Life in 2020

Experts warn of return to 'back to basics' living
24 October 2005

Report exposes how burgeoning levels of energy wastage could lead to stark lifestyle changes in as little as 15 years if we don't take action now.

Households in 2020 could be purged of their modern luxuries and forced to revert to simpler standards of living unless action is taken now to reduce escalating levels of carbon dioxide emissions, according to independent research commissioned by the Energy Saving Trust.

A panel of experts have predicted two alternative scenarios for life in 2020 within the report - '2020 Futures: Energy and Waste in an Age of Excess'. The bleaker outlook predicts that without a concerted effort to curb our individual carbon dioxide emissions and create a more sustainable future, the home comforts, timesaving luxuries and freedoms we currently take for granted could become things of the past.

In stark contrast, experts reveal that if we take positive action now to 'green-proof' our homes and create sustainable living spaces that cause minimal damage to the environment, an altogether more optimistic view of the future is within our grasp by 2020.

Strict rationing - similar to post-war rationing of food supplies, our energy use could be heavily rationed, with dedicated time-slots allocated to households to carry out tasks requiring energy use to avoid any wastage Harsh punitive measures - areas in cities and suburbs where energy usage reach critical levels could see stringently forced energy laws and waste directives imposed. Energy Police with the power to issue penalties and fines for excessive energy consumption could be born.

Philip Sellwood, Chief Executive of the Energy Saving Trust, said; "The bleak picture of life in 2020 can be easily avoided just by taking small measures now to reduce excess levels of carbon emissions - one of the leading contributors to climate change.

"We are optimistic that a step-change in the way we view our energy consumption in the home will see an energy-efficient future emerging, where environmentally hazardous homes are replaced with ecologically friendly ones and consumers recognise their own responsibility to create a sustainable environment for future generations.

"Rather than having to rely on harsher measures to urge consumers to take the issue seriously, we are encouraging people to act now and start saving at least 20% of their carbon dioxide emissions. This target is easily achievable by adopting a mix of simple measures such as improving insulation, turning appliances off standby, installing energy saving lightbulbs and turning the thermostat down by just one degree."

Energy and Waste in an Age of Excess

Over your limit

Oil Peak in 2005?

More evidence is coming in weekly to suggest that world oil production peaked in 2005. Within this past month, two notable petroleum geologists have produced statements to that effect. First there was Ali Samsam Bakhtiari, who said this past October. "In my humble opinion, we should now have reached 'Peak Oil'. So, it is high time to close this critical chapter in the history of international oil industry and bid the mighty 'Peak' farewell... At present, global oil output fluctuates around 82 mb/d as some institutions try vainly to push 2005 statistics towards 83 and 84 mb/d (as they always do). But they will be obliged to backtrack as 'actual' oil supplies fail to follow their 'paper' ones."(1)

This was followed by Colin Campbell's announcement at a conference in Rimini, Italy on October 28th that 2005 could be the year when world oil production peaks, to be soon followed by an irreversible decline. According to Dr. Campbell, "the maximum peak of production as far as the normal so-called oil has come this year; after that will be a long decline. Meanwhile, for other types of hydrocarbons… the peak will occur by 2010."(2) (Translated from Italian.)

These two statements, taken in concurrence with OPEC's August market report that total light, sweet oil production was declining,(3) and declining extraction rates from all the major oil companies except BP,(4) make it a safe bet that global oil production did indeed peak in 2005.

1 From 'Peak Oil' to 'Transition One', Bakhtiari, Ali Samsam. October, 2005. http://www.sfu.ca/~asamsamb/sb.htm

2 Petrolio/Campbell: In 2005 Produzione, Poi Iniziera' Declino. Apcom, October 28, 2005. http://economia.virgilio.it/news/foglia.html?t=2&id=4&codNotizia=11771131

3 OPEC Reveal Light, Sweet Crude Peaked, Vernon Chris. Vital Trivia, August 20th, 2005. http://www.vitaltrivia.co.uk/2005/08/26

4 Oil Majors See Extraction Fall, Vernon, Chris. Vital Trivia, August 2nd, 2005. http://www.vitaltrivia.co.uk/2005/08/24

The West has lost its vision of utopia

Dylan Evans

EVER SINCE Plato, western thinkers have dreamed of ideal societies, utopias that could perhaps never be fully realised, but which at least gave us something to aspire to — noble, beautiful visions of what society might one day be like. Thomas More, Tommaso Campanella, Francis Bacon, and Karl Marx all painted pictures of a future in which there is a strong sense of community, in which work is fulfilling, and leisure is used wisely and creatively. Now, at the dawn of the 21st century, this long tradition of idealism has all but vanished. We have no vision — just the paltry consolations of consumerism.

Sixteen years ago Francis Fukuyama saw the collapse of the Soviet bloc as "the end of history." What he meant was that liberal democracy had emerged triumphant over all alternative forms of human government. There is more to history, however, than government. Indeed, all the major visions of utopia place far greater importance on more mundane matters, such as the nature of work and leisure, and the structure of local communities, than they do on the grand questions of governance.

More, Campanella, and Bacon all agree that everyone must work. When work is shared out between all members of society, Campanella calculates that each person will have to work no more than four hours a day. That would leave plenty of leisure time, as well as energy to use that time wisely by, Campanella suggests, attending lectures. Even Marx, who is remembered more for his economic and political theories, started out with a vision of everyday life in the communist society, where a person might "hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner." By reducing history to the question of governance, Fukuyama consigned the more difficult questions about work, leisure, and community to oblivion. The "end of history" was just a euphemism for the end of utopia.

Visions can be dangerous, of course. Marx's dream became, for millions, a nightmare. In the 1990s, all ideas of radical social transformation came to be regarded with suspicion. It was as if humanity had finally grown up, and left such adolescent fantasies behind.

But if idealism without a dose of reality is simply naive, realism without a dash of imagination is utterly depressing. If this really was the end of history, it would be an awful anticlimax. Look at the way we live now, in the West. We grow up in increasingly fragmented communities, hardly speaking to the people next door, and drive to work in our self-contained cars. We work in standardised offices and stop at the supermarket on our way home to buy production-line food, which we eat without relish. There is no great misery, no hunger, and no war. But nor is there great passion or joy. Despite our historically unprecedented wealth, more people than ever before suffer from depression.

The major political parties are reduced to tinkering with the details of our current system. Their only objective seems to be: more of the same, only perhaps a little bit more cheaply. They have no grand vision.

It is this complacency, this lack of idealism, that is in part responsible for the repugnance with which Muslim extremists view Western society. When American President George Bush speaks of exporting democracy to the Middle East, he should realise that liberal democracy on its own is a limp, anaemic idea. If the West is to provide a more inspiring ideal, then it is time we devoted more thought to the questions that Plato, More, and Marx placed at the heart of their utopias; the question of how to make work more rewarding, leisure more abundant, and communities more friendly. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004

Enough....?

"If you live for having it all, what you have is never enough."

The 'green' century - CSE Environmental Education

The writing on the wall says technology will be determined by environment

Few people realise that the 21st century is going to be the century of the environment. Technological change is going to be heavily driven by the environmental imperative and human technologies will be forced to mimic nature's cycles and gentleness.

Why do we say this? Let us look at the evolution of science in the 20th century. At the start of the century, Einstein and Bohr asked 'What is matter?' By the middle of the century, scientists were asking: 'What is life?' and 'What is the universe?'

In the 1950s, Watson and Crick unravelled the structure of the DNA, which finally led to the emergence of biotechnologies today. By the end of the century, another critical question was asked: 'What is the web of life?'

This last question was not asked out of scientific curiosity but from human necessity. The vast range of technologies that had emerged because of increased human understanding of nature was beginning to have major impacts on nature itself. By 1960, it was difficult to breathe in cities from Tokyo to Los Angeles, and rivers like Rhine and the Thames turned into stinking sewers.

Technological interventions into natural ecosystems led to major environment surprises. For instance, CFCs, seen as wonder substances in 1930s, was found to be life-threatening in the 1970s.

Not surprisingly, a number of emerging technologies are being driven by environmental imperatives. For example, in the last 20 years, continuous changes took place in the internal combustion engine because of environmental concerns.

Despite all the environmental efficiency being introduced, as the number of cars grew, and health effects better understood, the automobile industry was pushed into newer and newer directions. Car-free cities, which again mean totally new transportaion systems, are being thought of. Emergence of fuel cells has been driven by the regulation set by the world's largest car market, California, which has mandated companies to introduce zero-emission vehicles.

It is clear that in this century, every new technology, even those in biotechnology, will be forced to take the environmental concern in account… the writing is on the wall. For us to read. And act.

- Anil Agarwal, Chairperson, CSE

Crying Sheep - George Monbiot

We had better start preparing for a decline in global oil supply....

By George Monbiot.
Published in the Guardian 27th September 2005.

Entering a New World

Our global economy is outgrowing the capacity of the earth to support it, moving our early twenty-first century civilization ever closer to decline and possible collapse. In our preoccupation with quarterly earnings reports and year-to-year economic growth, we have lost sight of how large the human enterprise has become relative to the earth’s resources.

As a result, we are consuming renewable resources faster than they can regenerate. Forests are shrinking, grasslands are deteriorating, water tables are falling, fisheries are collapsing, and soils are eroding. We are using up oil at a pace that leaves little time to plan beyond peak oil. And we are discharging greenhouse gases into the atmosphere faster than nature can absorb them, setting the stage for a rise in the earth’s temperature well above any since agriculture began.

Fortunately, there is a consensus emerging among scientists on the broad outlines of the changes needed. If economic progress is to be sustained, we need to replace the fossil-fuelbased, automobile-centered, throwaway economy with a new economic model. Instead of being based on fossil fuels, the new economy will be powered by abundant sources of renewable energy: wind, solar, geothermal, hydropower, and biofuels.
Instead of being centered around automobiles, future transportation systems will be far more diverse, widely employing light rail, buses, and bicycles as well as cars. The goal will be to maximize mobility, not automobile ownership.
The throwaway economy will be replaced by a comprehensive reuse/recycle economy. Consumer products from cars to computers will be designed so that they can be disassembled into their component parts and completely recycled. Throwaway products such as single-use beverage containers will be phased out.

The good news is that we can already see glimpses here and there of what this new economy looks like. We have the technologies to build it—including, for example, gas-electric hybrid
cars, advanced-design wind turbines, highly efficient refrigerators, and water-efficient irrigation systems.

We can see how to build the new economy brick by brick. With each wind farm, rooftop solar panel, paper recycling facility, bicycle path, and reforestation program, we move closer to
an economy that can sustain economic progress.

If, instead, we continue on the current economic path, the question is not whether environmental deterioration will lead to economic decline, but when. No economy, however technologically advanced, can survive the collapse of its environmental support systems.

Download Chapter 1

China Crisis: threat to the global environment

Western politicians queue up to sing its praises. Economists regard it with awe and delight. Other countries are desperate to imitate it. Yet there is another side to China's exploding, double-digit-growth miracle economy - it is turning into one of the greatest environmental threats the earth has ever faced.

An ominous sign of the danger is given in a groundbreaking report from Greenpeace, published today, which maintains that China is now by far the world's biggest driver of rainforest destruction. The report documents the vast deforestation driven by the soaring demands of China's enormous timber trade - the world's largest - as the country's headlong economic development sucks in ever-more amounts of the earth's natural resources.

THE NUMBERS

Consumption
China - growing at nearly 10% a year - already consumes more grain, meat, coal and steel than the United States

Wealth
China's population will grow from 1.3 billion to 1.45 billion in 26 years - when per capita income will be equal to that of the US today

Oil
On current trends, China will by 2031 be consuming 99 million barrels of oil per day. Total world production today is only 84 million bpd

Forestry
China is already the biggest driver of rainforest destruction, says Greenpeace. Half of all rainforest logs head for China

Global warming
By 2025, China will overtake the US as the top emitter of the greenhouse gases causing global warming

Cars
By 2031, China would have 1.1 billion cars if it matches current US trends - bigger than the current world fleet of 800 million

Aids, Hunger, Poverty...

Titanic Lifeboat Academy

As with any iceberg, the collision we're about to experience looks different from different perspectives and there is less information (on any of these perspectives) in plain view than all that can be found just beneath the surface.

Some experts warn us about Peak Oil. The Union of Concerned Scientists has warned us -- twice, now -- about Global Climate Change and the effects of environmental degradation. Still others warn about global population growth versus earth's "carrying capacity" of food and especially water. All pose crises of staggering proportions. From whichever side one views the "iceberg" towards which our Titanic culture has set its course, all these separate crises are combined in an inter-related whole which we are neither built to withstand nor presently equipped to survive.
It's too late to change course. Any part of the iceberg is sufficient to sink this ship we call "Western Civilization." It's not a matter of "if", it's now only a matter of "when." It's time we all started building lifeboats!

Listen to Julian Darley and Celine Rich being interviewed by Christopher Paddon and Caren Black of the Titanic Lifeboat Academy on the first episode of the Lifeboat Show on KMUN in Astoria, Oregon.

How much oil do we really have?

As oil prices remain volatile the markets do their best to forecast future prices. Unfortunately this is not an easy task. While it may appear extraordinary to outsiders one of the main problems in the oil market is the reliability of basic statistics.

"Oil market data is generally a black art like using a set of chicken bones," says Paul Horsnell of Barclays Capital. "If Columbus had thought he'd hit India when in fact he was in the Caribbean, that's about the level of oil market data."

Yellow River Source

Climate change is a reality already felt across the globe. The effects have been severe in China, from pervasive drought to massive flooding.

World Temperatures Keep Rising With a Hot 2005

New international climate data show that 2005 is on track to be the hottest year on record, continuing a 25-year trend of rising global temperatures.

Climatologists at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies calculated the record-breaking global average temperature, which now surpasses 1998's record by a tenth of a degree Fahrenheit, from readings taken at 7,200 weather stations scattered around the world.

"At this point, people shouldn't be surprised this is happening," said Goddard atmospheric scientist David Rind, noting that 2002, 2003 and 2004 were among the warmest years on record.
Many climatologists, along with policymakers in a number of countries, believe the rapid temperature rise over the past 50 years is heavily driven by the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities that have spewed carbon dioxide and other "greenhouse gases" into the atmosphere. A vocal minority of scientists say the warming climate is the result of a natural cycle.

Several scientists said yesterday that Earth's rapid warming could become self-perpetuating as the buildup of heat in the air, on land and in the sea accelerates. Ted A. Scambos, the lead scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center in Boulder, Colo., said the shrinkage of sea ice in the Arctic makes it more likely that the region will warm faster, because open water absorbs much more heat from the sun than snow and ice.

"Change is really happening in the Arctic. We're going to see this again and again," Scambos said. He added that, because the Arctic helps keep global temperatures down, any warming there can mean "you're going to change [the world's] climate significantly."

Anil Agarwal on Ecological Literacy

"Environmental literature being generated for school children is, with some exceptions, in the genre of nature education. It is very important to expose young children to the beauties and wonders of nature. But as they grow older, it is important they begin to understand how human beings and human societies interact with their environment for their survival and their growth, how these human interactions become a part of a society's culture, and why it is important to rationalise our relationship with our environment."

Anil Agarwal, founder-director of CSE

Thomas Edison on Solar Energy

"We are like tenant farmers chopping down the fence around our house for fuel when we should be using Nature's inexhaustible sources of energy-sun, wind and tide. I'd put my money on the sun and solar energy. What a source of power! I hope we don't have to wait until oil and coal run out before we tackle that.
"Thomas Alva Edison (1847-1931).

Life on a Crowded Planet

Is the life we are living now sustainable?

Will technology, free enterprise, governments, or something, make everything all right, no matter how much we waste?

Are we doomed and nothing can save us?

Or is it somewhere in the middle? If it is, shouldn't we have a plan to ensure that human life will be sustainable?

Life on a Crowded Planet attempts to create that plan--to explain, as simply as possible, what our problems are and why we have them; discuss population and environmental controversies and misconceptions; and propose specific effective solutions and plans of action, all of which could be funded by even modest decreases in military expenditures.

Development and Sustainability - Fritjof Capra

by Fritjof Capra

In an essay just posted on the CEL (Center for Ecoliteracy) website, Fritjof Capra uses an ecological perspective to examine "development" as defined in the life sciences and by economists and politicians. The differences in their definitions have profound implications for discussions of sustainable development.

Fritjof Capra: “The alternative view of development proposed by the global civil society sees development as a creative process, characteristic of all life, a process of increasing capability, in which the most important thing one needs is control over local resources….Because people are different and the places in which they live are different, we can expect development to produce cultural diversity of all kinds. The process whereby it will happen will be very different from the current global trading system. It will be based on the mobilization of local resources to satisfy local needs, and it will be informed by the values of human dignity and ecological sustainability.”

Download and read "Development and Sustainability" (140k pdf) >

Global Scenario Group

The Global Scenario Group was convened in 1995 by the Stockholm Environment Institute to engage a distinguished and diverse international group in an examination of the prospects for world development in the twenty-first century. Numerous studies at global, regional, and national levels have relied on the Group’s scenario framework and quantitative analysis.
The Global Scenario Group synthesized its findings for a non-technical audience in: Great Transition: The Promise and Lure of the Times Ahead
This path-breaking essay presents a fresh vision for a sustainable world. It describes the historic roots, current dynamics, future perils, and alternative pathways for world development. It advances one of these paths, Great Transition, as the preferred route, identifying strategies, agents of change, and values for a new global agenda.
The GSG’s research program continues through an expanded effort called the Great Transition Initiative, that takes the GSG’s scenarios as a point of departure in an effort to widely share a vision of hope and generate greater unity among global citizens.

Gandhiji ---- 2 Oct 1869 - 30 Jan 1948

Today is Mahatma Gandhi's birthday. Happy Birthday Gandhiji!

Melting Planet

Species are dying out faster than we have dared recognise, scientists will warn this week. The erosion of polar ice is the first break in a fragile chain of life extending across the planet, from bears in the north to penguins in the far south.

The polar bear is one of the natural world's most famous predators - the king of the Arctic wastelands. But, like its vast Arctic home, the polar bear is under unprecedented threat. Both are disappearing with alarming speed.
Thinning ice and longer summers are destroying the bears' habitat, and as the ice floes shrink, the desperate animals are driven by starvation into human settlements - to be shot. Stranded polar bears are drowning in large numbers as they try to swim hundreds of miles to find increasingly scarce ice floes. Local hunters find their corpses floating on seas once coated in a thick skin of ice.


By Andrew Buncombe in Anchorage and Severin Carrell in London
The Independent Online Edition

EnergyResources Group - Yahoo! Groups

Human history has been the story of obtaining and using increasing quantities and quality of energy.
Till right about now.
Today, human society is well into a transition from increasing to decreasing availability of energy and other resources--a circumstance that is also worsened by our increasing populations. In that context, the EnergyResources Group aims at objective and accurate understanding of what this means to our lives and future.

Indonesia police warn of anarchy over fuel rise

THOUSANDS of police are protecting petrol stations and Government buildings across Indonesia from mounting protests against plans to raise fuel prices tomorrow.
With queues of up to a kilometre to buy petrol, hundreds of demonstrators converged on President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono's palace in central Jakarta, demanding the price rise be abandoned.

Consumerism as a social disease

Advertising;s function is not to provide information any more than
consumerism's is to provide for people's needs; through delusion and
illusion, its function is the capture of "hearts and minds."