It’s a cautionary tale: things that have been stable for thousands or even hundreds of thousands of years can change in an instant, the world never to be the same. When it comes to the climate change game, we’re playing for keeps, and at stake is humanity’s fate.

“I think it is most important to talk about how to live in the suburbs, or the city, or the country in a low energy future.  I think that may be more productive than extended screeds against one model or another.”

Rural areas are likely to suffer first and deepest from the shortage of fuels. As we’ve talked about before here and here, hardships are already being felt.  Property values are falling more the farther away you get from urban cores. High fuel prices are likely to drive commuters – those with no real ties to the countryside – back to urban areas, leaving the countryside to those who have the abilities, inclinations, and family and social connections that will enable them to scratch out a living there. Astyk throws out a vision of what rural life might look like – and while it’s different from what we’re used to now, it’s not all bad.

Astyk also speculates on the future of urban and suburban life – but if  you’ve read her stuff before, you know that she’s verbose.  Rather than attempt to summarize what she has to say, I recommend that you read it yourself.

David Cohen at ASPO-USA points out that mitigating anthropogenic climate change is central to all the presidential candidates’ campaigns, and their primary energy initiative is a carbon emissions cap & trade system. While a carbon tax or cap-and trade may be laudable, we have argued that a moratorium on and phase-out of coal would be a better, more effective policy option.

Problems arising from our oil dependency take a backseat to climate change. But unfortunately, given the urgency of the need for action, these are not perceived as urgent – the climate problem is seen as one that can be solved gradually. This approach to our “oil dependency” only makes sense from a climate perspective, which requires us to change our energy consumption and infrastructure over several decades.

John Michael Greer remembers that around 1980 we (and other industrial nations) made a fateful decision to turn back from promising steps toward sustainability made in the previous decade – steps that could have led to a non-disruptive transition to a post-petroleum world. We’ve wasted a quarter century. Now, the chances of transitioning to a non-fossil fuel economy without massive disruption are remote.

The future is uncertain. Constructing a strategy for coping with our future is equally fraught with uncertainty. Relocalization – retooling lifestyles to rely more on local resources and less on a far-flung and increasingly fragile global economic system – is likely to a pretty good strategy to deal with the cascading series of crises that are already unfolding around us (Greer lists “the peak of conventional petroleum production worldwide, soaring prices and incipient shortages in other commodities, spiraling breakdowns in the international debt market, and the fraying of America’s global empire.”).

The one reality that seems clear is that the days of cheap and abundant transportation fuels are over. A rational response to that reality is to begin now to build local economies that minimize the need for transportation, both of goods and people. Resources poured into more infrastructure to support the automobile and the auto-dependent way of life are surely being poured down a rat hole. And we don’t have time, money – or precious energy resources – to waste.

What could be more rational than a moratorium on road building and other automobile-supporting infrastructure such as bridges and parking garages? Our planning needs to be immediately retooled to accommodate development without the automobile rather than requiring accommodation for the automobile.

Truck gardens and organic food production on the outskirts of small and mid-sized cities may be well-positioned to thrive in a world where transport costs have become a major limiting factor. The growth of farmers markets, community-supported agriculture, and direct sales of local produce to local restaurants have laid the foundations upon which local and regional food production networks can grow.

We can be certain that planning for a future as a continuation of our extravagant energy-wasting lifestyles will lead to disaster.

There is opportunity for public comment. The committee asks that you provide 25 copies of any written materials. If you plan to use video, DVD, PowerPoint or
overhead projection equipment please contact Committee Administrator Beth Patrino 24 hours prior to the meeting: beth.patrino@state.or.us

Committee members are: Rep. Jackie Dingfelder, Chair; Rep. Chuck Burley, Vice-Chair; Rep. Ben Cannon, Vice-Chair; Rep. E. Terry Beyer; Rep. Bill Garrard; Rep. Tobias Read; and Rep. Greg Smith.

Output fell 0.7 percent in January and 0.9 percent in February, to 9.79 million barrels a day, compared with the same months last year, according to Energy Ministry data.

The Bloomberg article refers to Russia as the “world’s second-biggest supplier.”  As these charts from The Oil Drum: Europe show, for the last couple years Russia has displaced Saudi Arabia to become the world’s top supplier of crude – although the picture isn’t quite so clear when it comes to all-liquids.

He waxes eloquent about the Willamette Valley:

“The bioregion defined by the Willamette River watershed is one of the most bountiful in the United States. The Willamette Valley is a hundred mile long, two-million acre stretch of prime cropland bordered by a dense, eco-rich coniferous forest. The climate is mild; wet in the winter, dry in the summer. It is excellent for raising livestock and farming, with soil particularly suited for many types of grasses and legumes. There is tremendous flexibility in what can be grown and the way that the various field crops can be rotated for the health of the land.

“Home to a variety of fish and other wildlife, the Willamette River basin is essentially a garden valley, Oregon’s own little piece of Eden.”

He points out that the region has the capacity to feed itself – and fifty years ago, it largely did. But this agricultural picture has been turned inside out. The centralization and globalization of food distribution means that now, nearly everything we eat comes from some place else – most often far away.

This graph in his article is stunning.

More than half of this prime Oregon farmland is being used to grow grass seed – a non-edible luxury item – instead of food.

Armstrong points out that we have lost more than agricultural production in the Willamette Valley. We’ve also lost the capacity to process or distribute what is grown. This means:

“At a very basic level, we are losing the ability to feed ourselves. Again, this is nonsense if not suicide.“

The solution? Relocalization:

“Thus the solution, and the target of food related relocalization efforts in the valley, is changing how and what farmers grow–specifically transitioning to organic techniques and converting grass seed acreage to wheat or other grains and legumes, rebuilding food industry infrastructure, and creating more markets to link buyers, growers, and distributors.”

Armstrong isn’t a relocalization extremist:

“It should be noted that a fully local food economy is not the goal. That would be impossible. But local food buying whether by individuals, food markets, restaurants, or processors needs to be stimulated beyond today’s five percent range to something more like twenty-five or thirty percent. This level of relocalized economic involvement could engender the kind of balance and stability that is needed to bring a modicum of food security to the populace and also a degree of sustainability to Willamette Valley agriculture.”

The $190 billion price tag compares with $1.2 trillion that world governments spent on military budgets in 2006. The United States splurged the most with $560 billion.

Brown told an interviewer from Planet Ark:

“Once you accept that climate change, population growth, spreading water shortages, rising food prices etcetera are threats to our security, it changes your whole way of thinking about how you use public resources.”

The $560 billion figure for U.S. “defense” spending does not include many military-related items that are outside of the Defense Department budget, such as nuclear weapons research, maintenance and production (which is in the Department of Energy budget), Veterans Affairs or the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (which are largely funded through extra-budgetary supplements, e.g. $120 billion in 2007). In addition, the United States has black budget – military spending which is not listed as Federal spending and is not included in published military spending figures. – Ed.

“is chock full of wars, the rise and fall of empires and of whole civilizations, ravaging plagues, breathtaking discoveries, vast migrations, world-changing inventions and cultural evolution. So, it is a puzzle why so much emphasis is now put on the supposed inevitable continuity of modern industrial life.”

Humans have squandered opportunities, let their ambition lead them to destruction, run out of natural resources, and despoiled the landscape beyond repair again and again. We’re now witnessing the collapse of the world’s fisheries, the loss of billions of tons of topsoil to erosion each year, the over-exploitation of water supples, the destruction of vast tracts of forests in the tropics and temperate zones alike. Yet we call it “progress.”

Cobb calls this unquestioned belief in progress a “cult of continuity”:

“The word “cult” in its simplest sense means a system of religious worship. In many cults nothing is more important than the acceptance of certain beliefs without the requirement of evidence. And, because cult members require no evidence (in the scientific meaning of the word) to confirm their beliefs, these members are remarkably immune to evidence that might also challenge their beliefs.”

This blind faith is dangerous because it relieves us of the responsibility to make wise decisions, decisions which might enable us to avoid disaster and actually achieve a sustainable civilization.

Why? Opposition from utilities and industry interests, who are concerned that any reporting scheme would surely be followed by regulation. And of course that’s the purpose of the bill – to set the stage and gather the information necessary to implement the Western Climate Initiative and adopt a cap-and-trade scheme.

This lack of recognition that we’re in a crisis that requires drastic and immediate action is evidence that we’re still in the “denial” stage of our response to climate change. And here in Oregon, peak oil – outside of Portland and its Peak Oil Task Force – isn’t even on our radar.

John Michael Greer in an article at the Energy Bulletin (and his own Archdruid Report) comparing our response to peak oil with the five stages of grief outlined by Dr. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.

We can’t expect to arrive at acceptance – of either global warming or climate change – all at once. Individually and as a society, we’ve got to work our way through, step by step, all the way to acceptance.

We still fantasize that we can figure out a way to continue living our lives in something like the way we do now. This refusal to let go is the single largest obstacle in the path of a reasoned response to the predicament of peak oil and global warming. The hard reality we have to face is the fact that the extravagant, energy-wasting lifestyles of the recent past have led us to the brink of climate catastrophe. And the realities of peak oil, soon to be followed by peak gas and peak coal, combined with the EROEI and scaling realities of alternatives, dictate that our profligacy cannot be sustained by any amount of bargaining or any number of grand projects.

Eventually we’ll have to face up to the reality that our way of life is over – and that the alternative will be okay. As Greer points out, if we redefine the situation in terms of managing a controlled descent from the giddy heights of the late industrial age, the range of technological options widens out dramatically.

There are still many (like CERA) who are in denial of peak oil. Anger is seen in our invasion and occupation of the remaining vulnerable oil producing provinces. How dare terrorists and Muslim fanatics deny us of our oil?

We see anger in the climate change context as soon as anybody actually proposes to do anything meaningful. Why do you suppose a carbon tax, the preferred tool of global warming activists and economists, isn’t even on the table? Because it could actually be implemented quickly and comprehensively, without offering the opportunity for entrenched interests to game the system. A carbon tax would actually force us to do something meaningful, now – it would actually accomplish something. We’re not quite ready for that, yet. Bargaining? We can begin to talk about that.

In the energy context, Greer sees bargaining in our rush to futile and destructive projects, like biofuels and nuclear. I would add tar sands and the chimerical “clean coal” to that list.

Given the political impasse, we cannot stand by helplessly.

We can make immediate changes in our own lives to minimize energy usage. Change our light bulbs. Insulate and seal our homes. Drive less. The list is endless. Tiny actions, multiplied many times, add up to something that matters. while saving money.

Even more importantly, the actions of individuals send critical messages to others and help to establish new social norms that tell everyone around us (our neighbors and our children) what “good” or “ethical” environmental behavior is. Social norms are powerful.

It’s critical that we push from the bottom up to get something happen at the state and federal levels. Governments set regulations and policies that affect what we all do in our individual lives. Doing something about global warming requires not just a rational, cognitive response. It needs an emotional response, even a spiritual response, certainly a deep shift in our values. The deeper the social change, the harder, and the longer it will take to bring about. Values and social and cultural norms take generations to change.

And herein lies our dilemma: we don’t have generations, or even decades. If we are to avoid climate catastrophe, if we are to transition to a low-carbon economy, we have to act now. Even tomorrow is too late.

Yet, on the other hand, I fear we’re much harder on those with whom we share at least some common ground than we are on our avowed opponents.

I think we need to step back and take a broad look at the situation that confronts us. It’s no longer good enough to work to save an endangered species, a stand of old-growth forest, a breeding ground for fish. The entirety of Earth’s ecosystem is now at risk. Uncounted myriads of species are threatened with destruction, including humans and human civilization as we know it.

Averting catastrophic climate change will require massive, rapid, and global action. Is the required response even conceivable?

James Hansen has said that it’s too late – we’ve already gone too far:

“The evidence indicates we’ve aimed too high – that the safe upper limit for atmospheric CO2 is no more than 350 ppm.”

The reticence of scientists and of the IPCC itself has become part of the problem, as today’s widely advocated 2ºC warming cap is demonstrably too high and would be a death sentence for billions of people and millions of species as positive feedbacks work through the climate system.

The report Climate Code Red finds that hitting a target of 350 ppm wouldn’t be nearly enough climate catastrophe. The report argues that a crash program to implement policies needed decarbonize our economy and achieve the necessary reductions in atmospheric CO2 levels, over a time period of a few years, is not a choice but a necessity for life.

Yet carbon emissions were greater last year than ever. World population was greater than ever. Consumption was greater than ever. There has been no reversal, not even a significant downtrend, in fossil fuel consumption.

What would it take, now and everywhere, to reduce atmospheric CO2 to safe levels? As Sally Erickson says at Speaking Truth to Power, it would take closing the highways, now and everywhere. It would take ending industrial agriculture, now and everywhere. It would mean shutting off everyone’s natural gas and oil fueled furnaces, now and everywhere. It would mean stopping about 90% of everything because everything we have and do has fossil fuel energy embedded in it. Forget about building nuclear power plants since they have fossil fuels embedded in their construction, large amounts of it. Forget massive production of solar photovoltaics: the mining of silica has huge amounts of fossil fuels embedded in the process. Forget hybrid cars – they take more energy to produce and dispose of than they save. The couch I’m sitting on, this computer, the computer you are staring at. Everything most of us take for granted as part of our daily lives is currently dependent on fossil fuels.

When Bill McKibben says “now and everywhere” he’s talking about the shutdown of industrial civilization. Who really thinks that’s going to happen, voluntarily or involuntarily, by political compulsion?

The stark reality is we are going to continue on this way until we can’t anymore. It is too late.

We’re not going to save the world, so we need to stop trying to fix a dying system. We should rather focus on new growth, on healing.

We won’t get anywhere or achieve anything by accusing those who don’t yet share our vision of lack of integrity. People have the capacity for a good heart, even if we may see them as ignorant or even corrupt. As Gandhi said, if we are to change the world we first need to purify our own thoughts, to aim at complete harmony of thought and word and deed. And as Buddha said, kindness is key. When words are both true and kind can they change our world.

It’s time to move beyond the traditional rivalries which are based on our attachment to the world as it was. We need to open our hearts to compassion, as it is only through compassion that a new community can emerge from the wreckage of the old.