by Richard Heinberg

The airline industry has no future. The same is true for airfreight. No air carrier has a viable plan to make a profit with oil at current prices—much less in years to come as the petroleum available to world markets dwindles rapidly.

That’s not to say that jetliners will disappear overnight, but rather that the cheap flights we’ve seen in the past will soon be fading memories. In a few years jet service will be available only to the wealthy, or to the government and military.

Sir Richard Branson of Virgin Atlantic says he wants to use biofuels to power his fleet of 747’s and Airbuses. There are still some bugs to be worked out in terms of basic chemistry, but it might be possible in principle—if only we could make enough biodiesel or ethanol without further driving up food prices and wrecking the soil. Even then it would be very costly fuel.

Are there other options for powered flight?

Hydrogen could be burned in jet engines, but doing so would require a complete redesign of our commercial aircraft fleet, and H2 would be expensive to make—unless the growing trend toward more costly electricity (as we phase out depleting, polluting coal and increasingly scarce natural gas) can somehow be reversed.

Last year I was invited to give the keynote address at the world’s first Electric Aircraft Symposium. NASA and Boeing sent representatives, but all told there were only about 20 in attendance. The planes being discussed were ultralight two-seaters: that’s the limit of current or foreseeable battery technology. These might come in handy in a future where they are the only option for emergency air travel (blimps need depleting helium or explosive hydrogen). But forget about 300-seat planes running on solar or wind power, ferrying middle-class vacationers to Bali or Venice.

There are good reasons to cut down on air travel voluntarily: flying not only swells our personal carbon emissions but spews CO2 and other pollutants into the stratosphere, where they do the most damage. However, the worsening scarcity of the stuff we use for making jet fuel takes the discussion out of the realm of optional moral action and into that of economic necessity and personal adaptation.

I fly to educate both general audiences and policy makers about fossil fuel depletion; in fact, I’m writing this article aboard a plane en route from Boston to San Francisco. I wince at my carbon footprint, but console myself with the hope that my message helps thousands of others to change their consumption patterns. This inner conflict is about to be resolved: the decline of affordable air travel is forcing me to rethink my work. I’m already starting to do much more by video teleconference, much less by jet.

Those who live far from family will be more than inconvenienced, as will the hundreds of thousands who work for the airline industry directly or indirectly, or the millions who depend on tourism or airfreight for an income. These folks will have few options: teleconferencing can accomplish only so much.

Our species’ historically brief fling with flight has been fun, educational, and enriching on many levels to those fortunate enough to benefit from it. Saying goodbye will be difficult. But maybe as we do we can say hello to greater involvement in our local communities.

(cross-posted from Post Carbon Institute)

There is a surreal quality to the experience of seeing the unfolding of unpleasant events that one has predicted. Plenty of times over the past few years I’ve said, "I want to be proven wrong!" Who in their right mind would wish to see economic collapse and famine? But it was obvious that, given the direction our society is headed, these must be the consequences. Now, with oil at $117 a barrel, the US economy teetering, and food riots erupting in Haiti, Egypt, and Asia, one could perhaps gain some satisfaction in saying "I told you so." But what faint compensation that would be. We are all going to have to share the bitter fruits of our society's century-long growth binge, whether we have criticized it or participated wholeheartedly. The only silver lining is the possibility that now, at last, as the trends (Peak Oil, the failure of growth-based economics, the failure of industrial agriculture, climate chaos, and so on) are becoming so starkly clear, policy makers will begin seriously to contemplate a Plan B (or C, as Pat Murphy insists). For those of us who have been lobbying in that latter direction for some while, this is no time to let up, but rather the ideal moment to redouble our efforts.

It’s with sadness that I announce the end of my association with New College of California. The college is in the process of closing as a result of administrative and leadership problems at the main San Francisco campus.

In January I happily accepted the invitation to work full-time for Post Carbon Institute as a Senior Fellow.

Details on both developments follow.

More About New College

The New College of California North Bay program on Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community was a pioneering effort that graduated hundreds of brilliant students, while serving as a hub within the region for environmental activism as well as musical and cultural events. While we faculty members were always frustrated with the San Francisco campus’s leadership, we were and continue to be extremely proud of what we accomplished here in Santa Rosa over the past ten years.

A countercultural school founded in San Francisco in the early 1970s, New College had no endowment and subsisted entirely on tuitions. We at the satellite campus in Santa Rosa (founded in 1998) carved out our own niche in environmental studies, thriving on the freedom and independence that flowed from our geographic distance from the main campus. We ran our program mostly by consensus via the college’s only continuing faculty meetings.

Last year the school’s accrediting agency, Western Association of Schools and Colleges (WASC), put the school on probation. This had happened several times before, but now serious allegations prompted a thorough review. Then the Department of Education began withholding student financial aid money, the lifeblood of the college. Faculty stopped receiving paychecks in October, and students stopped receiving financial aid. The school went into crisis mode; the president was replaced, and a Faculty Council stepped up to partially fill the governance vacuum. But these actions were insufficient. The Department of Education still has not released over $2 million of tuition (in the form of student loans), and without that money there was no realistic hope of reviving the school. At the end of February, WASC announced that it was revoking accreditation.

It has been instructive to watch the collapse of an institution, knowing that—as the global economy implodes over the next few months and years—something similar will be happening on a much wider scale to banks, businesses, and cities nearly everywhere. Clearly, while New College ran on idealism, money was the necessary enabler. As long as it flowed, things got done—after a fashion. When the checks stopped coming, staff and faculty soldiered on loyally for many weeks, but most had to leave to get paying jobs. For the world as a whole, both money and energy are prime enablers, and both are about to get scarce. When resources dissipate, people tend to show the best and worst of themselves. At New College, I’ve seen mostly the best, with many faculty and staff volunteering their time to help students finish up or get their transcripts.

I wish everyone well as they find their way to new employment.

More About Post Carbon Institute

Soon after the publication of The Party’s Over in 2003, I received an invitation from Julian Darley and Celine Rich to come to Vancouver and speak at a conference they were organizing (Bill Rees was another invited speaker). Though small in scale, this was to be the first Peak Oil conference in North America; it was soon followed by twelve other Post Carbon conferences in four countries, including one at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) in Washington, D.C..

Julian was schooled in environmental sociology and had been a consultant for the World Resources Institute; Celine had a background with cultural development projects. That year they formed Post Carbon Institute (www.postcarbon.org).

For the first few years, I was on the board of the organization, and in more recent years have been a Fellow.

In February 2007 Post Carbon Institute moved its headquarters from Vancouver, BC to Sebastopol, just a few miles from where I live in Santa Rosa.

Since 2003, the organization has grown to become a respectable non-profit with over a dozen employees and a million-dollar annual budget. Its programs include Global Public Media (www.globalpublicmedia.com), the Oil Depletion Protocol (www.oildepletionprotocol.org), the Energy Farms Network (www.energyfarms.net), the Relocalization Network (www.relocalize.net), Post Carbon Cities (www.postcarboncities.net), a Fellows program, and now Solar Car Share, which boasts a growing fleet of electric vehicles.

A related for-profit company, Post Carbon Inc., funnels its profits to the non-profit; its divisions include Post Carbon Press, which has released its first book (Post Carbon Cities, by Daniel Lerch); and Post Carbon Books (www.postcarbonbooks.com), which now handles my online book sales and publishes MuseLetter.

The organization’s objective is extremely broad in scope and scale—in Julian Darley’s words, "to get society off fossil fuels fast" by offering research and demonstrations in fields as diverse as agriculture, urban planning, grass-roots organizing, and public policy. Post Carbon Institute operates as a think tank (its list of Fellows includes Julian Darley, David Fridley, Richard Douthwaite, Colin Campbell, William Rees, Dave Hughes, and James Howard Kunstler), but it is also action-oriented, offering support to dozens of affiliated local groups scattered around the world. Any one of these areas of effort would be plenty to bite off for most NGOs. But with so little time and so much needing to be done in order for society as a whole to navigate a survivable transition to a non-hydrocarbon economy, it wouldn’t help matters much if one of the very few organizations with a holistic view of that transition were to focus on only one project area.

Post Carbon Institute is now firmly rooted in Sonoma County, but its mission and operations are global in scope.

As Senior Fellow, my role in the organization is many faceted. I am still writing and speaking on the usual topics, but now instead of attending faculty meetings and teaching students at New College, I attend meetings at the Post Carbon offices in Sebastopol, help with strategic planning, and help focus and integrate our vital programs.

This year I have lectures planned in the UK as well as many regions of the US and Canada, and will be finishing up my new book, The Great Coal Rush for Post Carbon Press. The lecture series I developed during my decade at New College will be captured on video later this year for DVD release, also by Post Carbon Press.

Meanwhile, the gardens at Janet’s and my home in Santa Rosa continue to mature, with expectation of record harvests this year.

Awareness of Peak Oil, Climate Change, impending global economic implosion, topsoil depletion, biodiversity collapse, and the thousand other dire threats crashing down upon us at the dawn of the new millennium constitutes an enormous psychological burden, one so onerous that most people (and institutions) respond with a battery of psychological defenses-mostly versions of denial and distraction-in an effort to keep conscious awareness comfortably distanced from stark reality. I discuss this in "the Psychology of Peak Oil and Climate Change," chapter 7 of Peak Everything, where I conclude that the healthiest response to dire knowledge is to do something practical and constructive in response, preferably in collaboration with others, both because the worst can probably still be avoided and because engaged action makes us feel better.

Some people who are aware of global threats respond psychologically with a relentless insistence on maintaining mental focus on possible positive futures, however faint their likelihood of realization. Other knowledgeable people are irritated by this behavior and prefer to plunge themselves into prolonged contemplation of the worst possible outcomes. On various Internet discussion sites this split plays out in endless flame-wars between "doomers" and "anti-doomers" (the latter differ from cornucopians, who deny that there is a problem in the first place).

I generally try to avoid both extreme viewpoints. To me, all that matters in the final analysis is whether awareness leads to effective action that actually reduces the risk of worst-case scenarios materializing.

But the fact is, even those who do engage in practical action get bogged down from time to time in fear, grief, and a sense of helplessness, or they suffer burnout from working too long and hard for too little reward. I've seen enough of this lately to conclude that some sort of informed pep talk may be helpful. (By the way: I experience the same symptoms occasionally; this pep talk is aimed as much at myself as anyone else.)

Burnout and depression are certainly understandable given the scale of the challenges facing us, but these responses cause problems since other people depend on us. Each of us who understands global crises and has some capacity to work on intelligent responses to them represents an enormous cultural investment. I'm thinking not just of the decades' worth of resources consumed in order to keep each of us alive and get us to where we are today, but of the information so carefully sought out and digested, and skills learned. These are not trivial things. I don't say this in order to motivate by guilt; it's simply the reality. If one of us falters, there are not millions and billions to take our place. There may indeed be many millions worldwide who are engaged in some type of vaguely benevolent enterprise, but when it comes to the core threats facing our planet, the ranks are remarkably thin. There are probably more like a few thousand globally who really understand the world resource problematique and are doing something sensible to address it.

A pep talk might take the tack of saying if only we pull together, our problems will vanish and the world will be a marvelous place in short order. But the people to whom I'm directing my remarks won't buy that line of persuasion for a second. We all know that we are in for very difficult times, and that there is no guarantee that, even if we do everything we can, the result won't be human die-off and environmental devastation.

This knowledge evokes overlapping personal and planetary worries. And it's these worries that can undermine even the most psychologically robust of us now and again.

Who among us hasn't fretted over the likely impacts of societal collapse on oneself, family, and friends? Of course, it's perfectly sensible to make some preparations. We should have some food stored, we should be gardening and making efforts to reduce our energy usage and need for transportation. But the obsessive thought that it's not enough can be paralyzing. What if financial collapse proceeds to economic, political, and cultural collapse; what could one possibly do to insulate oneself in that case? Tough question. There are too many unknowns. No matter what we do, there can never be a guarantee that we will be immune to the consequences of Peak Oil and Climate Change.

But this quandary is similar in some ways to the universal problem of personal mortality: we do what we can to maintain health (we eat right, we exercise), knowing nevertheless that eventually we will die. Still, the point of life is not to spend every waking moment trying to cheat death; rather, it is to enjoy each day as much as possible, to grow, to learn, and to give of oneself. Time spent building a family emergency preparedness kit needs to be balanced against time spent helping make one's entire community more resilient, and raising awareness in the world as a whole-and time spent with loved ones, and time spent singing and dancing or whatever it is that makes us happy.

Planetary worries can be even more debilitating. What if there simply is no hope? Once one starts down this mental path, the argumentative ammunition is almost endless. If oil wars don't get us, the multiple reinforcing feedback loops of climate chaos will. Corporate interests will continue to prevent politicians from doing the only things that could possibly prevent planetary meltdown. How could it be otherwise?

Yet again there are so many unknowns. How can we be any more assured of absolute extinction than of the absence of any possibility that, following some early signals of collapse, policy makers-even corporate leaders-will actually wake up and start doing sensible things? If, when an opportunity to influence policy does arise, there are no articulate advocates of a clearly worked-out alternative pathway (because we who are currently working in that direction have all given up and pulled the covers over our heads), then doom will have become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

I suspect that the burden of dire knowledge is exacerbated by the psychophysical impact of too much time on the computer and not enough outdoors. It's an occupational hazard: those of us who are aware of the impending collision of resource depletion with population growth and climate instability have acquired whatever understanding we have through countless hours tracking trends, peering at graphs, and noting
news items on glowing screens. Assuming you're reading my words on-line right now, you might want to bookmark this page and jump for a moment to http://homenet.hcii.cs.cmu.edu/, the site of an on ongoing research project of Carnegie Mellon University that has concluded that "Greater use of the Internet is associated with increases in loneliness and symptoms of depression."

So with this pep talk comes some friendly advice (again, I'm also talking to myself here): Take breaks. Eat well, and make sure you get enough exercise and sunlight. Ask yourself: What would I do for joy if I knew I had only a year left? A month? A week? Would I make love, spend time in nature, play music, or...?

Well, do it! But remember the rest of us, and don't drop the ball entirely.

In the end, there is no blame or guilt attached to any of this. And there is a limit to the utility of pep talks. Each of us has different brain chemistry, a different reservoir of past experiences that has shaped our character and repertoire of behavioral responses, all of which results in differing levels of tolerance for bad news and hard effort. We will each do what we can, given our unique makeup. But if words can help, let no courageous worker down tools for lack of simple reassurance.

We're all in this together. Let's rely on one another's reserves of psychological strength when we need to, and provide strength for others when we can.

There is a strange clause in the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) that applies to only one country—Canada. The clause states that Canada must continue to supply the same proportion of its oil and gas resources to the US in future years as it does now. That’s rather a good deal for the US: it formalizes Canada’s status as a resource satellite of its imperial hub to the south.

From a Canadian perspective there are some problems with the arrangement, though. First is the fact that Canada’s production of natural gas and conventional oil is declining. Second is that Canada uses lots of oil and gas domestically: 70 percent of Canadians heat their homes with gas, and Canadians drive cars more and further than just about anyone else. The problem is likely to come first with natural gas; as production declines, there will come a point when there isn’t enough to fill domestic needs and continue to export (roughly 60 percent of Canada’s gas now goes to the US).

That point is not decades in the future, it is fairly imminent.

Then there is the problem of Climate Change. Canada is committed by treaty to reducing domestic emissions of carbon dioxide. But most of Canada’s emissions come not from consuming fossil fuels, but producing them—increasingly, from producing synthetic diesel fuel from the tar sands of Alberta. Even if Canadians decide to drive less and turn down their thermostats, those efforts will do little or nothing to change energy production rates (hence emissions rates), because any extra amounts of fuel produced but not used domestically will simply be exported south; in fact, they virtually must be by the terms of NAFTA.

So Canada’s energy security and global climate security are both held hostage by a provision within a trade agreement—a provision that is unique in all of the world’s treaties. Canada has every reason to repudiate the proportionality clause, and to do so unilaterally and immediately.

Of course, the current Canadian government will not do so. Nor will the main opposition party. Both are securely bound to do the will of their puppeteers in Washington. But what about the NDP, Canada’s other main (center-left) party? Couldn’t it make the abolition of the proportionality clause a key campaign issue? Surely Canadians care about energy security and simple fairness. By raising the question, the NDP would educate Canadians about the links between fossil fuel depletion, globalization, and climate change, while forcing the other parties to either identify themselves with, or abandon, a policy that imperils their nation’s future.

Party leaders might be wary of the US response, but the latter would be fascinating to see. Of course the US would threaten all sorts of trade punishments. However, the domestic US political fallout is delicious to contemplate: in this case, US motives would require no speculation, as do the nation’s real goals in Iraq or elsewhere in the oil-rich Middle East. Americans wouldn’t be using economic muscle against demonized Arabs on the other side of the world, but against people who are culturally just like themselves who happen to live north of an imaginary line. The unfairness of the proportionality clause would be apparent to everyone and the idiocy of US energy and climate policy would also be plain—not just to Canadians, but to the rest of the world and (crucially) to US citizens as well.

With so much at stake, and with current policy leading inevitably toward crisis, isn’t it time for a bold move such as this?