The individualism indoctrinated as 'normal', 'mature' in the US, Britain and other colonised countries, makes returning to community ways, difficult. I live in a small town stone built by Scottish lowland settlers and Empire Loyalists. Only in the last five years has there been much diversity, despite the black Loyalist soldiers given land here, not to mention the Six Nations for whom the Grand River was central to daily living. There are community allotments attached to two churches. And there is a well established weekly Farmers' Market. There's a large Riverfest which draws local and national musicians. Many artists and activists live locally.. "never recovering hippies" is my daughter's term. There's an Arts Centre and a Poetry Centre as well as the huge Scottish Festival and the Truck Show. Several of us are strategizing around using a cafe, community lunches, the market and community circles to ignite and integrate the embers already there. Growing and sharing local food seems to undercut fuel-based transportation systems, provide local food security, involve every age group and build community.That's where many of us are putting our energy and resources right now. All input welcome. Collective wisdom makes a profound difference.
Indeed. This is why we require local Circles to allow such collective wisdom a chance to breathe. But it's challenging! These challenges is why we need things like Reweaving Knowing to provide a proper context for preserving wisdom and allowing it to evolve.
I'm with you James--although it feels lately like I have eggs in baskets all over the place. But I am volunteering with a community garden/ food forest project down the street from my house in Phoenix and I am about to learn about the Cool Block program and hopefully start up a round in my neighborhood.https://coolblock.org/
And I am very interested in City Repair's work in Portland and am thinking about how I can set up something in my front yard to engage with my neighbors more. My neighborhood is pretty friendly already and I do know a lot of my immediate next door neighbors' names and we have done favors for each other, etc. And some of my neighbors have solar panels so I know there is probably some level of interest in sustainability, at least among some of them.
The other thing I am brainstorming on is how to do some rainwater harvesting a la Brad Lancaster, and set up some demonstration gardens in my front yard with edible and medicinal, drought hardy native plants.
But I also haven't given up hope that through activism we can convince some percentage of the population to rise up and demand the government do something drastically different and more appropriate in scale to the problem. I'm still going out with Extinction Rebellion and collaborating with other EJ and climate groups to see if there is something we can do collectively.
By the way, Richard Heinberg was my professor in college back in 2005! I got serious about climate change in 2002-2003 while I was an undergrad and ended up transferring schools and changing majors because I couldn't see how anything else mattered much if all life on Earth was under threat. His teaching is a big part of why I never got sucked into the idea that there will be an easy, technological fix to all of this. Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts as always!
Sounds like you're doing good and important work there!
Isn't Brad Lancaster awesome! He's such a great inspiration to so many of us.
Phoenix seems to me to be way too big a city for such a hot, dry place. What would happen without air conditioning? But air conditioning is very energy intensive. Perhaps you could join with others in Phoenix to educate the public there about passive cooling design principles, if only to make it so that the air conditioners work less hard than they do. So many passive cooling methods are low cost to implement, too! I imagine that if Phoenix had an effective campaign to educate folks about passive cooling it could lower energy consumption considerably in that city.
Dear James, I finally made it to your page. I am in agreement with what you write in this post. May I ask if you made progress in the Heinberg pulse project, i.e. the quantification of how much energy will be required for the energy transition assuming all things equal (which is of course a flawed assumption as one can never change one thing in a system, but still....)
I did reach out, asking for help in calculating and quantifying the Heinberg Pulse. But such a project would take a lot of time and likely would require a team of qualified people working on it, and funding. No one who could be relied upon to help get this project off the ground offered to help get the project underway. Do you know anyone who might help launch such a project?
The Michaux Monkeywrench is the monkey wrench tossed into the theoretical gears of “energy transition” when we acknowledge that the world can’t possibly provision sufficient rare and rare-ish metals and minerals to enable the popular vision of “energy transition” to proceed.
The Heinberg Pulse is the energy cost of ‘energy transition’ — which acknowledges that greenhouse gases must increase in the near term in order to build out renewable energy infrastructure in the near term—, if the popular image of ‘energy transition’ is adopted.
Between these two, and for other reasons, the notion of a full replacement of fossil energy with renewable energy is -- to put it plainly -- a pure fantasy. It just won't -- and can't -- happen. The purpose for this story is to distract us away from doing what we should do, which is to radically reduce our net energy consumption and materials throughput in the economy. This would require an end to capitalism and industrial consumerism. Basically, as Chris Smaje has pointed out in his book A Small Farm Future, the future will be mostly rural and simple, with most of us working at self-provisioning of basic needs like food, shelter, clothing. And that's not such a bad life, really.
Can't say that I know who would be able to do the math, perhaps Tom Murphy, with a blog with the same name, https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ . And of course, Richard Heinberg himself should have based his statements on som facts, did you ask him?
Look at the UK, Germany, and any other country that is attempting to implement "Net Zero" right now. How it started versus how it's going. Then multiply such challenges by orders of magnitude to achieve your own desired results. There is your answer. The alternative is to condemn billions of people to poverty and suffering.
The individualism indoctrinated as 'normal', 'mature' in the US, Britain and other colonised countries, makes returning to community ways, difficult. I live in a small town stone built by Scottish lowland settlers and Empire Loyalists. Only in the last five years has there been much diversity, despite the black Loyalist soldiers given land here, not to mention the Six Nations for whom the Grand River was central to daily living. There are community allotments attached to two churches. And there is a well established weekly Farmers' Market. There's a large Riverfest which draws local and national musicians. Many artists and activists live locally.. "never recovering hippies" is my daughter's term. There's an Arts Centre and a Poetry Centre as well as the huge Scottish Festival and the Truck Show. Several of us are strategizing around using a cafe, community lunches, the market and community circles to ignite and integrate the embers already there. Growing and sharing local food seems to undercut fuel-based transportation systems, provide local food security, involve every age group and build community.That's where many of us are putting our energy and resources right now. All input welcome. Collective wisdom makes a profound difference.
"Collective wisdom makes a profound difference."
Indeed. This is why we require local Circles to allow such collective wisdom a chance to breathe. But it's challenging! These challenges is why we need things like Reweaving Knowing to provide a proper context for preserving wisdom and allowing it to evolve.
I'm with you James--although it feels lately like I have eggs in baskets all over the place. But I am volunteering with a community garden/ food forest project down the street from my house in Phoenix and I am about to learn about the Cool Block program and hopefully start up a round in my neighborhood.https://coolblock.org/
And I am very interested in City Repair's work in Portland and am thinking about how I can set up something in my front yard to engage with my neighbors more. My neighborhood is pretty friendly already and I do know a lot of my immediate next door neighbors' names and we have done favors for each other, etc. And some of my neighbors have solar panels so I know there is probably some level of interest in sustainability, at least among some of them.
The other thing I am brainstorming on is how to do some rainwater harvesting a la Brad Lancaster, and set up some demonstration gardens in my front yard with edible and medicinal, drought hardy native plants.
But I also haven't given up hope that through activism we can convince some percentage of the population to rise up and demand the government do something drastically different and more appropriate in scale to the problem. I'm still going out with Extinction Rebellion and collaborating with other EJ and climate groups to see if there is something we can do collectively.
By the way, Richard Heinberg was my professor in college back in 2005! I got serious about climate change in 2002-2003 while I was an undergrad and ended up transferring schools and changing majors because I couldn't see how anything else mattered much if all life on Earth was under threat. His teaching is a big part of why I never got sucked into the idea that there will be an easy, technological fix to all of this. Anyway, I appreciate your thoughts as always!
Hi Lydia -
Sounds like you're doing good and important work there!
Isn't Brad Lancaster awesome! He's such a great inspiration to so many of us.
Phoenix seems to me to be way too big a city for such a hot, dry place. What would happen without air conditioning? But air conditioning is very energy intensive. Perhaps you could join with others in Phoenix to educate the public there about passive cooling design principles, if only to make it so that the air conditioners work less hard than they do. So many passive cooling methods are low cost to implement, too! I imagine that if Phoenix had an effective campaign to educate folks about passive cooling it could lower energy consumption considerably in that city.
Nicely stated. We agree and recommend 2 short books along these lines which we are reading now:
Imagination is the Key -to unlock the environmental crisis Chris Sunderland 2021
and for those in design mode
Thinking in Systems — A Primer — Donella H. Meadows 2008
Dear James, I finally made it to your page. I am in agreement with what you write in this post. May I ask if you made progress in the Heinberg pulse project, i.e. the quantification of how much energy will be required for the energy transition assuming all things equal (which is of course a flawed assumption as one can never change one thing in a system, but still....)
Hi Gunnar -
I did reach out, asking for help in calculating and quantifying the Heinberg Pulse. But such a project would take a lot of time and likely would require a team of qualified people working on it, and funding. No one who could be relied upon to help get this project off the ground offered to help get the project underway. Do you know anyone who might help launch such a project?
By the way, as I have reported here -- https://www.resilience.org/stories/2022-10-31/energy-transition-the-luxury-economy/ -- the Michaux Monkeywrench is at least as much reason to dismiss the conventional / mainstream story on "energy transition".
The Michaux Monkeywrench is the monkey wrench tossed into the theoretical gears of “energy transition” when we acknowledge that the world can’t possibly provision sufficient rare and rare-ish metals and minerals to enable the popular vision of “energy transition” to proceed.
The Heinberg Pulse is the energy cost of ‘energy transition’ — which acknowledges that greenhouse gases must increase in the near term in order to build out renewable energy infrastructure in the near term—, if the popular image of ‘energy transition’ is adopted.
Between these two, and for other reasons, the notion of a full replacement of fossil energy with renewable energy is -- to put it plainly -- a pure fantasy. It just won't -- and can't -- happen. The purpose for this story is to distract us away from doing what we should do, which is to radically reduce our net energy consumption and materials throughput in the economy. This would require an end to capitalism and industrial consumerism. Basically, as Chris Smaje has pointed out in his book A Small Farm Future, the future will be mostly rural and simple, with most of us working at self-provisioning of basic needs like food, shelter, clothing. And that's not such a bad life, really.
A Small Farm Future, by Chris Smaje
https://www.chelseagreen.com/product/a-small-farm-future/?sscid=31k7_189nbw
Can't say that I know who would be able to do the math, perhaps Tom Murphy, with a blog with the same name, https://dothemath.ucsd.edu/ . And of course, Richard Heinberg himself should have based his statements on som facts, did you ask him?
Here's another model for building community. "One person did what you can do!" https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/one-person-did-what-you-can-do
The so-called Heinberg Pulse is a necessary evil, unfortunately. Anything else is a nonstarter in practice.
Why?
Look at the UK, Germany, and any other country that is attempting to implement "Net Zero" right now. How it started versus how it's going. Then multiply such challenges by orders of magnitude to achieve your own desired results. There is your answer. The alternative is to condemn billions of people to poverty and suffering.