"Have you heard about Peak Oil?" (video)

Well-stated overview of peak oil (using adult language) with knee-jerk conservative talking points undermined logically (imagine that!).



More details:

300 YEARS OF FOSSIL-FUELED ADDICTION IN 5 MINUTES

Narrated by Richard Heinberg

 

Feeding humanity in a future of declining resources and environmental crisis

The Food and Farming Transition: Toward a Post Carbon Food System

Richard Heinberg, Michael Bomford

The American food system rests on an unstable foundation of massive fossil fuel inputs. It must be reinvented in the face of declining fuel stocks. The new food system will use less energy, and the energy it uses will come from renewable sources. We can begin the transition to the new system immediately through a process of planned, graduated, rapid change. The unplanned alternative-reconstruction from scratch after collapse-would be chaotic and tragic.

The seeds of the new food system have already been planted. America's farmers have been reducing their energy use for decades. They are using less fertilizer and pesticide. The number of organic farms, farmers' markets, and CSA operations is growing rapidly. More people are thinking about where their food comes from.

These are important building blocks, but much remains to be done. Our new food system will require more farmers, smaller and more diversified farms, less processed and packaged food, and less long-distance hauling of food. Governments, communities, businesses, and families each have important parts to play in reinventing a food system that functions with limited renewable energy resources to feed our population for the long term.
Read the full report:
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Quacks like a duck...

by Richard Heinberg

According to an article in Le Monde on March 25, the US Department of Energy "admits that 'a chance exists that we may experience a decline' of world liquid fuels production between 2011 and 2015 'if the investment is not there.'" This bombshell emerged in "an exclusive interview with Glen Sweetnam, main official expert on the oil market in the Obama administration."
The Le Monde article goes on: "The DoE dismisses the 'peak oil' theory, which assumes that world crude oil production should irreversibly decrease in a nearby future, in want of sufficient fresh oil reserves yet to be exploited. The Obama administration supports the alternative hypothesis of an 'undulating plateau.' Lauren Mayne, responsible for liquid fuel prospects at the DoE, explains : 'Once maximum world oil production is reached, that level will be approximately maintained for several years thereafter, creating an undulating plateau. After this plateau period, production will experience a decline.'"
In other words, we don't believe that world oil production will soon reach a maximum and begin to decline (the "peak oil theory"); instead, we believe that world oil production will reach a maximum, stay there for a few years, and then decline. That decline could commence as soon as next year.
Two comments: First, what's the difference? Is this just a way to announce Peak Oil without acknowledging it? The idea of the "undulating plateau" has been part of the Peak Oil discussion for years (see my book Powerdown), and world oil production has in fact been at a plateau since late 2004. Second, how is it that readers in France now know more about U.S. Department of Energy oil supply forecasts than Americans do? There has been no equivalent article in the mainstream press in North America.
It's time for the DoE to answer some tough questions. Too bad U.S. media outlets are evidently too timid, busy, or uninformed to bother themselves with the trivial business of alerting the American people to an impending calamity that is entirely foreseeable and that a few people in government are evidently willing to speak about (at least in code), if only someone asks.

Conclusion? - Consume MUCH Less

ARRESTING NEW THINK TANK STUDY CONCLUDES: NO COMBINATION OF ALTERNATIVE ENERGY SYSTEMS CAN REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS

Santa Rosa, CA (13. November 2009)

An alarming new study jointly released by two prominent California-based environmental/economic think tanks, concludes that unrelenting energy limits, even among alternative energy systems, will make it impossible for the industrial system to continue operating at its present scale, beyond the next few decades. The report finds that the current race by industries and governments to develop new sustainable energy technologies that can replace ecologically harmful and rapidly depleting fossil fuel and nuclear technologies, will not prove sufficient, and that this will require substantial adjustments in many operating assumptions of modern society.

The new study (“Searching for a Miracle: Net Energy Limits & the Fate of Industrial Society”) is the first major analysis to utilize the new research tools of “full life cycle assessment” and “net energy ratios” (Energy Returned on Energy Invested, EROEI), to compare all currently proposed future scenarios for how industrial society can face its long term future.

The report analyzes 18 of the most viable power production alternatives, from traditional fossil fuels and nuclear, through wind, solar, wave, geothermal, biomass, et. al. to identify their “net energy” ratios—the amount of energy that must be invested in them vs. the amount of energy they will be able to produce---as well as their environmental, social and geopolitical impacts. It also considers such important factors as resource and materials supply, resource location, transportation, waste disposal issues, and others to create a full life cycle picture of each technology’s impacts.

“Searching for a Miracle” was published by the International Forum on Globalization (IFG). The content was largely provided by the Post Carbon Institute, a think tank that works toward a transition to a more resilient, equitable, and sustainable world.

The principal author of the report is Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow of Post Carbon Institute, and the best-selling author of such books as “The Party’s Over”, ““Peak Everything”, and “Blackout”. The editor of the project--part of the IFG’s False Solutions program--is San Francisco author Jerry Mander, who is Founder and Distinguished Fellow of IFG. His previous popular books on economics and technology include: “Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television”, “The Case Against the Global Economy”, and “Alternatives to Globalization”.

Following are a few of the main conclusions of this report:

✦ As the world’s higher-quality fossil fuel reserves rapidly deplete, no combination of alternative energy sources is likely to be sufficient to sustain industrial society at its present scale. Energy supply problems, perhaps severe, are likely during the coming decade, worsening as primary fuels become scarce and costly. Major adjustments will be required in industrial production and personal consumption; attention will need to be paid to stabilizing and reducing population levels over the long term.

✦ Fossil fuels and high-quality uranium ores are depleting rapidly; world oil production may already have peaked. Present expectations for new technological replacements are probably overly optimistic with regard to ecological sustainability, potential scale of development, and levels of “net energy” gain—i.e., the amount of energy actually yielded once energy inputs for the production process have been subtracted. Technologies such as “carbon capture and sequestration” and “4th generation” nuclear power remain largely hypothetical and may never be deployed on a large scale, while the prospects for oil shale, tar sands, and shale gas have been overstated to varying degrees.

✦ Certain energy production systems suffer from low or negative net energy gain; these include most biofuels, hydrogen systems, oil shale, tar sands, and biomass, some of which also present unacceptable environmental problems (as is also true of conventional fossil fuels and nuclear power). So far, the best prospects for large-scale production and net-energy performance remain wind energy and certain forms of solar, but these still face important limitations due to intermittency of supply, remoteness of the best resources, materials needed for large-scale deployment, and scale potential. Tidal and geothermal power—which can have high net-energy yield but suffer from a low potential energy production capacity—will prove marginally useful in a diverse future energy supply mix.

✦ Limits to future energy supply are more dramatic if environmental impacts are considered— including accelerating climate change, fresh water scarcity, destruction of food-growing lands, shortages of minerals, and threats to wildlife habitat.

✦ Given the above, it is necessary to prepare societies for dramatic shifts in consumption and lifestyle expectations. It will also be necessary to promote a new ethic of conservation throughout the industrial world. A sharp reversal of today’s globalization of commercial activity—inherently wasteful for its transport energy needs—must be anticipated and facilitated, and government leaders must encourage a rapid evolution toward economies based on localism especially for essential needs such as food and
energy. The study remarks that this is not necessarily a negative prospect, as some research shows that, once basic human needs are met, high material consumption levels do not correlate with high quality of life.

✦ The emphasis by policy makers on growth as the central goal and measure of modern economies is no longer practical or viable, as growth will be limited by both energy shortages and by society’s inability to continue venting energy production and consumption wastes (principally, carbon dioxide) into the environment without catastrophic consequences. Standards for economic success must shift from
gross metrics of economic activity, to more direct assessments of human well-being, equity, and the health of the natural world.

✦ With energy supplies diminishing, raw material resources similarly depleting, and crises such as climate change rapidly advancing, the long-term goal of satisfying the needs of the world’s poorest peoples—in their attempts to recover from centuries of colonialism, resource exploitation, and removal from traditional lands and economies—becomes ever more daunting. Efforts at relieving poverty, both domestically and internationally, will require more equitable reallocation of existing real wealth.

✦ These factors must all be taken very seriously by policy makers in all countries, and by global institutions that have thus far failed to be realistic about what will be required to avoid future social and economic breakdowns and geopolitical crises, as countries and peoples compete for dwindling energy resources, raw materials, and agricultural space. While it is not yet too late to change course, the opportunities to avoid catastrophic economic, environmental, social, and political impacts are few and quickly dwindling.

For further information, or additional copies of the report, please contact the organizations below:

POST CARBON INSTITUTE
500 N. Main St., Suite 100
Sebastopol, CA 95472 USA
Tel: +1.707.823.8700 • Fax: +1.866.797.5820
http://www.postcarbon.org • media@postcarbon.org

THE INTERNATIONAL FORUM ON GLOBALIZATION
1009 General Kennedy Avenue, Suite 2
San Francisco, California 94129 USA
T: +1.415.561.7650 • F: +1.415.561.7651
http://www.ifg.org • ifg@ifg.org

Chains...my Mama's got me locked up in chains...

Top of the Food Chain

by Richard Heinberg on November 25, 2008

Today comes the startling news of a British government report showing a drop in oceanic zooplankton of 73 percent since 1960.

For many people, this may seem relatively inconsequential as compared to daily cataclysmic revelations about the state of the national and global economy. This reaction is understandable: we care first and foremost about our own immediate survival prospects, and a new and greater Depression will mean millions losing their homes, millions more their jobs. It's nothing to look forward to.

It takes some scientific literacy to appreciate the implications of the catastrophic loss of microscopic sea animals. We need to understand that these are food for crustaceans and fish, which are food for sea birds and mammals. We need to appreciate the importance of the oceanic food web in the planetary biosphere.

At the top of the global food chain sits a species that we really do care about—Homo sapiens. The ongoing disappearance of zooplankton, amphibians, butterflies, and bees is tied directly or indirectly to the continuing growth of our own species—both in population (there are nearly seven billion of us large-bodied omnivores, more than any other mammal) and in consumptive voracity (water, food, minerals, energy, forests—you name it).

It's at this point in the discussion that some of us start feeling guilty for being human, and others of us tune the conversation out because there's apparently not much we can do to fundamentally change the demographic and economic growth trends our species has been pursuing for hundreds, if not thousands of years.

But the current economic Armageddon (that we care about) is related to human-induced biodiversity loss (that many of us don't notice) in systemic ways. Both result from pyramid schemes: borrowing and leveraging money on one hand; on the other, using temporary fossil energy to capture ever more biosphere services so as to grow human population and consumption to unsustainable levels. Our economic pyramid is built out of great hewn blocks of renewable and non-renewable resources that are being made unavailable to other organisms as well as to future generations of humans.

The financial meltdown tells us these trends can't go on forever. How the mighty have fallen!—Masters of the Universe reduced to begging for billion-dollar handouts in front of a television audience.

Next will come a human demographic collapse (resulting from the economic crisis, with poor folks unable to afford food or shelter), as mortality begins to exceed fertility.

In all of this it's important to remember that the species on the lower levels of the biodiversity pyramid have been paying the price for our exuberance all along.

The pyramid appears to collapse from the top, while in fact its base has been crumbling for some time.

Fallling Apart - Falling Together

Why Are Things Falling Apart?

Richard Heinberg explores the good and bad of our discovery of fossil fuels.

Eating Fossil Fuels: Oil, Food and the Coming Crisis in Agriculture

By Dale Allen Pfeiffer

The miracle of the Green Revolution was made possible by cheap fossil fuels to supply crops with artificial fertilizer, pesticides, and irrigation. Estimates of the net energy balance of agriculture in the United States show that ten calories of hydrocarbon energy are required to produce one calorie of food. Such an imbalance cannot continue in a world of diminishing hydrocarbon resources.

Eating Fossil Fuels examines the interlinked crises of energy and agriculture and highlights some startling findings:

The worldwide expansion of agriculture has appropriated fully 40 percent of the photosynthetic capability of this planet.

The Green Revolution provided abundant food sources for many, resulting in a population explosion well in excess of the planet's carrying capacity.

Studies suggest that without fossil fuel-based agriculture, the United States could only sustain about two-thirds of its present population. For the planet as a whole, the sustainable number is estimated to be about two billion.

Concluding that the effect of energy depletion will be disastrous without a transition to a sustainable, re-localized agriculture, the book draws on the experiences of North Korea and Cuba to demonstrate stories of failure and success in the transition to non-hydrocarbon-based agriculture. It urges strong grassroots activism for sustainable, localized agriculture and a natural shrinking of the world's population.

Peak Oil Is Now History

The Peak Everything Year

by Richard Heinberg

For those who understand the overwhelming importance of fossil fuel depletion, the signal event of 2008 was without doubt the oil price spike that sent the cost of a barrel of crude rocketing to $147. Knock-on effects were as anticipated: the airline industry contracted, the auto industry went on life support, food prices jolted upward, and the overall economy went into reverse (more on that below). Due to all of these things, the demand for oil subsequently peaked and began to slide, which in turn caused the price to plummet, with no end currently in sight.

I am among several commentators who have gone on record as saying that July 2008 will turn out to have been the all-time record month for world petroleum production. With the price so high (in July), all producers were pumping flat out. And now, with the price so low, there is no incentive to make the required enormous investments in future productive capacity, so that when demand picks up again (and it may be a few years before that happens), new additions to supply will not be sufficient to overcome the capacity erosion that will have accumulated in the interim due to depletion and decline in existing oilfields. Say goodbye to Peak Oil: it's history now.

Fortunately, high oil prices during the early months of the year led to an explosion of Peak Oil awareness. There was an unprecedented frequency of discussion of the issue in the mainstream media, with T. Boone Pickens doing much of the heavy lifting, but also we saw the release of several film documentaries, along with dozens of radio and television interviews of Post Carbon Institute fellows and board members. Transition Initiatives sprang up in scores of towns and cities around the world, and more communities began to assess their vulnerability to future oil shocks.

The climate continued changing this year, with a new record set for the melting rate of the north polar ice cap. Even more ominously, plumes of methane were observed rising from thawing permafrost in Siberia, leading some researchers to speculate that at least one of several potential "doomsday" reinforcing global warming feedback loops has been triggered.

Negotiations over the treaty that will replace the Kyoto Protocol have begun. Environmental organizations are planning to spare no strategic option (including massive direct action campaigns) to press for maximum emissions reduction commitments from the world's nations, but the economic crisis will likely weigh heavily on the minds of world leaders, whose top priority is the futile quest for a return to growth.

Which brings us to the subject of that annoying economic collapse that everyone keeps talking about. The "slowdown," as our government officials like to call it, actually started in 2007 when housing prices weakened and mortgage-backed securities started tanking, but over the past six months the low hissing noise that wary commentators have attributed to a deflation of the debt-credit bubble has turned into a vaporizing explosion.

In a commentary a few weeks ago I opined that 2008 will eventually be seen to have been the last year of aggregate world economic growth (as currently defined). Ever. That's a big, nasty prediction to make, but somebody needs to be pointing out the obvious: economic growth is, almost by definition, something that can't go on forever on a finite planet, and things that can't go on forever cease at some definable point in time. Given Peak Oil, I think we can define that point as now.

On the bright side, we are very nearly at the end of the Bush Administration, and we have just seen a historic election in which hope triumphed over cynicism. Despite realistic concerns that the Obama team faces unmanageable economic and geopolitical crises left over from its predecessors, and that the new Cabinet consists of insiders who are unlikely to grasp the unprecedented nature of the circumstances facing us, or to propose the kinds of bold policies that are called for in a post-Peak era, nevertheless it is clearly a time to offer every possible encouragement and support to our articulate and optimistic President-Elect.

Oilfields in rapid decline....11 more years?

"Nine Percent"

By Richard Heinberg for the Post Carbon Institute

The Financial Times has leaked the results of the International Energy Agency's long-awaited study of the depletion profiles of the world's 400 largest oilfields, indicating that, "Without extra investment to raise production, the natural annual rate of output decline is 9.1 per cent."

This is a stunning figure.

Considering regular crude oil only, this means that 6.825 million barrels a day of new production capacity must come on line each year just to keep up with the aggregate natural decline rate in existing oilfields. That's a new Saudi Arabia every 18 months.

The Financial Times story goes on:

"The findings suggest the world will struggle to produce enough oil to make up for steep declines in existing fields, such as those in the North Sea, Russia and Alaska, and meet long-term demand. The effort will become even more acute as [oil] prices fall and investment decisions are delayed."

This is putting it mildly. Investment capital is being vaporized almost daily in a global deflationary bonfire of unprecedented ferocity. Oil production projects are being mothballed left and right.

Inter alia, the IEA takes the requisite swat at "peak oil theorists," who, the agency somehow still believes, are saying that the world is "running out of oil." Of course that's NOT what peak oil theorists say, but a correct summation of their position would have to be followed with a statement to the effect that, "Our research supports their position," which would be just too embarrassing.

Sadly, the IEA feels it must pull its punch even further. With adequate investment in new small oilfields and unconventional sources like tarsands, it insists, the world can still achieve higher levels of production. In other words, if the $12 trillion that vanished from the world stock markets last week were invested in new tarsands projects, then theoretically a few more years of total oil production growth could be eked out (not growth in net energy production, mind you, but in the gross—and I do mean gross—production of exotic, very expensive stuff that it's physically possible to run your car on, assuming you could afford to do so).

Of course, any realistic assessment either of the likelihood of that level of investment appearing, or of the ability of new projects to really produce a sufficient rate of flow regardless of the size of the cash infusion, would end merely in a hearty belly-laugh.

Evidently peeved about being scooped on its planned November 12 press conference roll-out of the study, the IEA has disavowed the Financial Times story. But if nine percent is even close to being the final figure, then it's absolutely clear: July 2008 was the all-time peak in world oil production. Don't expect anyone at the IEA to officially admit that fact until 2025 or so. But among those who pay attention to the evidence and the terms of the debate, further ink need not be spilled in speculation.

Peak oil is history.

The Food and Farming Transition

by Richard Heinberg
MuseLetter 199/November 2008

The only way avert a food crisis resulting from oil and natural gas price hikes and supply disruptions while also reversing agriculture’s contribution to climate change is to proactively and methodically remove fossil fuels from the food system.

The removal of fossil fuels from the food system is inevitable: maintenance of the current system is simply not an option over the long term. Only the amount of time available for the transition process, and the strategies for pursuing it, can be matters for controversy.

Given the degree to which the modern food system has become dependent on fossil fuels, many proposals for de-linking food and fuels are likely to appear radical. However, efforts toward this end must be judged not by the degree to which they preserve the status quo, but by their likely ability to solve the fundamental challenge that will face us: the need to feed a global population of 7 billion with a diminishing supply of fuels available to fertilize, plow, and irrigate fields and to harvest and transport crops.

If this transition is undertaken proactively and intelligently, there could be many side benefits—more careers in farming, more protection for the environment, less soil erosion, a revitalization of rural culture, and more healthful food for everyone.

Some of this transformation will inevitably be driven by market forces, led simply by the rising price of fossil fuels. However, without planning the transition may be wrenching and destructive, since market forces acting alone could bankrupt farmers while leaving consumers with few or no options.

The Transition

To remove fossil fuels from the food system too quickly, before alternative systems are in place, would be catastrophic. Thus the transition process must be a matter for careful consideration and planning.

In recent years there has been some debate on the problem of how many people a non-fossil fueled food system can support. The answer is still unclear. But we will certainly find out, because there is likely to be no alternative, given that substitute liquid fuels—including coal-to-liquids, biofuels, tar sands, and shale oil—are all problematic and cannot be relied upon to replace cheap crude oil and natural gas as these deplete.

There are reasons for hope: a recent report on African agriculture from the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) suggests that "organic, small-scale farming can deliver the increased yields which were thought to be the preserve of industrial farming, without the environmental and social damage which that form of agriculture brings with it."

Nevertheless, given that we do not know whether non-fossil fuel agriculture can in fact feed a population now approaching seven billion—and given that current fuels-based agriculture cannot be relied upon to do so for much longer, given the reality of fuel depletion—the prudent path forward would surely be to tie agricultural policy to population policy.

Indeed, coordination will be essential also between agriculture policies and education, economic, transport, energy policies. The food system transition will be comprehensive, and will require integration with all segments and aspects of society.

This document is intended to serve as the basis for the beginning of that planning process. Our aim is to develop a template that can be used to strategically plan the transition of food and farming across the world, region by region, and at all scales (from the farm to the community to the nation).

Elements of Transition

The following are some key strategic elements of the food systems transition process that will need to be addressed at all levels of scale, from the household to the nation and beyond.

Re-Localization

In recent decades the food systems of Britain and most other nations have become globalized. Food is traded in enormous quantities—and not just luxury foods (such as coffee and chocolate), but staples including wheat, maize, meat, potatoes, and rice.

The globalization of the food system has had advantages: people in wealthy countries now have access to a wide variety of foods at all times, including fruits and vegetables that are out of season (apples in May or asparagus in January), and foods that cannot be grown locally at any time of year (e.g., avocadoes in Scotland). Long-distance transport enables food to be delivered from places of abundance to areas of scarcity. Whereas in previous centuries a regional crop failure might have led to famine, its effects now can be neutralized by food imports.

However, food globalization also creates systemic vulnerability. As fuel prices rise, costs of imported food go up. If fuel supplies were substantially cut off as the result of some transient event, the entire system could fail. A globalized system is also more susceptible to accidental contamination, as we have seen recently with the appearance of toxic melamine in foods from China. The best way to make our food system more resilient against such threats is clear: decentralize and re-localize it.

Re-localization will inevitably occur sooner or later as a result of declining oil production, since there are no alternative energy sources on the horizon that can be scaled up quickly to take the place of petroleum. But if the transition process is to unfold in a beneficial rather than a catastrophic way, it must be planned and coordinated. This will require deliberate effort aimed at building the infrastructure for regional food economies—ones that can support diversified farming and reduce the amount of fossil fuel in the diet.

Re-localization means producing more basic food necessities locally. No one advocates doing away with food trade altogether: this would hurt both farmers and consumers. Rather, what is needed is a prioritization of production so that lower-value food items (which are typically staple calorie crops) are mostly sourced from close by, with most long-distance trade left to higher-value foods, and especially those that store well.

This decentralization of the food system will result in greater societal resilience in the face of fuel price volatility. Problems of food contamination, when they appear, will be minimized. Meanwhile, revitalization of local food production will help renew local economies. Consumers will enjoy better quality food that is fresher and more seasonal. And transport-related climate impacts will be reduced.

Each nation or region will need to devise its own strategy for re-localizing its food system, based on a thorough initial assessment of vulnerabilities and opportunities. The following are some general suggestions that are likely to be applicable in most instances:

• The process will benefit enormously from policy support at both national and regional levels. This could include, for example, the provision of grants to towns and cities to build year-round indoor farmers’ markets.
• Food-safety regulations should be made appropriate to the scale of production and distribution, so that a small grower selling direct off the farm or at a farmers’ market is not regulated as onerously as a multinational food manufacturer. While local food may have safety problems, these will inevitably occur on a smaller scale and will be easier to manage because local food is inherently more traceable and accountable. Governments can require that some minimum percentage of food purchases for schools, hospitals, military bases, and prisons are sourced within 100 miles of the institutions buying the food. Channelling even a small portion of institutional food purchasing to local growers would greatly expand opportunities for regional producers while improving the diet of people whom these institutions feed.
• Cities and towns can rework their waste management systems so as to collect food scraps that can then be converted to compost, biogas, and livestock feed—which can in turn be made available to local growers.

But government can do only so much. Consumers must develop the habit of preferentially buying locally sourced foods whenever possible, and they can be encouraged in this by "Buy Local" educational literature distributed by retailers—who can also assist by clearly labeling and prominently displaying local products.

Growers themselves must rethink their business strategies. Instead of growing specialty crops for export, they must plan a transition to production of staple foods for local consumption. They must also actively seek local markets for their food. The Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) movement provides a business model that has proven successful in many communities. Small producers can also create informal co-ops to acquire machinery (such as small threshing machines for cereal and oilseed processing or micro hydro turbines for electricity).

The strategy of re-localizing food systems will be more challenging for some nations and regions than others. More urban gardens and even small animal operations (with chickens, ducks, geese, and rabbits) should be encouraged, but even then it will be necessary to source most food from the countryside, delivering it to the city by rail. Thus re-localization should be seen as a process and a general direction of effort, not as an absolute goal.

Energy

As society turns away from fossil fuels, the energy balance of farming must once again become net positive. However, the transition process will be complex and problematic. Farms will still need sources of energy for their operations, and will need to provide much or all of that energy for themselves. Meanwhile, farmers could also take advantage of opportunities to export surplus energy to nearby communities as a way of increasing farm income.

Farms must be powered with renewable energy. However, many energy needs on farms—such as fuel for tractors and other machinery—are currently difficult to fill with anything other than liquid fuels, which currently come in the form of diesel or petrol made from crude oil. Farmers should first look for ways to reduce fuel needs through efficiency or replacement of machines with animal power or human labor. This is most likely to be economically feasible in dairy, meat, vegetable, fruit, and nut operations. Where fuel-fed machinery is still required, which is likely to continue being the case for grain production, ethanol or biodiesel made on-site could supplement or replace petroleum. Farmers could aim to apportion one-fifth of their cropland to production of biofuels for their own use.

Many other farm operations require electricity, and this can be generated on-site with wind turbines, solar panels, and micro-hydro turbines. Effort first must be devoted to making operations more energy-efficient. Because these technologies require initial investment and pay for themselves slowly over time, assistance from government and from financial institutions in the form of grants and low-interest loans could be instrumental in helping farmers overcome initial economic hurdles toward energy self-sufficiency.

Eventually farmers are capable of being not just self-sufficient in energy, but of producing surplus energy for surrounding communities. Much of this exported energy is likely to come in the form of biomass—agricultural and forestry waste that can be burned to produce electricity. While farmers can also grow crops for the production of biofuels, the ecological and thermodynamic limits of this energy technology require that the scale of production be deliberately restricted. Otherwise, society’s demand for fuel could overwhelm farmers’ ability to produce food—and food must remain their first priority. In exporting biomass from the farm, growers must always keep in mind the productive capacity of sustainable agricultural systems, and they must strictly monitor soil health and fertility.

The transition of farms to renewable energy will require planning. Farmers, ideally with the assistance of regional and national agencies, should plan to increase energy efficiency, to reduce fossil fuel inputs, and to grow renewable energy production according to a staged, integrated program designed for the unique needs and capabilities of each farm. As a general guideline, the plan should aim to reduce oil and natural gas inputs by at least half during the first decade

Soil Fertility

In industrial agriculture, soil fertility is maintained with inputs provided from off-site. Of these inputs, the most important are nitrogen and phosphorus. Nitrogen comes from ammonia-based fertilizers made from fossil fuels—principally, natural gas. Phosphorus comes from phosphate mines in several countries. While sufficient low-quality phosphate deposits exist to supply world needs for many decades, high-quality deposits that are currently being mined are quickly depleting, which means that phosphate prices will likely rise within the next few years. [Phosphate Primer]

Both nitrogen and phosphorus are essential to agriculture. And our current ways of supplying both are clearly unsustainable. Unless alternative ways of maintaining soil fertility are quickly found, a crisis looms.

The long-term solution will surely depend on a two-fold strategy: designing farm systems that build fertility through crop rotations, and recycling nutrients.

Crop rotation can help with maintaining nitrogen levels. Simply planting a cover crop after the fall harvest significantly reduces nitrogen leaching while cutting down on soil erosion. Meanwhile, introducing leguminous crops into the rotation cycle replaces nitrogen.

Cleverly designed polycultures can sustainably produce large amounts of food, as has been shown not only by small-scale "alternative" farmers in Britain and America, but also by large rice-and-fish farmers in China and giant-scale operations (up to 15,000 acres) in Argentina. There, farmers employ an eight-year rotation of perennial pasture and annual crops: after five years grazing cattle on pasture, farmers then grow three years of grain without applying fertilizer. The need for herbicides is also dramatically reduced: weeds that afflict pasture cannot survive the years of tillage, and weeds of row crops don’t survive years of grazing.

Most industrial farmers have left behind the practice of cover cropping because commercial fertilizers have become the cheaper option. That cost equation is about to shift. It is therefore important that farmers begin planning for higher fertilizer prices now by gearing up their rotation cycles and building natural soil fertility ahead of the immediate need.

In industrial agriculture, the soil is treated as an inert substance that holds plants in place while chemical nutrients are applied externally. Without efforts to maintain natural fertility, over time organic matter disappears from the soil, along with beneficial soil micro-organisms. In the future, as chemical fertilizers become more expensive, farmers will need to devote much more attention to the practice of building healthy soil. But rebuilding nutrient-depleted soil takes, at minimum, several years of effort.

Traditional farmers increase organic matter in topsoil through the application of compost—which not only builds soil fertility, but also improves the soil’s ability to hold water and thus withstand drought. There is also mounting evidence that food grown in properly composted soil is of higher nutritional quality. Currently, in typical modern cities, consumers, retailers, wholesalers and institutions discard enormous quantities of food. Some communities have already instituted municipal programs for composting of food and yard waste; such programs could be expanded and made mandatory, with compost being given free to local farmers. This would reduce the amount of garbage going to land fills, as well as farmers’ needs for fertilizers and irrigation, while improving the nutritional quality of the diet.

In addition, recent research with "terra preta" (also known as "bio char"), a charcoal-like material that can be produced from agricultural waste, suggests that its introduction to soils could reduce plants’ need for nitrogen by 20 to 30 percent while sequestering carbon that would otherwise end up in the atmosphere.

The potential of composting and the use of terra preta to mitigate the climate crisis is hardly trivial: a one-percent increase of soil organic matter in the top 33.5cm of the soil is equivalent to the capture and storage of 100 tonnes of atmospheric CO2. per square kilometre of farmland.

Ultimately, there is no solution to the phosphorus supply problem other than full-system nutrient recycling. This will entail a complete redesign of sewage systems to recapture nutrients so they can be returned to the soil—as Chinese farmers learned to do centuries ago. But if sewage systems (or simpler variants) are to become primary sources of phosphorus and other soil nutrients, they cannot continue to be channels for the disposal of toxic wastes. It is essential that separate waste streams be developed for the disposal of all pharmaceuticals, household chemicals, and industrial wastes. Thus the problem of soil fertility is one that farmers cannot solve on their own: it is a crisis of the food system as a whole, and must be addressed contextually and holistically.

Diet

The consumer is as important to the food system as the producer. During recent decades, consumer preferences have been shaped to fit the industrial food system through advertising and the development of mass-marketed, uniform, packaged food products that, while often nutritionally inferior, are cheap, attractive, in some cases even physically addictive. The advent and rapid proliferation of "fast food" restaurants has likewise fostered a diet that is profitable to giant industrial agribusiness, but disastrous to the health of consumers. However lamentable these trends may be from a public health standpoint, they are clearly unsustainable in view of the energy and climate crises facing modern agriculture.

Because processed and packaged foods and fresh foods imported out of season add to the energy intensity of the food system, rich and poor alike must be encouraged to eat food that is locally grown, that is in season, and that is less processed. Public education campaigns could help shift consumer preferences in this regard.

A shift toward a less meat-centered diet should also be encouraged, because a meat-based diet is substantially more energy intensive than one that is plant-based.

Government can help with a shift in diet preferences through its own food purchasing polices (see "Re-Localization," above). The process can be helped even further by a more careful official government definition of "food." It makes no sense for government efforts intended to improve the nutritional health of the people to support the consumption of products known to be unhealthful—such as soda and other junk food.

Farming Systems

During the past few decades farming has become more specialized. Today, a typical farm may produce only meat of a single kind (turkey, chicken, pork, or beef), or only dairy, or a single type of grain, vegetable, fruit, or nut.

This narrow specialization seemed to make economic sense in the era of cheap transport and cheap farm inputs. But because nature is diverse and integrated, the deliberate elimination of diversity on the farm has led to problems at every step. For example, animal feedlot operations (also known as concentrated animal feed operations, or CAFOs) produce enormous amounts of waste that end up in massive manure lagoons that pollute ground water and foul the air. Meanwhile, grain diets fed to the animals result in digestive problems requiring the large-scale administration of antibiotics that find their way into both the human food system and ground water, and that lead to antibiotic resistance among disease organisms that afflict humans.

Farm specialization also impacts the grain or vegetable grower: soils that annually produce these crops need a regular replenishment of nitrogen; but if the farmer keeps few animals, there may be no option other than to import fertilizers from off-site.

By switching to multi-enterprise diverse systems, farmers can often solve a range of problems at once. Feeding much less grain to livestock while giving them access to pasture that is in rotation with other crops maintains soil fertility while leading to better animal health and higher food quality. The farmer, the environment, and the consumer all benefit.

The post-hydrocarbon food transition may also compel a rethinking of the size of farm operations. The mechanization of farm operations and the centralization of food systems favored larger farms. However, as fuel for farm machinery becomes more costly, and as farming once again involves more labor, smaller-scale operations will once again be profitable. In addition, a smaller scale of operations will be needed as farms become more diverse, since farmers will have more system elements to monitor. Agriculture will thus become more knowledge-intensive, requiring a curious, holistic attitude on the part of farmers.

In urban areas, micro-farms and gardens—including vertical gardens and rooftop gardens that in some cases include small animals such as chickens and rabbits—could provide a substantial amount of food for growers and their families, along with occasional income from selling seasonal surpluses at garden markets.

Farm Work

With less fuel available to power agricultural machinery, the world will need many more farmers. But for farmers to succeed, some current agricultural policies that favor larger-scale production and production for export will need to change, while policies that support small-scale subsistence farms, gardens, and agricultural co-ops must be formulated and put in place—both by international institutions such as the World Bank, and also by national and regional governments.

Currently the US has 2,000,000 farms. In the US in 1900, nearly 40 percent of the population farmed; the current proportion is less than one percent. Today, the average farmer is nearing retirement age.

In nations and regions where food is grown without machinery, a larger percentage of the population must be involved in food production. For example, farmers make up more than half the populations of China, and India, Nepal, Ethiopia, and Indonesia.

While the proportion of farmers that would be needed if the country were to become self-sufficient in food grown without fossil fuels is unknown (that would depend upon technologies used and diets adopted), it would undoubtedly be much larger than the current percentage. It is reasonable to expect that several million new farmers would be required—a number that is both unimaginable and unmanageable over the short term. These new farmers would have to include a broad mix of people, reflecting the US’s increasing diversity. Already growing numbers of young adults are becoming organic or biodynamic farmers, and farmers’ markets and CSAs are also springing up across the country. These tentative trends must be supported and encouraged. In addition to Government policies that support sustainable farming systems based on smaller farming units, this will require:

• Education: Universities and community colleges must quickly develop programs in small-scale ecological farming methods—programs that also include training in other skills that farmers will need, such as in marketing and formulating business plans. Apprenticeships and other forms of direct knowledge transfer will also assist the transition.
• Financial Support: Since few if any farms are financially successful the first year or even the second or third, loans and grants will be needed to help farmers get started.
• A revitalization of farming communities and farming culture: Over the past decades rural towns have seen their best and brightest young people flee first to distant colleges and then to cities. Farming communities must be interesting, attractive places if we expect people to inhabit them and for children to want to stay there.

Seeds

Today’s seed industry is centralized and reliant upon the very fuel-based transport system whose future viability is in question. Most commercial seeds are of hybrid varieties, so that farmers cannot save seed but must purchase new supplies each year.

Worldwide, a growing proportion of the commercial seeds that are available are genetically modified. GM seeds have primarily been developed by chemical companies to support the sale of their proprietary herbicides. The promise of more nutritious foods, or crops that can produce biofuels more efficiently, is years from realization. Given that the need for transition is immediate, efforts to build a post-fossil fuel food system cannot wait for new technologies that may or may not appear or succeed. In any case, the GM seed industry is based upon current systems of transport, and fuel-based inputs such as chemical fertilizers and herbicides, that are all inextricably tied to the wider fossil-fuel based provisioning systems of society. Thus GM crops would be unlikely to be of much help in the transition in any case.

What is needed instead is a coordinated effort to identify open-pollinated varieties of food crops that are adapted to local soils and microclimates, and a program to make such seeds available to farmers and gardeners in sufficient quantities. In addition, local colleges must begin offering courses on the techniques of seed saving.

Processing and Distribution Systems

The transition process will undoubtedly be fraught with challenges to food processing and distribution systems, which currently rely on large energy inputs and long-distance transport.

For example, the meat industry now depends upon centralized facilities for slaughtering livestock—which must be transported long distances to these facilities. Re-localizing food systems will entail creating incentives for the emergence of smaller, more localized slaughterhouses and butcher shops. One interim solution would be for a fleet of mobile abattoirs to go from farm to farm, processing animals humanely and inexpensively.

Many health regulations were originally designed to check abuses by the largest food producers, but such regulations may now inhibit the development of smaller-scale and more localized processing and distribution systems. For example, farmers should be able to smoke a ham and sell it to their neighbours without making a huge investment in nationally approved facilities. A small producer selling direct from the farm or at a farmers’ market should not be subject to the same food safety regulations as a multinational food manufacturer: while local food may occasionally have safety problems, those problems will be less catastrophic and easier to manage than similar problems at industrial-scale facilities.

Food processors must look for ways to make their present operations more energy efficient, while government, consumers, and retailers find ways to reduce the need for food processing and also for food packaging. This gradual shift will require institutional support for families in storing, processing, cooking, and preserving food within the home.

Meanwhile, in view of inevitable problems with existing transport systems, national and regional food storage systems must be reconsidered. Reserves of grain, sufficient to provide for essential needs during an extended food crisis, should be kept and managed to avoid spoilage.

Packaging of food should be regulated to minimize the use of plastics, which will become more scarce and expensive as oil and gas deplete—and which are implicated as sources of toxins in any case.

Government should institute policies that prioritize the distribution of food within the nation by rail and water, rather than by road, as trucks are comparatively energy inefficient.

Supermarkets are currently the ultimate distribution sites for food in most instances. However, this model presupposes near-universal access to automobiles and petrol. A resilient food system will require smaller and more widely distributed access points in the forms of small shops and garden or farm markets. Government regulations and tax incentives can help accomplish that shift.

Wholesalers and distributors will have a changed role in a transitioning food system. They will still be needed to manage the supplies of various seasonally produced foods moving from producers to consumers. However, rather than favoring large producers and giant supermarket chains, they must alter their operations to serve smaller, more distributed farms and gardens, as well as smaller and more distributed retail shops.

Resilience Action Planning

The transition process will succeed by creating more resilience in food systems. Resilient systems are able to withstand higher magnitudes of disturbance before undergoing a dramatic shift to a new condition in which they are controlled by a different set of processes. One quality of resilience is redundancy—which is often at odds with economic efficiency. Efficiency implies both long supply chains and the reduction of inventories to a minimum. This "just-in-time" delivery of products reduces costs—but it increases the vulnerability of systems to disturbances such as fuel shortages. As more attention is paid to resilience and less to economic efficiency, redundancy and larger inventories are seen as benefits rather than liabilities. Other resilience values include diversity (as opposed to uniformity), and dispersion (rather than centralization) of control over systems.

Building resilience into our food systems as we move toward a post-fossil fuel economy will entail all of the Elements of Transition detailed above. It will also require planning at four levels: Government, Community, Business, and Individual or Family. At each level the planning process will necessarily be somewhat different. The purpose of this section is to delineate the main planning steps that will make sense at each of these levels. In some instances, steps within an action plan can or should be undertaken concurrently. In any case, what is offered here is merely a skeletal outline for a process that must be developed to fit unique needs of those it will serve.

Government

The following steps are applicable at any level of government—national, regional, or local. At the highest level of scale (the nation), each step will itself be the subject of planning and delegation. At the lowest level of scale (small villages), government may lack the capacity to undertake any of these steps and can do more than offer symbolic official support to volunteer citizen initiatives.

1. Assess the existing food system. Begin with a study of current systemic vulnerabilities and opportunities. How are farm inputs currently sourced? How much food is currently imported? What proportion of those food imports are staples, and what proportion are luxury foods? What are the environmental costs of current agricultural practices? How would the current food system be impacted by fuel shortages and high prices?

2. Review policies. How are current policies supporting these vulnerabilities and environmental impacts? How can they be changed or eliminated? Are there policies already in place that are likely to help with the transition? How can these latter policies be strengthened?

3. Bring together key stakeholders. Organizations of farmers, food processing and distributing companies, and retailers must all be included in the transition process. Many will wish simply to maintain the existing system; however, it must be made clear that this is not an option. Many companies involved in the food system will need to change their business model substantially.

4. Make a plan. The transition plan that is formulated must be comprehensive and detailed, and must contain robust but attainable targets with timelines and mechanisms for periodic review and revision. A scoping exercise must be undertaken to assess the impact of the plan on agricultural output and to quantify the changes in kinds of commodities produced and in their volumes and prices.

5. Educate and involve the public. The public must not only be informed about the government-led aspects of the transition process, but must be included in it to the extent that is practical. Citizens must be educated about food choices, gardening opportunities, and ways to access food from local producers. Their successes and challenges in adaptation will inform new iterations of the plan.

6. Shift policies and incentives. This is the key responsibility of government, as it either limits or enhances the ability of community groups, businesses, and families to engage in the transition process. Policy changes must reflect stakeholder input, but must nevertheless be designed primarily to further the Elements of Transition, rather than the short-term interests of any particular stakeholder group.

7. Monitor and adjust. An undertaking of this magnitude will inevitably have unforeseen and unintended impacts. Thus it is essential that progress be continually be reviewed with an eye to making adjustments to pace and strategy, while maintaining absolute adherence to the central task of methodically removing fossil fuels from the food system.

Community

The following are action steps for adoption by voluntary community groups, as opposed to governments (see above). The Transition Network provides an excellent model for this kind of community action. Such efforts seem to work best when the scale of community is such that meetings are manageable in size and meeting participants need not travel long distances. Thus in large cities, neighborhoods could apply Resilience Action Planning while sending delegates to occasional city-wide coordinating meetings. The overlap and mutual support between community organizations and local government efforts must be a matter for discussion and negotiation.

1. Assess the local food system. This assessment process should be undertaken in cooperation with government, so as not to duplicate tasks. Volunteer citizen groups are in position to provide perspectives that otherwise might elude government assessment efforts—such as opportunities for community gardens, or problems with access to food from local producers.

2. Identify and involve stakeholders. Local growers, shop owners, public kitchens, restaurants, schools, and other institutions that produce or serve food should all be contacted and invited to join a voluntary re-localization initiative and to offer input into the process.

3. Educate and involve the public. Community groups can stage public events to raise awareness about food transition issues. "Buy local" brochures and pamphlets, paid for and distributed by a consortium of local businesses (but organized by volunteer groups), can list local producers, farm markets, restaurants, and shops.

4. Develop a unique local strategic program. This can include farmers’ markets, CSAs, school lunch programs, and public kitchens, networked with local producers, including community gardens. The program, based on input from stakeholders, should feature targets and timelines developed through a "backcasting" process, beginning with a collaborative exercise aimed at envisioning the local food system as it might look in 2025 after fossil fuels have ceased to play a role.

5. Coordinate with national programs. Local volunteer efforts can play a significant role in informing national government policies, and in implementing the national transition strategy. However, this will require the maintenance of open channels of communication, which in turn will be the responsibility of both government and the local groups.

6. Support individuals and families. Individuals are likely to change food habits and priorities only if they see others doing so as well, and if they feel that their efforts are supported and valued. Community groups can help by establishing new behavioral norms through public events and articles in local newspapers. Practical help can be offered via canning parties, garden planting and harvest parties, and gleaning programs. Local food and gardening experts can be made available to answer questions and concerns. Neighborhood food storage facilities can also be created to supplement household cupboards.

7. Monitor and adjust. All of these efforts must be continually adjusted to assure that all segments of the community are included in the transition process, and that the process is working as smoothly as possible for all.

Business

Relevant businesses include farms, shops, processors, wholesalers, and restaurants. However, the following steps could also be useful to organizations such as schools, colleges, and hospitals that dispense food as an ancillary part of their operations.

1. Assess vulnerabilities. Every business or organization that is part of the food system must take an honest look at the inevitable impacts of higher fuel prices, and fuel scarcity, on its operations. Examine scenarios based on a doubling or tripling of fuel costs to highlight specific vulnerabilities.

2. Make a plan. Develop a business model that works without—or with continually shrinking—fossil fuel inputs. Then "backcast" from that imagined future condition, specifying time-related targets.

3. Work with government and community groups. Given the fact that government will be developing regulations to reduce fuel use in the food system, and that community organizations will be offering support to local farmers and food shops that spearhead the transition, it makes good business sense to lead the parade rather than lagging at the rear.

4. Educate and involve suppliers and customers. No business is an island. The transition will flourish through strengthened relationships on all sides.

5. Monitor and adjust. For businesses, one obvious and essential criterion of success is profitability. The bottom line will help indicate which adaptive strategies are working, and which ones need work. However, negative financial feedback is no reason to abandon the essential goal of transition.

Individual and Family

1. Assess food vulnerabilities and opportunities. Whether at a family meeting or by oneself over a cup of tea, take a long honest look at your typical monthly food purchases and give careful thought to the implications. How much of your food comes from within 100 miles? How much is packaged and processed? How many meals are meat-centered? Where do you shop? How would you be impacted if food and fuel prices doubled or tripled?

2. Make a plan. Create an ideal food scenario for yourself, including diet, shopping habits, and gardening goals. Then "backcast" a series of time-related goals. Write these prominently on a calendar and attach it to the front of your refrigerator.

3. Garden. Even if you don’t have access to a plot of land, you can still grow sprouts in a jar or a few food plants in a window box. Look for opportunities to contribute work to a community garden. Develop your skills by seeking out gardening mentors.

4. Develop relations with local producers. Even if you have a large garden you probably can’t grow all the food you eat. Rather than shopping at a supermarket, begin to frequent your local farmers’ market, or join a CSA.

5. Become involved in community efforts. Get to know your neighbors and compare gardening experiences with them. Together, form a "tool library" from which members can check out garden tools and gardening books. Organize or participate in planting, harvesting, food-swapping, gleaning, and canning parties.

6. Monitor and adjust. At the end of each month, revisit your plan and revise it if necessary.

The New Complete Book of Self-Sufficiency by John Seymour $32.06	The New Self-Sufficient Gardener by John Seymour $13.57

Food Crisis on the Way

Submitted by Richard Heinberg on October 15, 2008 - 2:39pm.

A perfect storm is brewing in the global food system, and North Americans and Europeans may not be spared this time.

Contributing factors:

The economic crash is still unfolding (no need for explanation here, just pick up any newspaper). It is inherently deflationary in nature because trillions of electronic dollars and euros are simply vanishing on a weekly basis. Efforts by central banks and the US Treasury to re-inflate the system are so far proving ineffective. This ultimately means less money in the pockets of consumers. If things go badly, it will mean NO money in the pockets of a great many would-be consumers.

Meanwhile input costs to farmers are at an all-time high, despite the recent fall in oil and natural gas prices. Moreover, farmers need loans in the course of their normal operations, and loans are hard to get now. That means many farmers just won’t plant as much as they ordinarily would. Many will decide they just can’t afford their hobby any more and go looking for work that actually pays.

On top of this we have the trends that have already led to high food prices in recent months—biofuels mandates, weather impacts (and crop failures) due to climate change, and higher transport costs for farm inputs and outputs.

Meanwhile, farmers’ incomes are not rising—just the opposite. Even though food prices are leading the inflation index, none of the expanding portion of the food dollar is finding its way into the pockets of the people who make the whole system go.

Michael Pollan’s excellent article in the most recent New York Times Sunday Magazine describes what we should be doing to avert a looming food crisis. Every nation and every state and region needs to be formulating a food plan along these lines.

Otherwise, we will be leaving our food system to the vagaries of the market, as we are doing with our energy system (see my previous commentary). The consequences are likely to be similar: less food to go around, extremely volatile prices, and farmers dropping out just when we need more of them.

The time available for the formulation and implementation of an effective policy response is very brief indeed.

Time to start planning next year’s garden.

Plan C: cooperate, conserve, curtail....

Plan C: Individual and Community Survival Strategies for the Energy Crisis
The Fifth Annual US Conference on Peak Oil and Community Solutions October 31 - November 2, 2008 Oakland University, Rochester, Michigan www.plancconference.org

At this groundbreaking conference participants will explore strategies for reducing energy use in the areas of housing, food and transportation, including both theory and practice. We will examine the long energy decline of the 21st century, the psychological barriers to rapid change, and the challenge of persuading our communities to embrace local, low-energy living. Attendance at this conference may be of critical importance at this time when the ongoing energy crisis is being compounded by the very real threat of credit and financial collapse.

Our survival is now, more than ever, in question. And it is more urgent than ever that we gather in Michigan to evaluate survival strategies and disseminate skills for growing food, creating local food security in their communities, retrofitting homes to reduce reliance on fossil fuels, and educating their communities to prepare for the difficult times we are facing.

Skyrocketing oil prices, mounting geopolitical tensions, grave economic realities, and dangerous climate changes are threatening our lives and communities like never before. The age of cheap, abundant fossil fuels is coming to an end, and urgent action is required to transform our overly consumptive society into one that uses far less energy.

By acting now, you can significantly cut your personal household energy use and overall consumption, support more localized economic production, and reduce your dependence on high energy transportation in your daily life. By doing this, you will be helping to create a more resilient and sustainable community adapted to the coming economic and ecological storms.

The conference will also feature in-depth workshops and panels, Connection Café discussion tables with area experts, an eco tour slide show, screenings of award winning films, entertainment, tours of local green buildings, a Green Living Expo, and healthy shared meals.

Schedule of Presentations and Workshops:
* Keynoter John Michael Greer, author of the forthcoming The Long Descent: A User’s Guide to the End of the Industrial Age
* Keynoter Dmitry Orlov, author of Reinventing Collapse: Soviet Example and American Prospects
* Richard Heinberg, Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute, author of The Party’s Over and Powerdown (via webcast)
* Katrin Klingenberg, director of the Passive House Institute US
* Peter Bane, editor of Permaculture Activist
* Christopher Bedford, President of the Center for Economic Security and the Sweetwater Local Foods Market
* John Richter, co-founder of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Education
* Pat Murphy, author of Plan C: Community Survival Strategies for Peak Oil and Climate Change
* Megan Quinn Bachman, Outreach Director of Community Solutions; co-producer of The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

For more information and to register, go to www.plancconference.org, contact Jill Hollowell at Upland Hills Ecological Awareness Center at 248-693-1021, or email info@plancconference.org. Note: Members of an organization or activist network are encouraged to attend as a group and receive substantial discounts for 3+ and 5+ member groups.

A LETTER FROM THE FUTURE
by Richard Heinberg

.......The economists could think only in terms of money; basic necessities like water and energy only showed up in their calculations in terms of dollar cost, which made them functionally interchangeable with everything else that was priceable - oranges, airliners, diamonds, baseball cards, whatever. But, in the last analysis, basic resources weren't interchangeable with other economic goods at all: you couldn't drink baseball cards, no matter how big or valuable your collection, once the water ran out. Nor could you eat dollars, if nobody had food to sell. And so, after a certain point, people started to lose faith in their money. And as they did so, they realized that faith had been the only thing that made money worth anything in the first place.....

Read the complete article....

Seriously folks, you all need to think about growing some food and getting REALLY good at it! If you haven't yet seen The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil you NEED to see it ASAP!
MuseLetter #188 / December 2007 by Richard Heinberg

What Will We Eat as the Oil Runs Out?
The Lady Eve Balfour Lecture, November 22, 2007

Our global food system faces a crisis of unprecedented scope. This crisis, which threatens to imperil the lives of hundreds of millions and possibly billions of human beings, consists of four simultaneously colliding dilemmas, all arising from our relatively recent pattern of dependence on depleting fossil fuels.

The first dilemma consists of the direct impacts on agriculture of higher oil prices: increased costs for tractor fuel, agricultural chemicals, and the transport of farm inputs and outputs.

The second is an indirect consequence of high oil prices - the increased demand for biofuels, which is resulting in farmland being turned from food production to fuel production, thus making food more costly.

The third dilemma consists of the impacts of climate change and extreme weather events caused by fuel-based greenhouse gas emissions. Climate change is the greatest environmental crisis of our time; however, fossil fuel depletion complicates the situation enormously, and if we fail to address either problem properly the consequences will be dire.

Finally comes thedegradation or loss of basic natural resources (principally, topsoil and fresh water supplies) as a result of high rates, and unsustainable methods, of production stimulated by decades of cheap energy.

Each of these problems is developing at a somewhat different pace regionally, and each is exacerbated by the continually expanding size of the human population. As these dilemmas collide, the resulting overall food crisis is likely to be profound and unprecedented in scope.

I propose to discuss each of these dilemmas briefly and to show how all are intertwined with our societal reliance on oil and other fossil fuels. I will then argue that the primary solution to the overall crisis of the world food system must be a planned rapid reduction in the use of fossil fuels in the growing and delivery of food. As we will see, this strategy, though ultimately unavoidable, will bring enormous problems of its own unless it is applied with forethought and intelligence. But the organic movement is uniquely positioned to guide this inevitable transition of the world's food systems away from reliance on fossil fuels, if leaders and practitioners of the various strands of organic agriculture are willing to work together and with policy makers.

Read the rest of the article...