be prepared

One of the most interesting outcomes of the revolutions in the Middle East is what that is doing to oil prices. Nomura merchant bank’s commodity team writes that crude oil prices could double to over $220 a barrel causing an oil crisis like that of the 1970s.

Jeremy Leggett, my favourite oil commentator, also writes that we’re entering a time of consequences, that with peak oil now a prospective above-ground situation as well as a below-ground.

‘Nobody – whether individual, household, community, city, government or business – can responsibly afford simply to hope for a comfortable outcome on the peak-oil risk-issue any longer. We all need to be drawing up contingency plans, and taking whatever proactive measures we can.

‘Not all the potential outcomes of this latest human drama are negative. There is upside potential for a road to renaissance beyond, including in Saudi Arabia. But we will be challenged, and we will all need to play our parts in holding society together in the tough times ahead. The more proactive we are, obviously, the softer the landing, and the quicker we can engineer the road to renaissance.’ 

With so much dire news coming our way – including today’s coverage of a UN report of global decline of honeybees – I actually welcome the breakdown of a way of being – caused entirely by the human race - that no longer serves us (and probably never did). The question is, are we facing renaissance – rapid evolution - or revolution? One could be conscious and willing. The other could be bloody, with many losers.

baby, it's cold outside

So. Fucking February is over (our family swears our way through the month) and with luck this week is the last of the cold snaps before the spring bursts through, as it always does in March. But I do feel a little nostalgic this year for the winter behind me. It’s been a good one, maybe because I’ve been so close to it and have had to work more creatively this year for my comforts instead of simply avoiding discomfort.

We’ve had the central heating on only briefly at the beginning and end of the day (for the kids’ sake, really) and since we work from home have had to bundle ourselves up in rugs, hot water bottles, socks, slippers, hats, padded jackets and all that jazz when working on computers. Beds piled high with blankets at night... Keeping the wood burner fed has in itself kept us warm, as have twice-weekly forays to the allotment. And hot soups at lunchtime have stoked the fires too.

I recently read a fascinating article that describes the body itself as a heating system. Although we talk so much about insulating our houses these days we focus very little on keeping heat in our bodies through good clothing. The article goes into detail about the kinds of clothes we need to use to keep our skin temperature at a comfortable 32-33 degrees. Two layers of long thermal underwear under normal clothes can reduce the need for space heating by 80%, for example.

The only problem with longjohns, I have found, is that as soon as I start moving about and generating internal heat through exercise, I need to take those layers off. And if they’re near the skin, it involves an entire strip, in the cold. It has been quite hilarious this winter turning up to Transition meetings in an overheated pub room and for half the hardy attendees to have to strip off to their undergarments.

Perhaps this sounds a bit holy or poverty-minded to some people, and I have had varieties of sneer-back about this kind of talk. Honestly, I'm not entirely sure that this is the way to go. Maybe it's true what some people say: 'they' will invent some kind of infinte clean fuel. Or, since 'they' don't seem worried, we don't need to do anything yet. I don't know why I actually enjoy pushing my comfort edge. Maybe it's because when I reach the edge, I realise that I am still at ease, still happy and playful in my own domain and maybe that makes me feel less fearful of a future with less, and more excited about all the new creative possiblities it brings.

here comes the sun

I'm jumping for joy because we’ll soon be installing solar photovoltaic panels on our roof on St Johns Terrace. Last night’s planning committee gave us permission, going against the conservation officer’s (lengthy) recommendation for refusal, as well as opposition by Friends of Lewes and the new Conservation Area Advisory Group. (Though with loads of support from residents and Transition friends).

It’s a coup for several reasons. The chair of the committee, who is very supportive of renewables, agreed that the council’s interpretation of the Article 4 Direction (which places extra conservation measures on Lewes) should be reassessed. It’s a ridiculous waste of taxpayers’ money and residents’ time for householders in central Lewes to require planning permission, where in all but four towns in England, solar panels are permitted anywhere except on listed buildings.

Second, our roof is central and visible, and will, I hope, inspire others. Ovesco, by the way, Lewes’s non-profit energy company, is investigating low-cost loans for people who can’t raise the cash. £11,000 in our case, from a job that practically did Dirk in when he spent three months solid earlier this year playing for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
Third, these panels will enable us to generate half our current electricity needs, probably more if we made a bit more effort – and all once the children leave home. All our electricity will be free when the sun shines, and when we’re not using it, it will be used by one of our neighbours.

The new Feed In Tariffs make solar pv affordable, with a payback of 12 years in our case, through an income (£900pa) that is guaranteed for 25 years. So once we’ve paid off the system, the payments will continue, much like a pension.

There’s quite a ‘phew’ element to all this for me, as it’s the latest in a long list of resilience measures our household has been putting in place over the last couple of years. Peak Oil, which three years ago, when we started Transition Town Lewes, seemed like a distant mirage, is getting more and more real, with even Paxo leading a 15 minute discussion on it as Newsnight’s main story last night. Peak Oil means that easy oil has run out, and the fuel we have become so addicted to is becoming more expensive, more damaging to nature through extraction and CO2 emissions, and more unethical, in some cases, deeply, disgustingly so. Personal and community resilience is a sane response to this: growing food, working locally, building community, enjoying consuming less, and – finally – generating our own power from the sun. It’s a powerful feeling!

Knowing our onions

Despite the background chatter, news of the world crisis/opportunity is deepening daily. The future scenarios vary from apolcalyptic to idealised, so I stick to comment by deep thinkers and visionaries. Richard Heinberg, who visited Lewes recently, describes this time as the calm before the storm and encourages us to appreciate what’s around us. When he was in Lewes he spoke of the need for the world to develop resilient, localised communities, which are flexible and able to respond intelligently to shaky economies, resource shortages and climate impacts such as flooding.

In this recent video, he notes that we’ve already missed several opportunities to do so but that we still have the luxury of time and relative wealth to prepare ourselves and our communities. In terms of a risk assessment, it seems sensible, however surreal, to respond even to a small risk with a big potential impact.

These days I’m developing my food growing skills, since I’ve always had a latent smallholder in me. I’m already outgrowing my tiny garden and am planning next year’s experiment: a medium plot of potatoes, onions, beans and pumpkins. I’ll grow leafy greens and herbs at home and am looking for a plot near enough to commute to for those staples. Robin has offered me a corner of his field, or perhaps I’ll look for someone who wants to share their garden in Transition Town Lewes’s Garden Buddies scheme. One of the most radical positive acts we can do in these times is grow our own organic vegetables or buy them from a local grower.

How do we know?

OK so we have this bloody great challenge to make a rapid and managed transition away from fossil fuels and create community resilience. I’d not expected oil prices to start to spike so soon or so quickly but now they have, we’ve just got to sort ourselves out even more urgently.

Lewes is one of the most high profile transition towns so people often ask me, How do you know it’s working? I was at SEEDA (South East Economic Development Agency) this week trying to get funding for SETI (the South East Transition Initiatives, of which there are now more than 30 emerging) and they basically told me I’d only get government funding if we were able to demonstrate behavioural change in terms of per capita CO2 emissions saved. Not on your nelly!

So how do we measure success? This morning I ran into a friend who was getting on a train. She’d dropped out of Transition Town Lewes because she was too busy. But, she said, she’d been busy creating a new vegetable garden and cycling to Lewes from Ringmer. How could she get the council to make the Ringmer Lewes Cycle route to happen more quickly? Someone else admitted she was taking the train for the first time because of rising fuel prices. Another friend passed on an old book in a cotton bag. One of my neighbours was riding home on a new bike last night and my next door neighbour asked me over the weekend about where to find willow for a raised bed of vegetables to replace his lawn.

How do you measure those changes? How do I know they were as a result of Transition Town Lewes? Is the change fast enough? I don’t know and I don’t care. I am trying to do what Joanna Macy, the deep ecologist, says: to free myself from the tyranny of constantly trying to calculate our chance of success.

Peak Oil in the news - can we move on please?

Yesterday oil hit $135 a barrel; up $5 it was the biggest daily hike in 60 years. The price of oil has doubled in a year, increased 10 times over in 10 years. Opec predicts that oil will reach $200 a barrel by the end of this year. Peak oil hit the headlines big time this week, including the front page of the FT – this animated short http://link.brightcove.com/services/player/bcpid1488655367?bctid=1568084747 was on the Daily Telegraph’s website for example. It’s great that peak oil is now mainstream. Once people get over the shock of what it’s going to mean to our economy, we can get on with the work that really interests me – what are we going to do about it?

This transition period is not going to be straightforward as the solutions are divergent: there are those who will want to keep the economic growth show on the road, using coal to liquid, GM and other high-carbon, earth unfriendly technologies. That, and a run on nuclear, could be suicidal. The environmentalists will strengthen the call for low-impact earth-repair solutions and clashes will certainly ensue as the two paradigms go head to head. I’m reminded of the transition phase of labour; that’s when you tend to say, fuck off, I don’t want to do this any more. But it’s also the time just before you start to actually give birth to the gorgeous new, long-awaited baby.

Meanwhile, a good part of the economic ‘crunch’ (a lovely polite sounding word, that) is underpinned by the markets’ realisation that the party’s over. That’s reflected in the fact that the oil future prices are now higher than before. The price of oil, as Norman Baker said this week on Radio 4, is not going to come down again.

Having seen all this ahead a while back, I’m now pretty familiar with the range of possible futures, and look forward to the time when we’re all on the road to creating the better future with less fossil fuels. Transition Town Lewes is designed to help people through this – the faster we get on board, the gentler the transition. As the management guru Peter Drucker famously said, The best way to predict the future is to create it.

changing the dream

Last week my friend Chris interviewed Professor Richard Heinberg in Lewes about appropriate responses to climate change and peak oil. Not the ‘peak oil theory’ but the real effects of rising energy prices on ordinary people. In many countries, Heinberg said, peak oil is already happening in the form of electricity blackouts and transport fuels being beyond the means of the man in the street. People in the West who recognise the problem early on, he said, are the ones who will be more resilient and be at an advantage in a world with rising energy prices. These are families and businesses who are proactively changing their habits to be less dependent on fossil fuels.

So we set the scene for our old dishwasher breaking down over Easter. We’d managed to resuscitate it several times, but we finally had to admit it was destined for the scrap heap. We’ve spent the last week starting to make the transition away from a dishwasher. Blimey, there are a lot of dirty plates. I’ve realised that a dishwasher is as much for storing unwashed dishes as for cleaning them. We’re still trying to negotiate the choppy territories of ‘who washes’ in a family of six. We are ill-equipped. But hang on, dishwashers are a recent luxury. As a child, it was my job was to wash and hand dry the plates for a family of eight. In Finland, apparently (see photo) they build cupboards above the sink to drain the plates.

So now I’ve sent a challenge out to Sue Fleming, who co-runs Woodworks of Lewes, a hand-made kitchen design company. Sue’s in the Transition Town Lewes business group with me. Can your company, I asked, design and make an above-sink dishwashing/drying/storage system that’s easy to use and looks elegant in our town house? I believe in frugality but not austerity.

This story sums up my reluctance as a rich white polluter to let go of modern luxuries in order to build resilience and save us all from extinction.

The Upside of Down

When Jeremy Leggett spoke to Transition Town Lewes about peak oil and climate change a year ago, he told us that when peak oil hit, the economy would take a nosedive, recover temporarily and then go into a terminal decline. I never understood the reasoning behind that; surely markets adjust slowly and evolve to new ways of doing things?

I’m not an economist, but I’m starting to put the pieces together. Nobody’s spelling it out, but could the soaring price of oil and the collapsing economy be linked? Oil keeps hitting progressive price milestones, and just going up, which is what Leggett said would be a sign that Peak Oil had come in to the traders’ consciousness. If something is likely to be in shorter supply in the future, its price will go up, right? Meanwhile, our economy is, like a pack of cards, based on debt on the assumption of future economic growth. That assumption is based on ever increasing supplies of oil and other natural resources which, we all know, is the fatal dream that we’re starting to wake up from.

So if we are indeed witnessing the beginning of a systemic collapse, as many commentators are saying, the prevailing culture can either Keep the Show on the Road at any cost (including building runways and nuclear power stations and invading countries with the remaining fossil fuels) or Live within our Means. This will mean a radical although probably life saving rethink of all the assumptions of the Western Empire. As Richard Heinberg, who is talking in Lewes on 25 March, writes, ‘Economic contraction may be bitter medicine, but it's part of the cure for what ails our planetary home. However, we can manage this contraction either foolishly or intelligently.’