Local effects of moving past the peak

The following is a slightly edited excerpt from comments I delivered at a rally opposing the proposed Parkside development in downtown Asheville, July 15, 2008. The issues I raised have far wider ramifications than their impact on this one development, and I have been asked by a couple of people to post them here. -c

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Past the peak

We have almost certainly passed the peak of global oil production. If that hasn’t happened yet, it will unquestionably occur in the very near future. The current run-up in prices can be explained away by the war in Iraq and the threat of war with Iran, price gouging by OPEC or the oil companies, or speculation.

But the practical reality is that oil prices will never come down again by any significant amount, and the increases will soon make us nostalgic for $4 gasoline.

The post-oil world is going to be very different from the world all of us are accustomed to. It will change almost beyond our imagining, it will change fast and it will be painful. The most immediate effect here in Asheville is likely to be the collapse of the tourist economy. I haven’t seen figures yet, but I would be willing to bet that tourism is already off this summer, due to higher gas prices. Some restaurants have closed lately, feeling the pinch already. Others will follow.

Unlike many other cities and counties, Asheville doesn’t have much of an economy beyond tourism anymore. There’s a little manufacturing and some tech and financial jobs and the health industry, but not much that brings in outside money. The end of oil is going to hit us like a sledge hammer.

A collateral effect of the oil collapse will be a general rise in all energy prices. Natural gas can replace some oil uses. But the price will rise. Coal is being touted as an option, but it’s dirty. Clean coal technology is expensive and problematic. Nuclear power has proven to be enormously expensive, and safety remains an urgent concern. Solar and wind power are good bets, but installation of sufficient generating capacity to replace the oil used for electricity in the next decade will be approximately impossible.

Replacement of gasoline and diesel for transportation fuel on a meaningful scale will not occur and there is every possibility that we will face rolling blackouts or brownouts on a regular basis in the not-distant future.

Meanwhile this country’s total debt obligation to other countries now amounts to $50.5 trillion. One trillion is a very, very large number. Fifty trillion dollars approximately equals the total income of everyone in the country for one year.

At the same time, the value of a dollar has fallen by 40 percent on world markets since 2000. We are rapidly becoming a very poor country. China has begun unloading dollars. There’s talk of pricing oil in Euros. The empire is collapsing. The time line is uncertain, but the outcome is clear.

This week the Congress is getting ready to bail out Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac and there was a run on the IndyMac bank. The men behind the curtain are telling everyone not to worry and maybe things will settle down for a while. But this is what the beginning of a collapsing economy looks like. Note that he last time this kind of thing happened, in what we call the Great Depression, conditions were different. We had loads of oil, for one thing. We were exporting it.  And we had a large and growing industrial base. Now the big industry is all overseas.

I know most of you have heard all that before.  Why am I repeating it at a rally to save our park? What does that have to do with developers and high rise condos and building a sustainable community?

Here’s why. How many of you have ever lived in a walk-up apartment above the sixth floor? Six floors of stair climbing is considered to be the reasonable limit for young healthy adults. Elderly folks are likely to stop at two or three. Taller buildings are heavily dependent on elevators. Elevators are costly to run and very unreliable during electrical blackouts. All services to high rise buildings cost more in terms of energy or time—simply walking up and down six flights of stairs carves into your day, particularly when you are hauling groceries or moving furniture. A community that is looking realistically at our energy future cannot reasonably afford to build any new buildings taller than six stories.

The skyscraper is about to become a historical artifact of the oil era. We can’t afford to build new dinosaur buildings in Asheville.

At the same time, we need to demand that our building code requires the highest attainable level of energy efficiency in all new buildings. Gold LEED certification shouldn’t be a bargaining chip, the way it was with the Ellington Hotel (approved several months ago by the city council). It should be required on all commercial buildings. We need to push for smaller, better insulated, naturally lighted homes and apartments. The baby-steps that Asheville City Council has undertaken are a worthwhile start, but they are still far short of what will be demanded by circumstances in the very near future.

We need to divert our community development money away from fantasies involving new industry and invest the money in a revolving loan fund to retrofit homes and businesses: first with energy saving technologies, then with alternative power sources. Dollars invested in energy savings deliever an immediate and increasing, guaranteed payback. A ten percent savings on heating oil is worth more every time the price jumps. Dollars we don’t spend on energy stay in our pockets and in our community.

At the same time, we need to do everything in our power to support and expand local agriculture. Before the oil era, about 25 percent of our population was engaged in feeding the rest of us. Today 1.5 percent of our population are farmers. The difference is almost entirely due to oil for fuel and natural gas for fertilizer. In the next decade or two, we are going to become a much more agrarian society as a matter of survival. We need to facilitate that, and quit turning valuable farm land into subdivisions and shopping centers. We also need to figure out how to return human waste to the land as fertilizer. We need to rethink our sewage disposal on a major scale.

It appears that the WalMart problem, that is to say, the high cost of low prices, will solve itself as Chinese goods become too expensive due to shipping costs and the weak dollar, but we need to do what we can to support local businesses during this transition time. If we want to have a local hardware store tomorrow, it makes a lot of sense to shop at a local hardware today.

We can facilitate that by asking local businesses to create lists of the top 10 or 20 items they consistently purchase from outside the community, and distribute those lists to every local business so they can find local suppliers for the goods and services they need. The longer we can keep dollars in the local economy the more benefit they will have for everyone as the local hardware store hires a local worker who shops at a local market whose owner hires a local painter who hires a local roofer  who shops at the local hardware and so on.

In short, what I’m suggesting is that our activism has to go beyond stopping one misguided project after another and protecting one parcel at a time from the rapacious greed of the handful of developers who value dollars above community. We need to broaden the effort, to insist that our elected officials face the looming realities of the 21st century. Pretending that things will be better tomorrow will not make it so. Imagining that peak oil and the collapse of the U.S. economy will not profoundly affect our lives is a recipe for disaster.

In closing I’d like to recall an interview I conducted with Environmental educator David Orr who chairs the environmental-studies program at Oberlin College and lectures at four dozen other colleges and universities each year. Two of his books are academic bestsellers, and as an environmental educator, Orr has few peers.

He came to Asheville last October to keynote the tenth-anniversary celebration for South-Wings, the Asheville-based environmental group that puts eyes in the skies over clear-cuts, blasted mountains and disappearing estuaries throughout the Southeast. I caught up with Orr at the nonprofit’s offices on Haywood Street.

“Humanity has faced crises before, but there has never been such a high likelihood that we would destroy ourselves,” Orr declared. “Even nuclear war would probably have left survivors, but climate change, collapsing biodiversity and toxic pollutants are all hitting at once. Any one of them could do it.” He described his recent correspondence with Wes Jackson (of The Land Institute) and Amory Lovins (of the Rocky Mountain Institute) about the appropriate public stance to take in the face of these bleak circumstances.

Jackson is utterly pessimistic about the prospect of a technological fix for modern society, and in his writings, he notes that since the invention of agriculture, human society has inexorably drawn down the Earth’s capital stock. So his life’s work has been trying to reinvent agriculture as a sustainable practice.

Lovins, on the other hand, tends to be an optimist who devotes his energies to inventing our way out of the shrinking ecological box we inhabit. His headquarters in Snowmass, Colo., is solar-powered, with an atrium where tropical-fruit trees grow. Lovins envisions hydrogen-fuel-cell-powered autos that will generate electricity for our homes and produce pure hot water as a byproduct.

Orr told me he sees no use in preaching pessimism, because if people don’t believe that they can save themselves, they may not try. On the other hand, he finds no rational basis for optimism. There are few people alive who have devoted more time and attention to the living systems that sustain us, and Orr is convinced that we are in very deep trouble. And I would note that the view he offered of the calamities we face doesn’t even include the oil shortage or financial collapse.

“What we can talk about is hope,” he said. “We can hope for heroes. We can hope that many of us can be heroes. It will take heroic work for our species to survive, to make the changes necessary, but people are capable of heroism.”

I believe that. I believe you here today are community heroes for working to save our commons. And I believe that at least some of you here today will be the heroes we need to bridge the coming crisis.

The last time a generation was called to salvage a crumbling world we faced global depression and a world war. Heroes rose up and delivered a freer, fairer, more humane society than the prewar U.S.A. had ever been. This time, its up to us.

~ by bothwellsblog on July 17, 2008.