Resilience Panel: Bosak 20 April 2013 1

Energy Implications for Climate Change Planning

Comments by Jon Bosak, a cofounder of tclocal.org, at the Community Resilience panel of

the Climate Smart and Climate Ready conference, 20 April 2013.

TCLocal has been researching, presenting, and publishing detailed recommendations for

local resilience at tclocal.org since 2006, so I’m not going to repeat that material here.

Instead, I’m going to devote my six minutes to a description of the economic environment

we’ll be working with going forward as we attempt to deal with climate change.

Let’s start with the predictions we were making seven years ago. We said:

We were about to start running out of cheap energy

We would begin to rely increasingly on more difficult and expensive methods of

fossil fuel extraction

The increasing cost of production would cause an inevitable long-term rise in the

price of energy, in particular the price of oil

The end of cheap energy would ultimately mean the end of long-term economic

growth

I’m sorry to say that these predictions were correct. World conventional oil production did

in fact peak in 2005; we are now relying on techniques like deepwater drilling and

hydrofracking that are both more dangerous and more expensive; and this is driving prices

up over the long term.

The following chart, which I generated from a spreadsheet provided by the U.S. Energy

Information Administration, shows the trend from 2000 to the present quite clearly. The

straight line is a best-fit linear trend line generated by the spreadsheet software from the

EIA data. Note that this is a description of the actual data, not a projection, and it shows

that the enormous

swing in prices

before and after the

economic crash had

no effect on the

long-term trend now

that we can step

back far enough to

see it clearly. This

long-term rise in the

cost of energy is the

key to understanding

the context in which

we will be operating

in trying to cope with

climate change.

Resilience Panel: Bosak 20 April 2013 2

Notice that we’re talking about price here, not availability. Price and availability are

completely different issues. Availability has never been the problem; price is the problem.

Or to put it in physical terms: Absolute amount has never been the problem; relative cost

and difficulty of production is the problem. Unconventional methods like fracking and tar

sands have been known for a while now, but they were too expensive to use until the price

of oil and gas hit a certain level, and now our reliance on those methods to keep up sagging

production guarantees that the price is never going to fall much below that level as long as

we keep using the stuff. (Due to a mad cycle of overinvestment, prices of natural gas are

temporarily below the level at which producers can make a profit, but this will correct itself.)

As to that last prediction about the end of cheap energy meaning the end of economic

growth, it looks like that may have come to fruition as well. We’re not seeing a long-term

global economic recovery, and it turns out that our official statistics here in the U.S. are

hiding millions of permanently unemployable people who have taken refuge in disability

benefits.

So what’s the future?

The cost of everything is driven to a large extent by the cost of energy, particularly for

things that have to be grown or transported. The effect of ever-increasing costs is to

strangle the economy and to lower our collective standard of living. In other words: most of

us will become poorer over the long run. Due to increasing population, this is true even if

we can keep energy production constant, which is unlikely.

One commentator, the psychologist Kathy McMahon, has described this as a “sucky

collapse.” In other words, nothing spectacular happens, but life just keeps getting suckier.

The size of a can of tuna gets smaller while the price stays the same. We work harder for

less pay. And so on.

People are amazingly flexible in adapting to this kind of thing — hardship becomes the new

normal. Psychologists call it “reframing.” So you’ll say, “we can’t afford to go anywhere, but

we’re spending more time together”; or “we can’t afford to eat as much as we used to, but

on the other hand, we’re losing weight.”

This reframing can obscure a key fact about responses to climate change, which is that we

are going to have fewer and fewer financial and physical resources with which to do

anything about it. That’s very important to keep in mind, because it’s going to determine the

kind of approaches that are available to us.

Another key understanding is that increasing numbers of people will become unemployed.

This is partly due to a probably inevitable economic decline and partly due to a certainly

increasing number of white-collar jobs being automated out of existence.

A third key to understanding our situation is that we are going to continue to burn fossil fuel

as fast as we can until it really is all gone (meaning: until it takes more energy to extract it

than you get out of it, a point that is reached long before the stuff is actually used up).

Resilience Panel: Bosak 20 April 2013 3

There are three reasons (aside from simple greed) that we’re going to burn through what’s

left of the fossil fuel as quickly as we can.

First, as we get further into the stuff that’s harder to produce, more of that energy will be

required just to maintain current production. In other words, you have to keep burning more

fuel to get the same amount of fuel produced. So the rate of CO2 generation keeps

increasing even if production stays constant.

The second reason we’ll burn through what’s left as quickly as we can is that we will want

to use more and more energy to try to solve the problems we will be facing as a result of

climate change. Schemes like seawalls around Manhattan are ultimately futile, but that’s

not going to stop us from trying.

The third reason we will keep extracting natural gas in particular is that methane is what

synthetic fertilizer is made out of. It’s estimated that if we ran out of natural gas today, 40

percent of the world’s population would starve to death.

Long before that happens, it appears certain that climate change will impact our food

supply through drought and weather disasters at the same time that rising fuel prices and a

failing infrastructure will make it increasingly difficult to move food around the country to

cope with local shortages. This makes the relocalization of food production a priority for

achieving local resilience.

The single best response to climate change is a transition to organic food production, not

only because it’s the only method of food production that is sustainable indefinitely, but

because soil improvement is one of the best ways to sequester carbon from the

atmosphere.

Sustainable farming is also the answer to the unemployment problem, because it largely

substitutes manual labor for fossil fuel inputs. It’s been estimated that the transition to

sustainable farming will require 50 million new farmers in the U.S. alone.

A lot of those new farmers are going to be coming right here to central New York, because

we have water and an increasingly milder climate, and they will be joined by the climate

refugees we can expect to move northward and eastward from places that will become

virtually uninhabitable over the next several decades.

This demographic shift is one of several social challenges that we will be facing as climate

change continues. Poverty and inequality are almost certain to get worse because of job

destruction and because there will be physically less of everything due to constraints on

energy inputs. And when people eventually wake up to what’s happening, they won’t have

the myth of the rising tide lifting all boats to fall back on.

So what are we going to do here to build local resilience?

Let’s start with what we won’t be doing: we won’t be transitioning to some alternative forms

of energy production on a scale that will replace what we’ve got now. We no longer have

the resources even to keep our current infrastructure from falling apart, let alone to replace

it with something fundamentally different. We must concentrate on local measures that may

be hard to accomplish but don’t cost much.

Resilience Panel: Bosak 20 April 2013 4

In the area of food production, we must encourage community gardens and establish tool

lending libraries for gardeners. And we must protect and encourage local farming in every

way possible in order to build our capacity for local food production. For example, here in

Tompkins County, we must end the replacement of the last good orchard acreage on the

hills surrounding Cayuga Lake with high-end suburban housing.

For local energy, we can recognize what’s right in front of us and rebuild the local capacity

for hydropower that supplied much of the electricity in upstate New York until the big

power conglomerates bought up all the municipal power companies half a century ago.

For example, we can put hydropower on the creeks coming into Ithaca. A committee

appointed by Mayor Peterson a few years ago reviewed engineering and environmental

studies paid for by the City of Ithaca back in the 1980s and concluded that harnessing the

power of Fall Creek and Six Mile Creek would generate all the electricity needed to run City

municipal services, would pay for itself in 13 years, and would provide a continuing benefit

to the City budget of $800,000 annually, in perpetuity, with no damage to the environment,

while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions due to City operations by three

and a half times as much as the City is hoping to achieve with its entire Local Action Plan

for 2016. The only obstacle to the realization of this project is lack of leadership.

Another cost-neutral strategy is to change local ordinances to encourage resilient practices.

This could range all the way from allowing people to raise chickens in the City to requiring

that all future construction be passive solar like the recently showcased Aurora Pocket

Neighborhood project.

Sharing goods and developing local media are other important ways to improve local

resiliency, and you’ll be hearing more about both of those in just a moment from the other

panelists. Thank you.