From the Times Argus:

The well-known Food Stamp program got a new updated name Friday, and Vermont Gov. James Douglas was on hand for the launch, standing in front of three tables of food at Shaw’s Supermarket Friday afternoon. The state’s expanded nutrition program was symbolized by the display of foods for breakfast, lunch and dinner, underscoring the new name and “3Squares” focus on healthy eating.

Enrollment in the program currently stands at 31,000, or more than 12 percent, of Vermont’s approximately 250,000 households. Those households represent more than 61,000 individuals in the state.

The program has expanded by about 57 percent since 2001, when it served 39,000 individuals, said Steve Dale, the commissioner of the Department for Children and Families.

Douglas said he anticipates that “tens of thousands of additional Vermont families will be eligible” for 3Squares VT. “What better time to make that important change than now, when so many Vermonters are struggling to pay their bills in these challenging economic times,” he said.

During the summer, anti-hunger advocates and members of the Vermont Food and Fuel Partnership looked for the most effective way to confront an expected winter crisis caused by spiking fuel bills that could force Vermonters to cut back on food. The consensus was to raise the eligibility ceiling for the supplemental nutrition assistance program and eliminate the asset test, which Douglas called “a burden to participation.” Those changes, agreed to last summer, went into effect Jan. 1.

Now people with gross incomes of 185 percent of the federal poverty level, up from 130 percent, are eligible for the program. That’s $3,269 a month for a family of four. And people will no longer have to spend down their savings for their children’s college education or their retirement to qualify.

I have to say, it was a bit of a shock to realize that if we lived in Vermont, my family would qualify for food stamps. But, of course, that goes along with what has been a massive national shift away from food stamps as a method of helping the most vulnerable and toward food stamps as a food subsidy that essentially makes food affordable for a large percentage of the population. In the last few years, we’ve seen food stamp enrollment (and let’s be honest, they’ve changed the name before; they will still be calling it food stamps, no matter what marketing Vermont does) move up to 1 in 9 Americans, and 1 in 6 people in Michigan and Washington, D.C. Given the scale of the expected economic crisis in 2009 and 2010, it would not be surprising to see those numbers hit 1 in 5 Americans.

Now I want to be clear: I am in favor of food stamps and any strategy that helps keep people from going hungry and that ensures adequate nutrition. I’m also strongly in favor of any new program that reduces or even attempts to reduce the stigma of accepting aid when it is needed. That said, however, the question needs to be asked, are food stamps the best possible way to address the issues of food security and access that we’ve created in our society?

First of all, let’s talk about what’s driving the vast increase in food stamp enrollment in the U.S. The first factor is state enthusiasm: that is, there has been a laudable push to bring more hungry people into the food stamp program. There has also been a push by the states to expand their food stamp enrollment because food stamps are federally funded and effectively transfer federal dollars into the state: That is, the food that food stamp recipients purchase in Vermont gets spent in Vermont.

Food stamps are, in fact, an extremely effective way of subsidizing state economies, because virtually every dollar gets spent directly. That is, unlike, say, tax returns that often get saved or put into markets that benefit others, low-income families don’t have a lot of reserve, so the money they get circulates around. It gets spent and used in the economy, upping the velocity of money. In this sense, food stamps are a much better investment than, say, bank bailouts: Money given to Citibank, for example, goes into the bank’s coffers to offset its existing debts, and is mostly never seen again. Food stamps given to low-income families get spent at the supermarket or the farmers market and get money circulating in the community. In a comparatively poor state like Vermont, this is absolutely urgent.

But, of course, there’s another, not-so-helpful reason why food stamp enrollments are rising — people are struggling. The price of basic foods rose vastly in 2007, and while some foods have declined in cost somewhat (milk, for example), agricultural prices are always based in large part on the last season’s production, and so consumers can expect to pay high prices for a long time.

Moreover, as more industrial food producers are forced to stop absorbing higher commodity prices and make up for shifts in their bottom lines that occurred last year, prices are likely to remain high while companies attempt to remain in business. With one major industrial producer, Pilgrim Foods, already in bankruptcy, we can expect to see some measure of consolidation in the system, probably leading to higher prices overall. Combine that with dramatic month-over-month job losses and pay cuts, and more and more people to struggle to put food on the table. Indeed, food pantries and food stamp application handlers are all reporting more people who never thought they would be in their present situation needing help.

I think it is important that those of us who think about food begin thinking about food stamps not as an emergency support program, but as a normative food subsidy for Americans. The move to include middle-class citizens in food stamp programs is likely to grow, and the fact that the middle class now needs food stamps to get by is not just a bad sign for the temporary economy, but a serious structural shift in our food system.

The expansion of food stamps is already having a substantial impact on the food system as a whole. Remember, states are being flooded with dollars that can only be spent on food. This means that the food marketplace is being shifted as a whole, for as spending drops, we are shifting dollars in a particular direction. Again, I have no difficulty with this to the extent it mitigates hunger, but we do need ask who these subsidies are actually supporting and keeping in business. They should be working toward a food system that operates in the national interest, one that minimizes external costs to be borne by citizens at large, one that minimizes contributions to global warming, and one that provides maximum investment in food systems likely to handle economic and ecological upheaval.

In this sense, food stamps are not an unmitigated good. At this point, food stamps disproportionally benefit the industrial food economy: Many farmers markets and CSA programs cannot or are not set up to accept food stamps, and low-income families often struggle to get transport to farmers markets and farm stands that do accept them. CSAs usually require upfront payments that food stamp recipients cannot make, and while many CSA owners attempt to accommodate low-income shares, their personal profit margins are sufficiently low that this doesn’t always work.

Not only does this prioritization of the industrial do considerable ecological harm and also reduce the access of lower-inc
ome families to healthy foods, but it works against the interests of the states, which lose most of the dollars spent there as they go back to industrial producers. A rational system would be something like Michael Pollan’s proposition that food stamp values are doubled when spent directly at farmers markets or through CSA payment programs. So too would using some federal subsidy and education money to teach people how to cook and eat seasonally, so that they could get the most from their food stamp dollars, buying high-quality, whole foods.

But more importantly, the rise in food stamp use should make us look seriously at our industrial food system and our food system in relationship to the world at large. For a long time, the one thing that you could say about American industrial food was that it was cheap. But if food is no longer inexpensive, not just for the poor, but for the American middle class, then the single virtue of the industrial food system begins to collapse. That is, even with a system of externalized costs, one that defers paying the full price of pollution, industrial food is no longer affordable. So why were we keeping the industrial food system around again? Certainly not because there are no better choices. If we are going to subsidize expensive food, why not good, nutritious food that will lower national health costs, enrich small farmers and local economies, and improve overall local food security?

If we are to accept that something as basic as food has now moved out of the realm of ordinary affordability, this should make clear to us precisely how vulnerable we are to hunger even in the U.S. The fact that we have acknowledged a need for a subsidy that extends well into the middle class (and it actually extends further than implied, because food stamps automatically make you eligible for things like subsidized school lunches) means that the industrial food system no longer is managing to do the one thing that you could say in its defense — provide affordable food. And if this is no longer the case, there really is no defense left for industrial agriculture.

Originally published at Casaubon’s Book.

But of course, as Rod Dreher and Carolyn Baker point out, so far there’s very little from the Obama administration that should make us feel secure that he will shift the status quo. Ultimately, Hillary, Geithner and the rest of the crew mostly can be described as people who did things not as badly as George W. Bush and his Cabinet, but that’s hardly saying anything of note.

I was in college when Bill Clinton was elected president, and I was almost alone in my social circle in refusing to volunteer for him. I’d supported a more leftist candidate in the primaries, and despite my acute desire to believe that Clinton would offer some kind of radical change, I couldn’t quite shake the reality of his positions. The same is true of Obama, who, for example, wrote of dealing with the mortgage crisis in terms of the moral hazard of bailing out homeowners, but appears to have few qualms about bailing out banks.

I had precisely the same feeling during this campaign. I preferred Obama to Hillary Clinton, and there were genuinely moments of hopefulness in his campaign. But riffing on the late, great Molly Ivins: You have to dance with them that brung you. That is, Obama couldn’t possibly come to power without indebting himself to people who are more invested in the status quo than in improving lives.

In order to be the president many of us hoped Obama would be, he would have to be willing to betray many of the people who brought him and dismiss their hopes and investments in his future. This is no easy feat for anyone, and it is probably less so for someone who came so far, so fast, with the hand of so many.

But presidents are known by the company they keep — the reality is that no man can supervise all the elements of the nation alone — they depend enormously on appointees. He will rely on reports and summaries from those he appoints, and those summaries will be given by men whose viewpoints are already formed. Vilsack cannot but describe our food system through the lens of his prior investments, and this will be disastrous.

In 2002, the Atlantic ran a story by Mark Bowden called "Tales of the Tyrant," which described what it was like to be a dictator and imagined how Saddam Hussein’s situation must lead inevitably to his downfall. The deepest reason, Bowden argued, was that everyone lied to the dictator all the time — they couldn’t do anything else.

It is true that our presidents don’t routinely throw out advisors who tell unpleasant truths, but even the best of them are surrounded, not so much by people who lie all the time, but by people who tell their truth as though it were "the" truth. To some degree, of course, this is inevitable — everyone’s worldview is shaped by their experiences. But it is possible to bring in a diversity of viewpoints, to find, in multiple versions of the truth, something closer to reality.

Obama has overwhelmingly chosen one, very narrow set of viewpoints — the viewpoints of people who have power now and to whom he is already indebted for his power. I don’t claim that there is no hope for Obama, but before he chose these people to surround him, there was hope that an ordinary man of integrity, hearing a range of viewpoints, might choose something different. Now, we have to imagine that Obama is an extraordinary man, one with the power to find unconventional paths to knowledge and the willingness to override the viewpoints in which he has invested himself. It gets harder to hope for change.

—–

Last weekend my family and I appeared in the New York Times as victims (or perhaps purveyors) of a new mental illness, “carborexia.” Apparently this is the pathological inability to produce sufficient carbon, an environmental mania so extreme that it transforms ordinary lives into obsessive madness.

The article began with the fact that my son Simon is deprived of the great American pastime because it is a half-hour drive to a league that doesn’t have games on the Jewish Sabbath (poor kid, he has to play catch with his parents and pick up games with his friends and brothers — in fact, he and one of his friends actually broke one of our front windows yesterday with a particularly nice hit). The language of the article included the term “huddle together for warmth” to describe the fact that my young kids sleep together in both warm and cold weather. All of this operated to implicitly imply that I’m abusing my kids in my pursuit of a lower energy life. And since even implied accusations of child abuse and mental illness are a potent weapon in this society, I wouldn’t be shocked if you did think I was crazy and a bad mom.

My first inclination was to fire back with the accusation that instead, most Americans may be suffering from a pathology called “carbulimia” in which they gorge themselves on energy — twice as much as Europeans, who often have a similar or higher standard of living and level of happiness — and then effectively vomit up the excess, deriving no benefit and often causing actual harm to their health and hope for the future. But this doesn’t quite get at the issue either — it just continues the Times’ trivializing of real eating disorders and their sufferers, and it adds another dumb and dissonant faux-disease to the cultural lexicon. Definitely not what is most needed. Moreover, most of us don’t take in huge quantities of energy for its own sake; we use it because that’s how our society is structured and how we’ve been taught to meet our needs. We use most of our energy because we’re not sure how to do anything else.

Debating which extreme is pathological doesn’t help us find a functional way of life. And that is what is desperately needed. Quickly. NASA’s chief climate scientist James Hansen has argued that we need to reach 350 ppm within a decade, and we’re already at nearly 390 ppm. The arctic ice is already in the danger zone, Greenland is showing increasing melting signs, and methane is being released from upper levels of arctic permafrost. Meanwhile, there are signs that we may have passed the world peak in crude oil production, and the volatile price of energy has helped drive us into a recession.

The governments of China, India, and Russia have all announced that they have no intention of taking major steps to reduce their climate impact while wealthy Americans, Canadians, and Australians consume all they want. They argue that they are trying to bring their populace out of poverty, and that we who produce the largest per capita emissions need to make our reductions first.

We argue with them that we won’t reduce our standard of living, that “the American way of life is non-negotiable,” in part because we are frightened by the idea of changing our way of life into something unfamiliar. Thus we enter a global game of chicken — they won’t change until we do, and we won’t change because we don’t want to live like poorer people. Never mind that we are condemning our own children to greater poverty as larger and larger parts of their income will be required to mitigate unfettered climate change. This is known as “cutting off your nose to spite your face,” and it is pretty much our current climate policy. That’s going to have to change.

The only hope we have to make rapid changes, on the scale necessary to achieve the 350 goal, is to put every tool we have on the table. We need to invest as much as we can in things like massive reinsulation, renewable energy, and public resources. We need to use sustainable agriculture, reforestation, and the preservation of existing rainforests forests to pull carbon out of the atmosphere.

But these will not be enough. We cannot make this sort of shift in under 10 years on renewable energy development alone. It would be nice if we could, or if we had 50 years to do this, but we don’t have the time and resources, and there is no point in mourning the time we wasted. We have better things to do.

What is going to be needed is a rapid shift in the American dream and the American way of life. Without that shift, there is no hope that China, India, and Russia will forswear coal or make other changes. Unless we can look poorer nations in the eye and say we’ve met our targets, we’ll all pay the price together.

Without a model for a good, sustainable, and happy American life that produces 50-90 percent less carbon — not from costly technologies that simply can’t be put in place in time, but from ordinary practices of daily life that can — we’re doomed. If we believe that living a sustainable life makes us crazy, or forces us to live in misery and poverty, we face misery and poverty for future generations all over the world.

The good thing is that the good American life isn’t so very far away. In 1945 we used 80 percent less energy per household than we do now. Your parents and grandparents lived that way. They heated the rooms they used most often and closed off the other ones, wore sweaters, and walked more than they drove. They took the bus. They ate less meat. They grew victory gardens and ate food grown near them. They shared with their neighbors more, and they worked together on what was then the greatest challenge facing the world: the rise of fascism.

What is most needed isn’t a move to the third world; it is a return to a familiar past. There are plenty of Americans living right now who grew up like my kids are today. Instead of being driven to ball practice, they played baseball with other kids in their yard, and helped their parents weed the victory garden. They wore warm clothes in the winter and slept outside in the yard in a tent when it got too hot inside instead of clicking on the air conditioner. Many grew up like my kids on farms, or spent their afternoons playing outside on the sidewalk or among the trees rather than sitting inside watching tv or playing video games. They walked or biked places. They mostly ate food from their family gardens or from local truck farms near their homes rather than processed foods and take-out. Maybe a few of you even remember that kind of childhood.

Don’t get me wrong — I’m not a perfect mom, and my kids don’t live in fairyland. We too struggle to find balance between the good in our energy use and the things we can afford to discard without doing harm. We don’t always get everything right, but we’re trying. The reason I agreed to allow a photographer to come to our farm was that I believe that the very first step to moving toward a sustainable life is being able to imagine ways of getting there without the fear that it means unimaginable hardship. I had hoped that they might even show that we’re having fun because we are.

As a society, we’ve come so far away from our lower energy life that we now think that the past is uninhabitable — that we can’t go home again. And it certainly isn’t as simple as flipping on the way-back machine. It requires thought, practice, and time, small steps and failures, experiments, and discussions with friends who care about the same things. It requires an investment of time and energy. But the past isn’t so very far away, either. It would be a mistake to think that a life with less energy is so distant, so unimaginable that we cannot conceive of inhabiting that space. Instead, it is something we can get to with a bit of commitment and energy, with allies and imagination and creativity.

Maybe my way isn’t right; I don’t know. I know doing it exactly my way isn’t for everyone — we need city models of the sustainable life and suburban ones as much as we need me and my garden and our goats. We need versions adapted to different ethnicities, faiths, and cultures, but we need all of these, and we need them badly because as much of our future depends on our creating renewable energies or reinsulating homes. It depends at least as much on ordinary people transforming their lives with lifestyles with which the whole world can live.

It is a pity that we’ve heard so much about one half of the equation (the electric cars and renewable grid) and so little about this very basic question: How will we live? How will we go on in a way that sustains us and creates a sustainable future for our posterity? How will we find a way home to our past and our future simultaneously? How will we find an equitable way out of our terrible dilemma?

I don’t claim to have all the answers — heck, maybe I am crazy, because I truly think that this could be accomplished — but I’m enjoying the process of making it happen. I do think that there are some answers available here and here for those who care enough to try.

There is simply no more important issue than food facing the world in the next decades. And “facing the world” doesn’t mean “something we can conveniently leave to others” — it faces each of us directly.

I want to talk here about two things: First, I want to address anyone who may still have the lingering sense that dinner isn’t really as important as how to keep transportation going or where to drill. Because dinner has long been the territory of women, as women entered the workplace in the 20th century dinner became the territory of no one. Now, we are only just beginning to realize that we do have to understand food, to be familiar with it, and to have a relationship to its creation. We are only just discovering, as Lord Byron put it, that much does depend on dinner.

The power of our food system is this. Up to 12 percent of our total fossil fuel use is linked to the food system. More than 35 percent of our total greenhouse gas emissions are linked to our food system. Our hope of controlling climate change or chance of avoiding a world in which many people simply die from lack of food access depends on the creation of a system that can withstand the coming shifts in climate, energy costs, food availability, and worldwide depression. Without basic food security, we can expect radical political change — people looking for scapegoats, governments overthrown, acts of war, violence, etc. Without basic food security we can expect to see a lost generation, hungry kids all over the world stunted developmentally, children dead, anger rising, people unable to address the coming crisis because they are too weak — their mental development was shaped by hunger, they were too hungry to learn about citizenship because they are too angry, and too hopeless because as Gandhi said, they can see God only in the form of bread. So yes, dinner is just that important.

Why mention cooking and food preservation? What not focus on growing food? There are a couple of reasons. The first is that there are already many people and organizations who focus on the production of food. The distribution of food has the attention of many groups — community gardeners, victory garden groups like Kitchen Gardens International, food and farming experts, and millions of ordinary people who are starting to see how important it is that we focus on the agricultural system. Michael Pollan wrote in this week’s New York Times about the ways that food production needs to be at the forefront of our policy initiatives.

The second reason is that we have enough food already to feed the whole world. It is true that we need to increase yields in some of the poorer places of the world, but food access and preservation are as central to ensuring food security as greater production.

I’m focusing on the quieter end of this, the aspect of food security that hasn’t as yet gotten the attention it so desperately needs. Worldwide, nearly one-third of all the food we produce is lost before it can be consumed. It is lost in the fields because there is no one to harvest it — as in some U.S. states this year due to a decline in migrant labor — or transport delays and shortages, pest damage, or lack of the right tools for low-energy food preservation.

In the U.S., millions of people suffer food insecurity in part because they do not know how to cook low-cost staple foods, or how to make use of leftovers and parts of vegetables not commonly eaten. In the U.S. our food security may well come to depend on local food systems, but most Americans who “eat local” do so only during the harvest season because they have no idea how to preserve food or to minimize loss.

In the poor world, children suffer poor nutrition and hunger because the food their parents grow cannot be preserved. They have no access to basic tools or fuel for cooking and preserving due to deforestation. In the rich world, children suffer poor nutrition and hunger because no one knows how to cook, preserve, or feed themselves, so we eat cheap, toxic, fast, and processed food at high cost.

I write a lot about growing food too, but today I want to draw attention to the urgent problem of making the best possible use of the food we do have. To minimize waste, to support the local food systems we will depend on in the new economy, to cook — that most ordinary work of human beings, which makes the difference between the normal development of children and decent nutrition and good health — and to prevent the disastrous loss of health and future, we can preserve the abundance of food we have.

This is one of the ways that everyone can take part. We can all learn to store and preserve food. We can all learn to cook. We can learn to use basic staples as our primary source of food, leaving rich foods like meats for festivals and celebratory occasions. We can share food with our neighbors and strengthen local communities when we sit down for a meal together.

We can save a bit of money on our grocery bills by eating what is local, abundant, and basic, and give that money to the increasing number of people in our neighborhoods and the world who need a helping hand just to eat, and to groups that provide appropriate techniques and technologies that allow the poor to preserve more of their food. We can share our knowledge and our techniques with others and help them out of growing poverty. We can take the appalling quantity of wasted food and eat more of it, creating greater equity in the world and reducing methane in landfills. We can come closer to the use of a fair share and leave more for others.

For developed and undeveloped nations alike, there is no question that food security will be the central issue in the coming decades. I applaud the attention that agriculture is receiving on this World Food Day, and I draw your attention to the equally urgent problem of the lack of cooking and preserving food to address food security.

What are the chances that we’re going to constrain our use of coal, so that we can avoid this tipping point? So far, the world is engaged in a massive build-out of coal infrastructure, that has been only slightly, if at all, constrained by environmental awareness. Despite Al Gore’s call for 100 percent renewable electricity, the general path seems to be toward more coal usage, not less.

As winter approaches in the North, we begin to see how peak oil doesn’t just work for the climate, it works against us. Coal stove sales are up — my local AgWay recently posted a cheery sign saying “We Now Carry Coal”– and so are wood stove installations,which include reinstallations of older, inefficient stoves from the 70s and 80s. Long wait-lists and high prices for newer stoves drive people to heavily polluting wood stoves and thus to cut more forests to feed them.

Electric space heaters, powered by coal-fired electricity, are likely to be the saviors of many freezing households. Instead of getting closer to Gore’s goal, increasing gas prices drive customers off of comparatively cleaner fuels and on to coal fired electricity. The actual number of generating sources required to get anywhere even remotely near 100 percent renewable energy and meet demand is rising faster than the capacity for renewable energy generation.

Will customers care enough about climate to change to bear being cold in the winter and hot in the summer? Will they tolerate rising electric costs without demanding more cheaper coal? Will the preponderance of our populace democratically choose to accept less energy, and its matching lower economic growth for the good of the world? And will China, India, and other nations do so? It is not impossible, but we didn’t do it when oil and natural gas were plentiful. It is about to get much harder to do these things.

Meanwhile, one of the consequences of the energy peak is its widespread economic impact. The cost of energy, along with other factors, is driving many nations into recession — or worse. The U.S. economy is doing well only in comparison to some much worse-off economies — and the word “Depression” is being bandied about more and more. Meanwhile, more and more of our funds are being allocated to bailing out financial institutions, instead of the kind of massive investment in renewable infrastructure that is required. While we’ve lived on the principle that there is always more money — money is tied to energy, and it may be that for the U.S. — there isn’t always enough money for massive public investments. Again, the shift away from coal is looking further and further away.

The ugly truth is that peak oil and peak natural gas are going to push us toward coal very hard while we’re struggling to get away from it. What we could not do when both oil and gas were plentiful, and cheap energy fueled a booming economy will only be harder in a recession, as energy prices rise and the incentives to use the coal become greater.

How might we avoid a climate disaster? I think it is clearly time to stop selling the narrative that we can all keep things going much as they have been. The “no one has to make sacrifices, everything will be essentially the same, just driven by solar panels and windmills” account that the public has been given of climate change must be replaced with one that acknowledges that sacrifices will be required, and that contextualizes those sacrifices, just as the sacrifices of the World Wars were once contextualized.

Unless we draw together the links between climate change and peak oil clearly, and help people understand what they already viscerally know — that this is costing them — we cannot even remotely hope to bring the public around to the new reality. The only hope is a narrative in which self-sacrifice and powerful conservation now ensures a tolerable future for our posterity. That discussion cannot even begin until climate activists stop talking about the shift to renewables as though it will be comparatively simple and painless and start acknowledging the pain already out there.

It points out the deep danger we’re in — how teetery both the world and America’s food and energy systems are. It is well worth a read, particularly because of its clear articulation of the bind we’re in — the strategies we’ve used in the past to get out of disaster will only accelerate collapse in the long-term.. The tools we’re using to get more food out of the ground take food from the future.

The analogy that I’ve been using for some time is the comparison to the seawater used to extract oil in the Ghawar and other aging giant oilfields. Matt Simmons, the world’s expert on this subject, argues that you can make the oil production levels look good for a while — but the seawater you pump in only accelerates the day that disaster strikes. That’s true of our agriculture — at this point, we’re in a losing race between expanding food production and climate change — all the conventional strategies for growing more food push us faster and faster towards the day that the planet can produce much, much less food. Every bite of food we eat now through conventional means takes food out of the mouths of our children.

I think many people, deep in their hearts, think that ecological disasters apply mostly to other people. But, of course, as Midwesterners are finding out right now, that’s not true. And it isn’t over — every image of floodwaters we see is brown — washing precious topsoil away, and pushing artificial fertilizers into water tables. And the rest of us will be thoroughly schooled in that lesson as well, most likely.

So how do we avoid becoming North Korea? Are there personal or policy approaches that can fix this? Could you have guessed that I have some suggestions, some obvious, some perhaps not.

The first one is obvious: We need to get the oil and gas out of agriculture — and rapidly. Farmers are already struggling to afford the fossil fueled inputs that are required for conventional agriculture, and industrial organic agriculture is almost as dependent on fossil fuels as conventional. All the fossil fuels — especially artificial nitrogen — that we use are preventing future generations from eating. Heck, it won’t take until future generations grow up; most of us under 50 will probably live to see it.

We’re seeing now just how oil and natural gas costs reverberate through the food system, and while it is possible to use wise forms of management to reduce those reverberations, the only possible way to stabilize the food supply and separate it from volatile energy prices is to end the dependency of the food supply on fossil fuels. We know that this is possible — besides the study mentioned in the paper above, other studies, including one last year at University of Michigan and a host of others have shown that organic agriculture can match and exceed yields. Moreover, organic practices that match yields in optimal seasons often exceed conventional yields in times of plant stress — that is organic soils rich in matter hold up better to drought, heavy rains and other difficult conditions. It isn’t a panacea, but in a world where drought and flooding are inevitable, we need the best cultural practices possible.

But doing this involves replacing the oil and gas with people — that is, when Cuba moved to organic agriculture, it matched and exceeded agricultural yields on small farms. But the large collective farms owned by the state never could match yields — one of the agronomists concluded that “farms of this scale are not easily compatible with organic production.” And that’s the problem: We can get our need for fossil fuels in agriculture down quite low, but we can’t do it without paying more people a living wage to grow food. And no, this isn’t just me, the UNESCO report made essentially the same claims.

Which brings me to the second conclusion: Gardens are even more essential in the fossil transition than they may be overall. Think about it — food prices are already high — a shift in our economy towards more agricultural labor, and paying farmers better will keep food prices reasonably high, and involve large scale economic changes. That means the cheapest food out there is going to be food grown by those who are not depending on it to make a living — who grow food for subsistence or for very small scale sales on their own land or on community land. And because they are less dependent on either hired labor or fossil fuels, gardens are the future of affordable food in the U.S. Will they meet every need? No. But they can make the difference between getting by and widespread hunger.

The next point is perhaps a bit less obvious. A few years ago, in my paper “The Ethics of Biofuels” almost no one noticed that one of my principles was that we had to shift our “biofuel” priorities from corn and soybeans for ethanol and biodiesel to … trees. For wood. And perhaps even more importantly, for climate stabilization and for erosion control and soil repair. The home heating crisis I’ve been discussing for years is beginning. And there is the real danger that the U.S. will deforest itself nearly as badly trying to keep warm as North Korea did trying to grow food. The long term consequences of that would be horrifying.

Thus, instead of pushing to grow food on marginal land, moving Crop Protected soils into production (which we’re seeing now), we need to use hilly and marginal lands to grow forests, ideally forests at least partly composed of edible protein, oil, and other crops. We will need the wood, as home heating moves back to biofuels. We will also need the erosion control — Midwestern fields once had hedgerows, that could stop the flow of soil, provide space for wildlife, and wood for stoves. Bringing back the hedgerows might be a beginning strategy.

In already forested areas, the struggle is going to be for management. And that’s going to have to be a big, big focus of our energies. The thing is, it gets bloody cold up here, and most of us have gotten used to “room temperature” being a heck of a lot warmer than it was in any other period of human history during northern winters. The temptation to burn just a little more is going to be vast. But we can’t — the pollution will be a disaster, and the deforestation worse.

So we’re going to have to strictly self-regulate our forests — and plant new ones as fast as we can. And since this is not likely to make it on to the public agenda anytime soon, we’re going to have to do it on our own, on the small pieces of soil we tend.

It wouldn’t be easy for us to turn into North Korea — it would take a lot of bad management. But it wouldn’t be so hard we couldn’t do it, either. We’ve got to do better.

Previously posted at www.sharonastyk.com

It has occurred to me that there must be a simple way of explaining peak oil to everyone — but most solutions have concentrated on creating a single simple method of explaining peak oil, when what is needed is a highly specialized approach, designed to help people grasp the issue in the most basic terms imaginable. Being a helpful sort, I have undertaken to provide those explanations. Thus, all you need to do is evaluate the person you are explaining things too, and from there, insert the proper explanation, using my handy list.

If the person is a lot like Homer Simpson:

The way to explain it is: “Beer comes from oil. You use oil to run tractor to grow barley. You use oil to run fermenting equipment. You use oil to ship beer to liquor store. You use gas, made from oil, to drive drunk to the store to get beer. No oil means no more beer — ever.”

The solution you offer: More beer good. Beer comes from oil. Must. Save. Beer.

If the person is a lot like A Soccer Mom:

The way to explain it: “Yes, I heard how awful it was that the coach criticized your Christina — I agree, he was completely out of line to hurt her self esteem like that. Speaking of self-esteem, did you know I’ve lost 11 lbs on the 100-mile diet? I feel great, and I fit into some clothes I haven’t worn since Jared was born. All that fresh produce and unprocessed food has been so wonderful — Mike says I look younger, too, and it seems to improve my skin. And Jennifer is a lot less hyperactive since we’ve been biking everywhere. And Lisa is writing her college application essay on the impact of our environmental lifestyle changes. My friend Rita who is a guidance counselor told me that this will really help differentiate her from all the soccer players and school newspaper writers for the people at Yale. Green is the new black, you know.”

The solution you offer: You will be thinner, happier, sexier, and your kids will be smarter if you do this stuff. Oh, and btw, it saves energy, too.

If the person is a lot like Rush Limbaugh:

The way to explain it: “Evil people in China and India are burning up all of America’s oil. Those selfish bastards are trying to compete with us just so that they can have running water, and the Democrats in Congress won’t let us nuke them like we really should. They are trying to prove that Americans can’t compete without a lot of energy. We need to prove that we’re better than they are, with or without oil, because God loves America best. With Jesus to help us conserve, we don’t have to have oil.”

The solution you offer: Conservation is patriotic, and a good way to stick it to people in other countries.

If the person is a lot like Paris Hilton:

The way to explain it: “Without oil to manufacture TV sets, run Entertainment Tonight and power all that TV, no one will watch what you do. No one will care if you have sex on the internet, go to jail, or kill Britney Spears with your bare hands while mud wrestling on reality TV. Yes, you’ll probably still be rich enough to buy oil, but all the good hotels will be having brownouts, and everyone will be so busy trying to get along that they won’t care about you. Oh, and if they get a chance, you servants will probably kill and eat your little rat-dog.”

The solution you offer: “Think how much attention Angelina Jolie got by adopting all those poor kids. Maybe you should take some of your money and bring renewable power to a whole city in India. You could have a series on almost any network but Fox about making your home environmentally sound and helping poor people get access to renewable energy.”

If the person is a lot like Grandpa Simpson:

The way to explain it: “You know, back in the old days we didn’t have all this newfangled technology crap. We just did good, hard work, and knew the value of a dollar. Back then we didn’t need TV or cell phones or cars. We didn’t sit around downloading music from that there internet; we had real music, in real speakeasies, and we danced for hours. And that pornography on that there filthy computer — in our day, we had to do real work to see naked women, carve real peep holes through rock-hard chestnut boards. Kids these days wouldn’t know what to do with a hoe or a horse or a jackknife if it bit them in the ass. We need legislation to get them off the streets and back onto the farms!”

What to suggest: national service programs, chain gangs and Victory Gardens.

If the person is an Aging Hippie:

What to say: “You were right about everything. Absolutely everything. Growing your own food. Renewable energy. The economy. Drugs. How sexy greying ponytails are. Not trusting old people … oh wait …” Well, almost everything.

What to suggest: Stop looking so smug.

If the person is an Economist:

The way to explain it: “OK, just for a moment, let me ask you to suspend your belief for just a moment. Imagine that unicorns and fairies roam the forests, that the sun goes around the earth and that the U.S. has a meaningful third party. OK, now imagine that it is just possible that we can’t actually substitute grain for gasoline, or benzene for water. And further imagine that people dying is bad, even if it seems like it is good for the economy.”

What to suggest: Give up now.

If the Person is Your Dubious Spouse:

The way to explain it: “I’m doing this because I love you and I want us to have a positive future. Preparing for a low energy future will definitely bring us closer together and make our marriage stronger, happier, and sexier. I can’t think of anything more romantic than discussing our feelings, the current depletion rate, and the latest apocalyptic novel while canning okra in the 90-degree heat. And I think you are never more beautiful than when you are putting up rainwater cachement.”

What to suggest: A literal roll in the hay. Move the scythe first.

If the person is The President of the United States:

What to say: Ask Dick. He’ll explain it to you.

What to suggest: Invade Venezuela, Iran, Russia, Mexico, and Norway by Thursday.

Originally posted at www.sharonastyk.com.

There are quite a few people who hear that the energy peak or climate change is coming and believe that building up their stocks of ammo and heading for the hills is the way to go. I recognize, even if I do not share, that impulse: It is the impulse to protect your own, the panic you feel when you realize that your society, which on some level is supposed to protect you, hasn’t planned ahead for this one. And so there’s a tendency of people to get into discussions about what happens when refugees or hungry folk come around, and a lot of times the answer is that you have to protect your own again. Protect your own means “shoot people,” in many cases.

And there are clearly some times that protecting your own will be necessary, as there are today. But I also think that sometimes this is a product of reading too many science fiction novels. You know the kind: the end of the world comes suddenly, either because alien space bats change the laws of physics, or the giant asteroid hits the earth, or whatever, and all of a sudden, 99 percent of the population of the earth conveniently dies off, and then it is left to the survivors to recreate the world with their new religion (à la Octavia Butler), their coincidentally spared nuclear power plant, and handy astrophysicist (Niven and Pournelle), the SCA (Stirling) or something or other else. In these books, you always know somehow that if you don’t save every single crust of bread, your loved ones will starve to death, so it is a moral choice to say no to the wandering beggars. In fact, it is fairly moral, generally speaking, to do anything but eat them because, after all, every refugee is a threat. And in the books, they usually have swords and big guns.

Well, I can’t swear life will never be like this, but it is worth noting that in many hungry places in the world, including New Orleans in 2005, refugees were actually much more vulnerable to violence than they were aggressive. Despite the stories of rape and murder and mayhem (which turned out to be mostly nonsense), and the people standing by their doors with big guns, most of the most desperately needy people did nothing more than wait politely, weep, beg for help, and maybe sing a little. And that’s true of most refugees in the world — these desperate people race across borders, trying to escape disaster or terrible violence, and they don’t attack those around them — they wait and pray for a little food. And yet we’re terrified of them.

During the Great Depression, thousands of young men and women took to the rails because they were hungry and had no jobs. While they did occasionally commit acts of violence and fairly often stole small amounts of food, generally speaking these young people were much more likely to be abused than to do serious harm. They were thrown out of towns into the cold with no food, because the law said no one who didn’t live there could have the sun go down on them. They were raped and beaten up by other refugees and by locals. They were thrown in jail and set on chain gangs for the offense of being homeless. Writing about it later, many of them told stories of going to soup lines and being cast out hungry because the town said that there was nothing for anyone but their own. A young man tells a story in David Shannon’s The Great Depression of traveling through the Midwest all winter without a coat of any kind, visiting relief services and asking if anyone could give him a coat. He never got one.

Now, it is possible that none of these places had a coat to give. It is possible that adding one more bone and two more potatoes to the soup pot would mean someone’s child died of hunger — I don’t know. But I think it’s more likely that when things get hard for us, we often panic — we look at what we have and we see all the terrible things that could happen — and so we hold on hard to what we have, regardless of the consequences to others.

These issues are about to gain a new currency with us. The estimates for climate change-induced refugees rise between the hundreds of millions and the billions. The truth is that even if we act now, the world is going to be newly full of people moving about, and their survival is going to depend on our relationship to those groups.

Unlike the novels, though, we’ll probably never know for sure that we’ll always have enough — there isn’t any way to be sure, sometimes, whether there will be more tomorrow. So how do we know whether to share, whether to greet the stranger with a gun or a plate? How do we know, if things change and the world seems uncertain, how to respond to one another?

Well, the world was once much poorer than we are, and there was a fairly universal set of rules for this: the exact opposite one from the ones we tend to assume may pertain. Right now, when we in America are richer than most kings of old, we assume that our job is to hold on tightly to what we have.

But in my faith (I’m a Jew), and every single other religion and in secular stories, we hear the tale of the stranger in disguise. The stranger who appears in the form of someone desperately poor and in need, and who turns out to be a god, or an angel in disguise. Those who turn the stranger away are punished. Those who welcome them are rewarded.

In Judaism, it is Elijah who walks the world in the form of a stranger. Each year, at Pesach, just as the first new foods are coming but before we are overwhelmed with plenty, we are to open our doors and call out that all who are hungry should come and eat. A few years ago, I was teaching Hebrew school to fourth and fifth graders, and I asked them what they would do if, in their comfortable suburb, someone were to come through the door and ask to join them. Almost universally, they were horrified at the thought of sitting down at the table with someone strange who actually needed food badly enough to come in off the streets. They felt that such a person would inevitably be dangerous. Most of the children said that their families don’t really call out and don’t really leave the door open.

That, I think, is where we are at in our society. I’m not arguing against prudence and care or saying that we will always have enough to give away without thought. But we are very rich now, and I think it is worth remembering that in every society and faith, the obligation to welcome the stranger and offer them something even in the face of our own hardship is central to our beliefs. We need to be wary of a false senses of scarcity — yes, plan for the future, store food, create a reserve. But recognize that in many cases, that reserve is for sharing, not for holding close.

The stories aren’t always religious: Sometimes it is the good king or another of power who travels in the guise of the poor. It doesn’t really matter. They are designed to teach us that nothing is ever certain, that we can never have enough for everything we need. We are supposed, in our vulnerability, to be willing to risk something for another both because it is right and also because we too have been strangers.

Jews are frequently reminded we have been strangers many, many times, but I think even in our minority culture we have forgotten what that strangeness means. And the future, with all its difficulties, means that none of us can be certain that we will remain privileged and comfortable. You can prepare perfectly and still lose your home to rising sea levels or lack of water; you can do everything right and have bad things befall you. There are things we cannot control.

So each of us must live in the world as though we will someday be the stranger who turns to another for a hand. And each of us must be willing to offer one, if we expect to receive it. This is much more risky than greeting the hungry with violence or indifference. It is more difficult than talking about “them” the nameless hordes we fear. It is frightening. It is hard. What if the stranger who comes in to the door is angry, or smelly, or frightening? What if, despite our best rational precautions, harm is done? But then again, what if we do harm to an innocent other by allowing our fear to shape our thinking too much? And what if the stranger at our doorstep is Elijah, to see if we have the courage of those who came before us?

Originally published at www.sharonastyk.com.

“On Tigger’s back!  And Tiggers can’t climb downwards, because their tails get in the way, only upwards, and Tigger forgot about that when we started, and he’s only just remembered.  So we’ve got to stay here for ever and ever — unless we go higher.  What did you say, Tigger?  Oh, Tigger says if we go higher we shan’t be able to see Piglet’s house so well, so we’re going to stop here.”

– A.A. Milne, “The House At Pooh Corner”

My kids were out climbing trees yesterday, supervised by Eric and our visiting friend and my honorary brother, “Uncle” Jesse.  Isaiah really wanted to climb up to a particular spot, but couldn’t get there on little four-year-old legs.  Jesse helped him up part of the way, and then told him he had to do it himself or be content with where he could get to.  Jesse observed, “I wanted to give him a boost, but only up to a place he could get back down from himself.”

I was struck by what a useful metaphor and perhaps even principle was embodied in that casual statement.  I was also reminded, perhaps because I’ve now read Winnie the Pooh to my children approximately 1,000 times, of the classic representation of what happens when you climb up and can’t climb down. If you can forgive the cuteness, it does seem apt.

Let us imagine ourselves climbing up a rather steep and precarious tree, boosted up by fossil energies into a place we simply could never get to without them. The problems we are facing right now all originate in our fundamental inability to voluntarily set limits — that is, at no point did most of us even recognize the basic necessity of stopping at a point at which we could get down on our own, without our petrocarbon helpers. So right now we look like Tiggers high in the trees — we can climb up, but we can’t climb down. Is the problem our fear or that our tails (our structural addictions to energy) get in the way? It can be hard to tell. But what is not terribly hard to tell is that one way or another, we have to come down — and probably quite rapidly. The goal is to avoid a painful “thud” upon descent.

Why do we have to come down? Well, there are two compelling reasons. The first is this: We can’t keep burning fossil fuels, period. And we have very little time to make our choices. The evidence for this has been building up steadily over the last two years, but the paper that James Hansen presented a few weeks ago pretty much put the final nail in the coffin — the old targets for carbon reduction are far too high, and we are going to essentially have to reduce industrial emissions to near zero, and very soon. As Bill McKibben argues in his recent essay “Civilization’s Last Chance” in the L.A. Times:

Here’s the thing. Hansen didn’t just say that if we didn’t act, there was trouble coming. He didn’t just say that if we didn’t yet know what was best for us, we’d certainly be better off below 350 ppm of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

His phrase was: “if we wish to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed.” A planet with billions of people living near those oh-so-floodable coastlines. A planet with ever-more vulnerable forests. (A beetle, encouraged by warmer temperatures, has already managed to kill 10 times more trees than in any previous infestation across the northern reaches of Canada this year. This means far more carbon heading for the atmosphere and apparently dooms Canada’s efforts to comply with the Kyoto protocol, which was already in doubt because of its decision to start producing oil for the U.S. from Alberta’s tar sands.)

We’re the ones who kicked the warming off; now the planet is starting to take over the job. Melt all that Arctic ice, for instance, and suddenly the nice white shield that reflected 80 percent of incoming solar radiation back into space has turned to blue water that absorbs 80% of the sun’s heat. Such feedbacks are beyond history, though not in the sense that Francis Fukuyama had in mind.

And we have, at best, a few years to short-circuit them — to reverse course. Here’s the Indian scientist and economist Rajendra Pachauri, who accepted the Nobel Prize on behalf of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year (and, by the way, got his job when the Bush administration, at the behest of Exxon Mobil, forced out his predecessor): “If there’s no action before 2012, that’s too late. What we do in the next two to three years will determine our future. This is the defining moment.”

Even McKibben acknowledges that we may be too late — that we may have already condemned our children to a planet radically different than the one we live on now — and not different in a good way. He observes the simple truth that we don’t have a choice but to struggle now for the best possible outcome, because a whole lot is at stake. McKibben is working on precisely this objective with Project 350, and I have hopes that the members of my baby, the Riot for Austerity, will eventually work with them, raising the profile of the “you don’t have to wait — you can live in now” contingent.

There’s another reason we have to get down from the tree: the simple fact that we are increasingly being priced out of energy markets. The combination of the dollar’s fall, the growing depression and a growing deflation means that energy is being rationed by price — and more and more of us are in danger of experiencing real shortages of energy for meeting basic needs. Whether those shortages of food, energy, or other resources arise from absolute shortages or simply because of inequity and our price rationing system doesn’t really matter. The simple fact is that we must either find useful ways to climb down rapidly or simply pitch out of our tree as rising costs make the crisis acute.

There is a great deal of talk about the potential of this renewable technology or another, about how if we just do this and this and this, we can get carbon emissions down, or help people adapt. Generally speaking, these plans fail to take into account several factors. That doesn’t make them impossible, it simply reduces their likelihood of success. They are:

1. The sheer scope of the problem.  This is partly denial and partly the fact that the science has changed so rapidly.  Eight months ago, the major narrative was still 550 or 450 ppm would suffice for carbon reduction.

   Achieving those levels was extraordinarily difficult, but easy compared to achieving 350 ppm — and as Hansen notes, it may be necessary to drop the levels further. Most thinkers still haven’t caught up to the sheer depth of change needed — which would involve pretty much zero industrial emissions, according to U-Victoria researchers. Zero — that is, none. That’s the number that stabilized the climate in their research.

   Then there’s peak oil — for years, we were told that the declines would be a slow and stately 2 percent or so.  Then came Jeffrey Brown’s useful Export Land Model which showed that no, the declines are far steeper.  And, of course, energy costs are playing out in arenas that people didn’t expect, and in ways no one quite predicted, spiking food prices, for example.

2. The scope of all the problems put together.  Nearly everyone doing this work is completely out of their fields on some level (certainly not excluding yours truly).  Climate scientists are usually not petroleum geologists, and vice versa. Neither are usually economists (which is often to the good, but has its downside), and thus expert on how global economic crisis is likely to impact what we can expect to do. Nor are economists, climate scientists, or geologists usually ethicists, or experts in issues of justice, or political scientists.

   It would not be inaccurate to say that no one fully understands what I like to call the “Crisis Ourobouros,” that is, the disaster that is always swallowing its own tail. And because no one fully understands it, and most people are experts only in one area, it is very hard to come to a clear analysis, say, of how a growing credit crisis and reduction in capital lending for massive projects and rises in energy prices will constrain a future build out. The feedback loops don’t just exist within climate change and peak oil, but in the whole of our present situation.

   Although James Hansen and Richard Heinberg respectively have done compelling analyses of how climate change and peak oil are likely to impact one another, they have barely begun to look at the giant iceberg of what faces us.  Thus, we still have conversations about hybrid cars and light bulbs, when we need to eliminate almost all private transport and slash home energy use.

3. How urgent things are. The fact that the Arctic ice may disappear 75 years before IPCC projections, or that the long feared hypothetical methane burp is probably already occurring should give us a clue, but until recently it hasn’t. Although Hansen and Carbon Equity have led the way on this, there has been a widespread perception that we have until 2050 as more conservative IPCC estimates suggest. We don’t.

   And we don’t in several ways. Not only do radical emission cuts have to be made now, we are running up against other constraints.  As capital tightens, the economy struggles and our infrastructure frays, we may well have a very limited period in which we can build renewable energy capacity, or reinsulate homes. It is possible that I am overestimating the shortness of our window — but it is also certain that underestimating is safer for us than overestimating it.

   We may simply have to do some serious triage, recognizing that each of our pet build-out strategies may never come to fruition. The emphasis, then, has to be on strategies that return to us even if they are halted by fossil fuel supply constraints, loss of capital or other crisis. That is, we have to do things that will help us even if we can’t do everything.

4. The costs of the solutions. Most build-out analyses don’t contain a full, fair analysis of their climate implications, a gaping hole in analysis that must be filled. That is, a build out that gets our emissions way down in the long term but does so with an carbon that enables more loss of methane from the permafrost and ultimately doubles carbon equivalents is an unacceptable choice.

   The odds are very good that most truly world-scale build-out strategies will simply turn out to be far too carbon intensive to keep up anything like our present life. For example, my own back-of-the-envelope calculations on one proposed strategy to keep the energy flowing in suggests that we might put an additional 100 billion tons of carbon into the atmosphere doing a build out for a massive desert solar program.

   Any strategies must include their carbon costs — and assume that those costs occur on top of at least partially functioning economy and its carbon costs, since otherwise, capitalization simply won’t occur.

   It may be that we have simply waited too long to have a meaningful renewable build out.  It is almost certainly true that we have waited too long to have one that will be ready to smoothly take our old lifestyle from our new one.  Instead, we face several decades of a drastically altered lifestyle while we cut our usage in anticipation of someday being able to use a bit more, when our build out is complete.

   The other cost that hasn’t been fully calculated is the economic one.  Overwhelmingly we are told that green solutions will be good for the economy.  This is the most errant nonsense of our times — and most analyses in that regard are based on far lower emissions cuts than are even remotely acceptable.  Stabilizing emissions will involve among other things, huge cuts in consumer spending, because there is no way to make a perfectly green VCR, flat screen, or foot massager.  They still use resources — lots of them.  The truth is that consumer spending alone would probably be enough to tip us into major recession, and since we’re already heading that way, the word “depression” is probably appropriate. Whatever we are going to do, we are going to have to do fast, with little money, little credit and careful calculations of emissions costs. This is not happy news, but it is no less correct for being unpleasant.

5. The sheer cowardice of most of us.  The blunt truth is that we are very close to being past the point at which anything will do us any good at all.  And my own sense is that because we’re so close to the verge, many people would rather we imagine ourselves to be well past it, so that they are not required to make the hefty sacrifices.  And most people cringe from the notion of telling an energy-addicted populace that the solutions we have to come up with rapidly probably involve a great deal of hardship, economic suffering and a host of other bad things.  How much easier to argue that we can refine a little on our present situation and essentially have what we have had?

   There are some people with the courage to tell the truth, however almost none of them are elected to office (it is virtually impossible to elect someone who tells hard truths), and those who do tend to be tarred with the brush of apocalyptic fantasists. It is generally easier to talk about technical possibilities than to deal with the real possibility that even technically possible solutions may fail for lack of money, energy, political will or for their potential to crash carbon limits.  This cowardice may, in the end, be our final undoing.

   And it will hurt us not only because of the enormous political difficulties (greater, even than the technical ones) of addressing peak energy or climate change, but also because our fear of mentioning self-sacrifice or deindustrialization makes the political opposition to this situation more acute.  The simple fact is that we are taking precisely the wrong course as we de-emphasize self sacrifice — and everything we do to reinforce the idea that people will have essentially the same lifestyle that they have reinforces their inevitable sense of betrayal.

   What could work — with great difficulty — is for us to enlist our fellows in a great project of courage and self-sacrifice.  People climb mountains, run marathons, march off to be killed at war, and engage in all sorts of grand, painful and difficult challenges because doing so expresses their sense of honor, their courage, their patriotism, their love for others. As long as we fear to call upon one another to sacrifice, as long as we sell the narrative that an essentially similar life is possible, as long as we deny the costs, we will give up the greatest tool we have: the passionate energy of those who are doing what must be done for a better future.

So what tools have we left in this time of great exigency and crisis? What are our options to get out of the tree? How do we get the tails out of the way, and overcome the enormous fear we have when the boosting power is taken away?

To my mind, there are a few relevant principles that are needed to get us to go in the true direction we need to go.

1. In the absence of a full and fair peer-reviewed literature that clearly delineates a best course in a technological sense, the presumption must be towards more conservative estimates. As Hansen notes, we may actually have to get to 300 ppm. That means that the emphasis should be on not making emissions or “negawatts” on a very large scale, on quick reductions rather than slow ones, on widely accessible solutions rather than expensive ones.  The goal must be the dramatic reduction of industrial emissions quite quickly.  The precautionary principle must be put into play routinely in any large scale planning for the future.
2. Renewable energies will be built, but they must be built at a pace that doesn’t put the climate over the edge, and that allows for the fact that future generations may want to use a bit of fossil energy too.

   That is, we cannot blow any limits doing this — our build-out will almost certainly have to be gradual, and probably comparatively slow until the total density of renewables is great enough to power regeneratively — that is, until/if we have enough renewable energies to actually power the construction of more renewables — not in theory, but in reality. In the very short term, this means massive constriction of access to energy, while hopefully, the future of energy for our children is somewhat brighter.  This will be unpopular and difficult, but it is necessary.

3. Human and animal powered technologies can and should fill in the gaps. With 6.6 billion people and growing, human power is the most abundant and underused energy resource on the planet. For systems, such as agriculture and local transport, that can be easily human powered, and in fact, improve in efficiency when human powered (small scale polyculture produces 2-10 times more agricultural output than an equivalent amount of industrially farmed land; a bicycle is by all measures the most efficient means of travel), human power ought to be the default mechanism.

   This will, of course, require a massive restructuring of the economy — paying people well to grow food, and badly to make cheap plastic crap or defend the manufacturers of such crap in court, in complete opposition to everything we’ve set into place. Thus, this will not be easy.

4. All solutions should, as mentioned above, work even if the project cannot be finished or scaled as desired. That is, we need to triage and emphasize projects that are feasible in the current situation within its timescale and other limits, that also get us part way there, even if we can’t go the whole distance. Currently, we have few mechanisms to prioritize, but we need to think hard about what matters most to our quality of life.
5. All solutions must work on a world scale. China and India will not accept a lower standard of living than we have. Neither will Russia. No narrative that includes the underlying idea that we’re going to keep using more energy than most other people can possibly address climate change, period. If we’re going to have fridges, they will. If we’re going to have private cars, they will. Now, it is perfectly possible that China and India and Russia won’t follow our lead, or rather, that they will continue to follow our lead and won’t follow our final change of heart. But there is no hope whatsoever that anyone, in any nation, will ever accept the idea “Oh, we’ll just use more, and you can bear the consequence — you won’t mind, will you?” They mind. So any solution we have has to involve equitable use, period. Otherwise, other nations will attempt to achieve what we have, or they will immigrate to our countries and use what we have had. That way leads to a worldwide game of apocalyptic chicken.

   So when we figure out our plans for the future, they need to look rather like “a fair share,” as little as most of us are accustomed to that thinking.

6. Finally, we are going to have to rethink how high in the tree we can and should be. That is, in many cases, the energy we’ve used hasn’t gotten us nearly as much as we think it has — not in happiness, not in our declining real wealth, not in security. What it has done is get us treed, and give us tails that get in the way of getting out. It has placed us in an enormously vulnerable situation — one that may well cause enormously more misery than doing without the energies in the first place would have. That vulnerability is economic, political, moral, and physical; we now risk a devastating fall. So any future analysis of how the world should look must also take into account the real question of where in the branches we want to stay. It should be low enough that, have we waited too long and courted disaster too badly, any further falls will be merely inconvenient, and not disastrous.

As Milne puts it,

“I thought,” said Piglet earnestly, “that if Eeyore stood at the bottom of the tree, and if Pooh stood on Eeyore’s back, and if I stood on Pooh’s shoulders –”

“And if Eeyore’s back snapped suddenly, then we could all laugh. Ha ha! Amusing in a quiet way,” said Eeyore, “but not really helpful.”

“Well,” said Piglet meekly, “I thought –”

“Would it break your back, Eeyore?” asked Pooh, very much surprised.

“That’s what would be so interesting, Pooh. Not being quite sure till afterwards.”

Since the blunt and painful truth is that we are simply not sure whether we have placed the final straw on the camel’s back, whether we have waited too long with both climate change and peak oil to avert the worst consequences, we must work from a radically different set of principles, and with awareness that what we have done so far is not adequate to the task at hand. We must simultaneously work to avert disaster and prepare for our own failure. As Eeyore notes, that is what will be so very interesting.

Originally posted at www.sharonastyk.com.

Now, at our comparatively low rate of use, I can expect 400 gallons of oil (at $4.13 gallon) to last us at least three years. Could we do without it entirely? Absolutely, but it is a nice cushion — I’m fond of the occasional hot shower, and it means on occasional busy days when we’re out, we don’t have bank the stove for extended periods (and thus create more particulate emissions). It acts as insurance so that the pipes don’t freeze when we’re away. And it means my mother doesn’t have to dress up like the Michelin man to sleep in the back bedrooms the stove doesn’t reach when she’s visiting in the winter. Although at these prices, Mom might have to suck it up, or we’ll move a futon in near the stove.

Since I don’t think oil prices are going down anytime soon, and various sources in the know including OPEC and Goldman-Sachs are predicting $200 barrel oil by the end of this year, this actually doesn’t look like a bad deal. But most people don’t have our fairly casual relationship to their source of heat. And, of course, we cut wood from our property, rather than paying $200-350 a cord as many wood burners do.

The combination of laying out such a huge sum and Gail the Actuary’s latest article on the frailties of the electric grid got me thinking more about an article I wrote a couple of years ago. In “It isn’t grid crash that makes the lights go out,” I argued that most of us should prepare for life without electricity, not out of fear of the loss of the grid but because of a real likelihood that many of us may not be able to afford the electric bill. Unfortunately, I think this prediction is more true now than it was when I wrote the original essay.

Looking at my 2K oil bill, I can foresee what is going to happen to large numbers of my neighbors around their oil and gas bills. It started this winter. Around here, the minimum oil deliveries are 100-125 gallons — it isn’t worth their while to haul out the truck to give you 25 gallons. But as 100 gallons starts to cost $300 or $350, it becomes less likely that low income families can come up with that amount, much less fill a large oil tank.

And most of them don’t see a tank lasting 2 years — the average American household in my region (where our record low is negative 30 degrees) uses almost 500 gallons a year. By fall, if oil prices continue to rise (and there’s no evidence whatsoever that demand will fall, and a good bit of evidence that producers can’t produce more), which seems extremely likely, heating oil is likely to rise to between $5 and $6 per gallon.

That would make even a bridge delivery of 100 gallons cost most of the monthly paycheck for a working-class family. Hell, it would be pretty much all of our discretionary income. And since most families use about 100 gallons a month in the cold weather, that’s going to be a big deal. Already, 16 percent of all Americans plan to use their tax rebates to pay utility bills. National Grid reports that 10 percent of all customers are more than three months overdue on their electric bills, and natural gas companies have similar difficulties. Heating oil companies are going out of business because they can’t collect overdue payments, and those remaining are unlikely to extend credit next fall.

That means the 8 percent of Americans who heat with oil are likely to be casting around for options to allow them to both eat and keep tolerably warm — probably electric space heaters and wood heat. But with wood up at $250 a cord or more in many areas, electric prices rising steadily as well, and capacity tight, tens of thousands of new high demand electric heaters are likely to present problems — both for the private users and for the electric infrastructure as a whole.

As Gail Tverberg’s article suggests, particularly in areas like the Northeast corridor where the grid is already vulnerable, the addition of these loads may represent a real threat to grid stability. Any modernization or added capacity will likely bring prices higher.

The cost of natural gas has also risen over the last few years, with mild winters helping to keep this from entering a crisis situation. But North American gas is already past its peak according to Julian Darley, author of High Noon for Natural Gas, and over the coming years, there are likely to be sharp price rises and competition with Canadians, who, not unreasonably, would like to use their gas for home heating too.

NAFTA trade requirements now have Canada selling most of its natural gas to the U.S. — but one cold winter in which Canadian needs can’t be met is likely to lead to a change in that situation — and if Americans have to rely on their own natural gas, prices will be vastly higher and supply much lower. It is also worth noting the vast rise in proposed new natural gas electric generating plants — we are building our electric capacity based on gas supplies that aren’t terribly secure.

Meanwhile, as people turn to other utilities, replacing their oil bills with natural gas or electric bills, the number of people who are struggle to get by is set to rise for a whole host of reasons — higher food prices, rising unemployment, the stripping of benefits from jobs, rising medical costs for aging baby boomers — the whole shebang. And that means less ability to pay new bills. Which means indebtedness to utility companies. And that means shut-offs. This is likely to be especially acute in cold climate areas, but the American South uses more energy than the North does, and is generally poorer, so this is pretty much an equal opportunity problem, with different periods of seasonal crisis.

Getting shut off is easy. Getting put back on is hard — there are hefty fees from your utility company. Some places charge interest on overdue accounts. In a whole host of ways, once you are in the hole, it is very hard to climb out. Many of us will get into the hole, and some will come out, while others will be stuck there.

What we are seeing is the beginning of the end of many American’s relationship to public utilities. As the costs of food and gasoline rise, and as benefits disappear and medical costs overwhelm many families, people are about to come hard against the costs of their fossil-fueled lifestyle.

At first, this will “just” be a problem for the poor, as is already happening — I’ve reported on the “Heat or Eat” crisis several times. But it isn’t just heat — that’s just one canary in the coal mine. The thing is, people struggling to get by tend to pay their bills in rotation, trying never to get far enough behind on any one bill to have a crisis. But that kind of juggling is often disrupted — unforeseen expenses always arise — and often there’s a cascade effect, since all the bills are increasingly large and somewhat overdue … It doesn’t take much to lose heat and power and gas.

If you listen to the news reports, it sounds as though the economy is stabilizing, like we’re near the bottom. Don’t worry, we’re told. But it is worth noting that almost everything that we’re seeing now represents, at one level or another, the selling off of things that have in the past had value, often at very low prices.

Last year, I suggested that the new economy was going to based on bottom feeding — scavenging off the leavings of our prior wealth. I see nothing in the news reports that suggests I was wrong — both the highest levels of finance and the lowest are showing the same things — the repackaging of increasingly worthless assets for sale at pennies on the dollar. There are already reports coming in of people stripping their attics of prized possessions and selling off anything they have, just to pay for basic bills. The metals in our pipes are already worth more than the houses, in many cases. Pawn shops are doing a booming business.

It seems mostly as though the economy is staggering along, but whether you are repackaging worthless commercial assets, worthless luxury vehicles or worthless TVs, they all add up to … worthless, in the most literal sense. The days of keeping the bills paid this way are numbered. The days of home equity loans are pretty much over, as almost half of recent home buyers now have no or negative equity, and whole regions (such as Las Vegas) have lost their access to home equity. There’s simply nothing left — and when there’s nothing left and the money doesn’t meet the end of the month, off go the lights, and the heat, and the gas.

For now, it is mostly the working poor leading the way. But it won’t stay that way. Most Americans live beyond their means — statistically, we spend about 5 percent more than we make. Middle-class Americans aren’t going to be able to absorb the vastly increased food bill, the heating bill, the electric bill, gas bill, the mortgage that isn’t worth much… something will have to give.

Fuel subsidy programs are already stretched — and a winter’s worth of fuel subsidies available to any low income household is good for about three weeks of heating at these prices. Many of us are about to face the reality that we’re not really all that middle class.

As more and more of us can’t afford our relationship with our utility companies, we’re going to break up like we’re on a bad date. And since there’s no money in the budget for the mass reinsulation of 90 million homes, or the subsidizing of fuel and electricity on the scale that Americans use it, we have two choices. We can break up with our utility companies only when we’re massively indebted and when we’ve already sacrificed dinner and home and other security to try to keep the lights on and the heat running, or we can do it wisely, and break up before the crisis gets acute.

That means adapting our homes to live without them. It isn’t easy — but for the $2,000 I spent on oil, many people could get the basic framework of non-electric living in place. And we could subsidize these things just as we subsidize solar or wind power — instead of giving people tax breaks for buying PV panels, we could give them tax breaks for buying things to enable them to live without them. Because while PV is great, it is demonstrably far too expensive for anyone struggling to pay their utility bills — and a lot of people who aren’t.

Two thousand bucks will get you a wood, corn or pellet stove, two solar powered battery chargers and batteries for flashlights and table lamps, and for your CD player or iPod. It’ll get you cardboard and tinfoil enough to make a solar oven for warm weather, and you can put stew on the back of the stove in winter. Depending on the size of your house and your needs, you might have enough left over for long johns, or a couple of personal battery powered fans. It isn’t ideal, but you’ll have light, heat, and food.

Another $40 will get you a tiny washer that you can do easily by hand, but a bucket and plunger will do. If you don’t have water, you’ll need money for a well pump, a cistern, lots of rain barrels, or some other water solution — and this will probably cost more. But maybe if money is tight, you can work on making the water solution collective — most places around the world have central water, and everyone walks over, chats at the well, and carries their jugs back.

Is $2,000 out of the question? Well, how about $300 in long johns, battery chargers, down comforters, and a few small electric appliances — a tiny efficient space heater to take the edge off of the room you are in and a microwave to ensure copious hot tea? You can live without heating or cooling — no one has to freeze or die of heat stroke. The simple fact is that we’re not going to be able to afford even these preparations once we get further and further in debt to the purveyors of fossil fuels — the abrupt transfer to the low energy lifestyle, without any preparation, is what I’d like to see everyone avoid.

There may or may not be imported heating oil, or Canadian natural gas and American coal-fired electric coming into your house. Your utilities company may or may not still be in business. But what is almost certain is that the present trajectory means that more and more of us are going to have to reconsider our usage — and many of us aren’t going to be using any at all.

Originally posted at www.sharonastyk.com.