I started this blog last year as a place I could work out ideas for writing and film pieces, and somewhere people could see where I was and what I was up to (on the assumption they gave a tinker’s cuss). But it all got delayed because I wanted to do my Yachtmaster, in England, in the winter, because it seemed to me that if I could deal with it there, I was okay anywhere. Thank you Marcus Greber, best Yachtmaster Instructor on earth and a great ecologist to boot. By spring I was done and I took his advice and worked for the summer season as a flotilla skipper and keelboat instructor for Neilson, first in the Greek Ionian Sea and then in Croatia in the Dalmatian islands, where legend has it Ulysses got into all sorts of trouble in the Odyssey. God I had a great time doing one of those things I’ve always dreamed of doing. I also had a chance to get some new ideas and think things through. Anyway, I got back and thought “oh bugger I forgot to do my blog or do any films or anything!” I was shocked. I went on holiday for a year. What a good idea. But while I was away….

The Storm broke. I’ve been on about this for 10 years, making people’s eye’s glaze at dinner parties, and getting nicknames like Dark Lord. Well hahaha. While there’s a certain amount of shadenfreude here, let’s be real: This is going to be the worst economic crisis anyone alive, and quite a few who’ve been dead for a while, have ever seen. This is the thousand year flood. But what killed me when I got back to England, was some reptilian politicians claiming this was a bolt from the blue. Oh, Please. There were enough Cassandras out there to make a chorus line. All singing, all dancing, screaming bloody murder. No, Mr. Brown, some of the smartest folk in the financial world have been on about this for a long time, George Soros and Jim Rogers not the least. It’s too late now, 40% of the so called “wealth” created in the last couple of decades has already evaporated. Time for some new ideas, because Capitalism as we’ve known it is gone like Elvis.

But what I haven’t seen yet is anyone talking about the climate and resource dimensions to this. Because in the background, while everyone’s been pawning their designer handbags, cometh the big beast; Resource Crash. All those hydrocarbons that fueled this boom, all that copper, steel, titanium, concrete, zinc, arable land…the square kilometres of cars – that’s metal out there, that no one is going to buy. All those cities – yes people, whole cities – in China, in Spain, in Brazil. All that stuff was made from resources that are not nearly so easy or cheap to mine, gather or process as they were in the 20s during the last great western bubble. It’s been a wild century and it’s all used, burnt, scattered or buried in landfills. Is that what we’re leaving the future children, the thrill of mining our compost, huddled under a plastic sheet to keep off the toxic rain? Nice.

So now what? Let’s go sailing, at least we’ll be able to get around.

Intelligent Design, as a phrase, has had a bad time recently since being hijacked by Creationists as a way to describe their er…“scientific theories.” Well, with apologies to the Lord, we need it back. For despite the glossy advertising and general glitziness of so much that passes for modern technology, most of it is pretty primitive. We’ve wasted the vast majority of the first trillion barrels of oil because of the way we operate. We spend vast quantities of oil and gas heating houses and businesses that are hilariously thermodynamically inefficient. It’s so bad that the new paper “Home Truths” from Oxford University suggests it’s possible to increase efficiency by 80%! If all those ideas were implemented it would very nearly halve Britain’s domestic energy consumption. The same is true, and probably more so, for the States.

What I mean by Intelligent Design is really two ideas. The first is to embed intelligence in most of the infrastructure that’s pretty primitive right now. We heat inefficient homes. We use a road and rail system that is unable to let us know how traffic conditions will affect our journey. We have designed a throwaway culture based on cheap plastics. Those plastics aren’t cheap, they only appear cheap if you allow the companies producing them to keep the waste products out of sight.

So suppose we begin to design everything with an understanding of the interdependence of everything and the massive advantages that can be made by including artificial intelligence in products – specifically to minimize energy and resource waste, both during manufacture and use. Obsolescence is obsolete. Designers need to take all aspects of the product cycle into account from an ecological perspective, that includes initial design, production, use, maintenance and eventual disposal. From this point of view the designer and architect have a fundamental responsibility to provide a sustainable infrastructure, a built environment, and the products that we use everyday.

Currently design is a function of least possible cost, rather than long life and environmental effectiveness. Perhaps what we’re looking for here is a general application of Bionics, not simply in the medical sense of implants and prosthetics, but in the more general sense of using natural systems as the basis for engineering and design. The work of Julian Vincent at the University of Bath is an example of the kind of thinking I mean: “Animals tend to do things using as little energy as possible but to maximum effect. That’s not always the way humans think, so it’s a great way to achieve a novel design.” It’s a pity that more ideas like this aren’t commonplace in the design world. But then maybe necessity will be the mother of all inventors once again.

Despite the bust in Bali and the ongoing avalanche of data that lets us know all our models have woefully underestimated the speed of climate change, we may have time to get this kind of new intelligence into the built environment. But to be realistic, we don’t have 3 decades either

It’s clear now that if temperatures do rise an appreciably, by more than 2∞ say, it becomes very likely the planet will experience disastrous climate destabilization. We will need to change infrastructure, power generation, agriculture and transportation within 20 years to have any realistic chance of avoiding runaway climate change. We will need to use fossil fuels to make those changes. So how accurate are the estimates of those who claim we are already at the peak?

In 2000, Colin Campbell, a well respected oil exploration geologist with a lifetime’s experience in evaluating oil reserves, began the Association for the Study of Peak Oil[1]. He had become convinced that, contrary to numerous claims by oil companies and oil producing countries, we were very nearly at the peak of worldwide oil production – named Hubbert’s Peak after King Hubbert, the pioneering American oil researcher who first predicted the US oil production peak in 1971.  Realizing the potentially catastrophic effect an imminent worldwide peak would have, Dr. Campbell founded ASPO with a group of scientists to research and publicize the facts. Over the last 7 years ASPO has moved from being dismissed as group of eco Cassandras, to being understood for what they are: a dedicated group of serious professional scientists with an urgent case.

Despite this, there is still disagreement within the oil industry as to accuracy of their analysis, most notably from Exxon, Cambridge Energy Research Associates (CERA)[2], and the International Energy Agency[3]. These organizations claim there is no foreseeable decline in Oil and Gas production. But what’s disquieting about these counterclaims is that none of them, nor any of the other organizations who oppose the idea of imminent Peak Oil, has been willing (or able?) to dispute the work of the ASPO scientists’ statistical analyses of recoverable reserves. The entire issue of estimating reserves is fraught with technical difficulties, but the main point is that discovery of so called “elephant” or giant fields – those with reserves of more than 500 million barrels (0.5 Gb) – peaked 40 years ago. And production typically peaks 40 years after discovery. We now use 30 Mbd for every 6 Mbd that are discovered. So if there’s no problem, where are the new elephants and why is that they aren’t being discovered?

Suppose that the scientists at ASPO are wrong, and that peak oil is far away. We still have the problem of climate change accelerating as we use the remaining fuel which will require global civilization to adapt to an enormous degree. That would be a better outcome because it would give us more time to adapt.

But suppose that they are right and that the Peak was reached last year. This means that the only fuels we have available to manage global adaptation to climate change will go into steep production decline within a couple of years. If this is true, we are in a brutal time crunch as we may lose the ability to make the changes and build the new infrastructures. Simple risk assessment argues that we lose nothing by assuming they are right.

For myself, I’ve been studying this issue for the past 6 years and I’ve met and interviewed some of ASPO’s members. I’m assuming that we are at the Peak and that in a very short time we’ll see production declines. So now what? Intelligent Design, Fashion and Comics, that’s what.

[1]http://www.peakoil.net
[2]http://www.cera.com/
[3]http://www.iea.org/

When industrialization really got underway around 1850 the concentration of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere was 280 ppm, as it had been for most of human history. Today it stands at 380 ppm. It’s simple arithmetic to see that by burning, at $100 or whatever price, another trillion barrels of oil – roughly what we’ve burnt so far – plus the rest of the recoverable gas and coal we will add at least another 100ppm to the atmosphere. Given that these gasses tend to stay in the atmosphere for as long as 200 years, we should expect to see 480ppm GHG concentration at least, and perhaps far earlier than imagined . At these levels the evidence is strong that the climate will radically destabilize, possibly outside the range of temperatures at which civilization, or humans, can exist. However, despite the obvious danger and 30 years of action by ecologists and climate scientists there has been no reduction in the increase of fossil fuel use, so it seems probable that a good quantity of the remaining oil, gas and coal will be extracted and burned. We are then faced with trying to adapt to a rapidly changing environment with increasingly expensive fuels and other resources. Can we at least get a good idea of the trajectory of these changes?

Aye, there’s the rub. The climate of earth is inarguably a Complex System. Complexity as a new branch of mathematics developed in the last 25 years gives us some interesting ways of looking at natural phenomenon like forest growth, cloud shapes, epidemiology, the branched shape of river systems or the coast of Brittany: – stuff with fuzzy edges. But one of the problems is that Complex Systems are inherently non deterministic, which means that making precise predictions about climate is virtually impossible[1]. So there is a fundamental problem in trying to get a grasp of where CO2 concentrations are likely to take us in temperature terms. So while the IPCC report[2]gives us a general view of the range of temperature increase, we have no way of knowing what real outcomes will be.

However, while the actual temperature rise may be impossible to predict, the probable effects of each degree of increase has been researched by Mark Lynas [3]in “Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet” – which makes for devastating reading. What comes out of it is that at temperatures within the IPCC predicted ranges, not to mention above them, we will be faced with the greatest adaptational challenge our species has faced. What makes this more difficult is that fossil fuels and the technologies they make possible are vital to our adaptational ability in the short term: building windfarms, solar panels, CO2 scrubbers or for that matter, fusion reactors all require sophisticated tooling and materials. This is what makes it imperative that we begin to adapt infrastructure, transport, and agriculture immediately. We are in a time crunch, with maybe 20 years at most (being wildly optimistic for once), before we begin to lose the ability to adapt our technology. As unfortunate civilizations before us have discovered, once a critical technology or resource is lost it may be irrecoverable.

That’s the proposition for climate, so now we need to look at how accurate estimates are for the extraction of the remaining fossil fuels….

[1]For a technical discussion of this topic see the new Roe & Baker paper in Science.
[2]Available here: http://www.ipcc.ch/
[3]Available here: http://www.marklynas.org/

I’m initiating this blog primarily as a platform to develop new projects and collaborate with others. Secondarily, it’s a convenient place for people to find me.

For the last few years working on various films, the background of virtually all the stories about diasporas, collapsing cultures, and individual tales of displacement seems to be rooted in Ecology – using the term in the broadest sense as a way of talking about all the complex systems that make up our world, including government and economics etc. – and Energy, which is the fundamental flow that supports the entire system. In a very real sense Ecology is the study of Energetic Complex Systems. That’s my working perspective.

The most immediate Project I’m working on is Peak Oil. The arguments are over, Peak Oil is upon us and despite the efforts of a host of “Cassandras”, including some of the most respected names in the oil industry, and the efforts of some in media, including myself, precious little of this debate was ever allowed onto mainstream news or factual programming. I’m working with Richard Hind to produce a “graphic novel” style series on this site, about Peak Oil – how we got here, and what the likely scenarios are as we go into production decline.

The most recent estimates are that we just passed the peak in 2006. We won’t know for sure until perhaps 2009, but we are clearly on the last plateau. So it appears that our use of fossil fuels for the last 150 years has placed us in a potentially difficult position. One the one hand the years of increasing energy supply allowed the population to expand by a factor of 6, unprecedented in human history, and at the same time the burning of the fuels sent the CO2 concentration from 280 ppm prior to industrialization to the current level of 381ppm, which is also unprecedented in human history. Whether our species has the time or ability to adapt to these new environmental and energy constraints is the question.