[A-List] Living with the Age of Entropy

[Bill Totten]

Is a life without fossil fuel possible?

by George Monbiot

Published in the Guardian (August 23 2004)


"Never again", the Texas oil baron and corporate raider T Boone Pickens
announced this month, "will we pump more than 82 million barrels". <1>
As we are pumping 82 million barrels of oil a day at the moment, what
Pickens is saying is that global production has peaked. If he is right,
then the oil geologist Kenneth Deffeyes, who announced to general
ridicule last year that he was "99 per cent confident" it would happen
in 2004 <2>, has been vindicated. Rather more importantly, industrial
civilisation is over.

Not immediately, of course. But unless another source of energy, just as
cheap, with just as high a ratio of "energy return on energy invested"
(EROEI) is discovered or developed, there will be a gradual decline in
our ability to generate the growth required to keep the debt-based
financial system from collapsing.

A surplus of available energy is a remarkable historical and biological
anomaly. A supply of oil that exceeds demand has permitted us to do what
all species strive to do - expand the ecological space we occupy - but
without encountering direct competition for the limiting resource. The
surplus has led us to believe in the possibility of universal peace and
universal comfort, for a global population of six billion, or nine or
ten. If kindness and comfort are, as I suspect, the results of an energy
surplus, then, as the supply contracts, we could be expected to start
fighting once again like cats in a sack. In the presence of entropy,
virtue might be impossible.

The only question worth asking is what we intend to do about it. 
There might be a miracle cure. Photosynthetic energy, supercritical
geothermal fluid drilling, cold fusion, hydrocatalytic hydrogen energy
and various other hopeful monsters could each provide us with almost
unlimited cheap energy. But we shouldn't count on it. The technical, 
or even theoretical, barriers might prove insuperable. There are plenty
of existing alternatives to oil, but none of them is cheap, and none
offers a comparable EROEI <3>.

If it is true that the Age of Growth is over, and the Age of Entropy 
has begun, and if we are to retain any hope of a reasonable quality of
life without destroying other people's, then our infrastructure, our
settlements, our industries and our lives require total reconstruction.
Given that our governments balk even at raising fuel taxes, it is
rational to seek to pursue our own solutions: to re-develop economic
systems which do not depend on fossil fuels.

For several years, I've been involved in one of these. Now that it has
passed its tenth birthday, I think it is fair to say that it works.

Tinkers' Bubble is forty acres of woodland, orchards and pasture in
south Somerset. It was bought by a group of environmentalists in 1994,
and a dozen people moved on, applied for shares and built themselves
temporary houses. They imposed a strict set of rules on themselves,
which included a ban on the use of internal combustion engines on the
land. They made a partial exception for transport: the twelve residents
share two cars. Otherwise, the only fossil fuel they consume is the
paraffin they put in their lamps. They set up a small windmill and some
solar panels, built compost toilets, and bought a wood-powered steam
engine for milling timber, some very small cows and a very large horse.

Almost everyone predicted disaster. The Independent even claimed that
the project had collapsed, after one of its reporters turned up on
market day and found the houses empty. There's no question that it was
hard. The first winter was spent wading around in two feet of mud. 
Some of the locals, mistaking the settlers for new age travellers, 
went beserk. There was plenty of internal strife as well. The work is
tough. They fell their trees with handsaws, heat their homes with wood,
cut the hay with scythes and milk the cows, weed the fields and harvest
the crops by hand.

But they have come through. They have made friends with the locals, who
are coming to see the project as an asset: the land is biodiverse, still
has standing orchards, and is open to the public. Their stall has won
first prize in the local farmers' market. They have learnt, often
painfully, to live together. Because it doesn't depend on heavy
machinery, this farm, unlike most, isn't in hock to the bank. One
hundred and fifty years after he published Walden, Henry David Thoreau
is alive and well in Somerset.

Needless to say, an army of bureaucrats has been deployed to murder him.
Peasant farming, the settlers have found, is effectively illegal in the
United Kingdom.

The first hazard is the planning system. The model is viable only if you
build your own home from your own materials on your own land: you can't
live like this and support a mortgage. So the settlers imposed more
rules on themselves: their houses, built of timber, straw bales, wattle
and daub and thatch, would have the minimum visual and environmental
impact. But the planning system makes no provision for this. It is
unable to distinguish between an eight-bedroom blot on the landscape and
a home which can be seen only when you blunder into it. The residents
applied for planning permission and were refused. They appealed and won,
but then the government overturned the decision. They took it to the
high court and the appeal court and tried to take it to the Lords, in
every case without success. But when they re-applied, the council, which
had woken up to the fact that homeless people were housing themselves
without costing the taxpayer a penny, changed its mind and let them live
there.

Then the environmental health inspectors struck. There are two sets 
of regulations in the United Kingdom. There are those which the big
corporations campaign against, and those which they tolerate and even
encourage, because they can afford them while their smaller competitors
cannot. This is why it is legal to stuff our farm animals with
antibiotics, our vegetables with pesticides, our processed food with
additives and our water tables with nitrates, but more or less illegal
to use any process which does not involve stainless steel, refrigeration
and fluorescent lighting.

The clampdown on small food businesses, on the grounds that their
produce might contain bacteria, has been accompanied by a massive rise
in food poisoning cases since the 1970s: largescale production and
long-distance transport provide far greater opportunities for infection.
Tinkers' Bubble, which has never poisoned anyone, is now forbidden to
sell any kind of processed food or drink: its cheese, bacon, juice and
cider have been banned.

But the settlers have learnt to live with these constraints, just as
they have learnt to live with all the others. They haven't yet solved
all their problems, but they have shown that a life which requires
scarcely any fossil fuel consumption is still possible. It wouldn't 
work for everyone, of course, but it works. And one day, unless we
demonstrate some willingness to respond to the impending crisis, those
who live this way could discover that - despite the obvious privations -
their lives are more comfortable than ours.

http://www.monbiot.com/archives/2004/08/30/living-with-the-age-of-entropy/

References:

1. T Boone Pickens, 9th August 2004. On the Kudlow and Cramer Show,
MSNBC.

2. Bob Holmes and Nicola Jones, 2nd August 2003. Brace yourself for the
end of cheap oil. New Scientist, vol 179, issue 2406.

3. EROEI tables can be found in Richard Heinberg, 2003. The Party's
Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies. New Society
Publishers, Canada.

Please also see:-

"Get Ready for the Peak Experience" by Kelpie Wilson, 
TruthOut.org (August 30 2004)
http://www.alternet.org/story/19719/

Bill Totten     http://www.ashisuto.co.jp/english/