NICOLE FOSS
– Her Australian tour starts at the BIG PINEAPPLE - 6 pm Thursday Feb 9th
Zero Carbon
by 2020 was at the Woodford Folk Festival – Transition Town Report
·
What
happened at The Green House at Woodford Folk Festival?
·
Why would we spend up big on a
yesterday’s monster?
·
What is wrong with a national
electricity grid in times of financial and energy contraction?
·
What does the global financial
crisis have to do with renewable energy?
·
Why do climate activists think
it’s ok to do deals?
·
Why is small both beautiful and
resilient?
At last the weather was
kind to the Woodford Folk Festival making it just that bit easier for people and
networks of ideas to intersect amongst the music and comedy. One of several of
my duties this year was self appointed monitor of the Green House program for
Transition Nambour. The Green House if you haven’t been there, is that venue
where environmental and related issues are spruiked and work shopped. There was
much talk for example, on the hot topic of coal seam gas and plenty of
discussion on growing and processing your own food. But a new presence this
year was an organization calling itself Zero Carbon Australia 2020 - Beyond
Zero Emissions. These folk seemed to be very organized and had been
given the large booth at the entrance to the venue. They promoted their cause
with vigor on and off the program and were actively seeking recruits for a
grass roots platoon for their campaign. The session I attended was conducted by
a flawlessly self confident young lady. She had learnt her stuff and held our
attention as she delivered the blueprint for the transition to a completely
de-carbonized Australian economy by 2020. Hundreds of experts are involved in
this not for profit project. When the plans are complete, they will be handed
over to corporations to implement – the same that have been funding the
research. I was very impressed by the boldness of the project and the quality
of the research and completely unconvinced of its legitimacy.
http://beyondzeroemissions.org/zero-carbon-australia-2020
http://media.beyondzeroemissions.org/ZCA-Stationary_Energy_Synopsis_20June10.pdf
http://media.beyondzeroemissions.org/ZCA-Stationary_Energy_Synopsis_20June10.pdf
One of the key components of the plan involves the
replacement of all existing coal and gas fired power stations with large scale
wind farms and solar thermal plants involving the storage of heat energy in
liquefied salt. These old and proven technologies, in large format, will
provide base power in support of our national electricity grid into the future.
I am not qualified to hold any position on the technology as
such, which may or may not be adequate to the appointed task but I am quite
prepared to suspend any doubts on that score and concede this might well be good
technology. My difficulty is with the national electricity grid itself – that
darling of our centralist planners, big energy companies and investors. It
works now but is it in fact viable into the future? My other difficulty is with
those climate change activists who suppose it’s in the interests of the climate
and humanity that they support the perpetuation of big centralized systems such
as our national power grid.
In his essay ‘Money
verses Fossil Fuel’, David Holmgren,
the co founder of Permaculture, sets out a position that challenges much of the
strategic logic behind current mainstream climate change activism. He describes
the moneyed interests supporting the alternative energy agenda as more
problematic than the miners and polluters themselves.
“The out of control
power of money and markets is leading us more rapidly towards the collapse of
human civilization than the short-comings and impacts of any specific activity
or technology including the burning of fossil fuels.” http://www.holmgren.com.au/
Climate activists are right to be concerned about the big
polluters and about finding alternative, non polluting technologies, for generating
electricity. But the cleanliness of the technology is one thing – size,
resilience and who owns it, turn out to be just as significant. Can we or
should we, like the Zero folk, be attempting to maintain or increase our
current levels of power generation. Should we continue to buy into the
debt/growth based model that is part and parcel of big centralize systems?
David Holmgren - “And many
environmental activists have failed to grasp the importance of energetic limits
to the wider human project in the quest for politically acceptable solutions to
the climate dilemma.”
Amongst the big operators in the global economy are those
who accumulate wealth by exploiting the natural world directly and those who
make it big-time by ‘clever’, more abstract means, in the market place. These
two groups are mutually inter-dependant but also constantly at war with one
another. Both of them are deeply committed to the debt based growth model and
the creation of larger and larger systems with each jostling for the
controlling high ground. But both groups are in fact losing control and both
are now hell bent on self preservation. Only the big fish survive in the
current economic climate and the path to survival is through merger and acquisition,
financed by more debt.
Says Ashvin Pandurangi of the Automatic Earth, “The largest
institutions are clearly the least flexible to ‘new and unexpected’ conditions
that will arise: and therefore are the most acutely vulnerable to “black swans”
and systemic shocks on the tightropes stretching across every line of latitude
from the North to South Pole. Look out below!” <http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2012/01/january-7-2012-death-of-institution.html>
‘Big’ is increasingly
vulnerable and economies of scale and the laying off of workers is increasingly,
obviously counter-productive. The very survival process is hastening the demise
of the system as a whole. Of the two groups however, David Holmgren sees the ‘clever’
group, those not involved directly in exploiting the earth for profit, as the
more imminent threat to life as we know it. These folk are more involved with
wild speculative bubbles and complex schemes involving massive leverage. And it
is these folk who often support large scale alternative energy technologies.
David Holmgren - “Our
money and markets are the most complex products of this deeply ingrained faith
in human ‘brilliance’ (hubris). And just as their foundational beliefs are
incomplete, so is their expression extremely dangerous.” http://www.holmgren.com.au/
After the so called green shoots of recovery, the signs are here
again of a liquidity crunch in the asset markets. In
fact the situation looks much worse than 2008, when there was still
a store of faith to draw upon. That faith has been drained away by feckless
regulators and authorities who failed to address any of the root causes of the
crisis or bring anyone to account. Instead they have been spreading, layer upon
layer, thin-as-air-funny-money, over the top of the symptoms. Anyone who has
paid the least bit of attention knows that these ‘magic money layers’ have proved
to be anything but magic. Not only are the root causes still with us (too much
debt, vast regional financial imbalances) but they have grown steadily
throughout the intervening period.
As Nicole Foss explains, “our
vulnerability to the consequences of debt is extremely high at the moment. The
scale of that debt is staggeringly large. The global credit hyper-expansion has
been decades in the making… we should be in for the largest economic contraction
in several hundred years, and it will be global.” http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2012/01/january-3-2012-storm-surge-of.html
The trouble with deleveraging is that once it gains
momentum, money is sucked out of the system through massive debt default and
falling asset values. There will be no money around to fund new projects and no
one who has it will be willing to lend it. As demand falls, and with it prices,
investment in the energy sector in general is likely to dry up. An effective
transition to a big system, carbon free economy will no longer be possible
under these circumstances. Because these conditions are already underway, the
likelihood of realizing this 2020 dream becomes more and more remote. On the
other hand, carbon emission may well drop owing to reduced demand and without
the help of climate activists or big ‘green’ corporations.
Nicole Foss - “One of our
consistent themes at TAE (The Automatic Earth blog spot) has been not expecting
solutions to come from the top down. Existing centralized systems depend on
dwindling tax revenues, which will dry up to a tremendous extent over the next
few years as economic activity falls off a cliff and property prices plummet.”
Hello Zero Carbon people. I like your technology. How about
bringing your know-how and enthusiasm down to Nambour? With your help we’ll
drum up some real grass roots support for a local, small scale, solar thermal,
molten salt plant. What do you say? A community scale power plant and grid,
owned locally, that supplies only its immediate locale is part of a very
different story to the one that you are currently championing. What is
politically acceptable to leaders and bureaucrats in Canberra or Brisbane won’t
work up here. We are looking for a resilient decentralized system that is not
owned or funded by mad bad corporations and does not want to grow beyond its
means.
“Climate activists in
particular”, says David Holmgren, “tend to
focus on the fossil energy industries as the ‘enemy’ (both for generating
greenhouse gases and funding climate change denial), but naturally see any
parties accepting the new climate agenda as allies. I believe that many of the
global players promoting the climate agenda are as dangerous as those denying
that agenda.”
One has to choose ones battles. Why go after big polluters, guns
blazing, when deleveraging is already moving against them. Why make common
cause with governments, central planners and corporations who sound like
environmentalists but are really growth junkies, for whom our one earth is just
too small. Step back a moment, allow deleveraging to do the fighting for you,
then throw your weight behind a truly worthy cause - like community building and
localization. Soon enough, the effects of peak oil will also be fighting on the
side of the environment to lower carbon emissions.
David Holmgren - “And many
environmental activists have failed to grasp the importance of energetic limits
to the wider human project (which includes energy flows in financial systems)
in the quest for politically acceptable solutions to the climate dilemma.” http://www.holmgren.com.au/
There are reasons why a smooth and easy transfer to a green
energy economy is unlikely to happen merely because it’s a good idea. One
cannot, for example, overestimate the level of psychological embeddedness of
almost every one of us in the context into which we are born and have lived.
The industrial age is our age after all. Whether it continues to advantage us
or not, the underlying assumptions upon which it was built are fundamental to
our lives and identities, almost like breathing. Only at the edges do some of
us start to question the under-pinning stories. We are not converted so easily,
even to sensible ideas; intellectually perhaps but not profoundly.
Ilargi – (Nicole’s writing
partner at The Automatic Earth) - “It’s
high time we begin to understand to what extent the interests of the
politicians and bankers and CEOs that we allow to make our decisions for us
(read against us) differ from our own. But since our education system and media
have denied the very existence of any such difference all of our lives, this understanding
will be very hard to come by for 99% of the 99%.” http://theautomaticearth.blogspot.com/2012/01/january-7-2012-death-of-institution.html
Even in the face of the disintegration of the world as we
know it, we will tend to want to cling to our big-system-world and demand that
it be fixed. Most of us will continue to lend our support to those who claim to
be able to bring it back. Those who enjoy or have enjoyed positions of power
are even more invested and will be relentless in their efforts to rebuild the
big systems. Time and again this will look like it is going to work only to
fail again. Eventually we will get the idea. There will be a shift in values
and a different way of doing things.
Nicole Foss
- “We have already seen cuts to services and increases in taxes and user fees,
and we can expect a great deal more of that dynamic as central authorities
emulate hypothermic bodies. In other words, they will cut off the circulation
to the fingers and toes in order to preserve the core. This is of course, a
survival strategy, from the point of view of the core. But it does nothing good
for the prospects of ordinary people, who represent the fingers and the toes.”
Transposing this general comment on the economy to the
national electricity grid, you can see that when ordinary consumers have
difficulties paying their accounts then there is less revenue and reduced
capacity for grid maintenance. When sections of the grid are not maintained,
outlying customers lose service. This is the nature of big systems. They work
in orderly, abundant times but are otherwise loaded with inefficiencies and grave
vulnerabilities. Big systems are sitting ducks for cyber or physical attacks on
hardware.
Nicole Foss – “The job of
national and international politicians in contractionary times is typically to
make a bad situation worse as expensively as possible, as they attempt to
rescue the dying paradigm that has conveyed so much personal advantage in their
direction. That paradigm is one of centralization – the accumulation of
surpluses from a broad periphery at the centre of power.”
Anyone who is a little familiar with how the exponential
function operates within our growth model or what complexity theory tells us
about mature systems under stress knows that our current way of doing things is
no longer working and all attempts to fix it can only make it less functional.
Despite initial appearances, the Zero Carbon plan for the national power grid
is one of probably many attempts to enliven, improve or save an imperial scale
technology.
Nicole Foss - “Such
systems cannot be responsive within the time-frame that would actually matter
in a financial crisis, where risk is cascading system failure, potentially in a
short period of time. Everything they might do is too complex, too expensive
and too slow to do much good. If we expect top –down solutions we will be
disappointed, and more to the point we will be unprepared to face a period of
rapid change. By the time we realize that the cavalry is not coming, it may
well be too late to do anything useful.”
Let’s say you are a former corporate director, high-level officer
or government official. And let’s say
you have bled your institution dry and retired with a nice package. Why not set
up a “non-profit” research organization and use it as a front to lobby in
favour of certain corporate interests – what about large scale green energy? Why
not, it is a long term cash cow if ever I saw one, a real on the ground asset. I
think that would be quite a good retirement plan for you and you’d be doing your
bit for the earth. Incidentally, I think there’d be something in it for you -probably
quite a bit actually, in one way or another. See Pew Charitable Trusts for ideas. They will
help you and so will countless climate activists worldwide.
Nicole Foss –
“Fortunately, other strategies exist beyond attempting to preserve the
unpreservable. What we must do is to decentralize – to build parallel systems
to deliver the most basic goods and services in ways that are simple, cheap and
responsive to rapidly changing circumstances.”
To discover more about how we might go about building these
parallel systems, we will need to go along to the Big Pineapple and listen to
Nicole. She is happy to keep answering
questions till everybody is satisfied.
Nicole Foss is giving her
first talk of her Australian tour on the Sunshine Coast February 9th
between 6pm and 9 pm at the main hall, The Big Pineapple Woombye. Tickets are
$10 and $8 and will be available at the door and at the Transition Town Nambour
stall at the Big Pineapple on Saturday mornings prior to the event.
The Facebook page for her Australian tour can be found at
Zero Carbon people in Melbourne, Nicole is speaking with Professor
Steve Keen at Ceres Community Environmental Park by Merri Creek in East
Brunswick
February 19th. 9am to 3.30 pm. Don’t miss it. http://www.ceres.org.au/
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