Dear David,

Thank you very much for this comprehensive page. I find it is a difficult but essential reading. To contribute something to your hard work I would like to draw your attention to this fairly recent analysis from Shell oil: http://www-static.shell.com/static/aboutshell/downloads/our_ strategy/shell_global_scenarios/SES%20booklet%2025%20of%20Ju ly%202008.pdf

It is fascinating how much similarity there is between their two and your Green/Brown Tech scenarios. However, they do not have any scenarios for a potential rapid decline in oil availability (so they still seem to be on the optimistic edge -- in exact accordance with what you say about the stakeholders' structural commitments in the Nested scenarios part...)

Best regards,
Bálint

I'm a design course graduate and after ten years still cannot see another path than permaculture as unlikely and utopian as that seems. I believe Mr. Holmgren and Mr. Mollinson will go down in history as pivotal figures- thankyou.

This is by far the best, most comprehensive and objective site that I've found concerning this issue. Cleanly presented and well-organized too. Bravo, accolades! I really appreciate your work, even if I struggle with what you're telling me.

Just got here, but so far this site seems incredible, and I hope to study it in more detail. Thanks for the effort.

Ken

excellent work.

Here are some parallel efforts that I've put together that complement your analysis.



http://www.oilempire.us/map.html
propaganda patterns: a political map to understand Peak Oil
http://www.oilempire.us/peak-choice.html
http://ww w.oilempire.us/peak-grain.html
http://www.oilempire.us/pe ak-scenarios.html

http://www.permatopia.com/levels.ht ml
local, bioregional, global solutions
http://www.permatopia.com/growth.html

ht tp://www.road-scholar.org
Peak Traffic: the Achilles Heel of highway expansion projects
Planning NAFTA Superhighways at the End of the Age of Oil
Troubled Bridges Over Water: time for transportation triage

Great site, David!

Easy to read through, yet comprehensive and big picture, and full of
valuable insights.

I especially liked the point about the four scenarios nested (similar
to Ken Wilber's holon analysis)and simultaneously true and applicable to different types of actors.

I am doing what peak oil / sustainability outreach I can in New York City. My colleagues in our local Post Carbon affiliate here are primarily interested in permaculture - we took a PDC with Andrew Jones - I've gotten involved with the local Sierra Club, which gives me a certain mainstream appeal.

My report on how NYC can deal with both climate change and peak oil is
online at www.beyondoilnyc.org. Thank you for all of your efforts!

regards,

Dan Miner

Dear David:

I saw a youtube-video (http://tinyurl.com/6bqkd8) with you and was highly impressed! You speak well. Not only that, the way you voice your thoughts impresses me as being quite in touch and well-versed and concerned and understanding!

I really wish you all the best,
from Germany,

Gabriel

Hi David
A great mass of detail nicely gathered together there. As far as actions go, I've had a sudden burst of faith in our capacity to deal with this, just watching how my day-to-day activities are moving into a more focussed mode through the influence of such people as your good self, John Michael Greer (the Archdruid), Jim Kunstsler et al.

I live a small town in South Gippsland where I help to run my wife's plant nursery. I had my own business building educational exhibits but that went belly up due to the tides of change sweeping through the corporate world. We sold our beautiful but nonviable ten acres overlooking the ocean to a high-flyer, paid out our debts and bought a bit of rough ground on the edge of town, less than a km from the centre. We'll build a low-energy low maintenance place on it this year. We can't afford expensive windows from Scandinavia or any stuff that can't be fixed locally if it breaks, so I'll do all the windows and doors too.

After years of having my own workshop, I'm tired of buying power tools that are unfixable a few years down the track, so I'm starting to collect good quality non-powered hand tools second-hand. At least you can fix them yourself. We've decided to start our new garden in tubs at the factory which we rent (and currently live in to save on more rent) so we can just cart the lot up to the new place when it's ready. I'm thinking of having a crack at Aquaponics too.

As secretary of the local Chamber of Commerce I find I'm working with a group of people who are very open to new ideas, especially if it helps them avoid insolvency! There's lots of cross membership between different community organisations here too which means word can travel fast and effectively. I've had a chat to both our local supermarket owners about the vulnerability we all have here at the end of the Kenworth powered supply line, and we are contacting our local transport companies to see how they think events are likely to pan out in the medium term. It may just buy us a little time if they were to start running a few compressed natural gas trucks in the face of the looming likelihood of fuel shortages as well as high prices.

I think your nested scenarios nicely capture what will be be the developing situation. There must be tens of thousands of folk like me groping somewhat blindly but surely towards viable solutions to our personal and local problems, while at higher political economic and educational levels it seems likely denial will be punctuated by bouts of increasingly ineffective band-aiding, until crack-ups allow more simplified and extreme solutions to come to the fore. We will need to tread very carefully to avoid getting under the wheels of whatever neo-fascist machines these crack-ups spawn.

Well best of luck to us all I say! And thanks for your final paragraphs - a wonderfully stirring call to arms!

Cheers

Lloyd Morcom

Hi David,

I came by your website via my recent conscious awareness of peak oil. I have known about permaculture for many years, but only now am learning what it actually is and how important a role it will be in the future if we are to survive.

We need technology now to disseminate information and get prepared...Bill Mollison on Youtube got me hooked and on from there...

I grew up in Ireland where there were still horses and carts, to when we are all speeding around like chickens with our heads cut off. We don't want to go back to some "rose tinted" past with it's authoritarian, repressive society, as there have been huge benefits in communication and knowledge from globalisation, it's just a pity that we got too to fond of the toys.

Keep up the good work

Like you Michael, I have felt from the early 1970's (Meadows et al) that the effects on humankind of the limits to growth were likely to be far more proximate than our leaders were ever likely to admit.

I do largely concur with your response to my short essay, but (and I'm sure this won't surprise you) with one or two minor caveats.

We all of us I believe, tend to think of, and refer to humankind as a homogeneous group, whereas in fact it isn't. The effects on the developed world from our burgeoning population and diminishing energy resources will be very different to those on the under-developed world.

If you live in a tin shack and have developed the technology to subsist on a quarter acre plot, the way you experience the effect of oil shocks will be very different to those of us who live in a city of 20 million, or in a society and civilisation which is totally predicated upon an abundance of cheap energy.

For these reasons it seems worthwhile to me, to consider any technology which would give us a little of the breathing space to which you refer. But we have to pick the right ones. My own particular bete noir is "Wind farms" because the energy return on the investment is appallin - a classic case of 'Public wealth being diverted to Private Profit'. Whether or not we will do anything worthwhile with the breathing space, is another matter entirely and my natural pessimism mitigates toward disbelief in that possibility.

I in no way suggest that our best bet, or even a good bet, is to maintain the energy paradigms which have sustained the West for the past 100 years; I just think that our systems are so unresponsive anyway, that any bought time would at least give us the chance of making a better transition.

You mention climate "instabilities" and "new changes". Perhaps they are new changes, but equally perhaps they are not. It is perfectly possible that all of the weather events referred to as "instabilities" or "anomalies" are within one or two standard deviations of the mean, if the mean were to be calculated on the "correct" time scale. (I have no idea what that is, and am becoming increasingly convinced that neither the IPCC nor the Met Office have any idea either). It is likely to depend on one's chosen time horizon. One of the features of human responses to events over the past 25 years has been our very short time scales. We constantly see articles referring to "in living memory" and the like. Living memory is just an instant.

"Instability" may well be precisely what climate IS. Like a coastline, which many think of as defining a country or continent, it is in fact in a state of constant flux. Take for example the IPCC's putative sea level rise of a couple of feet or so. I accept that this would have an effect on some large tracts of land, and millions of people if it occurred, but taking up the issue raised by you of the 10,000 year interglacials, we should perhaps take note that when the last three ice ages finished the sea level rise was 300 feet!

My primary thesis on this occasion has simply been that the much talked of climate change is in any case a diversion compared to the energy crunch, and may well prove to be nothing but a chimera.

Perhaps one of the most frightening graphs that I have seen recently is that of Professor Robert Ayres' model of GDP growth in the USA and in Japan, showing the very tight, and previously unsuspected, correlation of GDP growth and energy. This work undermined the Solow Cobb-Douglas model, and the correlation shown is a measure of the fragility of western economies and living standards in the face of any energy disturbance. The effects of even the currently rather minor oil disturbances is testament to this.

Your reply, quite correctly, was disturbing in that as we all agree, our societies will simply have no choice but to adapt to rapid energy consumption descent, whether we like it or not (and we will not), and there is currently no indication that our leaders have "got it" as the vernacular puts it. How we are to achieve that while our population rises by a further 50% is even more disturbing.

David, Thanks - great work this site-

It seems, that you put this site on line at the right moment for our recent Permaculture principles course in "Las Cañadas", Veracruz Mexico, where we worked with these szenarios to model existing and emerging realities in Mexico.
All the four szenarios can be observed in Mexico, where reduction of net energy after 2005-peak is a crude reality.
I would like to have some of these texts available for our mexican courses.
saludos
holger

David
I forgot to mention it...polar cities, the concept of polar cities for survivors of global warming, not at poles but in extreme northern areas and southern areas, maybe even in Tasmania and New Zealand high mountains, are LIFEBOATS. can you include them in your scenario later on?