions in the Strategic Ellipse would continue to become more important for the future organisation of the oil and gas supply of many importing countries.” xiv) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.1 “Oil as an Important Factor Shaping International Relations”; subtitle “Special Role of Threshold Countries Depending on Imports” (p. 29, paragraph 3)

“The primacy of securing energy due to peak oil could thus lead to neglect or at least new selectivity with regard to demands for the protection of human rights, good governance or democratic and ecological development in the relations between countries dependent on oil imports and producing countries. It can be assumed that the relations between Western industrialised countries and countries that lack resources will remain unaffected by this ‘moral decline’. Hence, in the service of energy security, pronounced double standards in foreign policy could be the result of this development.” xv) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.1 “Oil as an Important Factor Shaping International Relations”; subtitle “Reshaping Supply Relationships After Global Peak Oil”; additional subtitle “Conditioned Supply Relationships and Package Deals” (p. 30, paragraph 1-3, and 5)

“In view of a decrease in production and the producing countries’ need to satisfy their own oil demands, it can be assumed that supply relationships would become increasingly selective, and thus attractive return services beyond net sales revenues would become more important as a criterion for selecting privileged recipient countries. Owing to this, the global oil market could adhere to free market rules only to a limited extent. Just as before the oil crises in the 1970s, bilateral conditioned supply relationships and privileged partnerships would once again come to the fore.” “Buyers with the ability to submit appropriate offers or to meet the particular conditions would be in a position to undermine global market mechanisms and negotiate their own pricing and supply agreements. This situation could lead to an increase in package deals.”

“In general, goods and services that – similar to oil – strengthen the economic power of the producer countries or its possibilities to exert political influence would be particularly suitable as compensations for such package deals. Producer countries could progressively demand material and/or political trade- offs that might aid them in closing their technology gap, in overcoming their economic stagnation or, in many cases, in emerging from their political isolation. In international negotiations, for example, importing countries that are represented in relevant bodies like the UN Security Council could act as an advocate for the interests of countries that are rich in resources and influence or block relevant decision processes in their favour. Even though such ‘deals’ can be observed already, this trend might grow considerably. With regard to important oil-producing countries such as Sudan and Iran, China, for example, is already under suspicion of preventing sanctions and thus protecting the regimes in Khartoum and Tehran by its voting behaviour in the UN Security Council.”….

….“Importing countries could face another challenge if ideological aspects and differences also played an increasingly important role in the choice of selective oil supplies and privileged partnerships.” xvi) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.2 “Changed Distribution of Roles for State and Private Actors”; subtitle “More Intense Dispute About Production Licences” (p. 34, paragraph 3) “Owing to the wave of nationalisation in the oil producer countries in the 1970s, the share in global oil reserves held by national oil companies currently lies at more than 80%. It is becoming increasingly difficult for the IOCs to gain access to easily and inexpensively exploitable oil.” xvii) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.2 “Changed Distribution of Roles for State and Private Actors”; subtitle “Increased Importance of Oil Infrastructures”

(p. 38, paragraph 2)

“Global transportation routes via which oil is distributed with supertankers or long pipeline sections are, due to their broad ramifications, difficult to protect and sometimes provide easy targets for interrupting the oil supply. This would also increase the incentive to sabotage energy infrastructure. In this context, the high return on investment of attacks on pipelines, ports or refineries is likely to automatically put the oil industry in the focus of interest for any actor who seeks to reach his goals by using force.98 Numerous countries will exceed their production maximum at some point during their oil exploration. Since a major part of the oil reserves remaining after peak oil is concentrated in the Strategic Ellipse, the oil infrastructure in this region is becoming increasingly important for many countries. Interruption of these energy infrastructures would also be an easy and worthwhile target for actors who are willing to use violence. Particularly at the trouble spots of this region’s future energy infrastructure, a comparatively huge amount of damage with global political and economic implications could be caused with very little resources and at low risk (high return on investment). The series of attacks in recent years in Nigeria already show these tendencies.”

(p. 39, paragraphs 2 and 3)

“It must be assumed that both states and private companies will adapt to these growing requirements and will increase the security of energy/oil production and transport routes as well as infrastructure. This could lead to an increased degree of activity on the part of private actors when it comes to creating security and stability – a task which originally is a governmental responsibility.”

“If the industrialised countries' dependence on oil persists, they can be expected to seek to increase their influence on the countries of the Strategic Ellipse to ensure continued energy supply and create a favourable environment for stable production and delivery. This would not inevitably be achieved by military engagements, however, it would in principle generate a further increase in the number of external actors.” xviii) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.3 “Exploration of Further and Alternative Energy Resources”; subtitle “Natural Gas as an Extension of the Oil Era” (p. 42, paragraph 2)

“As oil production decreases, similar technologies and infrastructures may initially be employed to expand the use of natural gas. Contrary to oil, natural gas cannot simply be shipped but must be transported as gas via a pipeline or, after compression or liquefaction (liquefied natural gas (LNG)), with special-purpose tankers. Pipeline systems, however, which currently carry the major part of natural gas produced to the consumers, are regionally restricted. Instead of one world market for natural gas there hence are, in fact, several regional markets with limited options for the diversification of supplier relationships, in addition to associated energy security challenges. The pipelines, favoured for transport of natural gas to the customer countries, do not only span countries and regions but frequently also political and economic alliances and cultural areas. Therefore, conflicts over routes, construction and the security of pipelines may gradually increase. This does not only concern the bypass of states and regions that are considered to be unsafe. States that will not be included in the economic development of the reserves or the construction of pipelines also have to be dealt with.” xix) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.3 “Exploration of Further and Alternative Energy Resources”; subtitle “Expansion of Nuclear Energy and Increased Proliferation” (p. 43, paragraph 2) “Above all, the expansion of nuclear energy aggravates the problem of proliferation. Given a deteriorating energy situation, it will become more and more difficult for the world community to restrict or control access to nuclear technologies or their use by ‘critical’ states or crisis countries. Despite the efforts of the international community to establish effective monitoring and control mechanisms, these could increasingly be circumvented and sanctions become increasingly less enforceable. Moreover, given declining national oil reserves, the economic incentive to sell or transfer nuclear technology and/or nuclear material may grow substantially, not only in oil-exporting countries. Even oil-importing, industrialised countries may be inclined to transfer their nuclear technology in return for energy resources as part of a political package deal. Despite all efforts to prevent uncontrolled proliferation of nuclear technology which can always be used for military purposes, such incentives or even simple economic opportunities and necessities may put existing contractual obligations or even alliance memberships into perspective. Thus, as a tendency, more states may turn into potential or actual nuclear powers - with impacts on international and regional balances and alliance systems.” xix) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.3 “Exploration of Further and Alternative Energy Resources”; subtitle “Competition for Land Area in Energy Raw Materials and Food Production” (p. 43, paragraph 2)

(p. 44, paragraph 2)

“Under peak oil conditions, a massive expansion of the production of renewable raw materials for energy purposes as well as material use can be expected. However, the agricultural land area required is limited. The significantly expanded cultivation of renewable raw materials would increase global competition for agricultural land and water. Plants for energy generation compete with plants for the food industry and animal feed crops. Infrastructural measures, urban sprawl and, in some cases, urbanisation tendencies like, for instance, in Cairo, often lead to further cutbacks in potential land use. The massive rise in oil prices due to peak oil would add to the expenses of energy-intensive agricultural supplies such as fertilisers and pesticides as well as to the transport of agricultural intermediate and finished products. This may lead to constantly rising costs for food or at least to an increased volatility of food prices. Low-income strata in the cities and the rural population would suffer first and foremost, widening social gaps even further. In the light of continuously growing populations predominantly in developing countries, regional food supply shortages may be aggravated and eventually culminate in food crises.” (p. 45, paragraph 2)

“Thus, pressure on, and competition for, agricultural land should rise disproportionately. Provided that it has not been possible to achieve a globally sustainable production of biomass, increased disputes about land as a strategic resource would ensue - one of the oldest causes of conflict.”

(p. 45, paragraph 3)

“As these strategic commitments in the agricultural sector are expected to expand, it will not be easy to distinguish state from private-sector or even sub-state actors and interests in terms of land acquisition.”

(p. 46, paragraph 1)

“In addition, excessive biomass production without sustainable agricultural solutions would exacerbate the impact of climate change. A more intensive agriculture, especially with high yield crops grown as monocultures, will have additional negative effects especially on those regions that are already facing acute water shortages. The degradation of soil due to erosion, compression, salinisation and desertification may progress considerably. With the destruction of intact eco-systems and the loss of biodiversity the natural regeneration potential of the biosphere would decrease on a local and global level. Without sustainable solutions the rapidly growing production of renewable energy raw materials could intensify economic and ecological crises in many regions of the world.” (this writer’s italics) xx) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.4 “Intra- Societal Risks of Peak Oil”; subtitle “Restrictions in Private and Goods Transportation” (p. 49, paragraph 2 and 3)

“Given that no sufficient alternatives on the basis of regenerative energy sources have been established for transportation, peak oil is likely to cause a substantial rise in costs and possibly huge restrictions in motorised private transportation. This would have immediate effects on the functional mechanisms and ways of life of modern industrialised societies. Sudden shortages could be eased with the use of regulatory or voluntary measures (‘mobility vouchers’, ‘car-free Sunday’ etc.). However, suburban settlement structures in industrialized countries in particular (living in the suburb - working in the city centre) hamper a rapid transformation of private transportation. If the restrictions are considerable, all economic sectors concerned – from the automobile industry through the construction business to tourism – would experience a downturn. The ‘mobility crisis’ could turn into an important new aspect of the economic crisis.” (this writer’s italics)….

….”A possible consequence would be bottlenecks in the supply of existentially important goods.” (this writer’s italics) xxi) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.4 “Intra- Societal Risks of Peak Oil”; subtitle “Upheavel in Economic Structures” (p. 54, paragraph 1)

“…it is not possible to rule out considerable frictions on the labour market. New economic sectors, jobs and market opportunities can indeed develop in the wake of post-fossil transformation. This economic upheaval could, however, initially result in significant transformation unemployment. It is regarded as a special form of structural unemployment that can evolve as a result of profound changes in transformation countries. Most importantly, a devaluation of employees’ human capital may occur because the change in structure causes thus far fully adequate qualifications to be replaced by other qualification requirements. Depending on its scope and duration, transformation unemployment could develop into a major economic problem.” (this writer’s italics)

(p. 54, paragraph 2 and Footnote #144)

“The intended transition towards a post-fossil society, however, confronts everyone with the same challenge because there are no best-practice models. Owing to the novelty of the situation there cannot be any such models yet.” (this writer’s italics)

Footnote #144:“ Most importantly in the US, there are already programmes available on a local level that deal very seriously with the preparation for peak oil. Overall, there is a trend in some population groups towards ‘resilient communities’. A very good example is a study carried out by the city of Bloomington (Indiana), http://bloomington.in.gov/media/media/application/pdf/6239.pdf (accessed on 13 October 2010).” xxii) From Chapter 3 “Possible Developments After Global Peak Oil”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Section 3.1 “Possible Peak Oil Induced Implications”; Subsection 3.1.4 “Intra- Societal Risks of Peak Oil”; subtitle “Loss of Confidence Amongst Society” (p. 54, paragraph 3; p. 55, paragraph 1)

“Historical case studies reveal that only continuous improvement of individual living conditions provide the basis for tolerant and open societies. Empirical studies for the OECD region also prove that setbacks in economic growth can lead to an increase in the number of votes for extremist and nationalistic parties.” “On the other hand, it cannot be ruled out that the people’s confidence in state institutions as well as politics would be considerably shaken. This confidence is likely to dwindle even more in societies in which it is already weak – in particular if it is becoming obvious in crisis regions that governments have in the past failed to develop suitable solution strategies and provide orientation for society during this period of transition (this writer’s italics). This personalised loss of confidence, which can express itself, for example, in ‘dressing down’ politicians, could – depending on intensity and duration – consolidate into a general and lasting crisis of confidence towards central national institutions and their ability to solve problems. A society, however, cannot survive without confidence. Sullenness with politics can give rise to lethargy or fatalism and can increase the likelihood of growing political instability and extremism. Via indirect legitimisation chains, this national loss of confidence could also have a negative impact on the legitimisation, functionality and actionability of supranational organisations and institutions as well.” From Chapter 5 “Conclusion” (p.91, paragraph 1 and 2)

“When considering the consequences of peak oil, no everyday experiences and only few historical parallels are at hand. It is therefore difficult to imagine how significant the effects of being gradually deprived of one of our civilisation’s most important energy sources will be. Psychological barriers cause indisputable facts to be blanked out and lead to almost instinctively refusing to look into this difficult subject in detail. (this writer’s italics)

“Peak oil, however, is unavoidable. This study shows the existence of a very serious risk that a global transformation of economic and social structures, triggered by a long-term shortage of important raw materials, will not take place without frictions regarding security policy. The disintegration of complex economic systems and their interdependent infrastructures has immediate and in some cases profound effects on many areas of life, particularly in industrialised countries.”

•yy) From the website of the Global Ecovillage Network (GEN)

(from the “About Us” section, at http://gen.ecovillage.org/about-gen/aboutgen.html )(paragraph 1)

“The Global Ecovillage Network (GEN) is a growing network of sustainable communities and initiatives that bridge different cultures, countries, and continents. GEN serves as umbrella organization for ecovillages, transition town initiatives, intentional communities, and ecologically-minded individuals worldwide.”

(from the “Vision and Mission” section, at http://gen.ecovillage.org/about-gen/vision-mission.html ) (paragraph 1)

“We envision an expanding network of communities, businesses, NGOs, media, educational institutions, governments, foundations, writers, researchers, educators, students, and citizen activists exchanging information and experiences globally to enhance our individual and collective capacity for living sustainably in community, at the present and for future generations.”

(from the “Vision and Mission” section, at http://gen.ecovillage.org/about-gen/vision-mission.html ) (paragraph 3-5)

“Goals:

To provide networking services in the form of information, encouragement, tools, examples, and leadership in developing and demonstrating sustainability principles and practices.

Through information exchange, advocate a community lifestyle to individuals from all walks of life, for them to cultivate balanced, healthy and sustainable living --- socially, spiritually, economically, and ecologically.

To serve as a think-tank, incubator, international partner organization and catalyst for Ecovillages, ecovillage-related projects, and lifestyle models that expedite the global shift to sustainability.” (from “What is an Ecovillage?” section, at http://gen.ecovillage.org/ecovillages/whatisanecovillage.html ) (in subsection “Background”)

“The motivation for ecovillages is the choice and commitment to reverse the gradual disintegration of supportive social/cultural structures and the upsurge of destructive environmental practices on our planet.

“For millenia, people have lived in communities close to nature, and with supportive social structures. Many of these communities, or ‘ecovillages’, exist to this day and are struggling for survival.

“Ecovillages are now being created intentionally, so people can once more live in communities that are connected to the Earth in a way that ensures the well-being of all life-forms into the indefinite future.

“Ecovillages are one solution to the major problems of our time - the planet is experiencing the limits to growth, and our lives are often lacking meaningful content. According to increasing numbers of scientists, we have to learn to live sustainably if we are to survive as a species. The United nations launched its Global Environment Outlook 2000 report, based on reports from UN agencies, 850 individuals and over 30 environmental institutes, concluding that ‘the present course is unsustainable and postponing action is no longer an option.’”

(from the “Ecovillage Design Education” section, at http://gen.ecovillage.org/education/ecovillagedesigneducation.html ) (paragraphs 1 and 2)

“The Ecovillage Design Education (EDE) course is a program of a GEN partner, Gaia Education. This new initiative was launched at Findhorn in October 2005 by a group of Ecovillage educators calling themselves The GEESE (Global Ecovillage Educators for Sustainable Earth.) The key program is a UNITAR-endorsed 4 week holistic introduction to designing sustainable settlements based on the GEN ‘living and learning’ principle. In four weeks you get an overview of all you need to know to design sustainable settlements all over the world.

"Gaia Education promotes a holistic approach to education for sustainable development by developing curricula for sustainable community design. While drawing upon best practices within ecovillages worldwide, Gaia Education works in partnership with universities, ecovillages, government and non- government agencies and the United Nations."

•zz) From the Transition United States website ( at http://www.transitionus.org/home ) i) From the “Why Transition?” section (at http://www.transitionus.org/why-transition )

Why Transition?

“We are living in an age of unprecedented change, with a number of crises converging. Climate change, global economic instability, overpopulation, erosion of community, declining biodiversity, and resource wars, have all stemmed from the availability of cheap, non-renewable fossil fuels. Global oil, gas and coal production is predicted to irreversibly decline in the next 10 to 20 years, and severe climate changes are already taking effect around the world. The coming shocks are likely to be catastrophic if we do not prepare. As Richard Heinberg states:

Our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels – and to do this as peacefully, equitably, and intelligently as possible”.

“The Transition movement represents one of the most promising ways of engaging people and communities to take the far-reaching actions that are required to mitigate the effects of peak oil, climate change and the economic crisis. Furthermore, these relocalization efforts are designed to result in a life that is more fulfilling, more socially connected and more equitable than the one we have today. The Transition model is based on a loose set of real world principles and practices that have been built up over time through experimentation and observation of communities as they drive forward to reduce carbon emissions and build community resilience. Underpinning the model is a recognition of the following:

 Peak Oil, Climate Change and the Economic Crisis require urgent action  Adaptation to a world with less oil is inevitable  It is better to plan and be prepared, than be taken by surprise  Industrial society has lost the resilience to be able to cope with shocks to its systems  We have to act together and we have to act now  We must negotiate our way down from the “peak” using all our skill, ingenuity and intelligence  Using our creativity and cooperation to unleash the collective genius within our local communities will lead to a more abundant, connected and healthier future for all.

“The Transition Movement believes that is up to us in our local communities to step into a leadership position on this situation. We need to start working now to mitigate the interrelated effects of peak oil, climate change, and the economic crisis, before it is too late. Together we can make a difference.” ii) From “The Seven Guiding Principles of Transition” section (at http://www.transitionus.org/initiatives/7-principles )

“The 7 Guiding Principles of Transition

1. Positive Visioning Transition Initiatives are based on a dedication to the creation of tangible, clearly expressed and practical visions of the community in question beyond its present-day dependence on fossil fuel. Our primary focus is not campaigning against things, but rather on creating positive, empowering possibilities and opportunities. The generation of new stories and myths are central to this visioning work.

2. Help People Access Good Information and Trust Them to Make Good Decisions Transition initiatives dedicate themselves, through all aspects of their work, to raising awareness of peak oil and climate change and related issues such as critiquing economic growth. In doing so they recognize the responsibility to present this information in ways which are playful, articulate, accessible and engaging, and which enable people to feel enthused and empowered rather than powerless Transition initiatives focus on telling people the closest version of the truth that we know in times when the information available is deeply contradictory. The messages are non-directive, respecting each person’s ability to make a response that is appropriate to their situation.

3. Inclusion and Openness Successful Transition Initiatives need an unprecedented coming together of the broad diversity of society. They dedicate themselves to ensuring that their decision making processes and their working groups embody principles of openness and inclusion. This principle also refers to the principle of each initiative reaching the community in its entirety, and endeavoring, from an early stage, to engage their local business community, the diversity of community groups and local government authorities. It makes explicit the principle that there is no room for ‘them and us’ thinking in the challenge of energy descent planning.

4. Enable Sharing and Networking Transition Initiatives dedicate themselves to sharing their successes, failures, insights and connections at the various scales across the Transition network, so as to more widely build up a collective body of experience.

5. Build Resilience This stresses the fundamental importance of building resilience i.e. the capacity of our businesses, communities and settlements to withstand shock. Transition initiatives commit to building resilience across a wide range of areas (food, economics, energy etc) and also on a range of scales (from the local to the national) as seems appropriate - and to setting them within an overall context of the need to do everything we can to ensure environmental resilience.

6. Inner and Outer Transition The challenges we face are not just caused by a mistake in our technologies but are a direct result of our world view and belief system. The impact of the information about the state of our planet can generate fear and grief - which may underlie the state of denial that many people are caught in. Psychological models can help us understand what is really happening and avoid unconscious processes sabotaging change. E.g. addictions models, models for behavioral change. This principle also honors the fact that Transition thrives because it enables and supports people to do what they are passionate about, what they feel called to do.

7. Subsidiarity: self-organization and decision making at the appropriate level This final principle embodies the idea that the intention of the Transition model is not to centralize or control decision making, but rather to work with everyone so that it is practiced at the most appropriate, practical and empowering level, and in such a way that it models the ability of natural systems to self organize.” iii) From “The 12 Ingredients of the Transition Model” (at http://www.transitionus.org/initiatives/12- steps )

“The 12 Ingredients of the Transition Model These 12 Ingredients (aka Steps) have grown out of the observation of what seemed to work in the early Transition Initiatives. They don’t take you from A to Z but rather from A to C, which is as far as we’ve got with the model today. These Steps don’t necessarily follow each other logically in the order they are set out here; every Transition Initiative weaves through them differently. The 12 Ingredients are still evolving, in part shaped by your experience of using them.

It is important to realize that they are not meant to be prescriptive. You do not have to follow them religiously, step by step, you can use the ones that seem useful, add new ones you come up with, and disregard others that don’t work for you.

1. Set up a steering group and design its demise from the outset This stage puts a core team in place to drive the project forward during the initial phases. We recommend that you form your Steering Group with the aim of getting through Steps 2 – 5, and agree that once a minimum of 4 sub-groups (see Step 5) are formed, the Steering Group disbands and reforms with a person from each of those groups. This requires a degree of humility, but is very important to put the success of the project above the individuals involved. Ultimately your Steering Group should be made up of 1 representative from each working sub-group.

2. Raise Awareness This stage will identify your key allies, build crucial networks and prepare the community in general for the launch of your Transition initiative. For an effective Energy Descent Action plan to evolve, its participants have to understand the potential effects of both Peak Oil and Climate Change – the former demanding a drive to increase community resilience, the latter a reduction in carbon footprint. Screenings of key movies (Inconvenient Truth, End of Suburbia, Crude Awakening, Power of Community) along with panels of “experts” to answer questions at the end of each, are very effective. Talks by experts in their field of Climate Change, Peak Oil and community solutions can also be very inspiring. Articles in local papers, interviews on local radio, presentations to existing groups, including schools, are also part of the toolkit to get people aware of the issues, and ready to start thinking of solutions.

3. Lay the foundations This stage is about networking with existing groups and individuals, making clear to them that the Transition Initiative is designed to incorporate their previous efforts and future inputs by looking at the future in a new way. Acknowledge and honor the work they do, and stress that they have a vital role to play. Give them a concise and accessible overview of Peak Oil, what it means, how it relates to Climate Change, how it might affect the community in question, and the key challenges it presents. Set out your thinking about how a Transition Initiative might be able to act as a catalyst for getting the community to explore solutions and to begin thinking about grassroots mitigation strategies.

4. Organize a Great Unleashing This stage creates a memorable milestone to mark the project’s “coming of age”, moves it right into the community at large, builds a momentum to propel your initiative forward for the next period of its work and celebrates your community’s desire to take action. In terms of timing, we suggest this take place about 6 months to a year after your first “awareness-raising” event.

The Official Unleashing of Transition Town Totnes was held in September 2006, preceded by about 10 months of talks, film screenings and events.

Your unleashing will need to bring people up to speed on Peak Oil and Climate Change, but in a spirit of “we can do something about this” rather than a doom and gloom scenario. One item of content that we’ve seen work very well is a presentation on the practical and psychological barriers to personal change – after all, this is all about what we do as individuals. It needn’t be just talks, it could include music, food, dance - whatever you feel reflects your community’s intention to embark on this collective adventure.

5. Form working groups Part of the process of developing an Energy Descent Action Plan is tapping into the collective genius of the community. Crucial for this is to set up a number of smaller groups to focus on specific aspects of the process. Each of these groups will develop their own ways of working and their own activities, but will all fall under the umbrella of the project as a whole.

Ideally, working groups are needed for all aspects of life that your community needs to sustain itself and thrive. Examples of these are: food, waste, energy, education, youth, local economics, transport, water, local government.

Each of your working groups looks at their area and tries to determine the best ways of building community resilience and reducing their carbon footprint. Their solutions will form the backbone of the Energy Descent Action Plan.

6. Use Open Space We’ve found Open Space Technology to be a highly effective approach to running meetings for Transition Initiatives. In theory it ought not to work. A large group of people comes together to explore a particular topic or issue, with no agenda, no timetable, no obvious coordinator and no minute takers. However, by the end of each meeting, everyone has said what they needed to, extensive notes have been taken, lots of networking has had taken place, and a huge number of ideas have been identified, and visions set out.

The essential reading on Open Space is Harrison Owen’s Open Space Technology: A User’s Guide, and you will also find Peggy Holman and Tom Devane’s The Change Handbook: Group Methods for Shaping the Future an invaluable reference on the wider range of such tools.

7. Develop visible practical manifestations of the project It is essential that you avoid any sense that your project is just a talking shop where people sit around and draw up wish lists. Your project needs, from an early stage, to begin to create practical, high visibility manifestations in your community. These will significantly enhance people’s perceptions of the project and also their willingness to participate. There’s a difficult balance to achieve here during these early stages. You need to demonstrate visible progress, without embarking on projects that will ultimately have no place on the Energy Descent Action Plan.

8. Facilitate the Great Reskilling If we are to respond to Peak Oil and Climate Change by moving to a lower energy future and relocalizing our communities, then we’ll need many of the skills that our grandparents took for granted. One of the most useful things a Transition Initiative can do is to reverse the “great deskilling” of the last 40 years by offering training in a range of skills.

Research among the older members of our communities is instructive – after all, they lived before the throwaway society took hold and they understand what a lower energy society might look like. Some examples of courses: recycling grey water, cooking, bicycle maintenance, natural building, herbal medicines, basic home energy efficiency, practical food growing, harvesting rainwater, composting waste (the list is endless). Your Great Reskilling program will give people a powerful realization of their own ability to solve problems, to achieve practical results and to work cooperatively alongside other people. They’ll also appreciate that learning can be fun!

9. Build a Bridge to Local Government Whatever the degree of groundswell your Transition Initiative manages to generate, however many practical projects you’ve initiated, and however wonderful your Energy Descent Plan is, you will not progress far unless you have cultivated a positive and productive relationship with your local government authority. Whether it is planning issues, funding or networking, you need them on board. Contrary to your expectations, you may well find that you are pushing against an open door.

10. Honor the elders For those of us born in the 1960s when the cheap oil party was in full swing, it is very hard to picture a life with less oil. Every year of my life (except for the oil crises of the 70s) has been underpinned by more energy than the previous years. In order to rebuild a picture of a lower energy society, we have to engage with those who directly remember the transition to the age of Cheap Oil, especially the period between 1930 and 1960.

While you clearly want to avoid any sense that what you are advocating is ‘going back’ or ‘returning’ to some dim distant past, there is much to be learnt from how things were done in the past, what the invisible connections between the different elements of society were, and how daily life was supported when less oil was available. Finding these things out can be deeply illuminating, and can lead to our feeling much more connected to place when we are developing our Transition Initiatives.

11. Let it go where it wants to go… Although you may start out developing your Transition Initiative with a clear idea of where it will go, it will inevitably go elsewhere. If you try and hold onto a rigid vision, it will begin to sap your energy and appear to stall. Your role is not to come up with all the answers, but to act as a catalyst for the community to design their own transition.

If you keep your focus on the key design criteria – building community resilience and reducing the carbon footprint – you’ll watch as the collective genius of the community enables a feasible, practicable and highly inventive solution to emerge.

12. Create an Energy Descent Plan At the moment there is only one completed Energy Descent Action Plan, the one done for Kinsale in Ireland. Although this was a student-led project, it did a very good job of producing a template that other communities could follow in designing pathways away from oil dependency. Some people find the term ‘Energy Descent’ too negative, and have chosen to call their EDAP an “Energy Transition Pathway" or a "Community Vision Plan".

Whatever it is called, the EDAP sets out a vision of a powered-down, resilient, relocalized future, and then backcasts, in a series of practical steps, creating a map to get there from here. Every community’s EDAP will be different, both in content and style. However, they will explore a wide range of areas as well as energy: energy descent is an issue which affects every aspect of our lives. Appendix

IPCR Critical Challenges Assessment 2011 (draft) Table of Contents (seeking input)

Introduction

1. Global warming and reducing carbon emissions

2. “Cultures” of violence, greed, corruption, and overindulgence—which have become so common that many of us accept such as inevitable; which are a significant part of the current crises of confidence in financial markets; and which are in many ways slowing the restructuring of investment priorities needed to respond to an increasing number of other critical challenges

3. The end of the era of “cheap energy” (particularly in reference to “peak oil”)

4. The increasing world population and its implications relating to widespread resource depletion (with special focus on the increasing number of people who are consuming material goods and ecological resources indiscriminately)

5. Current trends indicate that we are creating more and more “urban agglomerations” (cities with a population of more than 1 million people—more than 400), which require more and more complex and energy intensive infrastructures, where it is more and more difficult to trace the consequences of our individuals investments of time, energy, and money—and which are the least appropriate models when it comes to implementing resolutions to many of the other challenges in this ten point assessment

6. The U.S. and many other countries will enter the next 15 to 20 years burdened by substantial public debt, possibly leading to higher interest rates, higher taxes, and tighter credit

7. A marginalization of the treasured wisdom associated with religious, spiritual, and moral traditions

8. Global inequities and the tragic cycles of malnutrition, disease, and death

9. Community building associated with responding to the above eight challenges may or may not be accompanied by an exponential increase in compassion for our fellow human beings. In such circumstances, shortages of goodwill in times of unprecedented transition could tilt already precarious systems into further disarray, and thus erode established systems in even the most stable communities and regions

10. Sorting out what are real challenges and what are sound and practical solutions is becoming more and more difficult, as there are now, in most communities of the world, a multitude of ideas of all kinds coming to the fore in personal, family, community, and cultural life—all at the same time

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