Weaning from Fossil Fuels

Guy Dauncey
Common Ground Magazine
July, 2008

Around the world, people are reeling from the increases in the price of oil. In France, where diesel costs $2.14 a litre, fishermen recently blockaded the straits of Dover, demanding that the government step in with a subsidy.

In Spain, the fishermen went on strike and 10,000 truckers also blockaded the roads around Barcelona and Madrid, saying, “We haven’t got the money to buy fuel!”

In England, truckers and farmers created gridlock by driving at 10 mph along roads in Cornwall, demanding a fuel subsidy of 50 cents a litre.

Similar protests have been happening around the world. Some emotional commentators have fuelled the sense of crisis with headlines such as “Gas prices heading in the stratosphere” (Financial Post, April 17). If $1.40 a litre is the “stratosphere,” how will the Post express its shock when gas hits $2 or $5 a litre? “Gas prices leaving the galaxy, heading towards Andromeda?”

The price of oil will to continue to rise until we no longer need it because we have been forced to evolve beyond it. We are about to take an amazing step into the future by weaning ourselves off Nature’s abundant breasts and using our own intelligence to meet our energy needs. For all of our six million years as walking humans, we have sucked our energy directly from Nature, first as roots, leaves and fruits and then as firewood. Most recently it has been fossil fuels.

But fossil fuels are a one-time gift from the past. We are burning 32 billion barrels of oil a year and if there are a thousand billion barrels left, as most estimates suggest, they will be gone in 31 years. The price of oil will leave the galaxy long before then. Alberta’s oil sands, at two or three million barrels a day, make little difference in a world that burns 87 million barrels a day.

For many, the prospect of weaning seems horrible. The party’s over! Without oil, we will no longer be able to feed ourselves, live in the suburbs or import the goods we need. Everything will collapse. Past thinking engenders fear and a negativity that paralyzes creativity. The fact that our use of fossil fuels also causes global warming adds a litany of grim predictions to a future we are now really afraid of.

And yet, as Roosevelt said in the darkest year of the Great Depression, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself – nameless, unreasoning, unjustified terror which paralyzes needed efforts to convert retreat into advance.” Fear gives us adrenalin, freezes the brain and simplifies everything down to one powerful instinct: run!

Future thinking is different. It starts with a vision – a post-carbon world – then directs all thinking and creativity to that end. Globally, there is evidence that post-carbon living is possible. People are already living in zero-carbon buildings, driving zero-carbon cars and producing food on organic farms without oil-based fertilizers or pesticides.

The whole of Sweden is planning to be oil independent by 2020. The small town of Gussing, in eastern Austria, has reduced its carbon footprint by a full 93 percent since 1995, using forest biomass energy, solar and waste cooking oil.

Instead of highway trucking, we can build electrified high-speed railways. Ocean going ships are being designed that run on solar, wind, waves and hydrogen. For electricity, there is a global abundance of solar, wind, geothermal and ocean energy. For heat, there are excellent heat exchange technologies, plus solar and geothermal heat. It is only with air travel that we have no obvious solutions.

For any government now facing the anger of truckers, trawlers and taxi-drivers, there is a simple solution. The problem is not the price; it is the inability of companies in a competitive industry to pass the price on without losing ground to their competitors. The solution is for the government to publish a monthly fuel surcharge and require that everyone who burns oil for a living must pass it on to their customers. Let the market sort it out, instead of hard-working truckers and their families.

In one stroke, this particular problem can be solved, allowing us to focus on the main work at hand: to build a 100 percent post-carbon world as rapidly as we can.

Guy Dauncey is president of the BC Sustainable Energy Association (www.bcsea.org) and author of Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change. www.earthfuture.com