Fossil Fuel Euphoria :Hallelujah, Oil and Gas Forever!

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Tomgram: Michael Klare, The Latest News in Fossil Fuel Addiction

Posted by Michael Klare at 8:08am, October 15, 2013.
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The news couldn’t be better -- and it couldn’t be worse.  Or ask yourself this: What do these two headlines have in common: “U.S. expected to be largest producer of petroleum and natural gas hydrocarbons in 2013,” “Shift to a new climate likely by middle of the century, study finds”?

A great deal, it turns out. Evidently, as the U.S. Energy Information Agency reports, the U.S. willsurpass Russia as the leading combined producer of oil and natural gas this year.  For the time being, Saudi Arabia remains the globe’s number one oil producer.  And yes, according to a new study in the journal Nature, sometime around the year 2047 (give or take the odd decade), the world will hit a “climate takeoff point.”  Think of it as the moment when, according to the researchers, “the old maximum average temperatures become the new minimum temperatures, extending beyond any climate we have experienced since 1860,” that is, when systematic records first began being kept.

So for the U.S., we may be talking record fossil fuel production, while for the globe we are going to be talking record heat, record storms -- of which a preview could be seen in the monstrous cyclone “half the size of India” that just came out of the warming waters of the Bay of Bengal -- and record weather disruptions as the new norm on planet Earth.  The connection, of course, is record emissions of carbon dioxide from the record burning of all those fossil fuels.  It couldn’t be a nastier combo, something potentially straight out of Dante’s inferno.  And, as always, TomDispatch hasMichael Klare, author most recently of The Race for What’s Left, on the case. Tom

Fossil Fuel Euphoria 

Hallelujah, Oil and Gas Forever! 
By Michael T. Klare

For years, energy analysts had been anticipating an imminent decline in global oil supplies.  Suddenly, they’re singing a new song: Fossil fuels growing scarce?  Don’t even think about it!  The news couldn’t be better: fossil fuels will become ever more abundant.  And all that talk about climate change?  Don’t worry about it, they chant.  Go out and enjoy the benefits of cheap and plentiful energy forever.

This movement from gloom about our energy future to what can only be called fossil-fuel euphoria may prove to be the hallmark of our peculiar moment.  In a speech this September, for instance, Barry Smitherman, chairman of the Texas Railroad Commission (that state’s energy regulatory agency), claimed that the Earth possesses a “relatively boundless supply” of oil and natural gas.  Not only that -- and you can practically hear the chorus of cheering in Houston and other oil centers -- but many of the most exploitable new deposits are located in the U.S. and Canada.  As a result -- add a roll of drums and a blaring of trumpets -- the expected boost in energy is predicted to provide the United States with a cornucopia of economic and political rewards, including industrial expansion at home and enhanced geopolitical clout abroad.  The country, exulted Karen Moreau of the New York State Petroleum Council, another industry cheerleader, is now in a position “to become a global superpower on energy.”

There are good reasons to be deeply skeptical of such claims, but that hardly matters when they are gaining traction in Washington and on Wall Street.  What we're seeing is a sea change in elite thinking on the future availability and attractiveness of fossil fuels.  Senior government officials, including President Obama, have already become infected with this euphoria, as have top Wall Street investors -- which means it will have a powerful and longlasting, though largely pernicious, effect on the country’s energy policy, industrial development, and foreign relations.

The speed and magnitude of this shift in thinking has been little short of astonishing.  Just a few years ago, we were girding for the imminent prospect of “peak oil,” the point at which daily worldwide output would reach its maximum and begin an irreversible decline.  This, experts assumed, would result in a global energy crisis, sky-high oil prices, and severe disruptions to the world economy.

Today, peak oil seems a distant will-o’-the-wisp.  Experts at the U.S. government’s Energy Information Administration (EIA) confidently project that global oil output will reach 115 million barrels per day by 2040 -- a stunning 34% increase above the current level of 86 million barrels.  Natural gas production is expected to soar as well, leaping from 113 trillion cubic feet in 2010 to a projected 185 trillion in 2040.

These rosy assessments rest to a surprising extent on a single key assumption: that the United States, until recently a declining energy producer, will experience a sharp increase in output through the exploitation of shale oil and natural gas reserves through hydro-fracking and other technological innovations.  “In a matter of a few years, the trends have reversed,” Moreau declared last February.  “There is a new energy reality of vast domestic resources of oil and natural gas brought about by advancing technology... For the first time in generations, we are able to see that our energy supply is no longer limited, foreign, and finite; it is American and abundant.”

The boost in domestic oil and gas output, it is further claimed, will fuel an industrial renaissance in the United States -- with new plants and factories being built to take advantage of abundant local low-cost energy supplies.  “The economic consequences of this supply-and-demand revolution are potentially extraordinary,”asserted Ed Morse, the head of global commodities research at Citigroup in New York.  America’s gross domestic product, he claimed, will grow by 2% to 3% over the next seven years as a result of the energy revolution alone, adding as much as $624 billion to the national economy.  Even greater gains can be made, Morse and others claim, if the U.S. becomes a significant exporter of fossil fuels, particularly in the form of liquefied natural gas (LNG).

Not only will these developments result in added jobs -- as many as three million, claims energy analyst Daniel Yergin -- but they will also enhance America’s economic status vis-à-vis its competitors.  “U.S. natural gas is abundant and prices are low -- a third of their level in Europe and a quarter of that in Japan,” Yerginwrote recently.  “This is boosting energy-intensive manufacturing in the U.S., much to the dismay of competitors in both Europe and Asia.”

This fossil fuel euphoria has even surfaced in statements by President Obama.  For all his talk of climate change perils and the need to invest in renewables, he has also gloated over the jump in domestic energy production and promised to facilitate further increases.  “Last year, American oil production reached its highest level since 2003,” he affirmed in March 2011.  “And for the first time in more than a decade, oil we imported accounted for less than half of the liquid fuel we consumed.  So that was a good trend.  To keep reducing that reliance on imports, my administration is encouraging offshore oil exploration and production.”

Money Pouring into Fossil Fuels

This burst of euphoria about fossil fuels and America’s energy future is guaranteed to have a disastrous impact on the planet.  In the long term, it will make Earth ahotter, far more extreme place to live by vastly increasing carbon emissions and diverting investment funds from renewables and green energy to new fossil fuel projects.  For all the excitement these endeavors may be generating, it hardly takes a genius to see that they mean ever more carbon dioxide heading into the atmosphere and an ever less hospitable planet.

The preference for fossil fuel investments is easy to spot in the industry’s trade journals, as well as in recent statistical data and anecdotal reports of all sorts.  According to the reliable International Energy Agency (IEA), private and public investment in fossil fuel projects over the next quarter century will outpace investment in renewable energy by a ratio of three to one.  In other words, for every dollar spent on new wind farms, solar arrays, and tidal power research, three dollars will go into the development of new oil fields, shale gas operations, and coal mines.

From industry sources it’s clear that big-money investors are rushing to take advantage of the current boom in unconventional energy output in the U.S. -- the climate be damned.  “The dollars needed [to develop such projects] have never been larger,” commented Maynard Holt, co-president of Houston-based investment bank Tudor, Pickering, Holt & Company.  “But the money is truly out there.  The global energy capital river is flowing our way.”

In the either/or equation that seems to be our energy future, the capital river is rushing into the exploitation of unconventional fossil fuels, while it’s slowing to a trickle in the world of the true unconventionals -- the energy sources that don’t add carbon to the atmosphere. This, indeed, was the conclusion reached by the IEA, which in 2012 warned that the seemingly inexorable growth in greenhouse gas emissions of carbon dioxide is likely to eliminate all prospect of averting the worst effects of climate change.

Petro Machismo

The new energy euphoria is also fueling a growing sense that the American superpower, whose influence has recently seemed to be on the wane, may soon acquire fresh geopolitical clout through its mastery of the latest energy technologies.  “America’s new energy posture allows us to engage from a position of greater strength,” crowed National Security Adviser Tom Donilon in an April address at Columbia University.  Increased domestic energy output, he explained, will help reduce U.S. vulnerability to global supply disruptions and price hikes.  “It also affords us a stronger hand in pursuing and implementing our international security goals.”

A new elite consensus is forming around the strategic advantages of expanded oil and gas production.  In particular, this outlook holds that the U.S. is benefiting from substantially reduced oil imports from the Middle East by eliminating a dependency that has led to several disastrous interventions in that region and exposed the country to periodic disruptions in oil deliveries, starting with the Arab oil embargo of 1973-74.  “The shift in oil sources means the global supply system will become more resilient, our energy supplies will become more secure, and the nation will have more flexibility in dealing with crises,” Yergin wrotein the Wall Street Journal.

This turnaround, he and other experts claim, is what allowed Washington to adopt a tougher stance with Tehran in negotiations over Iran’s nuclear enrichment program.  With the U.S. less dependent on Middle Eastern oil, so goes the argument, American leaders need not fear Iranian threats to disrupt the flow of oil through the Persian Gulf to international markets.  “The substantial increase in oil production in the United States,” Donilon declared in April, is what allowed Washington to impose tough sanctions on Iranian oil “while minimizing the burdens on the rest of the world.” 

A stance of what could be called petro machismo is growing in Washington, underlying such initiatives as the president’s widely ballyhooed policy announcement of a “pivot” from the Middle East to Asia (still largely words backed by only the most modest of actions) and efforts to constrain Russia’s international influence. 

Ever since Vladimir Putin assumed the presidency of that country, Moscow has sought to sway the behavior of its former Warsaw Pact allies and the former republics of the Soviet Union by exploiting its dominant energy role in the region.  It offered cheap natural gas to governments willing to follow its policy dictates, while threatening to cut off supplies to those that weren’t.  Now, some American strategists hope to reduce Russia’s clout by helping friendly nations like Poland and the Baltic states develop their own shale gas reserves and build LNG terminals.  These would allow them to import gas from “friendly” states, including the U.S. (once its LNG export capacities are expanded).  “If we can export some natural gas to Europe and to Japan and other Asian nations,” Karen Moreau suggested in February, “we strengthen our relationships and influence in those places -- and perhaps reduce the influence of other producers such as Russia.”

The crucial issue is this: if American elites continue to believe that increased oil and gas production will provide the U.S. with a strategic advantage, Washington will be tempted to exercise a “stronger hand” when pursuing its “international security goals.”  The result will undoubtedly be heightened international friction and discord.

Is the Euphoria Justified?

There is no doubt that the present fossil fuel euphoria will lead in troubling directions, even if the rosy predictions of rising energy output are, in the long run, likely to prove both unreliable and unrealistic.  The petro machismo types make several interconnected claims:

* The world’s fossil fuel reserves are vast, especially when “unconventional” sources of fuel -- Canadian tar sands, shale gas, and the like -- are included.

* The utilization of advanced technologies, especially fracking, will permit the effective exploitation of a significant share of these untapped reserves (assuming that governments don’t restrict fracking and other controversial drilling activities).

* Fossil fuels will continue to supply an enormous share of global energy requirements for the foreseeable future, even given rising world temperatures, growing public opposition, and other challenges.

Each of these assertions is packed with unacknowledged questions and improbabilities that are impossible to explore thoroughly in an article of this length.  But here are some major areas of doubt. 

To begin with, those virtually “boundless” untapped oil reserves have yet to be systematically explored, meaning that it’s impossible to know if they do, in fact, contain commercially significant reserves of oil and gas.  To offer an apt example, the U.S. Geological Survey, in one of the most widely cited estimates of untapped energy reserves, has reported that approximately 13% of the world’s undiscovered oil reserves and 30% percent of its natural gas lie above the Arctic Circle.  But this assessment is based on geological analyses of rock samples, not exploratory drilling.  Whether the area actually holds such large reserves will not be known until widespread drilling has occurred.  So far, initial Arctic drilling operations, like thoseoff Greenland, have generally proved disappointing.

Similarly, the Energy Information Administration has reported that China possesses vast shale formations that could harbor substantial reserves of oil and gas.  According to a 2013 EIA survey, that country’s technically recoverable shale gas reserves are estimated at 1,275 trillion cubic feet, more than twice the figure for the United States.  Once again, however, the real extent of those reserves won’t be known without extensive drilling, which is only in its beginning stages.

To say, then, that global reserves are “boundless” is to disguise all the hypotheticals lurking within that description.  Reality may fall far short of industry claims.

The effectiveness of new technologies in exploiting such problematic reserves is also open to question.  True, fracking and other unconventional technologies have already substantially increased the production of hard-to-exploit fuels, including tar sands, shale gas, and deep-sea reserves.  Many experts predict that such gains are likely to be repeated in the future.  The EIA, for example, suggests that U.S. output of shale oil via fracking will jump by 221% over the next 15 years, and natural gas by 164%.  The big question, however, is whether these projected increases will actually come to fruition.  While early gains are likely, the odds are that future growth will come at a far slower pace.

As a start, the most lucrative U.S. shale formations in Arkansas, Pennsylvania, North Dakota, and Texas have already experienced substantial exploration and many of the most attractive drilling sites (or “plays”) are now fully developed.  More fracking, no doubt, will release additional oil and gas, but the record shows that fossil-fuel output tends to decline once the earliest, most promising reservoirs are exploited.  In fact, notes energy analyst Art Berman, “several of the more mature shale gas plays are either in decline or appear to be approaching peak production.”

Doubts are also multiplying over the potential for exploiting shale reserves in other parts of the world.  Preliminary drilling suggests that many of the shale formations in Europe and China possess fewer hydrocarbons and will be harder to develop than those now being exploited in this country. In Poland, for example, efforts to extract domestic shale reserves have been stymied by disappointing drilling efforts and the subsequent departure of major foreign firms, including Exxon Mobil and Marathon Oil.

Finally, there is a crucial but difficult to assess factor in the future energy equation: the degree to which energy companies and energy states will run into resistance when exploiting ever more remote (and environmentally sensitive) resource zones.  No one yet knows how much energy industry efforts may be constrained by thegrowing opposition of local residents, scientists, environmentalists, and others whoworry about the environmental degradation caused by unconventional energy extraction and the climate consequences of rising fossil fuel combustion.  Despite industry claims that fracking, tar sands production, and Arctic drilling can be performed without endangering local residents, harming the environment, or wrecking the planet, ever more people are coming to the opposite conclusion -- and beginning to take steps to protect their perceived interests.

In New York State, for example, a fervent anti-fracking oppositional movement has prevented government officials from allowing such activities to begin in the rich Marcellus shale formation, one of the largest in the world.  Although Albany may, in time, allow limited fracking operations there, it is unlikely to permit large-scale drilling throughout the state.  Similarly, an impressive opposition in British Columbia to the proposed Northern Gateway tar sands pipeline, especially by the native peoples of the region, has put that project on indefinite hold.  And growing popular opposition to fracking in Europe is making itself felt across the region.  The European Parliament, for example, recently imposed tough environmental constraints on the practice.

As heat waves and extreme storm activity increase, so will concern over climate change and opposition to wholesale fossil fuel extraction.  The IEA warned of this possibility in the 2012 edition of its World Energy Outlook.  Shale gas and other unconventional forms of natural gas are predicted to provide nearly half the net gain in world gas output over the next 25 years, the report noted.  “There are,” it added, “also concerns about the environmental impact of producing unconventional gas that, if not properly addressed, could halt the unconventional gas revolution in its tracks.”

Reaction to that IEA report last November was revealing.  Its release prompted a mini-wave of ecstatic commentary in the American media about its prediction that, thanks to the explosion in unconventional energy output, this country would soonovertake Saudi Arabia as the world’s leading oil producer.  In fact, the fossil fuel craze can be said to have started with this claim.  None of the hundreds of articles and editorials written on the subject, however, bothered to discuss the caveats the report offered or its warnings of planetary catastrophe. 

As is so often the case with mass delusions, those caught up in fossil fuel mania have not bothered to think through the grim realities involved.  While industry bigwigs may continue to remain on an energy high, the rest of us will not be so lucky.  The accelerated production and combustion of fossil fuels can have only one outcome: a severely imperiled planet.

Michael T. Klare is a professor of peace and conflict studies at Hampshire College and the author, most recently, of The Race for What’s Left (Picador).  A documentary movie version of his book Blood and Oil is available from the Media Education Foundation.

Follow TomDispatch on Twitter and join us on Facebook or Tumblr. Check out the newest Dispatch book, Nick Turse’s The Changing Face of Empire: Special Ops, Drones, Proxy Fighters, Secret Bases, and Cyberwarfare.

Copyright 2013 Michael T. Klare

Think a New Economy Is Possible? Meet the Man Already Making it Happen

by Tara Lohan, originally published by Alternet  | TODAY

Standing in front of a crowd of hundreds at Oakland, California’s Grand Lake Theater, Rob Hopkins shows a picture of a butcher shop in a small town in Northern Ireland. A row of hams hang in the window, the door is cracked open, welcoming, a passerby walks his dog. Just another example of a successful small town business, vital for the local economy. Right? Except, Hopkins explains what you can’t immediately see when you glance at the image. The store is real, but the window display is a fake—it’s simply photoshopped posters plastered over the glass. The local business has gone under, the shop is gutted, but those organizing the last G8 meeting of the world’s most powerful countries that met in Northern Ireland don’t want to be reminded of this and they sure don't want the media to see it. So the truth has been glossed over, obscured.

These are the times we live in. We can pretend everything is OK on Main Street, or we can actually try to fix it. Hopkins is already hard at work on the fixing. In late 2006, Hopkins, who taught permaculture, came up with the seed of an idea that has grown into something wild and beautiful: the Transition Network. It started as one Transition Town in Totnes, England and the concept has replicated across 44 countries and thousands of towns and neighborhoods. The initial idea is simple: “To support community-led responses to peak oil and climate change, building resilience and happiness.”

The organization now helps communities connect with each other, learn how to reduce CO2 emissions and decarbonize, and implement plans for a whole new kind of economic development. That’s where the idea of resilience comes in. According to the Transition Network:

‘Resilience’ has been defined as “the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and reorganize while undergoing change, so as to still retain essentially the same function, structure, identity and feedbacks.” In Transition, the concept is applied to settlements and their need to be able to withstand shock.

It sounds a lot like preparing for disaster, but it’s more like avoiding disaster by preparing for the inevitable by changing the way we use energy and structure our economy.

As fossil fuels become more and more expensive, how do we live with less of them or without them? As we come to the realization that in order to avoid catastrophic climate change, we have to start leaving many of these fossil fuels in the ground, how do we not just cope, but thrive? As our current economic system serves the few at the expense of the many (and the planet), how do we reinvision our lives and livelihoods?

Hopkins has presented his vision and the evolution of the Transition Network in three books, which get to the heart of these questions: The Transition Handbook: From Oil Dependence to Local Resilience, The Transition Companion: Making Your Community More Resilient in Uncertain Times, and most recently The Power of Just Doing Stuff: How Local Action Can Change the World. He is the winner of a Schumacher Award, is an Ashoka Fellow and a Fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, and was voted one of the UK’s top 100 environmentalists.

On what may be his only trip ever to the United States, Hopkins sat down with AlterNet to talk about the vital role he sees Transition Towns playing in our future, why he decided to make an exception to his no-flying rule, and how we can model a new economy.

Tara Lohan: What’s motivating your work? What gets you out of bed in the morning?

Rob Hopkins: I have four children and this is the longest that I’ve ever been away from them. My oldest is now 20. And so for me, one of the big motivators is climate change because it feels like many organizations and individuals are giving up on the idea that we can stabilize 2 degrees [Celsius]. It is what the world agreed on as a target but even 2 degrees [Celsius] is too much but the world seems to have given up in some ways that we’re going to do that. That is not something that I’m prepared to do. The reason for this trip is that it feels like the world has gone from “there’s no problem” to saying “it’s too late” without the bit in the middle “maybe we can actually do something.”

For me, the things that get me out of bed in the morning is climate change and the need to really do something about that, the need to build resilience in the face of the end of the age of cheap energy and all that that has made possible, the idea that we need to model an approach other than economic growth because at the moment, any return to economic growth that we see is a growth in social injustice, in social inequality, in carbon emissions and so on and we need a different approach.

TL: So what are the tools that communities need to be resilient?

RH: Communities need lots of things and some of those things need to be done by other people. There is stuff that governments need to do to support communities to be more resilient — they can’t do everything themselves. But communities need the organizing tools. What Transition does is to build on groups — the people who meet in the bar, meet outside the school gates, wherever, and decide that they’re going to start doing Transition. Those groups are the foundation for this whole process. So those groups need the tools, so that is a lot of what we do.

I think that groups need to be able to scale it up because what we are really talking about is community resilience as a form of economic development. So we need skills, we need finance, we need all kinds of things. That is starting to fall into place but we need to scale this up.

TL: So you’re interested in replicating the model but also scaling it?

RH: Absolutely. And with great urgency.

TL: Each town has its own individual value, but what is the value of Transition as a network?

RH: The beauty of having a network is that none of us can do this on our own. The network enables us to share best practices. So if one place comes up with something, the expertise can spread very quickly. So you don’t have 1,500 Transition groups around the world all trying to figure out how to do a constitution. And it enables us to share stories and it is stories that enable us and inspire and keep everyone going. A lot of my role is collecting the stories of what everyone is doing and putting them out in different ways because that is what I think keeps people’s energy up.

TL: Since you started this work have your ideas about what we are transitioning to or how we should be making that transition changed?

RH: I think when we started Transition it was very much framed as a community response to peak oil and climate change. It was about resilience. That was the beginning of it. I think now after seven years we talk about it being a community-led response based on the idea of community resilience as economic development. What we found after doing Transition for three or four years and going around meeting lots of groups and talking to them was that they were all saying the same thing: “I feel like during my week in order to keep the roof over my head and feed my family I’m working, doing something that runs against the values that are why I joined Transition. And then on Wednesday evenings and maybe on the odd Saturday I do stuff to try and pull it back in the right direction. I want to be able to step across and have my livelihood going in the right direction.”

And also people saying, “If we really want to be taken seriously doing Transition we need to model that we can be a form of economic development, we can create livelihoods, we can model a new economy in practice.” It’s not just an idea. In order to do that we need skills and some support. That is the thing that has changed, I think. Which, for me, feels like actually Transition has grown up very, very quickly. We had that stage of broadening and going all over the place and now it is really in that stage of deepening.

TL: What are some of the most inspiring examples of economic development you’re seeing?

RH: There are the towns that are doing an economic blueprint, so they’re building a very strong economic case that what they are doing is a from of economic development. They are measuring how much does this city, this town spend on food every year, spend on energy, spend on caring for the elderly, what percentage of that could be kept locally and what does that actually mean? So from the neighborhood of Brixton in London finding they could be bringing 60 million pounds a year into this urban district if they could just coordinate a 10 percent shift in how they spend money on food. That is not some hippie, flaky idea — that’s economic development at a time when we really need it. That whole idea of plugging the leaks in the local economy.

You have the Bristol pound in the city of Bristol, a complementary currency in a city of 800,000 people, which has the full support of the city council and over 600 businesses. The city’s mayor takes his full salary in them, you can use them on the buses in the city and to pay all your taxes. That is a real game-changer in terms of scale.

You have things like Brixton Energy, which is a community-run energy scheme which is owned and run by the people of the city working in very diverse, poor parts of London, and inviting people to invest in that. It has all sorts of benefits — training young people locally to install solar. Those models are really starting to get going now and it’s very exciting.

TL: I know the idea of peak oil jumpstarted this work, but in the US that idea is not resonating right now because we are gushing with oil and gas. How do you reach an American audience, where many people are excited about America’s so-called energy independence?

RH: There is still a very strong argument that that’s a bubble. The work Post Carbon Institute is doing arguing that actually fracking is a very short bubble and that most of the sweet spots are going to be played out very quickly. It’s really an investment bubble and the only people who are going to benefit from it are the people who were in first, and engineering companies.

But I think increasingly, my experience of the last 10 days of traveling across the US is that the impacts of climate change are being felt by ordinary people all over the place. In Alaska people’s homes are sinking into the permafrost as it melts, the roads are buckling all over the place, forest fires, floods, that kind of stuff is really in people’s face. But actually, whether people are able to put a name to it being climate change or anything else, I think there is a real sense that something is not right. That things are changing incredibly quickly around us.

And actually I think the way that Transition gets framed now is how do we create a new economy. Where is it going to come from? Who is the cavalry coming riding to the rescue in the place where you live? Is the government going to come in and sort it out? Is Apple going to come in and open a factory at the end of your street and employ everybody? Where is it going to come from?

Whether people call it Transition, whether they attribute it to peak oil, climate change, all these kind of things, what’s resonating with people I think is that the economy is just going down the tubes and it doesn’t represent us. It doesn’t build justice, fairness, the kinds of things we want to see. And we can do a better job and that’s already starting to be modeled.

The key challenge for me is how we do this in a way that takes it out of being perceived as alternative culture— that it resonates across the spectrum of people of all kinds of different interests. I just came from Houston and actually the people who are running the Transition group in Houston work in the oil and gas industry. And they are really the people who are inspired to do that stuff there. I really love when Transition beds in with people who aren’t the usual suspects.

TL: What have you seen so far in the US that has inspired you?

RH: I went to a place in Boston called Jamaica Plain New Economy Transition. They’ve got a great Transition group there and right from the start they really framed it around how do we create jobs and livelihood, how do we engage as widely as possible. They do all their meetings bilingually. They are doing really interesting stuff around working with local shopkeepers trying to start new businesses. They were a real inspiration.

Again Houston was really interesting because of the stuff they’re doing and who they are. And just meeting people, every time there is an event. I live in a small town in Devon, [England] and in 2006 had this idea and then wrote this book in 2008. I remember we had sweepstakes in the office guessing how many copies it would sell and I said I thought it would sell 2,000 copies ... and I lost. And it’s just gone off all over the place.

So, it’s just extraordinary for me to come and see people still clutching their copies of it and the new one. And just what people are doing and hearing the stories. I got a lift over here today with a guy who started a whole complementary currency, the Bay Bucks, for the whole Bay Area, a really innovative project working with business. It blows me away everyday and it’s not just getting an email from people in the second biggest city in Iran wanting to start Transition, but it is just meeting people and seeing what they’re doing and somehow it’s traced back to something we’re involved with — it’s just extraordinary.

TL: What’s been most concerning that you’ve seen here?

RH: I think the thing that I didn’t appreciate or having any experience of, the fear levels around this stuff is much higher here and there is that very real, palpable sense that once things start to fall there is nothing to catch — the whole stuff with healthcare here and how that worries people and how it completely dominates people’s life choices and how they spend their time and how much money they have to be bringing in just to cover the basics. I will go home and kiss my national health service on the cheek.

I did a talk yesterday with a group and people were saying it’s terrifying, it feels like things are moving so fast here. I remember someone saying, “when everything is getting better and better and worse and worse faster and faster all at the same time,” and I think you get that sense very strongly here. But if anywhere can do this and turn it around, it will be here I think. The resources, the incredible can-do spirit here, the entrepreneurial spirit — if that can be harnessed then that will be extraordinary.

TL: I understand you don’t normally fly. What made you decide to make an exception and come to the States?

RH: I haven’t flown in seven years. I went to the cinema in my town and watchedAn Inconvenient Truth and I got to the end after watching the last five minutes of ice water pouring down the glaciers in Greenland and then the bit comes up at the end of the film, “What to do: Change your light bulbs....” That’s not going to cut it! And I felt I had to leave the theater having changed something that was appropriate so I decided I wasn’t going to fly anymore. So Transition Network as it is currently seen and understood is having been created in 44 countries and thousands of communities without anyone getting on an airplane. Although it does mean sometimes feeling like Osama bin Laden sitting in a cave sending out DVDs of presentations round the world.

I can get to places in Europe by the train and I do a lot of presentations by Skype. The thing that swung it for me was I went to a film called Chasing Ice, which is visceral about what’s happening to the Arctic and shortly after that a woman who we know who has given some funding to Transition Network who is very connected in the U.S. to all the foundations and philanthropic organizations, she asked if we would come over and do some stuff and we said, no, we don’t fly. She said, “OK, I really respect that’s the case but all the foundations that I talk to, all the people at the UN, all the politicians I talk to, they’re all saying they give it 18 months and then they give up on mitigation, they pull all their funding out of mitigation and they just put it into adaptation.”

In other words they give up on staying below 2 degrees [celsius] and there was kind of a catch in her voice as she was saying it. And I thought, actually, do I want to be in a position in 20 years to say to my grandchildren, well, we didn’t sort the climate thing out, but I didn’t fly! As someone put it to me, “The moral high ground is all very well until the water is lapping around it.”

She said, “I can’t guarantee you anything will happen, that we’ll turn it around, but I can get you in front of lots of people.” So we came.

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http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-10-15/think-a-new-economy-is-possible-meet-the-man-already-making-it-happen