Denial? It's universal!

Just watching Kevin Anderson: Climate Change Communications Workshop DCU (With Slides) and in the first few words he coupled with the meme obsessing me these days: Denial! It's universal, it's everywhere. There are climate change deniers. On the other side there are people — some very sweet people — who think that by slathering their roof with solar panels and getting the government to legislate that solar panels be engineered under roads, the problem of climate change will be solved! Hooray! People who believe things like that of course depend on what they think are reliable experts, but these days, reliable experts are very rare indeed. 

What we have instead is all-pervasive PR driven by management imperatives, because almost everything has been corporatised and corporations are run by managers, right? Any smart manager knows the first thing you need to manage are perceptions. And that just comes down to PR, the wholesome face which now covers what has become almost universal racketeering. 

Notice all the insurance ads on TV? Notice all the calls you get trying to sell you insurance? In the words of the late Julius Sumner Miller, a former chocolate salesman who traded on his cred as a science educator, "Why is this so?". Well if you read the financial news and you pick up the soiled edges of some cover sheets over things-people-at-the-top-would-rather-you-didn't-know, you might find underneath that the insurance industry world-wide is suffering from a major cash flow crisis brought on by zero interest rates and a stock market which has become a casino, so that the money which formerly was invested and then drawn on to pay out claims is no longer there. How do you fix the problem if you run an insurance company? Well once you realise you're in charge of a giant Ponzi scheme, you grasp the nettle and try to reel in more marks to pay up-front fees to keep the ship afloat while praying you can cash in your chips and bail out before the whole sucker goes down.
  
Jim Kuntsler's latest picks up the same theme:

The mystery is at last revealed: why does the field of candidates for president score so uniformly low in trust, credibility, likability? Why are there no candidates of real substance, principle, and especially of real charm in this scrim of political basilisks? (Surely there are many people of substance and principle elsewhere in America — they just don’t dare seek the job at the symbolic tippy-top of this clusterfuck of faltering rackets.) The reason is that the problems are unfixable, at least not within the acceptable terms of the zeitgeist, namely: the secret wish to keep all the rackets going at all costs.

This is true, by the way, of all parties concerned from the 0.001 percent billionaire grifter class to the deluded sophomores crying for “safe spaces” in their womb-like “student life centers” to the sports-and-porn addled suburban multitudes stuck with impossible mortgage, car, and college loan debts (and, suddenly, no paying job) to the deluded Black Lives Matter mobs who have failed to notice that black lives matter least to the black people slaughtering each other over sneakers and personal slights. None of these groups really want to change anything. They actually wish to preserve their prerogatives.

Jim is turning into a grumpy old fart these days and his posts are getting shorter and shorter as he riffs on fewer and fewer old themes. But that doesn't mean he's wrong.

The other day I was talking to a very nice woman whose son I had the privilege of meeting via a film course I was involved in a couple of years ago. He is an intelligent — maybe even brilliant — young guy from an ordinary background. Like nearly every nerdy kid I've spoken to in the past few years he wanted to be a game designer and sure enough he has cracked a uni course leading (supposedly) that way. But like everyone creamed off as the best by the education system, he has been led astray by the denialists running the show. "Work hard, jump through our hoops and the future will be yours!" But there will be no future in the Greenhouse World for over-educated and specialised keyboard thumpers, except exploitation and slavery in one way or another followed by the scrapheap. And of course at some level my friends son realises this and is wobbling on the edge of a nervous breakdown. Because no other path has been shown to him! For Industrial Civilisation, it's double down or death. Of course those at the top are still doing well out of this meat grinder and can rustle up any number of justifications for such criminal exploitation of the vulnerable young. 

So where does this place us individuals? Ok, so you've taken on board that the system is screwed. Then the question becomes, what do you do? Of course the so called 'selfish' types will look after number one. Some will want to commit suicide. I'm going to assume that you've chosen to live. It soon becomes obvious that No Man (or Woman) is an Island. Our survival depends on having a functioning society to live in. At this point many of us get stuck. It seems so much less stressful to go with the flow and bury the evidence piling up. Maybe the SWHTF after we're dead. Whew, dodged that one! But do you have any children? Do you have no younger person you care about who will have to live on, into the alien future bearing down on us? A detached attitude is all very well, but as even the arch-murderer Stalin is supposed to have said, "One death is a tragedy but a million is a statistic." What about that one, or half-a-dozen who you really care about?

I tried, when I first realised what was going on, to help my local community figure it out. I have little faith in committees but I was persuaded to form a Transition Group. It didn't work, as far as I was concerned. The concerned citizens who joined didn't think the way I thought. It ended up folding, much to my relief, as I felt my main job had become keeping the group going instead of doing something useful. Additionally I held three public meetings, one of which Nicole Foss of the Automatic Earth addressed. Maybe those meetings had some effect but it's difficult to know. No-one talked to me about it afterwards. I had one friend who said I was being way too negative on this blog. Fair enough. Anyway that last public meeting was just over four years ago and I felt I'd done all I could usefully do, without becoming regarded is yet another cranky weirdo, which is no way to be regarded if you want people to listen to you.

All that has remained for me has been to go on living and acting, as far as I am able, in the knowledge of what is coming towards us. There are heaps of analogous situations, some of which can be a bit disheartening. How would it have been to be a Jew and have the Nazi Blitzkrieg rumbling towards you in the Ukraine in 1942? One the other hand there is the example of Saint Augustine, bishop of Hippo in North Africa, former Roman good time boy, who when he saw the way things were with the Empire, sat down and wrote The City of God in the early 5th century AD. From each according to their ability you may say. There are lots of contemporaries doing the best they can in their own ways.

I've been preoccupied for the past three years with building a house and working, so my community involvement has decreased to almost nothing. I've resigned as secretary of the Chamber of Commerce, the committee on public transport in the Shire which I was on wound up, I spent nine years on the Secondary College School Council until my last kid had left. I had some involvement with a local alternative energy group but realised when I went to their last get-together that I was in grave danger of saying something which would threaten the Consensus among the Alternatives (see this & this). I'm not powerful enough to make unnecessary enemies and I hate to hurt my friends. Hell, I've even become nervous about what I post here. Maybe I should post anonymously?

My problem personally is that I am a classic nerd whose people skills are not terribly well developed, so I must be very careful not to offend people through some stupid oversight which any ten year old could avoid. And when you are dealing with a whole society of other people in various stages of denial, that's not easy to avoid! But we will soldier on and see what the future allows.

Stoneleigh & Ilargi in South Gippsland!

We had our public lecture with Nicole Foss (Stoneleigh from The Automatic Earth) the end of last month. It was organised as part of her Australian tour, and Malcolm McKelvie of Baw Baw Sustainability Network and I co-operated to put it on in Leongatha. Malcolm did a great job, whereas I was a bit behind the eight-ball for the weeks leading up to it as I had a heart attack on New Years day (my first, but a minor one fortunately) so I didn't get on top of the publicity as I'd hoped to. But it didn't matter: we had around eighty people turn up which was much better than I expected. South Gippsland Shire in the shape of Christine Hamilton from their Sustainability department was completely wonderful, organising the venue and arranging a donation to make it happen as well as cleaning up afterwards. Baw Baw Shire has also kicked in a substantial donation. So it was all good!

The lecture went well and Nicole was in fine form, especially with the Q & A afterwards. My friend Ross turned up just as the lecture was about to start and acted as moderator for the Q & A which was great. After the show we went back to our place in Foster where I was putting Nicole and Ilargi (he's a great guy!) up and we drank red wine, putting the world to rights until 12:30 or so. I mentioned to Nicole I was driving the Mount Best school bus and that if she, Ilargi and Trevor, the friend who had driven them down to the lecture, wanted to they could come with me in the morning for a spectacular tour of the hills of South Gippsland. So I woke Nicole up at 6:30, we picked up Trevor (Ilargi had elected to sleep in) and off we went. It was a perfect day, the views were superb and the kids on the bus didn't riot! After we sat around drinking coffee and talking about life, the universe and everything until just before midday when they headed off for the next lecture in Geelong. Whereupon I had to have a little lie down! It took me a couple of days to recover: I hope Nicole wasn't as exhausted as I was!

Summertime, and the living is easy…

Hi everyone — it's been a long time since I last posted. We had our forum in Foster a couple of months ago and it went reasonably well. South Gippsland Shire councilors kicked in a substantial amount of money to help run it for which I'm very grateful! I was aiming it largely at the people who were on the panel and it may have had some benefit there. But it's all water under the bridge now — I feel personally that the time for consciousness raising is nearly at an end. Now is the time to start work with the new realities in mind!

But I'm having one last go at educating the public and it's a beauty! Stoneleigh (Nicole Foss) from The Automatic Earth is coming to Australia on a lecture tour and we are having her give a talk down here. It will be at the Leongatha (edit in response to comment: Leongatha is in Victoria) Memorial Hall in the Council meeting room on February 21st at 7:30pm (2 Michael Place Leongatha) for those of you in the area. Cost will be $10.00. It will (I suppose) be basically her A Century of Challenges lecture, which is pretty technical and requires at least some economic knowledge, but is very in-depth and far-reaching in its scope. Definitely a must-know for anyone seriously planning for the future at any level. I've just had a meeting with Malcolm McKelvie from Baw Baw Sustainability Network with whom I'm jointly running the talk and we're happy with our arrangements, so it should be a good show!

So what comes next? I'm working three part-time jobs at the moment while I have a think about what business to start. What I'm planning to do at the moment is to run classes for Arduino control systems programming and building. I'm thinking of aiming it principally at local kids (although some adults may be interested too). I want to (a) get a low capital and knowledge intensive start-up business going down here for the brighter locals and (b) find out who the best programmers and solderers are so I can employ 'em! Back when my exhibit building business was operational, John Banikos and I built quite a few things powered by PLCs (programmable logic controllers), mini computers used in industrial processes. The Arduino is a low-cost PLC essentially. There is also an ultra low-cost computer which has just been released — the Raspberry — which I will check out.

I'd really like to get some sort of hackerspace going and try 3-D printing too, but it will have to be one step at a time for a while!

Our presentation to the Councillors

It was a little intimidating to sit at a table facing all the Shire Councilors, the CEO and various other high-ranking officials. I was just there to support Peter who did a great job, plowing on manfully through the piece that he'd written giving an outline of the dangers facing us with peak oil, with both of us unable to read the reaction of the councilors who were not on "our" side. I handled one question from Cr Mimmie Jackson — not particularly well as I strayed a bit off topic, but Peter was better with his responses.

After our five minutes we stayed on to listen to the other people there to present their various cases, then at the end we went out to have our pictures taken by the reporters covering it. We were joined by our three Councilors who reassured us that it had gone well and that we must keep it up in future!

If any article about it comes on line I'll link to it in a future post.

Preparing to Ride the Whirlwind

Next week one of my fellow transitioners and I are going to do a presentation to our local Shire Councilors. It is our first and so it will be an interesting exercise in doing a pitch, so to speak, to group of average politicians. We already know three are on our side — they come to our meetings — so we won't be aiming at them. Instead it will be a case of persuading the skeptics, or maybe just the indifferent. How to do this?

There has been a very interesting post on The Oil Drum's Campfire discussion in the past few days entitled Dear Candidate - What Will You Do if Growth Is Over...?. I read the whole thing — all the comments, which is the point of the exercise — the other night. I was struck by the general gloominess of outlook from most commentators. I wonder if it is a reflection of the disengagement of people from their communities and from politics or whether it reflects a different political scene in the USA. Or maybe I'm a little naive. But it seems to me that it should only be a matter of casting the situation in the right light.

Politicians must read the future with some degree of accuracy if they're to succeed. I see our function as letting them know what they're facing. After all, in ten years time when we will be in the very eye of the storm which is now breaking over us, there will still be Shire Councilors in South Gippsland. The more accurately they have gauged the situation, the better I think our situation down here will be. Yes, there will be some terrible economic times ahead. But these times are going to also allow opportunities which the clever and energetic can seize. Whether good or harm comes from this depends very much on our preparation now.

Our transition group is focused necessarily on issues which mean most to our members now. These issues are generally focused on food security which is something individuals and families can take care of. The bigger picture is very important though. How does South Gippsland support itself now and how will that change in the future? This is what I'm thinking about.

Talking of the big picture, today I listened to a talk by Stoneleigh of The Automatic Earth to a transition group in the UK. It's quite long but it gives the clearest picture of what is about to befall us all that I've heard lately, so if you can, give it a listen.

On building a house in town 2

How is our house different from a "normal" house? And how is it the same? Our design criteria were to build something low maintenance, with zero heating and cooling costs and as autonomous as possible without resorting to technologies which might not be available or easily maintained into the future. It must be comfortable and robust: able to cope with the more extreme climate which may develop over the next few years and decades. And it must be as cheap to build as possible fitting the criteria already outlined.

The obvious way to heat a house is using the sun and the house I built in the 1970's was what is called a passive solar design — the sun shone in on a tiled concrete floor in winter and heated it up, thus moderating the temperature during the night as well. I wasn't a great builder and had very tight finances, so it didn't work as well as it could have but with the mild climate at Waratah North, close to the sea, it was better than nothing and certainly better than the house I grew up in only a few miles away in Toora.

But the Waratah North house was weatherboard and had fairly skimpy insulation (none under the wooden floor) and lots of single-pane glass, plus it had no ventilation other than through opening windows. Also the sun coming in faded the furniture and any other thing it fell on, so you had to be careful what you put in the room. The glare could be hard to bear at times as well. And the room which didn't get the direct sun got mouldy and musty.

The new house has a much more sophisticated solar heating (and cooling) system. While the sun can come into one bedroom and a corner of the living room directly, most of the heating will be via a solar air heater on the roof from which air will be blown by a fan down under the concrete slab floor and through a rock pile heat store, which being fairly massive (around one hundred tonnes) will hold the heat and release it slowly up through the concrete slab. A second, separate solar heater will draw stale air from the house via a system of ducts such as you would find in large commercial buildings and before venting it outside it will pass through a heat exchanger where it will heat incoming fresh air. The house will have lots of interior thermal mass, well insulated from the outside, and double glazed windows throughout.

In summer the same solar powered air extractor will draw air up through the rock pile (which will cool the hot exterior air on very hot days). There will also be a solar hot water heater. The toilet will be a composting type so we can recycle waste into the garden and cut down on water usage and disposal. All our water will be collected from the roof of the house and carport/workshop and stored in a large 90,000 litre concrete tank which we've just had constructed. We had a similar setup at Waratah North and the water from our concrete tanks there was like champagne! The water will be pumped to a small header tank on a stand via a small solar powered electric pump — no noisy pressure pump which stops running if the power goes off leaving you with no water.

The advantage of this heating/cooling setup is I can build it and maintain it all myself. There are no microprocessors involved and the highest tech items will be some fans and an electric pump.

As for the construction of the house, it will have a series of flat roofs made of the kind of material developed for big commercial buildings using insulation glued between two metal sheets. It can span a large distance which cuts down on most of the carpentry needed for roof framing. The outside walls will be corrugated colourbond mostly, fixed to treated prefabricated stud walls and heavily insulated, with a couple of timber finished walls in the courtyard to cut down the harshness of the finish. The colourbond is low maintenance and cheap, plus a good material for our fire vulnerable site on the edge of town.

The floors will be concrete slabs for thermal mass and silence! We are planning for rammed earth interior walls for thermal mass as well.

No windows on the east or west walls and only one glazed entrance facing west in the courtyard under a roof overhang. All windows are well under eaves (we're starting to get more frequent large hailstone events). No lawn! The north facing windows (which are all on the ground floor) are protected by stone courtyard walls from any possible fire. I've got to figure out how to glaze the solar heat collector with strong enough, long lived material at a reasonable cost.

It's not a simple house at all, but hopefully by limiting the amount of plumbing and not going stupid with the kitchen (fortunately I can build all this!) we won't shoot ourselves down financially.

Riffing on the Archdruid's latest

He strikes again! The Archdruid rarely disappoints and this week's post is another ripper, as he meticulously pulls apart our hopes and fears over climate politics and expiates on the folly of betting on the big end of town, political or business, to save our arses (or asses for US readers). Because it's over folks! Till your garden, mend your fences and talk to your neighbors, because that's what matters now.

Local Food Map Website

Gordon Rouse has emailed me with his map of locally grown produce. It looks like a great idea. I'll quote from his email…

I wanted to let you know that my wife and I have launched our food map at http://www.localfoodmap.net.
The idea of the online map is to have locally grown produce easy to find wherever you are. You can search by keywords on your location, and registered producers will come up as icons on a map.

I am hoping as many food-producers from small vege growers to farms will put their farmgate presence on this map so that we can all find what is growing in abundance in our local area.
The system also allows users to subscribe to farms, which means growers can send out emails to their subscribers to let them know if there is a fresh harvest, or a large animal is being butchered.

I believe that this website could be an invaluable tool in meeting the aims of the Transition Town organisation, in promoting direct farmgate sales and food networks. I hope you can consider registering yourself as both producers and alertees, and maybe even letting your local members know about this through your contacts.

At this stage, there are only a few outlets in Victoria, so if you wish to see a demonstration of this working, I suggest you use "Melbourne Victoria" as your locality.

The meeting on Thursday night

We had a good turnout, and I had some calls from people who would have liked to have come but had other commitments. There were quite a few people I'd never met before. We watched a film about Cuba, "The Power of Community", which was interesting although it kind of avoided the issue of exactly who decided Cuba was going to go permaculture. Was it Castro or the plebs? Perhaps it doesn't matter for us because if the figures they gave of the radical reduction in fossil food usage for food production are true then we should be OK even here, with our poor soils.

But back to the meeting. We had a discussion after the film where we went around the room and each person spoke about their area of interest and reason for coming for the evening, and we used that to make a list of the areas of concern. These we've emailed back to everyone. There will no doubt be additions and alterations but the list gives us a basis for planning a future for the district which will take the changes we're facing into account.

Here's our Transition Corner Inlet topic list
Energy
Renewable
Decentralised
Bulk purchase
Community projects
Leadership example for other communities
Self-sufficiency
Showcase
Efficiency & design

Education/information
Encourage others to join
Spread awareness & understanding
Film Festival
Environmental issues
Basic energy knowledge for home or community
Using local libraries to stock relevant books/periodicals
Climate change & energy resource issues education

Local economy
Tourism eco/transition
Bartering/alternative currencies
Bulk buying & co-operatives
Small-scale local economy
Resilience
Practical crafts and handy skills
Multi use of facilities (halls, community gardens)

Food production
Producing basic food groups
Preserving/value adding
Survival food
Food security
Sustainable practices
Community gardens across all communities

Technology
Explore & trial ideas
Alternative fuels
Alternative modes
Getting networks in place
Safety for cycling
Hand tools use and manufacture
Practical recycling of resources
Animal use & management

Health
Growing medicinal herbs
Preventative health

Social
Values (modest scale/frugality/generosity)
Survival/confidence
Sharing with youth
Maintaining social connections at a distance
Older people & physical demands
Employment conditions/availability
Welcoming incomers
Toxic politics/polarisation of views/community division
Starting with simple steps before tackling bigger things
Using/maintaining community halls as social centres more effectively
Personal growth through social involvement
Helping communities help themselves/encouraging community self-reliance
Setting targets/measuring outcomes
Process driven from bottom up
Using the Net & other technology to connect to others
Using non-threatening messages to promote change
Dealing with anxiety, stress, grieving
Co-operation and sharing skills
Network expertise
Developing, maintaining and sharing contacts

Some of our topics are a bit thinly populated. I'm sure health is a much bigger issue, but we were missing the crucial people who could have contributed there. But this is just the beginning and over the next year or so we will expand our contacts and refine our list. We will use the list to develop action plans which we'll be able to pass on to the areas of the community who need to see them.

I was happy to see how so many people are anxious to get their teeth into something real and it takes away the feeling of isolation which I've been feeling for a long time in relation to my vision of the unfolding events. Onward and upward!

Transition Town blog for Corner Inlet district

Fiona Mottram and I have set up a new blog, Transition Corner Inlet, which will be a vehicle for communication about transitioning to a low energy/low CO2 future. Our first function will be a film, The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil, which will be screened next week at Foster Community Health Centre on Thursday October 22 starting at 7.00pm.

I'll keep this blog going as my personal take on the world, but the new blog will be a communal effort.

Maribyrnong City Council Peak Oil Contingency Plan

Phil Hart has posted an article on The Oil Drum about this initiative for the Maribyrnong City Council Peak Oil Contingency Plan (warning: PDF) with which he has been involved. It's well worth a read. The comments are worth a look too (as they usually are at TOD). In the comments there's a link to an article about the Shire of Yarra Range's attitude to the same question. Here's the vital quote…

But councillors Richard Higgins, Graham Warren and Chris Templer disagreed, saying it wasn’t council’s responsibility to plan for such contingencies.

They believe it should be a State or Federal Government issue.

Shouldn't we all just wait for Daddy to look after us?

Let me just say that when the tide rises it lifts all boats, but when it sinks only those who make it to the channel can float. We South Gippsland people live in the State electorate of the leader of the National Party in Victoria (the conservative former Country Party), Peter Ryan, and we also live in a Federal electorate represented by Russel Broadbent, a member of the Liberal Party (also conservative, you foreigners!). Both these gentlemen are in opposition to their respective governments. Neither are likely to get a bone tossed to them by their political opponents.

So as far as I'm concerned, the Lord helps those who help themselves. We have already seen how the government in Melbourne works when those closest to it (electorally) are threatened.

Our Transition Town meeting

It went well! We had fifteen altogether, although Ross West, who's in the State Emergency Service, was called away to an emergency (a lost windsurfer I think) soon after we started. Andrew McEwen (Director of Sustainability at South Gippsland Shire Council) talked about the situation which makes local community based organising so important, and Councillor Jennie Deane talked about how the transition initiative got going in Loch, which is a very small town up the western end of the Shire. Susan Davies (ex State Member of Parliament) talked about the Energy Innovation Cooperative which she is setting up. We had a fairly wide-ranging discussion, but in the end Fiona Mottram (who is a journalist on the Foster Mirror) and I decided we'd get a Transition Town initiative going here, just with the two of us to start with. Not quite sure what we'll do yet, but there were lots of ideas in the air!

What is a Transition Town?

I haven't explained what Transition Town means — thanks Elizabeth! A quote from the Transition Town site…

A Transition Initiative is a community (lots of examples here) working together to look Peak Oil and Climate Change squarely in the eye and address this BIG question:

"for all those aspects of life that this community needs in order to sustain itself and thrive, how do we significantly increase resilience (to mitigate the effects of Peak Oil) and drastically reduce carbon emissions (to mitigate the effects of Climate Change)?"

Transition Town meeting in Foster!

At 7:00 pm on Thursday the 24th of September — that's next week — we're having a meeting at the Community House in Foster (Corner of Station Road & Court Street, Foster) to talk about Transition Towns and related stuff. Andrew McEwen (Director of Sustainability at South Gippsland Shire Council) and Councillor Jennie Deane will speak. I'm sure I'll say a few words too. Bring some food to share, and ask anyone who might be interested to come along.
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Malthus, the Commons and localism

An interesting post from Ran Prieur. A quote…

Whenever someone brings up Malthus, I remember this critique of Malthus by Iain Boal, arguing that population only outruns food supply when there's non-local control of resources.

We've got a great example of that with Melbourne now pillaging the resources of the State ie. the water from the Thomson River and the North-South pipeline in order to keep the political peace in the ever-expanding outer suburbs. There is a certain inevitability about Melbourne acting more and more as a city-state, concerned only with its internal politics and riding roughshod over external interests. The most powerful player seems to me to be the construction industry, although you could argue their influence is national.

Anyway, bad luck if you're sitting on resources which the powerful in the City need to shore up their position. We are fortunate that so far we are just a bit too far away and awkwardly situated in South Gippsland for them to pinch our water. But it does underline the fact that local control of local resources is the key to sustainability. How can a community survive if the water is gone?

Talking at the Green Door

I'm giving a talk on Peak Oil at the Green Door Cafe & Produce Store, 29 Bridge Street, Korumburra this Thursday at 6:00 pm. Call them on 03 5655 2351 or email karen@greendoorcafe.com.au for more info.

The Carbonic Civilisation & its Discontents

Various legislative bodies around the World are busy pushing out laws which are meant to address the issue of greenhouse gases. How effective these laws are will be inversely proportional to the wealth of the country each legislature controls. This is because people are very bad at sawing off branches they happen to be sitting on.

Us ordinary folk may labour under the delusion that technology can solve any material problem. We see glossy pics of electric cars and solar panels, and imagine the only thing stopping the adoption of low-carbon technologies are some fossilised politicians and industrialists. But this is not so. The real brake on cutting carbon dioxide outputs are tens of millions of families with 2.4 kids, two cars, a hefty mortgage and orthodontists bills. The real costs will be very high for such folk, which are a lot of the people we know.

Why? Because you may recycle your plastic, not waste water, buy organic and do all the things we are told to do, but there is a whole lot of stuff "out the back" in the industrial suburbs of every city which has to operate on copious fossil fuels in order that we can live our lives, and this stuff — the factories, warehouses, freeways, waste treatment plants, hospitals, offices, roads, mines and railways — are expensive to rebuild and will take a long time to change. "Expensive to rebuild" means we must find the time to rebuild them. Either that or we must work to pay someone else to do it. And that assumes it is possible to rebuild them in a more benign form, which in many cases it is not.

We've just had a big materialist binge over the past few years, where the cost of the stuff we use has been kept artificially low because the Chinese have paid their workers a low wage to build it. That situation cannot last. We will soon go back to paying the real cost of living. This will mean less money to change our built environment to a less carbon intensive arrangement. Add to that the decline in oil availability and we have a real problem.

And then there is the unspeakable, uncomfortable truth that lies under all this — there are way too many people on the Planet. How are we voluntarily going to reduce our population to something more in line with what the Earth can support?

The truth is that we are animals like any other on Earth. We expand to fit our environment and then some. We want more, usually not much more, just that little bit, even the richest amongst us. Do you know anyone who wants less? No, I didn't think so!

We've expanded very successfully until now. Of course we always have Problems. And we always have earnest people, experts, discussing and proposing Solutions to these Problems. These Solutions, strangely enough, always need More of something. More spending on health care, education, law and order, supervision of industry. Surely a solution to the crises looming over us at the moment is a lot less of everything? People, cars, cows, strip mining, commercial fishing, driving, flying — well, make your own list!

But of course having a lot less means things get very tough for the great mass of people with the 2.4 kids, cars etc. They need to work to pay for their lives, they vote, or even if they don't, they can make trouble for the People In Charge. And of course we all want the world to be better, we just don't want it to be at our expense. Let the less worthy pay! So we will see the hunt for people to blame — scapegoats — intensify. But of course all that is in vain if the problem is all of us.

So what is my Solution? Well, it's in several parts.

Firstly it's your problem so you've got to solve it! OK, you didn't choose to be born, but can you tell me the name of anyone who did? So get over it — you're in charge of your life.

Secondly a lot of us, maybe most of us, don't feel we're really up to scratch in a lot of ways. We'd love to be told by some competent person what to do. We believe in experts. Well guess what? Experts are often wrong! And the more they say they know and the less you do, the wronger they tend to be. Sure, listen to what people say. But an honest heart and an open mind is of more value than believing any appearance of certainty. This may mean you run against the tide of opinion a lot of the time. Learn to deal with it. You don't need to broadcast your contrariness. But practice the courage of your convictions in small ways, because one day you may need to find it for something big.

You will come across people who believe that the world was made for the use of themselves in any way they see fit, and others who will tell you the human race is a blight on creation. Avoid these types — they are both expressions of arrogance, in that they make value judgements which no-one can truly make. And both attitudes lead to trouble.

The world will re-adjust to make everything right again. Nature has a way of dealing with these problems. Those who best protect themselves from what is coming will part of the future of life on Earth. Let that be a guide for your actions.

I don't think we can do anything at a world-wide or even nation-wide level about the greenhouse problem because of the pressure of population and the prior investments we have in our industrial civilisation. So we will have to deal with the consequences of dramatic climate change over the next few decades. That's the way it is folks. Just think about how you and those closest to you can survive the coming changes. Forget about survivalism and Mad Max scenarios. Most people will survive or die where they are, dependent on the conditions in their local area. So for a start, understand where you live, how it works, how people survive in it now and how they and you might survive in the future. If it doesn't look good, move to somewhere better while you can!

Understand how nature works. Darwinian selection works through the survival and reproduction of the fittest. That doesn't mean the ones who can win races, it means the ones that fit the best into their environment, who can gain sustenance, shelter and safety without wrecking where they live.

We are used to seeing ourselves in a very upwards and outwards way. I'd say the dominant story of our civilisation for the past sixty or so years has been "Everything will be fine once we get the settings just right and all those other people learn to behave themselves". But unfortunately that just isn't so, and we are going to be flung into a world soon where we wont necessarily have any idea of what's coming next. We'll be reacting to crises right on our doorstep, not trying to make the Afghans or the Somalis jump when we say jump. For a lot of us this is going to be a bitter pill to swallow. So preempt the change and embrace your inner powerlessness now! Just concentrate on what's close by and attend to its needs: self, family, community and the enclosing natural environment. Forget saving the world-as-a-whole. That's always been a totalitarian dream powered by cheap fossil fuel.

The hard part for many of us who wake up to what's really going on is we can feel very isolated. If our Significant Other doesn't share our new view of reality, what do we do? I don't know what the answer is here other than patience and good humour. Reality will impose itself on us all eventually. Your job is to make sure you're as right as you can be. Not that anyone predicting trouble gets thanked for it, but speaking from a little experience in these matters, time is on your side with this.

What do you tell the children? I have my way with this one too, but it may not be for everyone. I have four children, two of them step-children, the oldest of whom is thirty-four. My attitude has always been that children make their own way in the world and what you need to do is keep them safe, well-fed, emotionally secure and don't let them get away with bad habits. Everything else they will pick up themselves. If you push them in a particular direction you will get adults who either will do nothing unless they're pushed, or adults who believe in pushing other people.

I've been very lucky so far with how things have turned out, but I'm aware that it is luck and not good management. The problem is, if you do something to assure success, like spend a fortune on private tutors, all you do is create someone who can't live outside that sort of system. To my way of thinking the best you can do is let children grow up in an environment which is healthy, with not enough money to get them into trouble but enough to keep them fed and give them a few basic tools for their growth. As long as they don't feel crushed by the society they grow up in, or that they are too good for it, things are generally alright. As for us breast-beating about how we elders have squandered the inheritance and left them nothing, give it a break! The last thing anyone needs is an excuse for failure and by saying something like that, you will produce either arrogance (I'm not as stupid as the person telling me this!) or a victim's mentality (I'm one of you and therefore I'm doomed too!) in a child who isn't sensible enough to say "Phooey!" to you.

Education is important but I can't say that it is necessarily effective to spend twelve or more years sitting at a desk. Looking at the corner we're busy painting ourselves into with our mighty civilisation, one needs to question some of our basic notions here. It may become more difficult to fund in the future in any case. Opportunity is the most important thing, plus the ability to take advantage of it, which involves such things as good health, common sense and a lack of timidity. Character is something which matters more than just about anything and it matters a great deal when you're younger. And character is what will distinguish the survivors from the doomed in the next, difficult stage of our history — providing they are in the right place!

The next pillar of survival is community. We ordinary folk will find it much easier if we're part of a real community. Communities are the normal human social arrangement, but they have not fared well in our industrial world which demands loyalty to abstract functions and specialisations, and prefers humanity to be broken up into single, bite-sized functional units for easier deployment to places of highest profit. The Soviets did it by force, through murder and deliberate starvation in the nineteen-twenties to break up the village structure of the Soviet Union. Our more modern societies have done it through education (get the children away from their parents and environment) and propaganda (most advertising), and by driving local, small businesses under or by making them into empty shells, fronts for a franchise. All this has so undermined community that in many places it is vestigial, especially in big cities. As a natural human artifact, it is forever being rebuilt. But building community takes a long time, generations in fact, so in the face of the rapidity of the changes we're facing it's better to find one already in existence. I've had some experience of intentional communities (I'm an old hippy) and they tend to be unstable for a variety of reasons. So I don't recommend cults or communes unless they are embedded in a larger functional community and have good relationships with it.

The final step is for us industrially disabled types to throw away our crutches. Learn to walk or ride a bike — leave the car at home — grow some of your own food, talk to your neighbors, get involved in the work of your local community. Don't be like a little bird, lying back helplessly with your beak open, squawking and waiting for Big Daddy to drop something into it. Cause Big Daddy wont be there much longer.

The solution to the greenhouse problem of carbon dioxide will be a radical fall in its production by individual people, and this is going to happen not by executive fiat, but through the uneven collapse of the great industrial civilisation which has been built up on the back of the copious use of fossil fuels as these fuels stop being affordable to the great bulk of us. The cheap stuff has all gone, and the expensive stuff is too expensive to keep the wheels spinning. We will have wars for resources and people saying we've turned the corner and that new technology will save us — it's only five or ten years away! It's always just five or ten years away.

But the show is over. It will appear to run in for years, as the elites who manage to command remaining resources claim that everything has returned to normal and those who aren't benefiting have only themselves to blame, but that's the age-old story of the relationship between the haves and have nots. Forget alternative energy. It will provide only a tiny fraction of our energy. It simply costs too much compared to dirty old oil and coal.

Will life be worth living? Of course it will! This is an amazing time to be in. We have lived through and seen the peak of the greatest civilisation the World has ever known, and we get to decide how to deal with its dissolution and the shape of what comes after it. It would have been nice to have flying cars and holiday trips to the Moon, but there's still plenty of other good things to enjoy: wine and love, children, good friends, food, music. Have fun!

Cheers!

Lloyd

How do we get there from here?

I've just been talking to my friend Leo about ideas for living arrangements in the area we inhabit, which is rural and moderately populated in Australian terms. Change is coming in a big way, whether we like it or not. Can we steer our lives down the correct path in the face of the end of cheap energy?

Leo comes from a business and science background. He's been fairly high up the tree in various organisations over the years although he's retired now. We were kicking around the economic implications for the high speed broadband network which the Federal government has announced will be built down here as a pilot for the national scheme. Leo's a forester by training but he's come up through big business and he knows how all that side of things works. The problem is, everything we could think of that could take advantage of the broadband depends on more Business-As-Usual — that is, debt-financed tie-ins to the larger economy. Now it may be that BAU will carry on in some way for a couple more years in this country. But then what? What is the use of building up industry and a way of life that simply won't carry on for more than a couple of years and will lose all the capital placed in it? We will just end up with a population of upper-middle class types down here with no future, and they will be forced to move on.

The problem for us is that the solutions we come up with currently are all contained within a paradigm which I believe is doomed. And maybe Leo thinks that too — we were filled not with hope by our discussion, but by a kind of exhaustion. Now it may be age related: I'm in my late fifties and Leo is a bit older again. We've both been burned by life and the struggle to succeed, and suffered blows of fate which may have been deserved or undeserved. And maybe for some of us, there's a limit to how much you can take. But I can't help but feel at the back of it all was a sense that it's all smoke and mirrors now. We're all caught in a game, or dancing a dance, that we can't stop because it's the only game we know and we have to play something.

But what other game is possible? There are visions — I've talked about them here — and John Robb has just posted a link to a great essay (behind a subscription firewall) he's written for the World Politics Review which sketches out the necessary attributes of what will come next. The difficulty is: how do we get there from here?

The key issue from John Robb's point of view is the self-reliant community. That is, while communities may link together, they need to be able to exist independently if they have to. What is the point of having solar hot water if all your food comes from a major distribution hub in a distant city via a line of diesel trucks? What disruptions to our current networks can our communities survive? How are we going to make out in South Gippsland if we have a diesel fuel shortage? It will happen. There is no backup — no railway (it's been mostly pulled up), no alternate fuels, no local production which we could turn to for food for the numbers of people in our population.

We have drifted into our current predicament without any great plan. It's been the Market at work, and Australia is a country which has been built almost entirely around the functioning of international and national markets. Because this has worked so well so far, there has never been, except for a few brief moments such as the "Back to Earth" hippy movement of the late sixties and early seventies and a few more cultish experiments, any alternative way of doing business here. There are no "peasants". The closest thing we have are a few aboriginal settlements in remote places. Europe at least has a memory of such a way of life, as does much of Asia and Central and South America (they also have better soil!).

There are two levels of the problem to consider as well. One is the Emergency Situation, produced by, say, a sudden shortage of diesel fuel. Our way of life might be disrupted for a time and maybe never quite recover if it went on for long, but if we could weather it reasonably well, it would soon be forgotten by most people except perhaps emergency professionals. The other is a crisis brought on by a longer series of such emergencies, which would force big changes in populations and how we actually live down here. It's the latter changes I'm trying to plan for.

Perhaps it's a vain hope to try and plan, because most of us are pretty much stuck in the traditional way of doing things and even if we could see the desirability of change, would find it difficult or impossible. What could make such changes happen? What are the "boundary conditions"?

I don't think it can come from any campaign of persuasion, no matter how much talking we do. And something external, such as a huge violent change would kill off or drive most of us away. The most likely agent for change would be a series of disruptions which left no-one unscathed, which could just be surmounted and which were continuous enough for it to become obvious that Business-As-Usual was over for good. The successful survivors of such a challenge would be residents in communities which were able to shelter their members to some extent through a series of such crises. In turn the members of such communities would most likely have a primary loyalty to the community itself rather than to a career or group of like-minded associates. This is very different from the way most people live in Australia.

The alternative is a highly stratified society with the haves able to fight the have-nots to the death for whatever resources were available. I've no doubt this will be the case in many places over the remainder of this century. I just don't want it to happen here!

Can you convert a place inhabited by a population of isolated career-focused individuals into a strong community? I have my doubts. That's a very strong reason why I live where I do. Foster is a town inhabited mainly by people doing whatever they have to do to live here. No, it's not perfect here. The soil is just OK, it's cold and miserable for months in winter, the architecture is unremarkable, nothing really stands out other than Wilsons Promontory, which is like another world right next door. It used to be the view from our bed when we lived out of town. I can assure you that a great view doesn't pay the rent, which is one of the reasons we sold. But overall, I can't see any strong reasons not to live here.

There are lots of great places to live in the World. A lot of them are going to stop working when the oil runs out in the next five to ten years. Our task if we wish to have a stake in the future is to help the ones that can survive to do so. So we've got to keep battling away at this problem: how do we get there from here?

A localisation recipe

John Robb (whose mind must work at many times normal human speed!) has a short and solid post this week: "Resilience Judo". John's view of the world is probably a little too dark for many people, but he seems perfectly cheerful despite all that. He's like a scientist from another planet, picking over humanity's less pleasant mass characteristics with a cool eye. Anyway this post is so good I'm going to quote a lot of it with my comments.

There are growing signs -- from a black swan in savings/debt reduction to massive debt loads to quarterly trillion dollar losses in personal wealth to stagnant/falling consumer purchases to persistently low consumer confidence -- that the parasite ridden American "consumer" is finally dead. If this is true, the economic model of the latter half of the last Century is likely dead too, and that will mean wrenching change. It's my belief that the dominant solution is to prepare for a local future to ride out this storm.

I'd say we're about six months or a year behind the US in all this, but it will happen here soon. Here's the bulk of John's post…

Here are some of my random (more random than I would like) thoughts on what you should do to prepare:

• Ruthlessly reduce debt. Nothing on credit. Pay off every loan. Strategically walk away from underwater assets (like homes that are worth less than the mortgage). This will allow you to stay one step ahead of the death throes of the old economy.
• Turn your hollow home into a productive asset. Most homes are devoid of any productive capacity. Adding energy, food, etc production to them turns them into real, productive assets. Get your assets out of financial derivatives (stocks, bonds, etc.) as fast as you can and put them into productive assets (not commodities) you can touch.
• Make everything you can yourself. Grow your own food. Produce your own energy. Make/repair your own clothes. Turn costs into savings. Reskill to do this. The new "fashionable trend" isn't what you can buy, it's what you can make. Anyone that buys "designer or branded" anything is a fool.
• Work online. Convert your skills into something that can be sold electronically (most of my complex work is done this way). Develop the skills necessary to work as part of a virtual team. Telecommute whenever possible (and push to do this, even if it means less money), reduce the number of cars/dress clothes/etc you own in synch with this conversion (and move to a less expensive locale when possible!). Always have two jobs going at the same time.
• Build a local business. Own assets that produce and sell that production locally. Even if it is small, it will help down the line via contact networks/experience (a new spin on modern "networking"). Develop the niche skills that sell locally. Group/tribe up when possible to tackle larger opportunities.
• Barter. Cashless trades. Convert what you have to what you need. Skill set bartering is amazingly effective. Become part of a local barter network (the backchannel).
• Bring your family home. Grow your home to accommodate more people. Bring back parents and grown kids (with their families). This will allow you to pool incomes and radically reduce workload/costs. It's also beneficial for security. NOTE: I've found that consideration/compromise is the best way to handle an expansive family home environment.
• Suggestions welcome!!

To amplify on John's points, don't go into debt for anything at the moment! Prices are going to plummet left right and centre once the downturn really hits Australia. If you've got any stuff you don't really need, sell it on eBay now! Cash will be king for a while, until inflation creeps up as the Federal government starts to wash away its financial burdens (social security for a start).

Remember that power comes from ownership of the means of production! Get the tools you need, learn the skills you need.

Buy from Savers, or the local op shop. Go to garage sales for bargains. Swap stuff. Don't waste precious capital.

Think self-employment. My wife and I have a retail plant nursery and florist, a garden maintenance business, I design and build interactive educational exhibits and one of my sons and I are getting into breeding aquarium fish. All our businesses are tiny but they add up and we have no debt. Look at your skill set and see where you can go with it.

Look at your home and location. Is it going to work for you long term? We've bought a block of land in our town but are not building yet, and may sell and buy something more suited. Meantime another of our sons has moved back from Melbourne with his partner. She's working for us part-time as well as making and selling jewelry and he's working part-time for another retailer and running his own business, all with no capital costs worth speaking of. We share tools and help each other out. We have two vehicles between the four of us. Our costs of living are very low.

Last words to John Robb…

This change doesn't require cute and crunchy notions about "lifestyle" environmentalism. It's all about mitigation of stresses in the short to medium term as living conditions deteriorate, while at the same time preparing to ride the resilient community wave to rapid and sustained long term success/wealth.

Great post on "The Oil Drum"

Check this post out over at "The Oil Drum". It requires a certain amount of background knowledge to understand what these guys are on about, but Have We Reached an Inflection Point in Economics History?: “Indeflation” and Energy (awful title — the post is easier!) nails many things which we need to understand. They are

• It's over (meaning the debt-driven consumer economy)
• Frugal is the new meme, with all that implies for investment
• The cost of a barrel of oil is now close to the cost of production (no profit=no more oil)
• Governments at all levels and in all places still don't "get it" and wont in the medium term
• You're on your own, with respect to existing institutions

I'm in the process of setting up a forum with my friend Linda to get people together in my area who might have some ideas how we can work towards making where we live more attractive and survivable. I'm not smart enough to figure it all out myself, but if we start talking to one another about it (keeping the points outlined above in mind) we may shorten the time taken to work out whatever new arrangements we need.