Start
Learning To Live Withoug Oil
By George Monbiot
24 August,
2004
The Guardian
'Never
again," the Texas oil baron and corporate raider T Boone Pickens
announced this month, "will we pump more than 82m barrels."
As we are pumping 82m 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% confident" it would happen in 2004,
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 6 billion, or 9 or 10. 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.
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 redevelop 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 10th
birthday, I think it is fair to say that it works.
Tinkers' Bubble
is 40 acres of woodland, orchards and pasture in south Somerset. It
was bought by a group of environmentalists in 1994, and a dozen people
moved in, 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 12 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 berserk. There was plenty
of internal strife as well. The work is tough.
They fell 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 learned, 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 UK.
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 reapplied,
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 UK.
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: large-scale 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 learned to live with these constraints, just as they have learned
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.
· www.monbiot.com