Dear Committee,
Around Christmas I sent an email to Mike Rann endorsing Sandra Kanck’s proposal to form a Select Committee on Peak Oil. Then last week I received a letter from Paul Holloway informing me of the Committee’s existence and, to my mind, vaguely implying that submissions would be welcomed.
This is my submission. I have been kicking it around for months now, and it keeps changing. I meant to present it in Word format as a sober, well-researched piece of public service policy-speak, but it just didn’t come together. I have decided to present it in the style which comes most naturally to me. The conclusions are as sound as ever.
What are my credentials, besides the ability to think clearly, and write a basic English sentence? And a somewhat pessimistic temperament? I am a 41 year old father of two with a mortgage and working as an IT Consultant. My background is in mathematics. I have been taking a layman’s interest in the topic of Peak Oil for about 3 years. I have the dubious honour of being the resident expert among my family and friends.
What is the approach taken in this submission? Well for a start, I don’t wish to argue here that Peak Oil is happening, when it will happen, or how bad things will get. I assume others are going to do this for me, and I refuse to waste more energy on the task.
I wish to get right down to envisioning the Best Possible Future. A future created by people who, in 2008, sat down to envision the best possible future.
But first a brief digression into politics and pop psychology.
THE COMMITTEE
The select committee is comprised of Sandra Kanck (Dem), Jackie Lensink (Lib) and Russell Wortley (Labor). If you are reading this, hello and welcome. Your task is an important one, and not to be underestimated. You have power and influence. If you had wanted bureaucratic policy-speak you can get plenty of it from the department. Here are the raw thoughts from the street. Or from my study as it happens.
I am a
The matter of Peak Oil was debated in the Legislative Council on 9 April 2008, and again the following day 10 April. The link to SA Hansard Text Search
Interestingly, David Ridgway mentions a Queensland “Oil Vulnerability Task Force” which supposedly tabled a report last October (2007). Anyone have a link to that?
Chloe Fox from the Lower House has also spoken in Parliament on the topic at least twice. She had commissioned a report from a Parliamentary intern Tyson Retz on the impact to her electorate of Bright. I have requested and read the report from Tyson Retz.
Chris Hanna was keen to point out that he was first to bring the matter of Peak Oil up in parliament.
I am slowly piecing together the general tone of the response from our legislators. In summary, I have to say our legislators are hampered in one crucial respect. They have a deep-seated, innate desire to be popular. And while this will help get them re-elected, it is preventing them from making the Churchillian response required to meet the challenges of the next 5-10 years. There is a real risk that the present political establishment will be overtaken by events and become irrelevant in years to come. Unless they can adapt to the rapid change about to beset us. Someone will always adapt and survive. I just want it to be a civil society ruled by compassion.
THE PEAK OILERS
In some sense I am part of a loose collective. Let’s call it the Peak Oil Movement. Peak Oilers are legion. Check out www.peakoil.com some time. There are perhaps around 200,000 regular visitors to this site in the English-speaking internet space alone. I observe their posts, and their attitudes. While some are geologists, philanthropists, bleeding hearts and simple gardeners, many peak oilers are cynical, jaded individuals. They are almost eager for calamity to hit. Many are survivalists, hopeful of a harsher and simpler world, where they will be happier than the complex one they are resentfully trapped in now. There are others, like myself, who simply have a somewhat melancholy disposition, keen to be the bearers of heavy news. It is an amazing, important thing which is happening, and you get to feel “special” having perceived the truth well before others. I wish to be able to say one day: “See? How prescient and clever I was then! Able to look the cold hard truth in the eye. Seeing the truth where others didn’t. Now ye must all listen to what I have to say!”.
I am fascinated by the grandeur of this unfolding calamity. In the past 3 years or so I have become a master of confirmation bias. Everything I read becomes further evidence of Peak Oil. Every government policy is further evidence of the hidden hand of oil geopolitics. Every news article on global warming fires me with indignation that the “real problem” is not being addressed. Every trip to the servo becomes a communion with the surging tide of history.
DENIAL
What about the rest of the world? How can they not know? How deep does this denial go?
Remember the Doris Day song? “Que sera, sera. Whatever will be will be.” In the long term we are all dead. Even the sun will go out in 5 billion years. Today is a beautiful day, have some perspective.
Am I wasting my time riffing in this vein? I mean what kind of a parliamentary submission is this? Strange times indeed.
Well my contention is this: If you the reader can’t frame the question of what to do, in terms of your personal morality, then you are just striking a pose for someone else’s benefit. And don’t make it about a “legacy for the future”, your “name in history” and some such rubbish. That is all delusion also. Cast this concern for the future in terms of your own conscience. Nothing else works. That’s all I want to say on the pop psychology, now back to more practical matters:
THE BEST POSSIBLE FUTURE
This is the meat of the submission, presented in the form of an imagined future.
Adelaide, 2050 A.D. Back in 2008, the year of Peak Oil, a select committee sat. Today the electorates of Kanck, Wortley and Lensick forever immortalise the individuals who set in motion the rapid top-down changes which ensured that Adelaide’s response to Peak Oil became an inspiration for the world. Now every year graduates of the SA institute of Post Oil Governance go out into a world eager for their skills. While the rest of the world suffers cruel hardships and unspeakable treachery, the citizens of Adelaide, though poorer and less free, enjoy peace, good health, and the envy of the world. How did they achieve their good fortune? Not through some accident of geography surely? An abundance of natural resources? Surely with their arid unproductive soil, their lack of water, and high transport costs, the geography was against them? Surely they should have been the first to the wall?
How did this little insignificant nation-state of 1 million people, ethnically and philosophically diverse, aging and pampered, achieve such successful adaptation? What does their world look like now?
A first glance through our 2008-model rose-coloured glasses fills us with dread. Government surveillance and control are pervasive. The citizens of 2008 would be horrified by the degree to which government interference has become a daily part of life. However the effects are mitigated in that the federal government has waned in importance and relevance, and this interference is at least confined to SA State government interference. With a vastly larger public service, operating without the benefit of the Public Service Act.
Unleaded petrol is not readily available to private citizens or even industry, being allocated to the military and to police. Diesel is available on a sophisticated rationing basis for all remaining interstate haulage. LPG and diesel is used to run interstate trains. Bullet trains run on electricity. Personal transportation is performed done mostly with bicycles and electric scooters. Diesel sedans and SUV’s are available from regulated car hire companies for private use, though with long waiting lists. Air travel has become re-nationalised with severe limitations on private and even most corporate use.
US and EC biofuel subsidies were hastily outlawed in 2009, and are still thought of with a sense of deep historical shame.
Biofuel is still used by those in the primary sector but mostly this involves feed for draft animals, which have again become economical.
The key thing to realise about Peak Oil is this: the future will resemble the past. The future will resemble the past more than it will resemble the present. We are going to go backwards in many, many ways. If you do not agree with this basic premise, stop reading now. I have nothing further to say to you.
History
When we need to deal with a future which resembles the past, what better way than to ask those who have patiently studied the past. These special, endangered people, are called historians. They live in humanity faculties of places called universities. They have a lot to teach us. Oh by the way, these historians live in the future as well. They will be writing about us, you can be sure of it. They may even be reading this. A big hello to all historians from the future reading this.
Any parliamentary study group on the topic should include a historian with a good understanding of the dynamics of decline. Rapid and long term decline. However there is no precedent about the extent and scope of the decline we are about to experience.
Secondly, that peak oil will happen, is self-evident. The problem is not how to make a persuasive case about the timing and the exact cause of Peak Oil. It is how to cut through the cognitive dissonance which is paralysing people and stopping them from taking any kind of action. My belief is that the best way to do it is just to charge on ahead and start planning. Openly, without stopping for anyone’s approval or support.
Parliamentarians do have power, however they can only do so much without losing their constituency. It is this constituency which needs to be enlightened. Otherwise we face a political landscape dominated by fear and loathing.
Returning again to local matters. What things need to be done?
Having painted the picture of what could happen if we chose to do nothing, or chose merely to react to emerging information, we should paint a picture of what our state should look like if we have implemented the “perfect” plan. We should envision the best possible picture, where SA is an oasis of prosperity and stability, in a very different world. We must not restrict our dreaming by concerns of whether any of it is politically feasible now. We should assume that it isn’t, then make it so. We should not confine our thinking to concerns of whether it is or isn’t too costly. We should spend the money, with a clear vision that money itself is not real, but a consensus of worth.
The first unpalatable reality, and an ideological hurdle for some, is that the State has a the single most important part to play here. The State will orchestrate many of the changes. The State will be in charge and in control. Creepy, I know but there’s no way to sugar-coat it.
Laissez faire economic liberalism has done an amazing job, however it is in the past, and not suitable for the task at hand. This is an economic war that is being fought, with poverty and despair the invisible enemy. War is best not fought on free-market principles. It requires a united polity, acting with a high degree of uniformity and cohesion, with central command and control, acting on the best possible information.
Adelaide
In this best possible future the state is still organised around the dominant city, Adelaide. In this city, the majority of people still live in highly artificial environments, requiring electricity and air-conditioning. The majority of those people will still have jobs. Because of enlightened zoning laws, many of those jobs will be nearby. Local manufacturing, which has enjoyed a resurgence due to high transport costs and risks, is located centrally in the traditional centers not at the fringe. The population has moved from suburbia back to the center, into affordable and modern high density housing.
Clusters of suburbia have been repurchased by government. Houses and streets have been razed and rezoned to horticultural and animal husbandry use, then resold to private operators.
The combustion engine has not been outlawed for private use, and is still used by those who can afford it. Similarly it is still being used for haulage, air transport and government. Enlightened government action has relaxed vehicle safety standards enabling smaller and lighter vehicles to raise the fuel efficiency of the whole fleet. Many more people will commute with fuel or electric scooters and motorcycles. Government has removed residential street responsibility from local government and is managing this directly. Transport corridors become more differentiated and bicycle-only corridors will be added.
Many,