”Never again,” the Texas oil baron T Boone Pickens announced recently, ”will we pump more than 82-million barrels.” As we are currently pumping 82-million barrels of oil a day, Pickens is saying that global production has peaked. If he is right, he has vindicated oil geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, who announced to ridicule last year he was ”99% confident” output would peak this year. Rather more importantly, industrial civilisation is over.
Not immediately, of course. But unless another energy source as cheap and with as high a ratio of ”energy return on energy invested” is developed, there will be a gradual decline in the growth required to sustain the world’s debt-based financial system.
An energy surplus is a remarkable anomaly. An oil supply that exceeds demand has permitted us to do what all species strive to do — expand our ecological space — without competition.
It has led us to believe in the possibility of universal peace for a global population. If kindness indeed results from an energy surplus, then, as supply shrinks, we will start fighting. With entropy, virtue may be impossible.
There may be a miracle cure. Photosynthetic energy, cold fusion and other hopeful monsters could provide almost unlimited cheap energy, but the technical or theoretical barriers may prove insuperable. There are plenty of alternatives to oil, but none are cheap.
If the age of growth is over and the age of entropy has begun, our infrastructure, settlements and industries require total reconstruction.
Given that governments balk even at raising fuel taxes, we must pursue our own solutions, redeveloping economic systems that do not depend on fossil fuels. For 10 years I’ve been involved in one of these and it’s fair to say it works.
Tinkers’ Bubble is 16ha of woodland, orchards and pasture in Somerset, United Kingdom. It was bought by environmentalists in 1994 and a dozen people moved in, applied for shares and built temporary houses. They imposed strict rules, including a ban on the use of internal combustion engines. They made a partial exception for transport: the 12 residents share two cars. Otherwise, the only fossil fuel they consume is paraffin for lamps. They set up a small windmill and solar panels, built compost toilets, and bought a wood-powered steam engine for milling timber, some cows and a horse.
Almost everyone predicted disaster. And it was hard — the first winter was spent wading in deep mud. Locals, mistaking the settlers for New Age travellers, went berserk. There was internal strife, too. The work is tough; trees are felled with handsaws, homes heated with wood, hay scythed, and fields weeded and harvested by hand.
But they have come through. The land is biodiverse and they have learned to live together. Because it doesn’t depend on machinery, the farm isn’t in hock to the bank. About 150 years after Walden, Henry David Thoreau is alive and well in Somerset.
But an army of bureaucrats has been deployed to murder him. Peasant farming is effectively illegal in the UK.
The settlers decided that their houses would have the minimum visual and environmental impact. But the British planning system makes no provision for this. It cannot distinguish between an eight-bedroom blot on the landscape and a home that can be seen only when you blunder into it.
The residents applied for planning permission and were refused. They appealed and won, but the government overturned the decision. They took it to the High Court and Appeal Court and tried to take it to the House of Lords, without success.
But when they re-applied, the council, which had woken up to the fact that homeless people were housing themselves, decided to let them live there.
Then the environmental health inspectors struck. It is legal to stuff farm animals with antibiotics, vegetables with pesticides, processed food with additives and water tables with nitrates, but illegal to use any process not involving stainless steel, refrigeration and fluorescent lighting.
The clampdown on small food businesses, on grounds that their produce might contain bacteria, has been accompanied by a massive rise in food poisoning cases since the 1970s — large-scale production and long-distance transport provide greater opportunities for infection.
Tinkers’ Bubble has never poisoned anyone, but its cheese, bacon, juice and cider have been banned.
The settlers haven’t solved all their problems, but they have shown that a life requiring scarcely any fossil fuel is possible.
One day, unless we respond to the impending crisis, they could discover that their lives are more comfortable than ours. — Â