Zone5

The editors of last week’s Saturday Magazine, of the Irish Times and the guest editor Jane Powers, should be congratulated for the excellent Earth Issue. With mainstream environmentalists such as Richard Douthwaite and George Monbiot as well as features on Quentin Gargan and Clare Watson’s low-energy lifestyle near Bantry, the Cultivate Centre in Dublin and the Village community housing project in Tipperary, not to mention an interview with myself re. the Energy Descent Plan in Kinsale, what was most notable about the issue was to see how far the debate seems to have moved in the media over the last couple of years, and event the last few months. No longer are we subjected to the lies and obfuscation’s of professional climate sceptics, or an obsession with glitzy new technology that is promised to end our energy woes, and instead we have a well-thought out and well-presented mainstream magazine that would not look out of place next to an average copy of Permaculture Magazine or Local Planet.

After outlining the case for Peak Oil, and the debates about how much we will need to cut our CO2 emissions to avert dangerous climate change, Powerrs writes: “The figures are academic to a lay person, but they indicate the same thing: it is time to Power Down.Some of our needs are already being met by renewable energies… yet none of these have the potency of oil..Which brings us again to the inescapable conclusion that we have to cut our energy use dramatically…Yet energy conservation methods will not, on their own, ensure a bearable and sustainable future. Depending on how we react now, we are on the brink of either a disaster or an adventure. We can choose to go over the edge screaming and clinging to every single comfort and meaningless luxury we’ve grown used to in the past couple of decades or we can gird our loins, make plans, get educated, get prepared and do this thing together”.

Powers leaves us in no doubt that “this thing” is the heretical notion of giving up consumerism and using what little affordable energy we have left to restructure our society and follow a very different path than the one of endless growth that is sending us over the cliff. George Monbiot articulates what this change of direction will mean in the extract from his book Heat- How to Stop the Planet Burning:

“The campaign against climate change is an odd one. Unlike almost all the public protests that have preceded it, it is a campaign not fo abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people but also against ourselves.” (You can read about one groups’ radical attempts to powerdown and reduce consumerism HERE.)

Richard Douthwaite’s piece gives a brilliant analyses of how cheap energy has distorted our economic relationships, and in particular, how the price of food will rise with rising energy prices. The most extraordinary result of this distorted economies of fossil energy is that it is in some cases cheaper to burn food than energy crops (biomass).: “If wood pellets for your stove sell at 160euros a ton in Ireland and barley can be had for 108.50, why not burn barley?” He concludes wioth a look at something only those who remeber the war will be familiar with:the case for rationing. In a world where energy and its essential products are becoming scarce, the only way to avoid an ever-increasing gap between rich and poor and consequent exploitation is to ration those essential supplies. Whether this is likely to happen in any fair and just way or not, concepts like demanding more not less, and the question of rationing need to be talked about now, because we need to start getting used to the fact that significant changes are on the way.