Back in June, the Yes Men performed a fairly dramatic stunt. Pretending to be Natural Petroleum Council members, they presented a proposal to turn human beings into fuel:
After noting that current energy policies will likely lead to “huge global calamities…” Wolff told the audience “…in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could ‘keep fuel flowing’ by transforming the billions of people who die into oil… With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of disaster, but that means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will continue to flow for those of us left.”
Dark humor aside, we might argue over when, but at some point, the oil is going to run out.
Today, I’ll explore how we use energy, how we can change our sense of what energy means and why that change will be so much easier if started earlier than later.
The picture, by the way, is not a Photoshop effect. It’s long-exposure work, using an infra red filter to reduce the amount of light entering the shutter. When you do very long exposures (this was 29 seconds), images that pass across the screen don’t always appear, and when they do appear, they often appear ghosted. In this case, you get the ghost effect of the car as it paused for a moment at the intersection and then continued on.
Okay, so enough of the photo geek babble. Now onto science geek babble.
In 2004, the BBC was asking Is the world’s oil running out fast?:
How will you pay to run your car? How will you get the children to school? How will you heat your house? How much will transported food go up in price?
How will we pay for plastics, metals, rubber, cheap flights, Simpson’s DVDs, 3G phones and everlasting economic growth?
The basic answer is, we won’t.
This is the message from the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO).
People may disagree on when it’s going to happen, but there’s no real question that it will happen in many of our lifetimes. Per the Australian Broadcasting Corporation:
What would happen if the world were to start running out of oil? Conventional wisdom says we’ve got 30 years, but there’s a growing fear amongst petroleum experts it’s happening much sooner than we thought – that we are hitting the beginning of the end of oil now. So how soon will the oil run out, and can we stop our economy collapsing when it does? How prepared are we for the real oil crisis?
What are we going to do in order to make this transition from an oil-based economy to making better use of other fuel sources? How are we going to make this transition as easy as possible, and how will we do it as painlessly as possible?
Here in Vermont, Post Oil Solutions is organizing around local economy. They run workshops, educate the public, and support people trying to take control of their own energy solutions.
They have lots of great projects, such as community gardens, the Windham Energy Project and a Winter Farmer’s Market.
These are all projects that were started by people on a small scale and are growing into something big.
And this effort at getting people to think about energy, energy usage and our impact has a direct effect on personal behavior. I’ll just take a moment to outline some personal changes we’ve made as a household in the past few years. Many of these are more recent and directly a result of the localvore challenge:
- Composting: I attended a Master Composter course last Fall. In doing so, I learned how to save resources by not just throwing out uneaten/spoiled food. We now collect all our scraps, store them and reuse them in gardens once they’re converted to healthy, nutrient-rich, compost.
- Local Harvesting: We’ve started paying a lot more attention to where our food comes from. This is big. When you purchase food from across the county, you’re not just paying for the food. You’re paying for the cost of transporting that food. When we buy local food, we’re not only supporting our local economy, we’re paying attention to where our food comes from and what the conditions are. When I visit Hope Roots Farm to buy eggs, I know they’re free range because I see the chickens wandering around. Usually, I just take it on faith.
- Food Dehydrating: This ties in directly with the local foods. There are only certain times of year when you can get certain foods locally: blueberries; apples; root vegetables. Many of these can be dried when they’re in season, stored in various fashions, and used down the line for all sorts of purposes and it’s a lot cheaper to dry food and store it than to refrigerate it.
- Attention to How I Drive: I don’t always have as much choice about this as I’d like: I have places to be and places to be on time. But, if I have time, I don’t drive as fast as I might otherwise do. My car (a Prius Hybrid) is much more efficient at 55mpg than it is at 65. So don’t go faster than 55mpg unless I need to and I don’t ever go faster than 65. But for different cars, there are different efficiency levels. Whatever car you own, you can probably drive it more efficiently than you do today and you can learn a lot about that through some simple research.
- Paying More Up Front for Better Appliances
I’m fortunate in that I have the resources to do this. I understand that a lot of people don’t. But for those that can, there’s a significant difference between sticker price and cost. Buying energy-efficient appliances makes good sense from both an earth and an economic sense down the line. So why not offer low-interest loans or tax rebates so more people can buy things that, in the long run, will be cheaper for them?
None of these are rocket science; they’re simple steps that can be done in small increments. You don’t have to compost everything you can. You can make it a small project, composting the easy stuff, which at least reduces waste. You don’t have to buy everything local. But you can commit to having one day a week where all your food comes from local resources. You don’t have to drive slow all the time. But you can drive at the speed which is best for your vehicle when you have the opportunity to do so.
But in the meantime, though these are good personal steps, they’re small steps and, as individuals, we can only go so far with this. With so much of our energy being through large-scale industrial facilities, how can we compete with this?
The simple answer is that we can’t compete with it, but we can influence change and we have to do it by demanding more from our government, our corporations and our people. We can’t stay silent about this, nor can we expect that merely changing ourselves is sufficient.
We’ve got to make changes, and a lot of those changes have to be mandated through law if they’re going to stick. Changes like
Manure Power:
Four Vermont farms will soon be producing electricity from cow manure with the help of Central Vermont Public Service Corp… Farms in Sheldon, Fairlee, West Pawlet and St. Albans will receive the grants from the CVPS Renewable Development Fund, established in 2004 to encourage farmers to develop new renewable generation and provide new manure management options through Cow Power.
It gets better. According to CVPS President Robert Young, “these grants will help develop 8,400 megawatt-hours of clean renewable energy right here in Vermont… enough energy to supply 1,395 average homes using 500 kwh per month.”
This isn’t science fiction. This is real. It’s happening right now, but we need to take it a step further: don’t just award grants for this. Make it a requirement that farms above a certain production level give back to their communities by using manure power for their operations. If it’s true that cows contribute to global warming then it’s perfectly reasonable to expect large-scale farms to support anti-global warming efforts.
What if you don’t live in an agricultural state? Where might you find better energy resources there? I’ve written before about people power. I’m not talking about people powered political movements. I’m talking literally about energy derived from the day to day activities of individuals:
The band takes center stage, the fans surge forward and the sheer power of the crowd’s excitement amplifies the sound of their favorite songs – providing enough energy, in fact, to move a train… The Crowd Farm, a conceptual design by two graduate students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology… seeks to milk the mechanical movement of hundreds or thousands of assembled people to produce electrical power… the students have shown how the simple act of sitting on a stool can generate enough power to turn on four LED lights.
Think about what this could mean: roads designed to harness the power of the vehicles that move across them; sidewalks designed to power the town’s lighting system. Even without this technology we have playgrounds designed to power water systems. Can you imagine if we combined this technology with such playgrounds? What if basketball stadiums were designed to work with the power of the people and the players? What if assembly lines used the movement of their workers to help power the belt? What if the movement of people through lobbies powered the elevators? What if those great big buildings with the huge glass atriums combined solar power and human power to provide resources for their energy? What if we combined those with small, rooftop-based windmills, to add supplemental energy into the system?
What if all these systems generated more power than they needed? What if they could sell the excess energy at floor-based charging systems to anyone who wanted to power their phone, their iPod, their electric car or anything else that needed a quick charge? Think about what that could do for our economy?
And what if we provided federal grants for the research and development of these systems? Wouldn’t that fall under the sort of option that would dramatically improve national security?
What if we started to produce portable solar generators that we could use to power our own electronic devices? Oh wait, we already do.
In the last week, filmgeek83 posted a Daily Kos Diary about a Yahoo News story — New technique creates cheap, abundant hydrogen:
US researchers have developed… a way to cheaply and efficiently generate hydrogen gas from readily available and renewable biomass such as cellulose or glucose, and could be used for powering vehicles, making fertilizer and treating drinking water… their reactor generated hydrogen gas at nearly 99 percent of the theoretical maximum yield using aetic acid, a common dead-end product of glucose fermentation.
I’m not a scientist. I don’t have the technical background to know all the details behind the exact process behind this. But I can do math and I understand the basics. I can look at our choices and see that there is no future in an oil based economy. I can read and learn and understand that there are things that I can do better, but we need this tackled on a grand scale to make a significant difference.
I don’t know that it’s not too late to change the things we need to change, but I have to live as though we still have meaningful choices, both as individuals and as a nation.
Sure. We can talk about when the oil runs out. We can talk about what’s going to happen in the future. And we can say it’s a long way off, and worry about what’s going to happen when it finally arrives.
But what if we took the lead? What if we decided here and now that we’re not going to wait for the oil to run out? What if we decided today that it was time that we stopped treating oil like a necessity and started treating it like the last resort? What if we decided today that it’s better to invest in safe, renewable energy as though the oil were going to run out next month rather than next century?
We can do this. We have the resources to do it. We have the genius to do it.
We only need the will.