The launch of Grand Theft Auto 4 just made over $500 million is sales. So what does that mean for us as a country? It means that our youth are so wrapped up in virtual violence and non-reality, that as peak oil has begun to kick us in the teeth, millions of video game zombies are tuned out of our very real problems.

Last year, I wrote a satirical post (To All The Geeks, Gamers, and Non-Attention Payers) about kids having to get ready to eat one another as human society collapses. I’m no longer interested in using humor to break through.

What are we supposed to think when so many people are hot to press button combinations on a joystick to bitch slap hookers and shoot cops? Sure, it may all be in “Good Fun”, but the premise of such actions is much different than zapping asteroids or saving a princess.

If gamers today want to play a more “realistic game” they are getting one served up to them in the form of gas prices, food prices, layoffs, and war. And if they think they are immune to the effects, they might want to take their heads out of the X-Box for a few minutes and pay attention.

We are now in the most challenging time in our history as modern society begins to collapse. While we still have active social systems and a sense of order in America, the end of cheap oil and no fast alternatives means these video games could be training people for what is truly coming.

I hate to think that we could face such mayhem, where anyone and everyone could be a target of humans gone wild. Hell, people are already selling manhole covers for scrap metal. In times of desperation, if we do not keep our integrity and dignity as human beings, people who play these types of games might just snap and not be able to decipher between what is real and what is not.

When food and shelter become unaffordable or unavailable as they are elsewhere in the world, how will we maintain order? By telling people to stay home and play Grand Theft Auto? By locking everyone up in those minty-fresh FEMA camps?

Why not actively pursue that target market with enough time to waste on video games and recruit them to help the elderly with converting their lawns into food gardens or running errands? Or would they rather switch weapons with a quick flick of their thumb and simply shoot, beat, or flame throw them?

If the answer does not fall in the first category, we are in deep shit.

Attention all Ethanol haters: You really don’t know what you are talking about. All the manufactured hysteria blaming ethanol for high food prices is getting out of hand, and people need to wake up to reality. Blame the oil companies, folks - not farmers.

I usually don’t agree with George Bush, but listen to the truth he let slip out at a news conference when a reporter asked him the following question:

Reporter: The World Bank says about 85 percent of the increase in corn price since 2002 is due to biofuel — increased demand for biofuels. And your Secretary of State said that — indicated yesterday that she thought that might be part of the problem. Do you agree with that? And what can the United States do — what more can the United States do to help make food more affordable around the world?

“THE PRESIDENT: Actually, I have a little different take: I thought it was
85 percent of the world’s food prices are caused by weather, increased demand and energy prices — just the cost of growing product — and that 15 percent has been caused by ethanol, the arrival of ethanol.

“By the way, the high price of gasoline is going to spur more investment in ethanol as an alternative to gasoline. And the truth of the matter is it’s in our national interests that our farmers grow energy, as opposed to us purchasing energy from parts of the world that are unstable or may not like us.

“One thing I think that would be — I know would be very creative policy is if we — is if we would buy food from local farmers as a way to help deal with scarcity, but also as a way to put in place an infrastructure so that nations can be self-sustaining and self-supporting. It’s a proposal I put forth that Congress hasn’t responded to yet, and I sincerely hope they do”

Holy shit!

That sounds a whole lot like the message local food movements have been crying out for years, doesn’t it? George Bush, for once, is right. To keep blaming corn for high food prices is the height of ignorance. Sure, there are correlations, but to place all the blame on it simply shows there are many uneducated people out there. Take a look at this price index and decide for yourself what is the REAL reason for food prices skyrocketing:

So, let me REPEAT: Oil is the cause of food prices, and we can make fuel from things OTHER THAN CORN. Therefore, it’s not ETHANOL’s fault, rather the existing agricultural system in place supporting the WAY WE SUPPORT ETHANOL. Get it yet?

Corn gets you about 200 gallons of ethanol per acre. Here are some lovely examples of different feedstocks we can use:

Cattails - 2,500 gallons per acre (12.5 X more than corn)
Sorghum - 3,500 gallons per acre (17.5 X more than corn)
Fodder beats - 940 gallons per acre (4.7 X more than corn)
SOURCE

There are about 30 more feedstocks, from fruit to 70 million acres of weeds (mesquite) that we can make fuel from. And before you get all worked up over the food VS fuel argument, anyone can look at world crop production and see that we produce around twice the calories we need to feed everyone. What we have is a money shortage, since food is a commodity and not a right: Whoever can pay for it gets to buy it.

So it’s policies that need to change, folks. If you are angry enough, maybe it’s time to turn off the TV and video games and get involved a lot more. You can start by making sure you get involved by educating your politicians (Send them a copy of this book), supporting your local farmers, finding alternative transportation other than driving everywhere, and planting food at home.

This way we can start acting like grown ups and fix our problems instead of letting lobbyists and corporations continue to screw things up even more.

BONUS: Listen to Burt Bacharach & The Posies’ “What The World Needs Now” for 20 extra Karma points

Woo hoo! Even the Wall Street Journal is picking up on growing food at home.

Yes ladies and gentlemen, you can say you are trend setters. When getting your food from right around your house becomes the coolest thing you can do in the neighborhood, you can rest assured we are on the right track to dealing with Peak Oil.

Wait until Bright Neighbor is launched, when you see how we make it easy to do business as a lawn farmer!

No one said it would be easy to implement fixes for peak oil or climate change, and it is evident it will only occur with a bottom up and top down approach.

For years now, we have heard the Peak Oil predictions of Kunstler, Simmons, Heinberg, Blume, and other authors preaching their Peak Oil prophecy. As reality begins to pry the fingers from the ears of people who have long ignored our global problems, a critical mass of people have begun to ask “So what are we going to DO about it?”

What are we going to DO about Peak Oil?
What are we going to DO about rapid climate change?
What are we going to DO about market failure?
What are we going to DO about government failure?
What are we going to DO about fixing the food system?
What are we going to DO about fixing the transportation system?

Why is government failing? No one seems to agree, and it is BECAUSE no one seems to agree that man made laws are resisting adaptation to live with nature’s reality. After all, in a consumer driven planet, how can governments force consumer choice if choice is still abundant?

It is exactly for this reason that markets are failing in a growth-oriented global economy. Since resource scarcity is real, we are no longer able to have as much choice of supplies for real world items such as wheat, gasoline, and water.

But we have plenty of crappy niche Web 2.0 applications rushing to save the day, don’t we? Not enough engineers are focused on real world solutions such as local alcohol fuel and food production made from permaculture systems. Software jockeys are too busy drinking and coding Java to look up and see the ship is crashing on the rocks as both government and markets fail at the same time.

And while local municipalities are now actively creating Peak Oil Task Forces and sustainability commissions to help address the issues, they are powerless in the face of consumer choice. After all, money in people’s pocket means permission to consume. While these task forces seek to offer plans and advice for reducing carbon emissions and decreasing our dependency on fossil fuels - we are lacking the human willpower to change in time to mitigate a population and food disaster.

It is for this reason that these task forces can skip budgeting for “Outreach Programs” designed to talk about Peak Oil problems - and begin to look at funding implementing tools designed to support hyper-local communities, such as Bright Neighbor.

Yes, I am biased because that is my company’s solution (and competition is sure to follow). Right now, municipalities could implement tools to quickly help people learn to grow food at home, safely meet and collaborate with their neighbors, buy, sell, and barter at a hyper-local level, lend things out to one another, make ride sharing simple, among many other communications improvements. One problem is that people can do many of these things using a variety of tools available to them, but there needs to be an aggregated set of tools that eliminates redundancy.

For instance, if a community ends up using five different neighbor-to-neighbor applications, there will be neighbors that never connect. An immediate fix for Peak Oil, climate change, market failure, and local food systems would be to deploy an all-in-one tool that addresses life-support systems, supported by local governments or neighborhood leaders. If all the community members with Internet access and mobile devices in a single neighborhood coordinated to use a single communications system, then the chances of that neighborhood collaborating to help one another grow gardens, share resources, and generally improve their community are greatly increased.

It is the mission of Bright Neighbor to deliver community living tools that we can use now, instead of waiting for things to get worse. Why shouldn’t you be able to find someone in your neighborhood who has a 30 foot ladder right now? Or coordinate music jam sessions while bringing pot luck dinners created with locally produced food? Or help single moms locate other single moms that live around them to safely meet one another and share soccer-mom duties.

There are many ways to get started with Bright Neighbor, and they are life affirming reasons, not “doom” tools. We can gain value from better community living systems today. That is why we are excited to announce Bright Neighbor is now actively seeking pilot communities and neighborhoods looking for community organization and sustainability tools.

To sign up your neighborhood for a Bright Neighbor test run, please visit Bright Neighbor.

Who knows. There are so many people on earth as our ecosystems collapse, it might just end up being a tasty treat we all get used to. Thank goodness for ketchup.

This Lawns to Gardens post can be read here. I figure it’s a good way to help people discover the Peak Oil social network I have set up.

* Note - The article was written by Tad Montgomery, an ecological engineer living in Brattleboro, Vermont.

By Randy White
Editor Lawns to Gardens

Move over Rover, and make way for the new family pecker.

Yes folks, we have arrived at a crucial turning point and marker of change. If you plot major Peak Oil and system change events in terms of time, we have a new historical marker to add to the chart. The Age of Urban Chickens has returned!

I wish I knew about raising chickens. Here is a blog that knows everything about it. But what I do know is many Portlanders are now entering the “Chicken as a Pet” market, creating new job opportunities along with it.

After all, when the economy is tanking the way it is, people are looking for ways to sustain themselves. Chickens scratch up the ground, poop on your lawn, and give you free eggs. What pet can give you more? The best part is that the cat may chase it around but can’t really do anything to it since the chicken can peck back. Like my friend Mark says “It’s like any great disfunctional family.”

My neighbor happens to be a man who has skills in woodworking. In this crap economy, he could easily start building and selling custom chicken coops. I know this because there are people, right now, willing to shell out between $100 - $300 for a chicken coop, depending on features.

Features, you ask? That’s right. This is the coolest time ever to be alive, because as Peak Oil kicks in, entrepreneurs and engineers get to redesign civilization in real time. With all the low-cost technologies that make it easy for engineers and artists to build prototypes at a low cost, there are going to be some awesome new things that people build while we reorganize our hyper-local human ecosystems.

By that, I mean that in order to functionally navigate the downward slope of the energy crash, we need to be fun and creative. Life could really suck if we let it and don’t grasp onto this opportunity to reorganize our lives for the better. So imagine the kind of creative chicken coops that people like my neighbor will be building (from scrap and reclaimed materials, of course).

Smart builders can make the coops include dual functioanlity, such as adding in a a storage shed or make it a portable Rave station as this example shows:

There is no limit to our creativity. All we need to do in order to save ourselves are a few simple things. Here they are, in order:

1) Take the top 20 artists from Burning Man
2) Pair them with the top engineers of our day
3) Fund their projects such as cool, low cost chicken coops that serve multiple functions

And think beyond existing demand. Marketers today are thinking like today. Uh uh. Think like tomorrow. Right now.

While you do that, I’m going to think up names to call my chickens.

As the CEO of a technology company, Peak Oil analyst, and sustainability trend spotter, I want to point out some blazing examples of trends presenting themselves as we continue to try and overcome our sustainability / survival challenges.

TREND #1: EXPECT THE MEGA-PILLARS OF THE INTERNET TO TAKE OVER GOVERNMENT

It is only a matter of time before Internet software completely reprograms human behavior. The Mega-Pillars of the Internet, including Google, Microsoft, MySpace, Facebook, etc. will continue to duke it out with one another for primacy. In order to achieve this, they will continue to suck up the ideas of small start-ups that offer true innovation.

This will only continue as each mega-pillar also creates applications marketplaces by fostering open source programming environments for their users. Essentially, these behemoths no longer need to pay as many programmers, since they have users doing all the hard work for them. Applications that have real value filter their own way to the top, just like a good rock band. If enough people like you, you get famous.

Then, the big boys simply assimilate that cool new functionality into their mega-pillars that already have the eyes and ears of millions of registered users. This way, they can gain mass adoption in an instant, while fledgling startup companies either get acquired or go belly up after their ideas are stolen.

After a period, people will stop listening to government leaders and just start doing their own thing to survive. After all, they will have all the tools necessary to live sustainable lives at their fingertips. One example of this trend is how Google has assimilated the routes of government controlled transit.

So if you live in Portland like I do, you can now bypass the Tri-met website and simply use Google’s transit tool to plan your entire trip. As more of the Mega-Pillars begin to assimilate the functions of government, people will begin to rely on themselves and technology to self-sustain. Expect to see cool things such as people using their cell phones to see who in a particular neighborhood is selling or trading for eggs.

That means over time, government will become less necessary as sustainable systems better support themselves.

TREND #2: EDIBLE LANDSCAPING AND PERMACULTURE WILL BECOME A NEW ECONOMIC BOOM

We haven’t even buried the corpse of capitalism yet, but I will go out on a limb to say that as we find an equilibrium for allowing people to remain in their homes, we will need to use permaculture to hyper-relocalize our food systems and ecological foundations.

I see more and more policy planners paying attention to people that know a lot about the earth. As these gurus become consultants, we will see exciting designs as wealth meets sustainability. It will become much more than Hollywood trying to “Green” the Oscars. Landscapers that combine the law(n)s of nature with sheik design will be guaranteed a market.

The fun part will be seeing the labor market fight for jobs to help people do the conversion! How amazing will it be to see teams of neighbors working on permaculture projects together?

Need an example? Check out these two videos:

TREND #3: VIOLENCE WILL BE OVERCOME

I know I may get blasted by doomers for saying it, but I just don’t believe it’s the end of the world. Not without us really trying to stop that from happening. Ok, so crime is on the rise as the economy crashes. Or if someone actually lets loose a nuke in a city somewhere, it will suck tremendously. Or, if climate change ramps up so fast we all perish, then poop-on-a-stick. But to say that we just sat back and watched it all go down without even *trying*?

No way. I believe in America’s pioneering spirit, and that we are beginning to witness a journey within ourselves that frees us from the bonds of violence, and allows us to find happiness in appropriate food, shelter, and transportation systems.

We can’t help it if the financial system crashes, but we can help what we do about it. While the economies of the world are set for implosion due to peak oil, we should be set for an explosion of freedoms. Freedom to get out in our yards to make our soil rich and full of nutrients that plants love. We can explore the amazing freedoms of beekeeping, local food processing, board games, bike riding - a whole lot of reasons to keep on living.

Just because we all have guns doesn’t mean we have to use them.

Don’t look now, but we are at war!

No, I’m not talking about the War in Iraq, Afghanistan, or other politically driven war. I am talking about the war within ourselves. The war to cling and hang onto what is unsustainable. Seriously, did we really think we could Burger King and McDonald’s our way into the future?

It’s just not healthy, folks. The way we have been living, that is.

So, we are certainly headed for a lot of boo-hooing as reality renegotiates our lives for us. But hey, living is awesome! It sure beats dying. And our former behaviors have to die a quick death so we can reinvent America again. The great news is that it is a whole lot of fun!

There are plenty of leaders in this country that can teach people how to sustainably grow, prepare, and preserve local foods. No matter if you haven’t ever picked up a shovel… even lazy TV zombies can help in our transformation as we turn open land into productive soil.

If you haven’t seen the episodes of the Lawns To Gardens videos I have posted, let me assure you as a card carrying Nintendo geek - YOU CAN GROW FOOD! As things get more and more expensive and more people are laid off from the information economy, we will need to do physical work. And that’s okay, we need the exercise anyway.

There are plenty of gardening How-To sites on the internet, so I suppose Lawns to Gardens is meant to be more of a motivator. The cheerleader and “We Can Do It!” website meant to help people get over themselves. Especially since it looks like with so many people on planet earth, we had better sign peace terms with our own souls first.

Only then will we be ready as a society to high-five one another and put together local coordinated teams for gardening, exercise, community activities, and other sustainable behaviors. I very much look forward to our rebirth.

Right now, the media is busy blaming ethanol for high food prices. This has been proven false, and they are just trying to blame our current problems on a scapegoat.
Ethanol is not the culprit behind high food prices. and ethanol does not need fertilizer to be made. Ever heard of permaculture?

Propaganda, folks. Blaming high food prices on Ethanol is pure propaganda, and don’t you fall for it. They want to give you something to blame other than the oil barons. Watch David Blume debunk the propaganda you are being fed:

Learn more about David Blume here.

See why our military is sick of fighting for oil here.

Hemp as a materials resource and alcohol as a fuel resource have a linear history of being outlawed by capitalists. We can grow these and offset the oil crash.

Here is a Newsflash from Captain Obvious!

How are those Reagan-era economic policies working out for America? We could probably generate great revenues by taxing politicians’ prostitute activities, but since that will never happen, we are stuck with our economic meltdown. What’s so funny is how SMALL the government is making the text for their Mass Layoffs summary.

Gee, maybe if it’s small enough, no one will bother reading it!

Here are some highlights, including the 10 industries reporting the highest numbers of mass layoff claims:

1) Temporary help services
2) School and employee bus transportation
3) Automobile manufacturing
4) Professional employer organizations
5) Discount department stores
6) Light truck and utility vehicle manufacturing
7) Highway, street, and bridge construction Motion picture and video production
9) Wood kitchen cabinet and countertop manufacturing
10) Farm labor contractors and crew leaders

It’s the Farm labor that throws me off kilter. Why are farm laborers being laid off? Don’t we have a food crisis? Are humans asking for too much with their already low wages for picking fruits and vegetables? What gives?

I can only wonder how long it will be until America’s laid off workforce are ready to take on some 1930’s Depression type jobs, desperate for anything that pays the bills.

I think we are getting there, especially since all the bottlenecks for more war have been removed.

A statement from the honorable Andrew McNamara, Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation:

SUMMARY: In the twenty first century the human race must finally confront the reality that in the closed system that is planet earth, there are limits to growth.

No matter how clever we are, there is no escaping the physical limits of the world’s resources of oil, wood, water and arable land.

Andrew McNamara is a member of the Queensland State Parliament and the Minister for Sustainability, Climate Change and Innovation in the Anna Bligh government. He comes to the role with a reputation for confronting inconvenient truths and conventional thinking.

——————

I’d like to pay my respects to the traditional owners of the land on which we gather this evening.

I want to thank the Board of the Brisbane Institute for the invitation to address this gathering.

Tonight I want to talk about capital S Sustainability.

By that I don’t mean the usual narrow environmental concept of sustainability in agricultural production and land use.

I mean the future of our society, our economy and our environment; the structure of our cities, their energy and water sources and demand profiles; the treatment of these sources of our wealth; the imminent peaking of world oil supplies; our use of finite resources like gas and coal; and the way we dispose of those resources when we’re finished with them.

I will begin by considering what sustainability means to me.

It’s a word that means different things to different people and is a word used in connection with everything from nappies to mining companies.

I will look at sustainability in the context of today’s hottest issues – the crouching tiger of climate change and the hidden dragon of peak oil.

We can’t talk about sustainability without talking about waste and resource efficiency.

We talk a great deal about becoming a more efficient economy, but we really need to ask what we are becoming efficient at when we throw away more and more.

And finally I want to touch on the problem of population distribution.

Until we start talking about population distribution, we can not honestly claim to have the whole problem on the table.

And that I suspect will well and truly fill the 18 minutes I have left!

In 2002 the US national Academy of Sciences concluded that humanity’s collective demands first surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity around 1980.

Today, global demands on natural systems exceed their sustainable yield by an estimated 25 per cent.

That means we are meeting current demands by consuming the earth’s natural assets, setting the stage for decline and collapse.

With a population expected to top 9 billion this century, sustainability is the crucial social, economic and political issue facing the world today.

With some notable exceptions, policy makers have been guilty of allowing sustainability to be cast as a peculiarly environmental issue, marginalised from the main game of economic development.

In 1949, Australia’s greatest economist, Colin Clark presented the keynote paper “World Resources and World Population” at the UN Scientific Conference on Conservation and Utilisation of Resources.

He noted that the “conservation of soil, forests, stream flows and natural biological equilibria is certainly one of the most important and urgent tasks which faces us today.”

Sustainability is the ultimate whole of government - indeed, whole of society - issue.

Pigeon-holing it as a narrow environmental concept has led us down a path of accepting unsustainability in the name of jobs and economic development.

But as the world is now showing us, we can not forever trade off sustainability for short term profits.

Meadows and her colleagues in Limits to Growth (1972) defined a sustainable society as one that is “far-seeing enough, flexible enough and wise enough not to undermine either its physical or its social systems of support.”

Sustainability must be the foundation upon which we build economic strength and natural resilience.

It’s the beginning and the end of any discussion about society’s future… the purpose and the process for what we do… the aim and the outcome of our deliberations.

Sustainability isn’t something to be considered in isolation, almost as an afterthought.

It must be central to our planning, thinking and acting as we seek to live in harmony with the planet, and leave it in better condition than when we arrived.

What the science of climate change is now demonstrating is just how badly Australia’s approach of “borrowing from its past and its future, to sustain its current population and lifestyle” (Foran, 2003) has undermined those systems of support.

Due to my self imposed time constraints I do not propose to say too much tonight on climate change per se.

Let me assure you it is not for lack of interest or an appreciation of the urgency of the task.

Global warming is a symptom of the problem of living unsustainably. Consuming fossil fuels without considering the waste is a sustainability issue.

Industrialised society’s failure to minimise waste and emissions, and neutralise those necessary for continued industrial development in a sustainable manner has created today’s diminished environment.

Ice core records show that at the time of the beginnings of agriculture and the development of the first cities 8,000 years ago, CO2 in the atmosphere stood at around 280 parts per million.

The Industrial Revolution commenced in 1780, literally got up a head of steam, and by 1930, CO2 in the atmosphere had risen to 315 ppm (May, 2007).

Lord May, the Australian born, former President of the Royal Society (2000 – 2005) and Chief Scientific Advisor to the British Government (1995 – 2000) makes the point that the rate of increase in greenhouse concentrations is unprecedented in the 10,000 years since the end of the last ice age and if current trends continue, we will see atmospheric CO2 levels reach “at least 500 ppm” by 2050 (May, 2007, p7).

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is made up of the leading climate scientists from 169 countries concluded in their February 2007 report that by 2100 we will see warming in the range of 1.1° to 6.4°, with the likelihood of settling at 2.0° to 2.8° (IPCC 2007).

It is worth noting that the IPCC’s predictions have consistently underestimated the rate of change.

What is still not widely understood is just how significant that apparently small change in global average temperatures is in effect.

As Lord May noted, “the difference in average global temperature between today and the depths of the last ice age is only around 5°C.”

We are looking at a rate of extinction that is of the same order of magnitude as the one that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The challenge of climate change, or human induced global catastrophe as it should be known, might be the clarion call that heralds another threat caused by our careless consumption of fossil fuels.

I spoke earlier of climate change as the crouching tiger; the danger we can see. It is real, dangerous and imminent.

I suggest that we face an even graver threat, that is even more imminent than global warming, and in response to which we have chosen to look the other way for 50 years.

The hidden dragon I speak of is resource depletion; of the peaking supply of those sources of energy that have enabled our explosion from around 2 billion people on the planet in 1900 to 6.5 billion today.

This is truly the unseen threat that will confront us all soon enough, whether we choose to see it or not.

I was here last year when Dr Roger Bezdek, one of the authors of the Hirsch Report (2005) on peak oil written for the US Department of Energy addressed the Institute on the topic of the inevitable peaking world oil and gas supplies.

His is one of a growing group of voices predicting that sometime between 2006 and 2020 the world will pass a point after which we will never have as much oil at our disposal as we did the day before.

What began as a whisper from Shell’s chief geologist M King Hubbert in the 1950s, is now a shout which can’t be ignored.

The US CEO of General-Motors, Rick Wagoner, stated publicly in January this year that in GM’s view the world has now passed peak oil.

Official world production figures released by the International Energy Agency in its World Energy Outlook (2007) show that November 2006 is firming as the possible peak of production, with the world’s daily average in that month of 85.5 million barrels per day (mbpd) of oil and condensates not having been exceeded in the 14 months since.

The high stakes humanity is playing for in the environmental poker game where the chips come from our own declining resource base were summed up by renowned astronomer, Sir Fred Hoyle, in 1964 in “Of Men and Galaxies” who declared:

“It has often been said that, if the human species fails to make a go of it here on Earth, some other species will take over the running. In the sense of developing high intelligence, this is not correct. We have, or soon will have, exhausted the necessary prerequisites so far as this planet is concerned. With coal gone, oil gone, high grade metallic ores gone, no species however competent can make the long climb from primitive conditions to high level technology. This is a one shot affair. If we fail, this planetary system fails so far as intelligence is concerned. The same will be true of other planetary systems. On each of them there will be one chance and one chance only.”

High stakes indeed.

Yet what have we done but draw upon the Earth’s non renewable resources as if they were limitless, and create an economy that assumes - indeed demands - cheap energy to sustain the national and international movement of food and goods and water and people in ever greater volumes and numbers.

We have laid out our cities and built our suburbs and resumed agricultural land as if it were our purpose to live as far as possible from where we work and further than we can imagine from where our food is grown.

For the past week West Texas Crude has been consistently trading between US$100 and US$102 a barrel and we now stand on the threshold of an upswing in global oil prices that will have a significant impact on the economy of the world and for which we are seriously unprepared.

Unsustainable consumption has a price, and we will soon pay it.

I am however not as worried about the impact on our economy of rising oil prices feeding into higher transport, packaging, pharmaceuticals and food costs - as serious as these will be - as I am about the cause of these impacts.

Peak oil is not a theory.

Since commercial oil drilling started in Pennsylvania in 1859, country after country has gone through the same depletion curve.

Oil, when first discovered, literally shoots from the ground, due to the pressure built up in the reserve over millions of years.

As more wells are sunk, production rises exponentially, but inevitably, when between one third and a half of the oil in the field has been extracted the pressure drops away and the oil stops flowing.

Oil can still be extracted but at much greater cost and much more slowly. Once the peak of production is passed, it is irreversible.

Australian oil production peaked in 2000.

There was a brief period in the 1990s when we produced 100% of our domestic oil needs, Australia now is producing less than 70% of our needs, and the balance of payments is showing the strain.

Notwithstanding our substantial coal, gas and uranium exports, Australia is on the verge of becoming a net energy importer as a result of our reliance on imported oil products.

The International Energy Agency in 2007 warned of serious global supply disruptions starting in 2010.

Just as we have changed the way we view and use water, I suggest that our current liquid fuel usage patterns are about to change as well.

What both peak oil and climate change will impose upon us is a requirement to use less energy, not just petrol but all forms and carriers of energy, in order to produce less greenhouse gasses and to allow for the greatest degree of energy substitution possible.

We will need to live closer to work, schools and shops or the public transport nodes that can link us to those destinations.

The town planning concepts that arose out of the justifiable desire during the industrial revolution to not live next door to what Blake described in “A New Jerusalem” as “dark satanic mills” and which gave rise to residential urban sprawl 30 minutes drive away from the so called “business park”, have become redundant - if not downright indulgent - in a world where energy efficiency and restraint will be the guiding considerations for business, its financers, customers and regulators.

Cabinet recently asked me to oversee the production of a Queensland strategy to mitigate the impacts on the state of severely reduced oil supplies.

The dragon is now out in the open with the tiger, and we are in between.

We have the capacity with existing technology and intellect to adopt more sustainable policies and practices to bring greenhouse gas emissions under control through greater use of renewable energy sources and mitigation strategies, and to reduce our reliance on oil.

The Government has directed its attention to these issues already with the ending of broad scale land clearing and forest acquisition and restoration programs such as are underway in Springbrook and the Daintree.

More sustainable lifestyles for Queensland families are being supported by Transport Orientated Developments which my colleague John Mickel is driving in the Transport portfolio, and new programs such as the $100 million Renewable Energy and Smart Energy Funds that I jointly administer with Mines and Energy Minister Geoff Wilson, and the $430 million Climate Change Fund.

We face a huge task, one that Lester Brown in his “Plan B 3.0” (2008) describes thus:

“The challenge for our generation is to build a new economy, one that is powered largely by renewable sources of energy, that has a highly diversified transport system, and that reuses and recycles everything. And to do it with unprecedented speed.”

An economy that recycles everything is a long way from where we are.

In Cradle to Grave, William McDonough and Michael Braungart say that:

“ Humans are condemned as the one species on the planet guilty of burdening it beyond what it can withstand; as such, we must shrink our presence, our systems, our activities…. The goal is zero: zero waste, zero emissions, zero “ecological footprint.”

Queensland has a big backyard.

We have never thought of ourselves as being short of land in which to dump stuff.

The idea of zero waste and extended producer responsibility is something that has taken off overseas, but is only sputtering to a start here.

Consequently, in Queensland we have among the worst rates of recycling and highest rates of landfill in Australia.

We must do better, and we will do better.

This all actually presents a new opportunity.

It is a great opportunity to lead the world in new technologies, new industries and new green collar jobs.

Looking to the horizon is not just about seeing the threats, we can also prepare for the opportunities.

As daunting as the work we have to do is, there is however still one piece of the puzzle not yet on the table.

In an energy-constrained world dedicated to massively reducing greenhouse gas emissions, it’s time we spoke its name; population.

American biologist Edward O. Wilson wrote:

“The rampaging monster loose upon the land is over-population. In its presence, sustainability is but a fragile theoretical construct.”

Peter McDonald, from the Australian Centre for Population Research, estimates that over the next 40 years or so, Australia’s population will grow to around 25 to 26 million.

Addressing the question of population sustainability requires recognition of the fact that there are two Australia’s in terms of population.

There is the Australia in which 66% of the population live in just five large and disbursed cities and there is the rest spread out over a huge land mass, but even then, overwhelmingly clinging to the coast line.

The Hon. Barry Jones (2003) referring to the unanimous House of Representatives Standing Committee on Long Term Strategies 1994 report, “Australia’s Population ‘Carrying Capacity’: One Nation – Two Ecologies” and notes that:

“a serious examination of Australia’s future population composition needed to be based on geographical, environmental and resource diversity.”

The proposition remains as correct and as unstarted today as it was in 1994.

In 1997, the then Premier of New South Wales the Hon. Bob Carr, in opening the National Conference of Australians for an Ecologically Sustainable Population said:

“I think people are ready to grasp the argument that the unsustainable growth in population numbers is degrading our planet and that Australia must begin to think of itself as a country with a population problem. Let’s throw away for all time the notion that Australia is an empty space just waiting to be filled up. Our rivers, our soils, our vegetation won’t allow that to happen without an enormous cost to those who come after us.”

Half a generation after those wise words by Bob Carr, they remain just as true and just as unacted upon as they were in 1997.

In Queensland my Ministerial colleague Craig Wallace, the Minister for Natural Resources and Water is conducting a series of water planning studies to map the reserves of our water catchments and projected draws on those reserves over the next 50 years.

The Deputy Premier and Minister for Infrastructure and Planning Paul Lucas is reviewing the State’s regional plans to ensure that there is adequate infrastructure provided for anticipated growth up until 2050.

What is now necessary, however, is recognition of the fact that while carrying capacity is expandable, it is never infinite.

Population is a topic for discussion at Kevin Rudd’s 2020 discussion and I look forward to that debate.

The key to achieving a sustainable Australian population in the 21st century is population distribution - adopting policies which encourage and support population growth in areas where it can be supported sustainably, and discouraging it in those places where it can’t.

Population maldistribution increases the stress on available resources and heightens the need for more stringent sustainable living practices, such as water restrictions.

Developed countries have the double whammy of increasing populations and rampant consumerism.

It’s one thing to provide the necessities of life… quite another to provide the trimmings demanded by affluence.

Population distribution, standard of living and sustainability are linked inextricably.

They sit like three moons around a planet… separate, but part of the one system; influencing each other, intimately connected.

A long term study pointing out the appropriate population distribution for Australia, including modelling of the impacts both of climate change and peak oil on our capital cities, our regional cities and rural areas must now become a priority.

This will of course be controversial.

As Butler (2003) notes, no academic or political consensus exists concerning the optimum population for Australia.

That is however no excuse not to start.

In the 21st century, the human race must finally confront the reality that in the closed system that is planet earth, there are limits to growth.

No matter how clever we are, there is no escaping the physical limits of the world’s resources.

The laws of physics trump the laws of economics every time.

What we need above all is smart growth.

Growth that is low carbon.

Growth that is low pollution.

Growth that is resource neutral.

We need growth that actually adds to the natural capital, instead of destroying it.

The title of my talk tonight is “Highway of Diamonds.”

The Bob Dylan tragics in the room might have recognised the phrase from his 1962 classic, “A Hard Rain’s A-gonna Fall.”

In the song Dylan poses the question “Oh what did you see my blue eyed son?” and offers in part the reply, “I saw a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.”

It has increasingly struck me as a perfect symbol for the choices we now face in dealing with climate change, peak oil and population; what to build and where; road or rail; seaport or airport; capital city or regional centre; balancing the enormous costs of providing infrastructure now in a time of momentous change against the undoubted costs of acting too late and in more uncertain times.

We need to get it right.

No one will thank us for a highway of diamonds with nobody on it.

By Randy White
Editor, Lawns to Gardens

So… do you like it hot, dirty, and full of heavy breathing?

Then pick up a shovel and get to work! Many Americans still haven’t accepted the idea of growing their own food on whatever plot of land they have available. It seems most people still expect the Federal government is supposed to help us ween ourselves from mono-culture, which is of course laughable. We all know deep-down that America has crashed into the rocks of reality, but why give up when we can play until the end of the game?

There are many positive things we can all change about ourselves to fix this place. It starts by getting off our butts, turning off the TV, and checking out our lawn / soil conditions. But until all media programming concentrates on turning Americans into farmers no matter where they live, my questions are:

- What percent of Americans are at least making an attempt to grow ANY food at all? Herbs? Carrots? Anything?
- What tools are available to help non-farmers enjoy the benefits of farming?

I love that video. And sure, while I am a cynic, I do believe there are those of us who will do what we can to make it without crying for someone other than ourselves to save us. (Note to Christians: What Would Jesus Grow?)

Fun facts:

44% of gardeners increase their time spent outdoors due to their garden.
58% of gardeners increase their fresh fruit and vegetable consumption each day.
83% of gardeners save money on food because of their garden.
75% of gardeners share extra produce with people who don’t live with them.
44% of gardeners meet new neighbors as a result of their garden.

And if you don’t have the first clue how to get delicious veggies to pop out of the ground and into your mouth, do yourself a favor and head over to www.growveg.com. GrowVeg is one of the most valuable tools on the Internet, and I’m excited to announce the formation of a GrowVeg and Bright Neighbor partnership (coming soon!).

GrowVeg will help non-farmers plan their gardens better than just about any other tool you will find, and it comes with a free 30-day trial. Try it out before we reach this future:

By Randy White
Editor, Lawns to Gardens

Have you ever been in a fight?

You know, a real life and death “Oh Shit!” moment in your life when someone is in your face and there is no way to avoid an ass-kicking from one side or the other?

I would rather avoid such entanglements and simply get along with my fellow man. That’s nature’s economy, getting along with others, but then again - so is population correction. The human “Market Correction” we are beginning to experience due to peak oil, overpopulation, and ecological destruction is certainly getting interesting. This article focuses on my Malthusian view of the way things are going down, based on Leap Year night in Seattle.

I feel people are scared right now, and everybody senses that the big problems we have in America to maintain sustainability are getting too hard to handle. This is causing social pressures that are spilling over into forms of aggression amongst ourselves. Here’s an example, put in terms of sociological implications of a typical American bar / nightclub:

The Meat-Head culture that has for so long so blindly followed poor leadership have failed to evolve in time to save themselves. They are now so confused by the implosion of America’s modern, unsustainable living system, that they cannot possibly fathom letting go without a fight. Heads are starting to pop and corks are starting to blow.

For instance, when you mix American testosterone, social pressures caused by overpopulation, and alcohol, the results are utterly predictable. Here is a message to all of our country’s meat-heads:

When you can no longer pay your bills, you tend to get frustrated. If you also happen to pump a lot of iron and you think you have a physical upper edge, you might just pick a fight these days. After all, you aren’t going to take shit from anyone anymore. You are just so sick of it all, so fuck it, right?

I witnessed one of these fights this weekend. I was in Seattle laying the groundwork for a secret project to help Seattle build better local community, and decided to take in a little Rock-and-Roll. Only it ended up being a white hip-hop show instead. And what a fantastic musical discovery it was!

The musical line-up:

No-Fi Soul Rebellion
A Husband-Wife musical duo complete with a one-man atomically-energized musician. I haven’t witnessed such great crowd working since Rabbit-In-The-Moon’s legendary Portland Halloween show.

Telephone Jim Jesus - A horrible crap solo act in between

Sole and the Skyrider Band

Toward the end of Skyrider’s set, a fight broke out over who-knows-what between a couple of Meat-Heads. Their necks were thicker than tree stumps and something sent them into heated fisticuffs. Now, this is a show where people came together for PEACE and FUN, and the pressure was even too great at this place for civil cohesion.

Not that you can use a single event to gauge society, but if I were a city planner, I would be looking beyond what was reported to my police bureau for statistics and demographics of crime. For instances, I would want to know the present growth pattern for fights at clubs and entertainment venues. Live musical performances are places in American society where strangers from the same town mix together with sexual tension and alcohol.

I am curious…

How many fights are breaking out within cities?
Who are getting into fights?
What are the deeper reasons for those fights?

Who knows, this show took place on February 29 (Leap Year) and it is, as you know, not a common day of the year. 2008 consists of 366 days instead of the ordinary 365. These special leap years occur every four years. They are what cause our seasons to change at the same time every year and they keep the calendar in alignment with the earth’s motion around the sun.

So perhaps this Leap Year in Seattle was a historical marker for a new reality shift. A time to recognize solutions to our social problems. We had better implement better communications tools to help testosterone driven Meat-Heads deal with the death of industrial society. It is surely falling down, and we are heading into a period of sacrifice. Either we sacrifice our addiction to consumerism and learn to better share resources with one another, or you won’t be able to avoid violence anywhere you go.

“We think we could go into crisis mode in many commodities sectors in the next 12 to 18 months . . . and I would argue that agriculture is key here.” says Jeff Currie, Head of Commodities Research at Goldman Sachs.

It’s time the government hires creative thinkers that can imagine the impossible, and create tools to be prepared for the worst. The reason is that these people will challenge existing expectations.

This is why I would like to pre-announce the April 2008 launch of my company Bright Neighbor LLC. Our team of programmers have been working tirelessly, and we are close to releasing a software program I believe will help solve our societal and currency challenges. It will:

- Slice!
- Dice!
- Help Save America!

How?

It connects people better than MySpace. It is more relevant than than FaceBook. It will un-invite E-vite. It will help people easily grow food gardens within cities. It will do everything right, and will help municipal planners help solve the crises caused by global warming, Peak Oil, financial collapse, and human overpopulation.

Want to see America without intervention?

Take a look at Nigeria. It is a mess, due to the combination of legions of legendarily corrupt politicians, buckets of oil money, and vast pools of neglected citizens. The Niger Delta, the wellspring of Nigeria’s oil wealth, is particularly messy. It’s where people, abandoned by their government, are living at a minimal subsistence level just outside the fences of the major oil company compounds, which sport European levels of convenience and lifestyle for their expatriate employees. As a result, it’s little wonder that the Delta’s political environment is a swirling maelstrom of local actors, from tribal chiefs to gangs all competing for a tiny slice of the Delta’s abundant oil wealth, most of which flows into the hands of corrupt politicians/military leaders in Lagos and the coffers of global oil companies.
SOURCE

Also take into account that the United States’ main worry is that Russia - which set up an official SWF last month - is planning to relaunch the cold war, only this time with oil and gas receipts rather than with the Red Army.

Some western governments are suspicious about the motives of sovereign funds that have been buying up assets in developed countries.

Washington, which has launched talks with funds in Abu Dhabi and Singapore, has concerns over Russia’s one-time rival communist superpower China, which has grown weary of stockpiling US Treasury bonds and has started to size up physical assets in the west.
SOURCE

The big secret is that Rupert Murdoch could help save America using MySpace if he wanted to. If only he wasn’t such a Grinch, I would happily show him how.

But first I want to see if Bright Neighbor can beat him to it.

(Bonus: No-Fi Soul Rebellion Music video!)

By Randy White
Editor, Lawns to Gardens

Oopsy. Looks like America was caught off guard from reality. I still am in awe some “News” outlets are still debating whether a recession has arrived.

1) What schools did they go to?
2) Don’t send your kids there

Just today, oil scored a new high price record at $101 a barrel.

The logic of OPEC’s argument makes no economic sense. They report:

“Market analysts say OPEC producers might cut production in response to the slowdown of the US economy, which is world’s biggest oil user.”

Excuse me, but does that make any sense? Have we seen a drop in demand? Why would they decrease the amount of oil when the demand is rising? To me, this screams geological realities and market distributors making excuses for an inability to add more oil to the market. And that constitutes post-peak. Here is another comical take on peak oil, this one is from MSNBC:

“Oil futures shot higher Tuesday, closing above $100 for the first time as investors bet that crude prices will keep climbing despite evidence of plentiful supplies and falling demand. At the pump, gas prices rose further above $3 a gallon.

There was no single driver behind oil’s sharp price jump; investors seized on an explosion at a 67,000 barrel per day refinery in Texas, the falling dollar, the possibility that OPEC may cut production next month, the threat of new violence in Nigeria and continuing tensions between the U.S. and Venezuela.”

See the contradiction? Wake up to real economics, folks.

Since the new Depression is most definitely here, and it is only going to get worse before things get better, how are young people reacting?

Young people do not have to be defined by their age. Normally, youth is associated with inexperience and naivety, which is why they are often discredited by the more entrenched, ‘experienced’ adults, right?

But what happens when that experience turns into obsolescence, and the adults themselves have attention deficit disorders? To me, it would imply that they are losing control and don’t know how to solve their problems.

The most amazing thing happened the other day. I was home and there was a knock at the door. Two young giggling women opened their introduction with: “Hi. We’re a little short on Rent this month, and were wondering if you had any soda cans you might want to donate?”.

I must be turning into a bit of a scrooge, because while I invited them to go through my recycling containers, I certainly wasn’t about to give them money. Not after they showed up on my front porch with their cell phones in hand.

So it makes me wonder - just how are clueless dolts in America going to handle the severe lifestyle changes that are coming? Many people have never dealt with Trauma, choosing rather to tune out into whatever entertainment experiences have kept them distracted from dealing with pain. It’s always the easy way out, trying to take pills to mask symptoms rather than getting in shape.

Only something is different now, isn’t it? It sure is getting harder to live the same way, isn’t it? But, “like, everything’s gonna be all right though, won’t it dude? Won’t we be able to keep dancing like they do in those TV commercials, and keep buying all the neat products and services they tell me to purchase? If only I could afford it.”

Sorry kids, financial stress is just the beginning. Wait until you have to grow your own food. Ha! If only you knew how awesome gardening is, and how much food we can produce on a small piece of lawn.

I would like to know when people are going to put the math together and start waking up to the fact that money is about to go bye-bye and we may have a crash of civilized life. I just hope the Internet remains operational - I see it as one of our only hopes for communication and keeping things civil.

For any late comers to the game!

And just one more reminder…

How crude. Crass, I say!

What a despicable attempt to get attention! I mean, you would never watch this kind of thing, would you? Why, sex is awful! Just awful, I say!

It’s 2008, and Porn is everywhere. The natural urge for humans to do the wambo-wambo has pervaded technology through and through. Of people I run into that read this blog, many of them have mentioned the Peak Oil girl dance video and the debate arose whether or not people heard her message or were too busy watching her hotness dance.

Since these are advertising and economics people, the debate arose whether advertising and porn have achieved a complete fusion. I say it has, and we may as well admit it, even as this year’s Superbowl ads that were banned are a symptom of TV trying to keep control of content. After all, the economy is crashing all around us, so they will be forced to start selling the dirty mags in faux family friendly stores.

So come on, admit it already! Sex in advertising can be the last fun party trick played by this econ crowd… that last little blue pill to pop a final stiffie for lady liberty as we all fall down.

Don’t believe me? Just take a look. YouPorn has made God’s database of porn a free commodity. People come from all over the world to watch it. The comments sections are filled with praise and critics alike, both men and women, in all sorts of different languages.

YouTube has to keep up with the competition, and allow racy videos to be posted and viewed as long as you click a button saying you are an adult.

(Fun Tip: Turn down the volume of this video and turn up your own favorite music. Tada! Free private strip show.)

Sure, sex has always been used to sell products and services. What’s changing, rather, is the level of acceptability in how far advertisers could push sex in people’s faces to pimp their wares. People everywhere now have access to whatever gets their rocks off. Even in the middle east, with all that bullshit going on, the people there are sneaking as much sex in as they can using the machines that flow the stuff 24/7, (except when their internet cables keep getting cut mysteriously).

Consumers have always liked choice, and since the Long Tail of the Internet just popped a stiffie, Porn has truly merged consumerism and advertising. TREND SPOTTER: It will be used more and more to try and save the present economy from collapsing. That’s because the Internet has become a free virtual Porn store with infinite shelf space. Instead of 30 types of jam, people can pick and choose just about whatever they want in terms of witnessing a sexual experience outside of reality, and advertisers are openly beginning to attach messages to the content - therefore creating economic value to sell goods and services.

Before it all crashes, you might stock up on those econo-sized boxes of Trojans they have over at your local Costco. Buy books in bulk and get all fancy with yourselves since we’ll be at home a lot more from now on.

The elite have worked for a real long time to suppress this urge in people. They don’t want the miserables to know how good it is to live, so they used control of content distribution and religious code in books that make people feel bad about their natural sexual urges, when in fact we are only monkeys that have evolved and no matter what any religious leaders says, humans like to get it on.

Can you name me one year when political leaders and religious leaders don’t have a sex scandal break to the headlines? And those are just the ones that get caught.

So it’s time for the puritans to put on a pair of hotpants, and realize that while sex is everywhere, it doesn’t mean the apocalypse has to happen and that the world is full of evil. The end of days are not nigh, just the end of such suppression.

I look forward to a freed populace that learns how to get its act together and help save the planet while having access to maslow’s uber needs.

Ok… enough with all this sex talk. I have to go see how my potatoes are growing and till the earth to get ready for planting in the spring. Lots of vegetables to plant, and a ton of happy worms have made plenty of nutrient rich poop to mix with my soil to foster great plant growth.

Growing food at home - how patriotic, eh?

Peak Oil means that we will be refocusing our social efforts on creating ways for people to become better socially connected in MeetingSpaces.

After all, life is about to become much harder, so we will need ways to use less energy while creating social tools to make living with less travel ability more worthwhile. And with stale beer, bands, and ideas not getting people into the door anymore due to a decrease in consumer spending - venue owners are now willing to take more risks.

I see advanced, localized MeetingSpace trends popping up all over the place, now that technology has become cheap enough to get really creative with it in venues. Check out this video to get an example, and just imagine the possibilities if they installed a floor that generated electricity by people dancing on it.

Or imagine using a device like this new touchscreen technology as a learning application in MeetSpaces, teaching people how to do urban farming while giving them something beyond present learning technologies.

Take also, for instance, the hot new trend in Portland. At Mt Tabor on Hawthorne, Portlander’s are attending “Middle Thursdays”, a night dedicated to YouTube Karaoke and movie-screen sized Guitar hero.

Instead of requesting songs, attendees submit their favorite YouTube videos and have access to their own private theater and bar. There are frequent breaks to have “Guitar Offs” between the party goers as well.

To ensure there is seriousness among all the fun, at least one video containing a peak-oil communications message is shown. Attendees can coordinate carpools, get creative with night bike riding, pay carbon offsets for the evening’s electricity usage, and make sure to recycle all of the waste. Even food scraps are collected to add to compost.

It seems as we make the transition to a less oil-dependent way of living, we can try to have the best time possible. With enough creativity, positive attitudes, and proper consumer behavior, we can slow down our waste and also use fun opportunities to teach people how to make peace with the earth, each other, and their pitiful attempts at mastering Guitar Hero.