This article orginally appeared in the Ecologist November 2008

During the past weeks the world media have been transfixed by the convulsions of the US and global financial system. At stake are billions in bailouts and trillions in derivatives. The viability of banks and currencies is threatened, and ultimately the savings and investments of hundreds of millions of ordinary people.

Meanwhile, the news from the environmental front is just as terrifying: this past summer saw the second-highest Arctic icecap melt rate (after last year’s record), and Russian scientists observed the large-scale release of methane (a super-potent greenhouse gas) from thawing Siberian permafrost.

How is the average person to judge the relative importance of the financial and environmental news?

Of course financial turmoil has real-world consequences for people. Families that were formerly middle-class may now be forced to learn what poverty feels like. But, however uncomfortable, this kind of economic dislocation is inevitable, given the nature of our economic system. During the 19th century, the world’s industrial nations endured a depression, currency collapse, or financial panic at least once every decade or two. The most recent general depression, during the 1930s, was followed by war and a period of relative stability (and furiously paced fossil-fueled growth). Sweden, Argentina, and other countries have seen more recent banking failures, but otherwise we’ve all gotten used to an unusual calm.

Welcome back to the historic norm of economic uncertainty!

Ecosystems are also unstable. Natural disasters, freak weather events, and plague species can send finely-tuned mutual relations between plants, animals, and microbes into dramatic flux. These perturbations tend to balance themselves out over a time period commensurate with their scale and severity.

But now we are seeing converging environmental crises on a scale and level of severity that is comparable only with mass extinction events of the geologic past. The climate is destabilized, the oceans are dying, and both renewable and non-renewable resources are being depleted at such a rate that one has to wonder whether future human generations can maintain any economy at all.

These ecological disasters are unfolding at a slower pace than the financial crisis, and therefore seem not to warrant as much public attention. Yet civilizations have collapsed because of far smaller environmental problems than any one of a dozen now converging upon us.

Moreover, news about the environment must compete not only with numbers from Wall Street, but with stories about our favorite celebrities and sports teams as well. In effect, we are entertaining ourselves to death while we obsess over the fortunes of gamblers and thieves.

Which is all the more reason to turn off the television, look out the window, and pay attention to the real world of non-human nature. Doing so is the only way to maintain a sense of proportion about what we hear and read, about where we’re headed and what we should do about it.

Financial collapse? It will be nasty, but we’ll survive it. Ecological collapse? I wish I could be so sure.

This article originally appeared in The Ecologist, September 2008

Ask the major oil companies why oil prices are beyond ludicrous and they’ll tell you there’s plenty of oil out there, there’s just a lack of investment in exploration and production.

Funny, the level of investment in the global oil industry hasn’t dropped off a cliff lately. Yet oil prices have shot up like asparagus in April. What’s going on here?

What the experts are really saying is that a higher level of investment is needed now than previously to yield the same increment of new oil.

Hmmm. Let’s drill deeper, metaphorically speaking.

In fact there’s still oil being produced today that could profitably be sold for $30 a barrel. But—crucially—there’s not nearly enough to meet the demand that would exist if all oil were selling at that price. That $30 oil comes from super-giant oilfields discovered back in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s. The industry doesn’t find oilfields like that anymore, and the old ones are seeing declining rates of production. Now what’s available for prospecting are plays in ultra-deep water, where it costs a half million dollars a day to rent a drilling rig. We’re talking NASA moon-shot level of technology here. That’s not $30 oil; it’s $75, $100, or $150 oil. No one would be interested in it, except for the fact that $30 oil is getting so scarce.

Meanwhile, high oil prices are already killing the airline industry, the automobile industry, the trucking industry, the fishing industry, and tourism. In effect, the world is teetering on the brink of a Greater Depression because cheap oil is a fading memory. So here’s the solution: We could reduce the price of oil just by reducing demand. If the world could be satisfied with the amount of oil that can be produced cheaply, then the price would fall. But we’d have to keep reducing demand to maintain that price since the cheaper oil continues to deplete.

There is only one orderly way to achieve this, and that is through a global agreement to ration oil consumption by quota, so as to reduce demand artificially. Just reducing demand in one country won’t help much, because some other country will quickly take up the slack. No, we all go on a diet together.

Everyone would kick and scream—but no louder than they’re currently doing. Of course it would be a tough bargain. The alternative is even tougher, though.

Without such a Protocol, continually soaring prices will be a given. Nations will be tempted to secure essential fuel by military action or covert subterfuge. Just how well this is likely to work we may judge by events in Iraq over the past few years. How badly do we want cheaper oil? Badly enough to cooperate internationally? Badly enough to lower our consumption? As soon as we want it that badly, we’ll have it. Until then, welcome aboard the oil-price escalator.

[Originally written for The Ecologist.]

Climate Change is the worst environmental crisis ever. It is a problem of fossil fuel dependency, and solving it requires reducing that dependency quickly and dramatically.

But from a policy standpoint, Climate Change is hard to address. Because the worst of its impacts may come decades from now, its solution is framed as a moral imperative: we should reduce fossil fuels for the environment and future generations. Many policy makers genuinely want to do the right thing, but when a choice arises between climate protection and economic growth, growth wins nearly every time. Because 85 percent of world energy comes from fossil fuels, it is hard to find a way to quickly end their use without a severe reduction in available energy, and a resulting contraction of the economy. Any politician campaigning for economic contraction faces a tough battle.

The peaking in production rates of oil, coal, and natural gas presents a different problem. Again, it is one of fossil fuel dependency; but in this case, instead of a sink (or pollution) dilemma, it is one of source (or scarcity). Fossil fuels are finite. Depletion ensures that the rate of extraction of these substances will soon start to decline, wreaking havoc on industrial economies, perhaps leading to societal collapse.

Will peak oil solve the climate problem? No! It is true that most models of future carbon emissions overestimate the fossil fuels that can be extracted in coming decades. Indeed, peaking studies suggest that depletion will hold carbon emissions to a level such that atmospheric CO2 concentrations won’t significantly exceed 450 parts per million—the target often mentioned by IPCC. However, recent climate research shows that climate sensitivity has been underestimated, so our target should be 350 ppm—a level surpassed decades ago. This means that, if we are to avert climate catastrophe, we must reduce fossil fuel use more quickly than depletion alone can effect.

Will addressing Climate Change mitigate the impact of Peak Oil? Not unless extremely stringent emissions policies reduce consumption rates ahead of depletion. But, as noted, such policies are a tough sell on the basis of moral argument alone.

Depletion adds more economic weight to the necessity of addressing Climate Change. Consider future supply scenarios for coal: if, as studies indicate, world coal production will start falling within two decades, this means coal will soon become much more expensive. New coal power plants thus become a bad bet for purely financial reasons. And renewable energy sources and conservation start to look much more attractive.

Peak oil kicks the discussion into overdrive. Petroleum prices are already soaring, creating crises for the trucking, airline, and automobile industries, and contributing to rapidly rising food costs. These impacts rivet the attention of policy makers. Reducing oil dependency is increasingly seen as a matter of economic survival.

Taken together, Climate Change and oil/coal/gas depletion form an airtight argument for rapidly weaning society from fossil fuels. Maintaining dependency on these fuels is not an option; our only choice is whether to reduce it proactively and intelligently, or let dire events drive reactive policies.

[Originally written for The Ecologist.]

As the urgent necessity of our transition away from fossil fuels becomes plain, it’s inevitable that some of us will take that necessity seriously enough to explore the edges of “normal” behavior. On the post-carbon frontier, the hardiest pioneers are those willing not only to apply ingenuity and make personal sacrifices, but also to look downright silly to the mainstream.

These trailblazers of sustainability tend to come in two shades: Techno-Green or Gandhi-Green. The former hue belongs to the individual who hopes to save the world with eco-gadgets; the latter to the saintly soul passionate about ceasing to do fuelish harm.

I know a brilliant Techno-Green engineer who has every imaginable energy-saving, non-hydrocarbon-based home accoutrement—solar PV and hot water panels, a ground-source heat pump, an electric car, solar cookers—plus power monitors everywhere that feed data into a laptop recording a second-by-second readout of energy expenditure.

Gandhi-Green is the tint of another pioneer who comes to mind—an earnest young woman who insists on walking everywhere she goes (No motored rides, thanks! How and where was that bicycle made?), refuses to heat her cabin in the winter (which is easier here in California than in many places), eats mostly food she’s grown or foraged, buys nothing new, and eschews hot showers.

If there were a post-carbon contest, I’m not sure which of these extremists would win. Fortunately, there is no contest: we need both kinds of people willing to turn their lives into laboratories to test strategies that get us off fossil fuels fast.

The majority of people in our high-tech, commerce-driven society are likely to be more comfortable contemplating the Techno-Green solution. Going without anything is just not cool; indeed, it’s exciting to think that Peak Oil and Climate Change might offer excuses to buy new and better toys. Anyway, if technology helped get us into the mess we’re in, surely it can help get us out.

However, the reality is that, as the era of cheap energy sputters, we’ll all be doing without a lot of things. It will be essential to know how to be frugal with intelligence and good cheer.

Most of us on the post-carbon path find ourselves hesitating between these extremes. We use computers and other tools made of depleting metals and minerals, powered by electrons from who knows where, hoping that by doing so we are moving in the right direction in other respects. We experiment with hydrocarbon asceticism, knowing that our very existence is still enabled by a complex society running on oil, coal, and gas—a society vulnerable to convulsive failure, with endless casualties, unless we find ways to help it power down in a planned program that will doubtless depend on the services of wind turbines, smart grids, and other high-tech wonders.

We need both approaches, and we need people quirky enough, and courageous enough, to stake out territory on their fringes. Going to extremes may make one a curiosity, but in this instance it also makes one useful to our collective survival.

[Originally written for The Ecologist.]

Take relentless population growth. Add decades of expanding per-capita resource consumption. Simmer slowly over rising global temperatures.

What do you get?

Traumatic information: that is, information that wounds us through the very act of obtaining it.

Everyone knows things are going wrong. But if you understand ecology, you know this in a way that others don’t. It’s not just that the current crop of world leaders is idiotic. It’s not just a matter of a few policies having gone awry. We’ve been on a perilous track since the dawn of agriculture, capturing more and more biosphere services for the benefit of just one species. Fossil fuels recently gave our kind an enormous economic and technological boost—but at the same time enabled us to go much further out on an ecological limb. No one knows the long-term carrying capacity of planet Earth for humans, absent cheap fossil fuels, but it’s likely a lot fewer than seven billion. The implication is not just sobering; it’s paralyzing.

So what to do with such traumatic knowledge? An argument can be made for denial. Why ruin people’s day if there’s nothing they can do, if it’s too late to unseal our fate?

But we don’t know that it’s too late.

As hard as it is to get up every day and remember, "Oh yes, that’s right, we’re headed toward systemic collapse," in fact we can’t afford to forget it, if there are in fact measures to be taken to save a species, an ecosystem, or a human community.

To be sure, some of us are better able to handle the information than others. Many fragile psyches come unhinged without constant doses of hope and assurance. And so for their sake we need continuing positive messages—about a project to make a village sustainable, or about a new coal power plant halted by protest. Some will cling to these encouraging news bits, believing that the tide has turned and we’ll be fine after all. But as time goes on, collapse becomes undeniable. Limits to growth cease to be forecasts; instead, we see daily proof that we’re hitting the wall. As this happens, those who can handle the information spend more of their time managing the fraying emotions of those around them who can’t.

Strategy shifts. We move from rehearsing "Fifty simple things you can do to save the Earth" to discussing global triage.

As the Great Unraveling proceeds, there may in fact be only one occupation worthy of our attention: that of identifying the qualities that make our species worth saving, and then celebrating and exemplifying those qualities. If we concentrate on doing that, perhaps we win no matter what. Outwardly, it will probably look a lot like what many of us are already doing: working to save a species, an ecosystem, a human community; to make a village sustainable, or to halt a new coal power plant.

Taking in traumatic information and transmuting it into life-affirming action may turn out to be the most advanced and meaningful spiritual practice of our time.

When MuseLetter started in January 1992, it was a one-person operation. I wrote and edited every word of text (with the exception of one short essay in one issue), did the layout/typesetting, stuffed envelopes, and maintained the mailing list. It was a small list, and there was only a print version (I barely had email at the time, and this was before the World Wide Web existed as anything more than a concept). I enjoyed complete freedom to write on any topic, and to express any opinion, led only by my Muse.

As the years went by, volunteers began to help with mailings. Then I added the option of e-mail subscriptions. By 2006, Post Carbon Institute was generously aiding me with a paid part-time assistant who handled most of the administrative aspects of publication. Also by this time, the subject matter dealt with in MuseLetter had become focused almost entirely on issues related to energy and the environment. As of this writing, four books on Peak Oil and related topics have emerged through monthly MuseLetters: The Party’s Over, Powerdown, The Oil Depletion Protocol, and Peak Everything.

This January I was offered, and happily accepted, a paid position with Post Carbon Institute as Senior Fellow. The mission of Post Carbon Institute is exactly congruent with the work I have been doing independently for the past five years, so the match could not be better. If you are not already acquainted with the organization, please explore the web site, www.postcarbon.org.

Post Carbon Books is now handling production and administration for MuseLetter, thus enabling me to focus more on writing and public speaking.

Because MuseLetter serves the educational and research purposes of Post Carbon Institute, we have decided to make e-mail subscriptions free from now on. The print version will continue, with subscription costs unchanged, and likely improvements in the offing (larger print). Revenues from print subscriptions will support the Fellows program of Post Carbon Institute.

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The Soil Association's Lady Eve Balfour Memorial Lecture 2007 was given by Richard Heinberg and chaired by Anna Ford, BBC Newsreader. The title of this year's event was ‘What will we eat when the oil runs out?’

Audio links:
broadband - high quality audio
dial up - faster download audio

A short summary of the event is available on YouTube.

Richard is interviewed in Leonardo DiCaprio's "The 11th Hour" a documentary concerning the environmental crises caused by human actions and calls for restorative action through a reshaping of human activity.

From Leonardo DiCaprio's 11thHourAction.com website:
"The mission of our community is to inspire action at every level: from individual action, up through our communities, to the state, national and international level. The actions are all shifting our civilization to a sustainable future. Let's work and take action together. The time is now. The hope is you. Let's begin."

Richard is a featured speaker in Crude Impact, an award-winning documentary film which Chris Vernon of TheOilDrum.com called " a terrific film... the best documentary I have seen on the subject." This feature film explores the interconnection between human domination of the planet, and the discovery and use of oil.

Go to www.CrudeImpact.com to read highlights and view trailers.

Richard Heinberg has been honored with the M. King Hubbert Award for Excellence in Energy Education by the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas (USA). The other recipient of the award this year was Rep. Roscoe Bartlett, chair of the Peak Oil caucus in the U.S. House of Representatives.