Sustainable Community Solutions

I’ve toiled in the energy vineyards since I did my first energy audit in St. Paul in the summer of 1984. I worked for several nonprofit organizations between then and 1991, doing energy conservation/efficiency work (residential and commercial energy audits for the general population, energy audits for the federally funded low-income weatherization program, neighborhood energy home energy conservation/efficiency workshops, etc.). I subsequently went back to graduate school at the University of Minnesota’s Humphrey Institute of Public Affair in a master’s program, with an emphasis on planning and energy and environmental policy, later worked for the state of Minnesota, moved back to Northfield to be a stay-at-home dad, and eventually helped found RENew Northfield in the spring of 2001.

One of my primary interests throughout this nearly quarter-century has been energy policy, from the local to the international level. I’ve always felt that sound energy policy is central to not only effective environmental protection, but to rational economic policy and foreign policy.

At pretty much the same time that I was founding RENew Northfield, Dick Cheney infamously opined in the spring of 2001, three months into the Bush Administration’s first term, that “conservation may be a sign of personal virtue but it is not a sufficient basis for a sound, comprehensive energy policy.”

This was during the time that Cheney’s Energy Task Force, stacked with fossil fuel and nuclear industry insiders, was meeting in secret and developing the Bush Administration’s energy policy, which has been an abysmal failure in nearly every conceivable way: Oil prices have skyrocketed from $28 a barrel to the current $144; peak oil is likely here or just around the corner; US greenhouse gas emissions have increased at the same time that international consensus is developing that global emissions need to be reduced by something like 80% to preserve anything resembling the atmospheric, climatic and sea-level conditions humanity has experienced over the past 10,000 years; we are more beholden to oil despots in the Middle East and elsewhere than ever; our Middle Eastern foreign policy, perverted by our foreign oil dependence, has fueled (and financed) Al-Qaeda and other terrorist networks; North American natural gas production has plateaued; and on and on. The only bright spot (if you can call it that) is record oil industry profits…

In light of all of this, I had to laugh out loud this morning when I reached the Strib’s Sunday comics and saw the Opus strip above by Berkeley Breathed.
I’ve probably done roughly 2,000 energy audits since 1984 (158 of them for customers of Xcel Energy since November 2006 as a sub-contractor in my current incarnation here at Sustainable Community Solutions; click here for details on how you can get me into your home for a thorough energy checkup for just 35 bucks). If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, save some money, and move toward Berkeley Breathed’s “rare and final stage of oil grief,” I’d love to talk with you.

No day is complete for me without bed-time reading. I like to keep my reading diverse: I’ll go on a fiction jag for awhile (I was introduced to TC Boyle a few years ago, for example, loved the first novel of his I read, and subsequently read all of his novels in short order), then switch to non-fiction/biography/history/whatever before returning to fiction for awhile, and so on.

This spring/summer I’ve enjoyed both the historical fiction (The Contract Surgeon and The Indian Agent) and non-fiction (Buffalo for the Broken Heart: Restoring Life to a Black Hills Ranch) of South Dakota author Dan O’Brien. The novels are set in the early reservation days of the Lakota culture of the Black Hills region; Buffalo for the Broken Heart chronicles O’Brien’s struggles to establish a bison ranch in the Black Hills 110 years or so after the buffalo (and the buffalo-dependent cultures of the Plains Indians) were nearly exterminated. Fascinating reads all.

Perhaps the most engaging and thought-provoking reads of the summer thus far, however, have been a pair of jeremiads by social critic James Howard Kunstler. Kunstler is probably best known as the author of The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape (1993), and was featured prominently in the movie The End of Suburbia (2004).

The Kunstler books I read earlier this month both address peak oil and its possible effects. I’ve read numerous references to and excerpts from The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-first Century since its publication in 2005, but didn’t read it until after I read this year’s Kunstler novel, World Made by Hand. The future envisioned by Kunstler in The Long Emergency is not pretty, and it’s not far off, either, in his view. Kunstler explores the consequences of a world oil production peak, coinciding with the effects of climate change, resurgent and new communicable diseases, water scarcity, global economic instability and warfare. He concludes that things ain’t gonna be pretty: in a nutshell, we have been having a global party fueled by cheap fossil fuels (oil especially) for roughly the past century, and the partyers are going to crash hard, soon.

I don’t embrace every element of his vision fully, but I think he raises critically important issues that are not being addressed realistically, even today as oil prices fluctuate between $130 and $140 per barrel. At the time his book was published (April 5, 2005), oil prices were at $57 per barrel. This seemed like an alarmingly high price at the time, as oil had fluctuated in the $10 to $25 per barrel range throughout the 1990s. Now, Goldman Sachs analysts predict that oil is likely to rise to between $150 and $200 per barrel soon and the top energy analyst at Germany’s largest bank says “Two-hundred dollar oil would break the back of the global economy.” Kunstler seems eerily prescient in some ways, reading The Long Emergency three years down the road.

Kunstler’s novel World Made by Hand is set in a near future (2020 to 2030, roughly) in which multiple catastrophes have come to pass and the wheels have come off the global buggy. LA and Washington DC have been nuked by terrorists, throwing the US government and global trade into death spirals at the same time that global oil demand has exceeded supply to the extent that resource wars are triggered, pandemics have wiped out a significant percentage of the human population, and the industrial project is generally off the rails.

He creates an interesting world in which folks in a small community in upstate New York have reverted to a “world made by hand,” and are in the process of creating a workable way of life that can be sustained in a post-fossil-fuel, post-apocalyptic world. As with The Long Emergency, I certainly am not confident Kunstler is describing the world we will be living in soon, but I think he has important insights which mainstream American society would do well to ponder. I think it would be a healthy thing for Northfield’s civic leaders to think about and discuss the issues he raises. When our civic leaders are busy creating 530-acre industrial parks three miles out of town on a state highway, it is clear to me that these civic leaders are not contemplating the issues Kunstler raises in any serious manner. Northfield’s future may not be what our civic leaders seem to think it will be…