September 2005: Post Carbon News
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Post Carbon Newsletter #7, September 2005
- In The Wake of Katrina: A Call To Prepare
- Community Supported Manufacturing
- Post Carbon News Updates
- Outpost Folks: Rose Kudlac of Post Carbon Toronto
- Post Carbon Board Members: Richard Heinberg
- 'Katrina, New Orleans, and Peak Oil' by Richard Heinberg
- September Peak Oil Conference
1. In The Wake of Katrina: A Call To Prepare
It is now over a week since the devastating Hurricane Katrina struck the Gulf coast of Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. Anyone with an Internet connexion or a television will have seen the kind of terrible suffering and misery that are more commonly seen in the so-called Third World. On Global Public Media we have posted a particularly harrowing but iconic report from the BBC which lays bare what happens what the system fails.
Many will hope that lessons will be learned, so that the agony of the American Deep South is not completely in vain. Comparisons with the global South - another euphemism for the poor and plundered of the planet - do not inspire much confidence.
Nor do comparisons with the great blackout which affected fifty million people in the north east of the North American continent almost exactly two years ago - the electricity grid and power systems are still perilously fragile, and Katrina has left about ten per cent of US natural gas supply shut in, on which electricity production increasingly relies in North America (and many other places).
Unlike oil, there is no easy way for North America to get foreign replacement supplies of natural gas. There is mounting unease in high places that an American natural gas crisis will greatly worsen the difficulties with oil and gasoline supplies.
There are many lessons that can be learnt from the horror of this hurricane - a horror that vast numbers of poor people in other nations already know so well: Be very wary of depending on far-distant places and people to furnish your safety, food, health, power, and fuel.
The people of New Orleans knew their system was inadequate to protect them - some tried very hard to rectify the situation, but they failed.
The most terrible lesson of Katrina appears to be this: we, the ordinary people of this planet, are pretty much on our own for oil peak. Most of our governments, except for a few at local level and some brave lone politicians, have not even admitted to the concept of peak oil, far less begun planning for it.
We who care are now all New Orleaners, we are all vulnerable: the question is, are we going to do anything serious about it?
Most people who read this newsletter know that the global oil supply and natural gas supply in all English-speaking nations (except Australia) is in peril. If Katrina turns out to herald the decline of world oil and triggers a natural gas crisis, who out there - in any country, anywhere - is sure that their village, town or city is ready?
If you are ready - tell us about it and help others to learn.
If you are not ready, please consider joining with us in our very practical attempts to make both emergency and long-term preparations for this new world that will have to run on ever less oil, a system that must largely de-industrialise, an economy that will have to contract both in financial and spatial terms.
We must start to relocalize now and begin living locally once again.
Julian Darley
Director of Post Carbon Institute
Vancouver, BC office
2. Community Supported Manufacturing (CSM)
One of the ways we can relocalize is by making our supply lines shorter so that we produce our vital needs as locally as possible. At present this is almost impossible under normal economic conditions, so we are developing a system, based on community-supported agriculture, called - you guessed it - Community Supported Manufacturing.
CSM will help us bring our manufacturing and provisioning back under our control and back into our locale - it will therefore create desperately needed jobs as globalization collapses for want of cheap energy (and maybe lack of cheap money too). The idea of relocalized provisioning is central to Post Carbon Institute’s plans for dealing with peak oil, global warming and ecological degradation of the world.
The longest chapter in our forthcoming book, “Relocalize Now! Getting Ready for Climate Change and the End of Cheap Oil