Richard Heinberg discusses ending our fossil fuel addiction

An interview with Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute speaking about ending our fossil fuel addiction.

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Scott Bilby: This morning on Beyond Zero we are talking with Richard Heinberg, a senior fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, he is a foremost peak oil educator, and he's the author of "The Party's Over", "Power Down", "The Oil Depletion Protocol" and "Peak Everything". Welcome to the show, Richard.

Richard Heiberg: Good to be with you Scott and Matthew.

Scott: Can I talk to you about how you got interested in Peak Oil and just a little about your history?

Richard: I've been writing about environmental issues for close to 25 years now and about a decade ago I became convinced that energy was the linchpin to understanding how economies and societies change over time. Basically energy is not just part of the economy, it is the basis for the whole economy, and the whole modern industrial period really results from the fact that we discovered ways to use fossil fuels. It wasn't just discovering new technology. If the fossil fuels were not in the ground the industrial revolutions wouldn't have happened.

About 10 years ago I also found out about peak oil. I began to read about the work of British Petroleum geologist, Colin Campbell and realised that this is not just an academic affair but in fact our reliance on oil is going to get us into trouble in the short term because world oil production is very close to an all time peak. We are so dependent on oil that this is going to be a crisis that will far outweigh what we're seeing right now in terms of the financial crisis that's got all the headlines and everyone accessed currently.

So since that time I have written several books on the subject. I've traveled around the world to talk about oil depletion and peak oil – Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Europe, Great Britain, Ireland and all of North America – and as a Grateful Dead used to say it's been a long strange trip trying to talk to policy makers and wake them up to the enormity of the challenge facing us.

Scott: As you say, with the current global economic meltdown that seems to have started with the sub-prime mortgage problem in the United States, and we've seen the price of oil fall, what do you say to the people with their heads in the sand saying that falling oil prices means that peak oil is not happening?

Richard: Well actually those of us who have been warning about peak oil for some time also forecast this, we said that oil price would respond to scarcity and lies and then once oil prices got to a certain point that would undermine the economy and the price would fall. We would see extreme price volatility which is exactly what we have seen. Over the course of 2008 we've seen the price of oil go from $80 a barrel up to $150 and now back to less than $70 a barrel. That is extreme volatility. Of course, part of the fall in price has been forecast for much lower demand as a result of a global recession, or perhaps even depression, that we seem to be entering into as the result of the credit crisis.

But part of that fall in demand was also a response to very high oil prices on the part of not only ordinary consumers, drivers in the industrialised countries, but also the airline industry which has grounded hundreds of planes world wide, farmers globally who are cutting back on their fossil fuel inputs because they can't afford them. We are seeing broad-based demand destruction, and that is lowering overall oil demand considerably and the market is assuming that demand destruction is going to be substantial.

Matthew Wright: You see this current global crisis emanating from the United States as being directly related to oil in terms of loss of house values in suburbia. Do you think it's all that or the credit component on its own?

Richard: I say it's indirectly related to oil, or partially related to oil. Certainly there were other factors at work. We've been living in a bubble economy for some time and we've had in fact a series of bubbles. Fairly recently we had the dot com bubble in Silicon Valley and since that time we've seen the inflation of the mother of all bubbles, the real estate bubble and not only in the US but in Britain and some other countries as well. Inflated real estate values which have lead people to use their home value as an ATM machine to take out cash and that extra money floating through the system was leveraged and leveraged again through financial instruments like derivatives and so on to the point where we have created a house of cards based on debt and it was inevitable that the house of cards would come crashing down anyway. But I think the high oil prices were one of the triggers that caused the collapse when it did.

In fact oil is an underlying bubble beyond that because we've been living in a kind of energy bubble for the last hundred years with cheap fossil fuels that has enabled the world economy to grow at rates that are otherwise unsustainable – in other words as the cheap fossil fuels dwindle and as they cease to be cheap and cease to be abundant we are not going to be able to support the kind of economy we have now and we'll see a collapse not just of financial systems which is really all about electronic dollars and Euros and so on – we'll see the collapse of the real economy, of the ability to produce, manufacture and transport and all the other things that actually maintain our modern way of life.

Scott: Obviously we need to move to a post-carbon world and have that powered by renewable energy. What are your views on the time scales and sort of levels of investment required to make that transition?

Richard: Well, this is a transition that will require an enormous investment on the order of many trillions of dollars and it is going to take some time as well because it is impossible to rebuild lets say the transportation system in North America, or Australia for that matter, overnight. It takes time for tooling up, job training, coming up with the raw materials and actually building the infrastructure. We are looking at a process of probably at least 20 years, or more realistically 30 to 35 years, of building new infrastructure not only for producing renewable energy but for distributing it and using it through a more energy conserving infrastructure that includes urban design, housing, land use, transportation, agriculture – all of these systems that we've built over the past century based on cheap energy have to be redesigned and rebuilt for a lower energy and renewable energy economy and again that's going to take an enormous investment and enormous amount of time.

So we really should have started this process about 20 years ago because at this point we don't have 20 or 30 years to make those investments and do all of that work before peak oil is upon us. We've already seen the peak in world oil production this past July.

So that means the scale of the task is even larger. We have to accomplish this during a time of global economic recession, we have to accomplish it very quickly and therefore it has to be our number one priority. In other words, we have to put to one side all the other priorities that governments like to pursue. Here in the United States of course, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan that are costing so much money have to be dropped immediately so that we can focus on what really is our long term necessity which is the energy transition. Ultimately if we don't engage in this energy transition, not only peak oil but climate change will ensure the end of the modern age and society as we know it. This is a survival challenge. It is not optional.

Scott: Now the current financial crisis makes it more difficult to harness the levels of investment needed as you have just said, but at the same time we need to get moving very quickly because the time frame to make that transition is several decades at least, which you've also said. So we seem to be in a bit of a bind there. To try and go to someone now and say we need X amount of investment for this transitional phase to a post carbon society, they're probably just going to look at you and laugh.

Richard: In a strange kind of way, I think the opportunity is actually greater today than it was just a few months ago. We have already seen that the governments of the world are willing, in a bind, to come up with literally trillions of dollars in a very short period of time in order to save the financial investor class, in order to save the banks and investor houses and so on. These kinds of problems will sort themselves out anyway over the long term. Yes, there will be pain involved and we'll have to endure a recession/depression, but we've done that before. The world has been through many periods of financial turmoil over the last couple of hundred years and we've survived them all.

What we are coming up against now is an ecological disaster of a scale that our species has never seen before, and so if that kind of investment can be marshalled in the order of trillions of dollars just to stave off the financial collapse certainly that kind of investment is available for the scale of challenge that we're talking about now. And I would argue very strongly that we could deal with the financial collapse much more effectively not just bailing out the banks and the brokerage houses but by using that money to fund the energy transition because that money would go directly toward building infrastructure, it would create jobs, it would put money into the real economy and then that money would filter its way up. It would be a trickle up process rather than a trickle down which as we've seen over the last decades doesn't really work anyway.
Scott: Now, you're listening to 3CR and we are interviewing Richard Heinberg, a peak oil expert. Richard you were talking about putting dollars in the real economy - we have an interesting situation with the presidential candidates in the US at the moment - John McCain and Barack Obama. If Obama gets in I've heard he intends to put hundreds of millions of dollars…

Matthew: 150 billion dollars.

Scott: … 150 billion dollars into energy initiatives.

Richard: That sounds big on the scale of previous investments in energy infrastructure but that's 150 billion dollars over 10 years. I would say that's at least an order of magnitude less than the scale of investment that we need to be contemplating. We should be speaking in the order of hundreds of billions of dollars per year. And again that money needs to go not just to solar panels and wind turbines, but all the other infrastructure that will be necessary in order for us to adapt society to be running on renewable energy.

That means, for example, our agriculture system.

We've built a food system that is overwhelmingly dependent on oil and other fossil fuels – fertilizers, pesticides, herbicides, for running tractors and other farm machinery, for transporting farm inputs and outputs. Altogether for every calorie of food energy that we produce we invest about 10 calories of fossil fuel energy. Now that kind of food system only works with cheap oil so it is designed to fail if we don't have cheap oil any more, and we soon won't.

That means re-thinking our entire food system, how we grow food, how we process and store food and how we distribute food. We need to re-localise our food system so that we are not depending on food exports from the other side of the world just for basic commodities. That's just one example of the food system, but also again transportation, land use, urban design and all the rest of these.

Scott: Now, the whole thing about agriculture is very interesting because it's overlooked when people talk about peak oil and shortages that are going to occur in the future. Now, I've got a permaculture garden and some chooks as we call them here – chickens - and it's a great way to build closer ties with your neighbours and stuff like that. Now, addressing peak oil and mitigating climate change, it's a great way to reconnect with the land and build community but its going to have to be more than that, isn't it? We have to go the ‘hard yard' and actually introduce large scale rail projects powered by renewable energy and stuff like that. Have you got any information on that transition?

Richard: Yes, you are right but we need to be doing this from the top down as well as from the bottom up direction at the same time. In other words there's a lot that individuals and community groups can do in terms of growing food, distributing food, finding ways to reduce transportation, bicycle co-ops, car co-ops and so on - and yet that's not going to be enough. We are going to need large scale systems for transportation, we're going to need agricultural policies from the national government level that favour local production for local consumption, organic production and so on.

You mentioned transportation. There are proposals out in almost every country and region that I'm aware of for building more public transportation, for transitioning away from automobiles. Unfortunately these things are seen as a low priority and the danger is that as this credit crunch deepens that will be seen as an even lower priority while governments try to bale themselves out in the immediate problem. In fact, as we have been saying in this whole program, this has to be seen as a top priority and there are lots of very innovative possibilities out there including, not only, conventional electric rail, light rail, but also personal rapid transit which is even more energy conserving. But the main thing we're going to have to do really is just reduce our need for transportation to begin with. That means redesigning our cities so that people can get where they need to go by walking and by bicycle rather than having to take even public transportation.

Scott: Now the transition to a zero carbon future is not only our top priority as you say but as Rob Hopkins wrote in his book, the ‘Transition Handbook, From Oil Dependency to Local Resilience', he said "…it is one thing to campaign against climate change and quite another to paint a compelling and engaging vision of a post carbon world in such a way as to enthuse others to embark on a journey towards it." So we know what our main goal is. We need to transition, but trying to make it compelling to people so that they actually want to buy in, not just out of fear but because it is actually engaging, seems to be the toughest thing.

Richard: Here again I think in some strange way the economic crisis that we're just moving into now, and will probably continue for the next several years, may have a silver lining in that people will have to change how they are living anyway simply because they won't be able to afford driving the large vehicles and going to the supermarket whenever they need to and emptying the shelves of a bewildering variety of foods imported from across the planet. All that is going to change whether we like it or not.

Now the question is – is that change going to happen as part of a long range plan or is it just going to be ad-hoc adjustments to scarcity and adversity. If it's the latter then I don't think anyone is going to have a very good time with it. But I think a good model is what happened during the Great Depression with the ‘New Deal'.

There was a sense in North America, in the United States, that we were suffering through immense economic adversity but we were all in it together and that if we contributed, and with proper government leadership, we would come out OK on the other end. And what we actually did during that time was to build up infrastructure in the country. We built post offices and bridges and rail networks and all the rest, much of which we are still using today. Similar things happened in other countries around the world, but I'm not so familiar with the history of Australia in that regard.

But if we can regard this as not just a survival challenge and adversity but also as an opportunity to rebuild community, to find what's really important in life and focus on that which is community and family and creative activity, I think we will actually find that we are happier even as we use less; use less of energy and less of other depleting materials.

Matthew: Yes, Melbourne's a temperate climate and we do rely on heating season here, but we can use less and still be comfortable and warm because we can reallocate the resources we build our houses with and build them more insulated and slightly smaller but warm all the time without the need of fossil fuel gas heating inputs.

Richard: Absolutely. Well, this is the focus in Germany which is a much colder place. Germany has become a world leader both in renewable energy and also in solar design. The Passiv Haus is now the standard model in Germany for the construction of homes and these are houses that basically use no external energy supply for heating or for electricity. So, certainly it can be done. It's just a matter of design, a matter of awareness, of how we use energy and how we can reduce that and how we can maximise the energy input from the sun.

Matthew: I guess it's also regulation because once you've created the education program, some builders will take the advanced route and offer these to people in the market but others will need the stick approach with regulation.

Richard: You are absolutely right about that. I'm not so familiar with the situation in Australia but here in the US, home builders typically construct homes as cheaply as possible because people who buy homes want to spend as little as possible and without proper guidelines from government (regulations) very few homes get built that are up to the standard of efficiency that easily could be achieved with just a little more attention. So government has to lead on this process because we can't just leave it up to the market. If we do then unfortunately I think this transition is going to be very messy and very painful.

Scott: Now Richard, Beyond Zero Emissions is a climate change centre that focuses very much on solutions so is there anything you can suggest that our listeners need to do to prepare for the passing of peak oil?

Richard: Yes, of course. The first thing to do is to take a personal inventory of how you are using energy in your own life and that means looking at transportation, as well as household energy, as well as food energy. All these things can be fairly easily calculated and translated into a common energy unit such as joules or ergs or kilowatt hours and then you can see where you are actually using energy currently and typically food and transportation are big portions of personal energy use in the home which includes heating, refrigeration, lighting and so on and in each of those areas we can begin to make changes.

Now, the reason for doing the inventory first is that most of us have an unrealistic view of where we are using energy, and we tend to think that just by changing our light bulbs we will be making a big difference. In fact that's not where most of us are using it. Maybe by just changing your diet and eating lower on the food chain you could save more energy than by anything else you are doing, it depends on your personal situation.

Certainly by driving less and by insulating our homes, by having more energy efficient appliances we can alter our personal carbon footprint enormously. But it is a process. I say this because my wife and I have been on this journey for about a decade now and we've built the solar greenhouse on the side of our house, we have solar panels on our roof, we grow a lot of our own food and so on, and yet there are still things that we haven't gotten to on our list. It takes time, it takes attention and investment.

It would be enormously helpful if we had coaches, and I think this is a big job opportunity for the future. If there are young people out there looking at what to study in school and possible future careers, one of them I would recommend is learning to be an energy coach. Learning how to be available to people, perhaps offering your services commercially to go to individual households, and help people do this kind of energy auditing and energy planning so that they can reduce their energy, reduce their financial expenditure on energy and reduce their carbon footprint painlessly and in fact find at the end of the day that they enjoy their lives more. But again, most people need a little help with this because we are not encouraged or helped to think rationally about energy.

Scott: Richard, I would like to say thank you. We've run out of time unfortunately but it was very informative speaking with you on Beyond Zero this morning…

Richard: Yes, it's been a pleasure.

Scott: …and we'd love to talk with you again soon when we get the opportunity. We've just been speaking with Richard Heinberg, well-known peak oil educator and a senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute. If you want to know more about the Post Carbon Institute go to www.postcarbon.org. You can also learn more about Richard and buy his books at www.richardheinberg.com

Transcript by Vivienne