A few weeks ago, the climate activist and inventor Dave Wilks told me he’d
hit on a new way to describe the warming of our atmosphere: it’s equivalent
to nearly five Hiroshima bombs exploding per second, he said, and the rate
is rising exponentially. I’ve also spoken to experts who believe there’s
another threat facing us, no less significant than global warming: the end
of oil. Our lives depend on ever-increasing amounts of cheap energy, and
synthetic petroleum byproducts, and when oil production peaks we’re in
trouble. Some believe that will happen as early as 2010.
And it will all, of course, be exacerbated by population growth. Last week
researchers at a United Nations forum in Iceland said to keep pace with an
increasing population more food will have to be produced world-wide in the
next 50 years than during the past 10,000 years combined. We can look
forward to economic collapse and literally billions of people starving to
death.
In the 1970s, families abandoned the UK because they feared being wiped out by
Russian nukes. That dreaded event didn’t happen but I’m aware of two such
families, in the Bahamas and Australia, who don’t regret moving out. And it
seems to me that the combined threat of climate change and “peak oil” is
more menacing.
In fact, I’m starting to wonder about getting out of here – taking my wife and
daughter from London before the trouble starts. In this I take my lead from
the biblical patriarch Lot, whom Genesis records as having sensibly quit
Sodom before it started to rain fire and brimstone; but also from the
environmentalist George Monbiot, who turned his back on Oxford last year in
favour of rural Wales.
In the three years since I first started to worry very much about climate
change and “peak oil”, I’ve done a fair bit to address the problem. I
changed electricity supplier, ordered local food to be delivered to my
doorstep in a cardboard box, and replaced my lightbulbs. I bought an
electric car, protested outside shops that kept their doors open in winter,
and even devised an entirely new model for Britain’s energy infrastruc-ture
– a community energy cooperative.
Having sent an outline of my idea to virtually every politician I could think
of, I found myself delivering an hour-long briefing to John Gummer, leader
of the Conservative energy taskforce; and addressing a dinner of my local
Liberal Democrats, who raised the idea of the energy coop at a meeting of
the local council and won unanimous backing for it.
More recently, I got hold of several Electrisave meter readers, and leafleted
hundreds of neighbours offering to lend them a meter at no cost so that they
could reduce their domestic energy use. Only seven took up the offer, but –
undaunted – I persuaded the local vicar to host a public meeting. Apart from
the vicar himself, and a loyal friend of mine who belongs to the Green
party, only one other person turned up – bless her.
I mention all this not because I want congratulations – nor commiserations –
but because I dare say that many others are doing similar things, and
probably feeling no less downbeat about the results. But there is hope. In
the past few months I’ve become aware of a growing movement of people
devising creative solutions to the problems facing us. Over the same period
– and this is important – I’ve started to notice quite how many fruit trees
and shrubs are growing in the streets near my home in northwest London – but
more of them later.
The Transition Town movement was started by an Englishman, Rob Hopkins, after
a stint working as a teacher in Kinsale, Ireland. “I had never heard about
peak oil,” Hopkins says. “But then I showed students a film, The End of
Suburbia, which I’d never seen and, at the same time, Dr Colin Campbell from
the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas Ireland came to talk. I
have to say it was traumatic and shocking.
“One of the other members of staff said to me, ‘What has happened to your
students, they’ve been walking around looking grey all week!’ ” The film,
and Campbell, made clear that no aspect of life will be the same after oil
runs out. “When we got over the shock we set about looking at Kinsale. We
examined how the town might look in 20 years if it adapted to peak oil
instead of pretending it wasn’t happening.” The project lasted for seven or
eight months. “We came up with a plan, a vision of how the town would be,
and then backcast it to see how to get there, year by year.”
Returning to England, Hopkins helped to create a similar “energy descent” plan
in Totnes, Devon, and the Transition Town movement was born. It’s grown
incredibly fast. A year after Totnes launched, individuals and groups from
176 places have registered to become Transition Towns.
The first, Totnes, Lewes, Glastonbury and Stroud, were full of middle-class
hippie types, but in Bristol it’s the poorer districts that have been most
dynamic. And in Wales the impetus has come from the agricultural community.
The concept central to transition towns is building resilience. “We have
been doing work with people who remember the 1930s and 1940s, people who say
it would have been insane to eat apples from New Zealand. Back then, all the
food came from near the town. We don’t have that resilience any more. In the
lorry strike of 2001, we had only three days of food in Totnes.
“If we don’t do anything,” says Hopkins, “there are all kinds of grim
scanarios. But I like to think of those as like Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas
Future – possible outcomes we can avoid.”
The environmental movement, he believes, has promoted despondency and guilt.
Transition towns, by contrast, actively create positive change – launching
local currencies, planting nut trees, teaching survival skills. Until
recently, people like Hopkins believed the most responsible thing to do was
to move out, build a house and grow your own food. “But I came to question
that. I thought this would only be sustainable if I was prepared to sit at
the gate with a shotgun. What would I do with my carrots if the village up
the road was cold and hungry?”
A little lugubriously, I point out that if cities don’t get their act together
on climate change, and temperatures rise by six degrees, even people with
remote smallhold-ings will be wiped out by great fireballs of methane
shooting across the sky.
Looking for inspiration I travel to south London for a screening of the latest
consciousness-raising film promoted by Transition Town Brixton. A few weeks
ago, more people turned up to see a film about peak oil than bought tickets
for Ocean’s 13. Tonight’s film has attracted the largest crowd yet.
The Power of Community is about what happened to Cuba after Soviet oil
supplies dried up and the US embargo curtailed other imports. It shows how
Cubans gradually turned from reliance on carbon-intensive agriculture: urban
spaces were cultivated, from window boxes to wasteland. The transition took
years and Cubans had to forgo the equivalent of a meal a day – but, by the
end, even people in cities were producing half their annual fruit and
vegetable needs.
It’s an upbeat film, and the audience is clearly impressed. But before we
clear the auditorium a man with a beard points out that there’s a long way
to go. “There are people out there with fruit trees who don’t bother picking
the fruit. We have to teach them how to do that again.”
The point is well made. Next morning, I rise early and gather a stepladder and
my three-year-old daughter for a spot of urban gardening. Without crossing
more than one road, we pick 10 figs, a plum, and innumerable blackberries.
By next year we may have planted some trees and shrubs of our own – but only
if the methane fireballs haven’t torched us first.
Transition Towns is a serious movement. Look out y'all!
Ellen, Seattle, USA
Protesting outside shops just because they have left their doors open in the winter is not going to stop peak oil. Thats like trying to stop a tsunami with an umbrella.
Neal Grout, Maastricht, Netherlands
If you want to read more in the same vein, James Howard Kunstler's "The Long Emergency" will really alarm you.
charlie lindsell, putney, london
Unfortunately there's no way that home grown apples (or a plum and some blackberries) will save the planet.
What will save the planet is international cooperation in terms of taxing carbon production appropriately and policies that give energy generators clear, long-term incentives to scrub CO2.
Having said that, the article is fine - there's a bell-curve with extremists at either end, and so for every nay-sayer, it's important to have someone suggesting that home grown apples are the way forward, if only to stop everyone in the middle slipping back towards the "CO2 - we call it life" lot.
Richard Kirby, Cambridge, UK
"We can look forward to economic collapse and literally billions of people starving to death."
Only if we believe the empty notion that the joys of Cuban poverty and the dangers of global warming are real and preferable to the abundance that freedom and free markets bring.
R. Reagin, Ellijay, Ga
It is all very well to say "Grow your own" but how many of these pundits have actually tried it? Last year we had a prolonged drought, combined with an equally long hosepipe ban; this year we have seen an early "summer" followed by cold and wet weeks in July, which enabled fruit trees to flourish, but not veg. in the ground. The wet weather killed off many insects, but helped just as many viruses and bacteria. On top of all this. many plots of land need large and expensive additions of compost, manure and topsoil to produce half-decent crops. The only things to profit seem to be weeds.
Mugwort, Teddington, Middx
Brilliant article!!.As a Geographer (retired-are you ever?) I admit to never having heard of the concept of Transition Towns. But the idea is obviously being made to work so I will be asking if my local council has heard of TT and if so, what steps are they taking towards the fulfillment of the concepts embodied by TT. If the Council is not TT aware, I shall deirect them to the Sunday Times article.
Valerie M Jenner, Norwich, England
One of your British scifi heroes (Dr. Who) stated on a recent show; "Everything has it's time, and everything dies". Get used to it.
Ralf, Shannon, TN
We have a long way to go. In the 1970s it was the next Ice Age. Then the Nuclear winter. People binned their 8 litre cars in USA for Honda Civics (they were small in those day). But it really does seem that Peak Oil is close. Some believe conventional (easily produced) Peak Oil production was Oct 2005 and including Deepwater and Oil Sands - it should be any time from now until 2010 - a plateau of some 82.5 million bbls a day. Oil costs less than bottled water in the UK. And this includes the 80% tax we pay that goes direct to the government. I believe oil has been far to cheap for far too long and that it will rise from £70 / bbl to £125 /bbl by end 2008. There WILL be a crisis - and it's starting NOW. By the end of the year - you will see that the world cannot deliver more than 82.5 million bbls/day but demand is rising by 1.3 million bbls/day per year - so prices will skyrocket. Yes - it's time to start thinking about scarce oil - it will still be available but at 2-3 times the price
Mr Evans, Kent,
keep increasing the population and the gnp.don't think
dave, northwood, england
The Power of Community is a great film because it has so much positive to say for a transition towards a low-carbon society. London and big cities are the problem, but moving out of them i don't think is the solution. Instead we need to retain the creative and determined people within cities to lead the way in this big change which we face. It is very tempting to move out and try to find your own sustainable corning, but are you rightly say, this is a global problem and there really is no escaping the community and cooperative solutions. As for picking fruit, it really is insane how much is wasted. In one respect it may be better for the wildlife though. I'm still trying to build up the courage to ask my neighbour if i can buy apple of them instead of giving my money to Tescos - yet again sustainable living is within reach if only we had a culture which encourages such behaviour.
Mark Donaldson, London - Finsbury Park, UK
It has been fun watching the exponential growth in the shrillness of the climate terrorists, but surely we must be approaching peak paranoia? Five Hiroshimas a second, economic collapse, billions starving to death. Great balls of methane! What are they going to dream up next? And all this in a newspaper - one of the most environmentally damaging means of communication in existence - and written by a man who admits he is too lazy to walk or cycle to the shops and has his food delivered instead. Oh well, at least it gives the middle classes of northwest London something to yell at each other about in their eco-friendly gastro-pubs and organic juice bars, as they wait for Britain to: swelter as temperatures soar / freeze as the Gulf Stream reverses / be decimated by drought / swept away by floods / gridlocked by a million electric cars with flat batteries / abandoned and left to its fate by the middle classes of northwest London (PS, not sure if that last one would really be a disaster).
Aran Lewis, London,
these ideas are truly great. this style of small-scale community subsistence activity fits nicely into the idea that the future will be a local affair.
Tony Edwards, Sydney, A
Interesting, John-Paul.. The tanker strike of 2001 should have served s a stark wake-up call to show one frightening possibility for "Christmas Future". That incident, together with previous oil supply crisis, was triggered by political causes yet showed quite dramatically how fragile our JIT economy is when faced with a fuel supply crunch, even just for a few days. Imagine then a scenario caused by a physical, geological supply constraint, not able to be resolved by an expediant wave of a political wand, but worsening interminably. Nasty... I can't think of any optimistic outcome in a country such as this, where agricultural land, even using all the oil-based agricultural technology available today, can barely be expected to support a population of over 60,000,000. Any fig, plum or apple trees are likely to be burnt as firewood long before any fruit harvest takes place! No, John-Paul, take your own advice and get the hell out!
Kevin Stokes, Heathfield, UK
"I’ve spoken to experts who believe there’s another threat facing us... the end of oil." Well Duuuh.... sorry, but anyone not understanding the reality of peak oil may find their ignorance blissful right now, but not for long.
Please don't pretend there is a 'combined threat' though. Forget 'climate change', 'peak oil' is everything; it is so important that people have an appreciation of the fragility and 'finiteness' of our world's resources - nothing to do with saving the Polar bears, this is all about saving 'civilised' mankind.
Funny how all the 'anti-climate-change' measures we are encouraged to take actually just reduce oil consumption, don't you think? The whole CO2 mantra purely exists to take our eyes off the real issue; that would be fine if there was any chance of it working, but the public need to understand the issues before they can make the necessary contribution to efficiency.
Man-made global-warming is debateable until the cows come home... Peak Oil is NOT.
Dan Mason, Birmingham,
Oh God wot apocalyptic nonsense.
Bruce Robertson, Brighton,
I recycle, avoid products that come with too much wrapping, do almost all laundry by hand, eat more meals further down the food chain, use the car less, heat only the few rooms I use in winter, suffer a bathroom that at times smells like a pissoir, do without and do without and do without and often wonder 'why'? I'm so tired of people telling me I can't save the earth and have lately begun to agree, especially when I read of people buying second homes in Dubai and of indoor ski slopes in hot climates. However, I must live with myself and will do whatever I can to help. But I will have to succumbe to flying if I want to go away as I can no longer afford the train and ferry. This article is the first to give me hope in a very long time.
alice, quimper, france
This is not the end of oil, this is the end of CHEAP oil. Actually we are never going to run out of oil. It will get more and more expensive until no one can afford to burn it except those with it erupting at the bottom of the garden.
Chrissie, Sarliac sur l'isle, France
Blimey, I never knew you could grow fruit and vegetables in gardens! What a good job we’ve got Londoners to explain these things to us. How would we ever know otherwise?
Trofim, Worcestershire, UK