For real?

Just watched the evening news here in Denmark and they were reporting on the latest in the US Republican presidential candidacy race in Iowa, the big story being that someone called Rick Santorum is the front runner. DR (the Danish public broadcaster) had even sent a man with a microphone there who poked it in Mr Santorum's face as he finished a talking event, managing to ask him what he would do if he were president.

The slightly annoyed looking politician sputtered "I would make America great again, free enterprise and free markets, and restore Christian values."

In the following to-camera segment there followed the kind of Danish exchange only discernible to those who have lived here long enough to recognise it - that is, a kind of Victor Borge ironically raised eyebrow - as the reporter explained Mr Santorum's platform to the anchor. "Ban gay marriage. Block all abortion. Restore Christian values," and finally "Rick Santorum doesn't believe in global warming."

I half expected the two men to break out into loud guwaffs - as if they were talking about not believing the tooth fairy or Father Christmas. Luckily they cut away to an audience member just in time, a women, who said: "I'd vote for him because, y'know, marriage is between a man and a women, like it says in the Bible."

It's good to see those Republicans are debating the important issues of the day!

Interestingly enough, the following item was about the storm (real, not political) which is currently battering Denmark. Dozens of summer houses - i.e. wooden houses that Danes own but are not allowed to live in other than for holidays - are, as I type, at threat of being washed into the North Sea by surging tides and violent winds. Some have already succumbed and will be driftwood in the morning. "When I bought a house on the beach, I never expected this," explained one owner as he stood next to the wreckage.

Quite.

Finally, the last thing to report from this little corner of Europe is that money has apparently been pouring into the country over the last few days as scared investors look for a safe haven. The Danish treasury is not particularly in need of the cash (compared to others) and has started selling bonds with zero yields i.e. investors will just be happy to see their money back again.

They have been flooded with offers.

On the cusp of a New Year

Will we be sucking our Spanish lemons in 2012?

Well, I'm sat here at the kitchen table with a cold beer in front of me, Wagner playing faintly on the stereo and a chicken roasting in the oven. The rest of the family are in the lounge watching something unspeakable on the telly and, outside, darkness has fallen and the impatient are already letting off their fireworks.

So that was 2011 - I wonder what 2012 will bring. There are many worrying signs that a lot of the things most people take for granted will evaporate in a puff of pixie dust in the next few months and we all have our own pet worries about what will happen. My personal worry demon is that a euro (currency) crash will freeze up the banks and I won't be able to sell our house in Spain. If that happens it might mean that we need to move back into it - which would be no bad thing as it's a fantastically sited smallholding in a beautiful valley. But we're not finished paying off debts yet and, in my view, Spain isn't the most stable place to be when things go pear-shaped. To do so would mean that we may still be at the mercy of the increasingly merciless Spanish banks.

No, ideally we'd like to sell up and move on, 'investing' in some woodland and a another ramshackle ruin to do up in a place that's more aligned with our own culture i.e. England.

But a worse scenario would be that we do sell the house just before a bout of hyperinflation or a currency crash and end up holding a few peanuts rather than a piece of land with a house on it. One thing's for sure, Denmark isn't as immune to economic problems as it likes to think it is. With a new socialist government now in control of the country with the largest public sector (as a share of the economy) in the world it will certainly be worth keeping an eye on the next bond auction to see if the markets decide to inflict some punishment. Watch this space.

Nevertheless, I'm thankful that we have it as a bolt hole down in Spain in case things do turn nasty. We have a good network of friends and neighbours down there and people have been practising living on next to nothing for the past few years. At present our house is cared for by José, a Mexican immigrant, who is the ideal house sitter.

What's more, I'm more than grateful that we own a property somewhere and have a bit of land attached. To many, if not most, these kind of things are now beyond their reach. If only the UK property bubble would finally pop and planning restrictions would be relaxed to allow people who want to work the land the chance to actually live on it that would be a great step towards securing some tentative measure of self-sufficiency in that overcrowded island.

I will not, of course, be entertaining any fantasies of Mayan prophesies or any such thing in the coming year. Not that many people over here in Europe pay heed to such things, but the slight worry is that people who do believe the world will end in December next year will have a hard time adjusting to the fact that it hasn't - and if they are armed and dangerous then so much the worse. It will be 'interesting' to see how that one pans out.

This being New Year I do have a few resolutions to make. I'm not about to share all of them but the main gist is that I'll be giving up a couple of things that frankly I should have given up quite a while ago. The chicken that is in the oven is a farewell parting to a regular meat diet, and there will certainly be far fewer cold beers in front of me during the coming year as well. Another resolution is to publish the book I've been writing for two years - yes, publish.

It's about my time living in Spain, running an enviro newspaper and trying to live sustainably. I found a publisher (no easy task these days) but the more down the line we got the more they wanted me to make it more light-hearted and remove any mention of peak oil or any other 'conspiracy theories'. Well, the book is light-hearted enough but I've decided not to grace the publisher and will explore other options, including self-publishing. It's been more or less finished for about 9 months, living on a flash memory stick that is an advert for Hamburg Airport (complete with a plastic airplane in a liquid bubble). It's high time it came off the memory stick and into the real world.

My final resolution is to live more by the precepts that I've always felt drawn to - and that means being a bit more formally spiritual. As a first step I'm starting Tai Chi classes in January and want to get going with a daily meditation session. Aside from that I've been reading John Michael Greer's Druid Handbook, as well as downloading course material from a British druid order. I'm not sure it's for me - I come from a solidly atheist background - but my mother was a spiritualist and I'm pretty sure I've inherited her genes. I'll give it a try and see if it feels right.

Anyway, the chicken is starting to look crispy and the beer bottle is now empty so I'll bid any readers I have a Happy 2012 and hope that you have a peaceful New Year.

The Rock and the Spike

Agpalilik - it came from outer space ...

Last summer I came across quite a remarkable find. It happened on a day out in Copenhagen when I was taking my youngest daughter to the National Gallery to see what she would make of the paintings there. Not far from the gallery we happened to be walking down a busy street past the entrance to some grand old red brick building when something in its courtyard caught my eye. There was a large skip stacked up with abandoned office furniture and black bin bags, but it was something next to the skip that caught my eye. For, sitting there on some steel beams was what appeared to be a large red-brown meteorite.

There was nothing to stop us from going to have a closer look, so we did. Sure enough, it was a meteorite, and what's more it was heavily pockmarked and appeared to be made of iron.

A door swung open and a lady wearing a white lab coat came out into the courtyard. Having spotted us from inside the building (I now realised we were at the Geological Museum) she had been eager to tell us more about this large lump of iron sitting unceremoniously in the courtyard. The meteorite, it turned out, was part of the Cape York Meteorite, which smashed into the Earth some 1,000 years ago in Greenland. Named Agpalilik – aka 'the man' – the meteor weighs about 15 tonnes and had a section cut away, revealing the core.

It looked a bit sad and abandoned in the yard next to the skip but when it had been discovered it had caused great excitement. Inuit legend told of the arrival of this celestial gift and it took European explorers a number of years to locate the smashed fragments, the largest of which weighed 31 tonnes and required the construction of its own railroad to transport it to the coast and away to the United States. The fact that they had been pilfered must have caused the Inuit some distress because, historically speaking, these unassuming lumps of solid iron had a profound effect on the development of the local Greenlandic population.

It was the American explorer John Ross who stumbled upon the meteor, having discovered to his amazement that local Greenlanders had iron tips on their hunting weapons despite there being no mineral deposits in the area. At first the locals refused to show him the location of their stash of iron – a veritable gift from the gods that had allowed them to utilise iron age technology in a harsh environment. Eventually though Ross was able to bribe a guide by offering him a gun and was led to the impact zone. Three of the fragments were then shipped off to New York, where they remain, and it wasn't until the 1960s that 'the Man' was discovered and carted off to Copenhagen. By this point in time the Greenlanders had access to all sorts of modern conveniences and were less defensive of the meteor which had once brought them so much good fortune.

After we left I had time to reflect on our accidental discovery. The meteor, for the Greenlanders, had been not unlike our discovery of oil and other fossil fuels a couple of centuries ago. Both were gifts from out of time and space that had landed in our laps more or less randomly and radically changed the way we did business. In the case of crude oil, once we had learned a few good uses for it, nothing would ever be the same again. In that sense we are, as a species, opportunists, or less politely, scavengers. A Martian, viewing our activities over a long period of time, might reasonably conclude that as a species our job is simply to burrow into the planet's crust, bring various minerals to the surface that we find 'useful' and process them into forms that are at odds with the finely crafted balance of the biosphere i.e. 'pollution'.

And thinking in the long term is very useful when it comes to comprehending peak oil. Reading the various online arguments raging about whether we have reached peak extraction of this or that energy resource is a bit like not being able to see the wood for the trees. The point is not whether we have reached it in in 2006, or 2010 or even 2025 – it's that we are currently bumping along the plateau of a very tall and steep-sided mountain that, when viewed from a distance is a mere blip in human history.

Consider the diagram of the energy spike. We are, at present, right at the top of it. Most of us can't imagine that simple truth – we have been climbing to that summit since our grandfathers' grandfathers were babies. It takes no more than a couple of generations, three at the outside, for something to become normalised into human consciousness. In this case what we have come to believe is unassailable it is the idea that the planet we live on will continue to provide us with virtually limitless energy to power the lifestyles we feel we have become entitled to.

Our energy plateau. Image courtesy of Transition Towns

How do we safely get down from that spike? Alas, there are no easy options but one of the worst thing we can do is to go on believing that the energy mountain will keep getting higher and higher. Already our global energy system is showing signs of breakdown. The mega fields, such as those in Saudi Arabia, show no sign of being able to meet rising demand and the price of a barrel of oil is still hovering at around 100 dollars. Enthusiasts of shale gas come up with wild figures for its supposed productivity, although most operators report that the finds go flat after a year of operation (champagne bottles don't fizz for long) and in any case the other energy inputs and water requirements make the extraction difficult, expensive and environmentally destructive.

Those of us who are expecting some kind of collapse need look no further than the news headlines. As John Michael Greer posited in this week's Archdruid Report – this is what collapse looks like. It's going to be a long and rocky road down from that spike, and we'll find ourselves lurching from one crisis to the next, punctuated by periods of stability and calm, and we should ask ourselves how exactly are we going to prepare for it?

After all, it is one thing theorising and conducting online debates about catabolic collapse, but quite another to actually do something useful about it. My own steps have been modest but at least I hope they are a step in the right direction. We have started making and selling our own soap as a means of making some money from a product that people will still find useful for years to come (we can hope). I have also amassed a collection of practical books on everything from house building to home wine making that I spend evenings reading. My wife, luckily, already has a set of useful skills in that she is a qualified upholsterer and seamstress. She can take old unwanted furniture and restore it – and she is good at knitting.

Of course, these are first steps. We are looking at buying a piece of woodland and learning charcoal making skills. Woodland at present is very cheap on account of it being there 'only' for recreational purposes. I'm learning all about coppicing and other woodland crafts and, thankfully, several years as a conservation volunteer in my 20s means that these things are not alien to me and I can swing a bill-hook with confidence.

But there's a lot to do and learn and intuitions says that time is getting somewhat short. I'd be interested to hear from anyone else about what steps they are taking.

King Cnut and the Rising Tide

Storm surges have left parts of Denmark under water this week

I know it no longer gets as much media attention as it used to but global warming has been back in the news again lately with the COP17 meeting in Durban. Of course, you could be forgiven for not noticing it as it hasn't received as much press coverage partly because of lowered expectations that anything can be achieved by world leaders but also because the anti global warming talking heads have convinced enough people that it's a non-issue cooked up by greedy scientists and megalomaniac one world order socialists.

So it's all the more ironic that almost two years to the day after the Copenhagen talks ended Mother Nature has served a reminder of just who runs the show. A few days ago a powerful storm swept down from the North Atlantic, passing over Denmark as it continued south. The resultant storm surge saw sea levels rise quite dramatically around the coastlines and a number of areas were flooded, including Copenhagen's picturesque Nyhavn tourist area. Not since King Cnut has anybody seen anything quite like it before and, strangely, even though the storm was over several days ago sea levels remain high. I took the picture at the top of this post on a walk to my nearby beach this morning and you can see the rocks that act as sea defences are still, well, defenceless (and yes, that's an oil fired power station and incineration plant in the background).

Rising sea levels are of particular concern here because it is a pretty flat low country. Where I live is one metre above sea level, so even if the more modest predictions come true then where I am currently typing this blog will be part of the Baltic Sea before too long. Of course, readers of the Spectator would rubbish this claim, if they'd taken any notice of this week's cover story which claimed sea rises are, yes, a scam.

And there lies the dark irony because it was at the COP15 talks here two years ago that the world learned that political leaders are particularly useless when it comes to acting for the common good of securing (and acting upon) a deal to phase out hydrocarbons. A powerful binary has been created that says we can either save the planet or save the economy. Of course, even my six-year-old daughter could point out that the economy is part of the planet and not the other way around, but politicians and business leaders insist that this isn't so and we need to 'fix the economy' before we can 'fix the environment'. We are told this relentlessly. Just in the last week, by way of example, we have had in the news:

• UK chancellor George Osborne telling us that protecting the environment places a 'ridiculous' cost on businesses.
• A plan to apply a small tax on airplane departures will apparently damage the economy.
• US Republican hopeful Newt Gingrich mocking President Obama for delaying the Canada to Texas oil pipeline, implying he was a flake for heeding environmental concerns above economic ones.

So, if you believe all this, we can either have an economy with jobs or we can have a habitable planet. Relatively few question the assumption that we can have a third option - an economy without growth that could provide for us reasonably well without distorting the biosphere. But that's not up for discussion at present because all politicians can talk about is this magic thing called 'growth'.

We all know what growth is, of course, but most people don't realise that it has only been the aim of economic policy-makers since the end of the last world war. Before then we were quite happily going along without any explicit attempt to fuel it. But with the de-hitching of the money supply from anything of value (e.g. gold) and letting financiers write their own rules, we've seen an explosion of fractional reserve banking and consumers being led by the nose into unsustainable high-debt lifestyles. Why has this happened?

Italian Peak Oil writer Ugo Bardi has a pretty good answer. In his recent essay 'Why is Economic Growth so Popular?' he points out that with a ready abundance of cheap energy at hand the path of least resistance is always to exploit non-renewable resources in the short term at the expense of the long term. If the economy hits a sticky patch on its upward trajectory the political pressure is there to offer stimulus packages to the most exploitative and short-termist industrialists in order to get the ball rolling again, whatever environmental damage it causes.

And that's part of the reason any top-down conferences on what to do about the predicament of global warming will always end in failure. National governments, who for the most part are elected by individual voters, can only ever retain their power by maintaining their unholy pact with the voters, who by and large demand a higher standard of living. I can't personally think of any election won on the promise of 'less jobs and a lower income for all!'

I was there at the COP15 two years ago and witnessed the wheels coming off first hand. I had convinced the publisher of the newspaper where I worked that we should print a daily newspaper covering the conference. He refused at first, but when it got closer and he became aware of what a big deal it was he smelled money in the air and agreed to let me go ahead with it – provided I was 'neutral' in my editorial tone (of course I wasn't, but his English skills were not too hot and so …). We were just a small newspaper normally, run from an office in an ex-slaughterhouse in the red light district area of the city. Our audience was normally comprised of disgruntled expats, multinational employees on hardship postings out in the wilds of Jutland and the pampered diplomatic classes, whose functions we were expected to attend and photograph. All in all it was not dissimilar to the fictional Rome newspaper in Tom Rachman's excellent book The Imperfectionists. So it was quite a change to suddenly find ourselves at the centre of the then biggest media event on the planet.

It was a surreal couple of weeks. The city suddenly became more multicultural than it had ever been, with huge numbers of protesters from all over the world, including in their numbers plenty of indigenous folks from far mountain kingdoms and perpetually shivering tropical islanders in their thin polyester suits. Our normally placid office became a round the clock hive of activity with swarms of journalists and distributors traipsing in and out. We worked feverishly, sending the final proofs to the printers close to midnight and picking up 20,000 copies way before dawn broke so that the army of distributors on bikes could get them out to every corner of the city.

We interviewed everyone from Nobel Laureates and landless Amazonians to film makers and film stars (yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger was there, advising us that the only way out of the impasse was to give more power to big business). I got to meet and talk to some of my then environmental heroes, such as Bill McKibben and a pre-nuclear George Monbiot, and I'll never forget the phone call from the Israeli Embassy saying that Shimon Peres wanted to talk to us about his new electric car scheme. One day, introducing myself to a tired-looking man hunched over a laptop at the next desk whom I assumed to be a streetwalker feeding off our WiFi connection, I found out I was talking to the editor of Politico. “Are you always this busy?” he asked.

But all this is not just to walk down memory lane and air a few choice anecdotes. I remember the distinct mounting excitement among invited delegates that Obama was going to fly in at the end and strike a historic deal that would save us all from damnation. I wasn't so sure. The news leaking out of the conference centre was not good and the over zealous Danish police had spent two weeks cracking down hard on peaceful protesters, leading to a frustrated feeling of betrayal in the air. The night before the end of the conference we received a leaked email detailing a plan to railroad a deal through that favoured the big industrialised nations at the expense of the smaller ones. So, predictably enough, when Obama did finally arrive on his big blue plane there was simply no way the US and the Chinese were going to sign anything that remotely committed them to a binding deal. Obama was shunned by the Chinese, and the only thing that prevented him from looking a total fool was the Danish hosts' fig leaf of a treaty aka the Copenhagen Accord.

The conference had ended with a whimper and the clean up crews got straight to work erasing every trace of the fact that the city had been occupied by an unruly army of people whose cause for optimism had been crushed. Polar bear suits were retuned to rental shops to be dry cleaned and a wheelie bin outside our office was full of signs that said 'Stop Global Warming!'.

The two years since Copenhagen have lead many campaigners to despair. What is the point of protesting if you just end up in a 'free speech zone' kettled in by the police and ignored by the media? What hope, they ask, do we have if neither individuals nor government are prepared to act?

It's a good question and I'm not claiming to know the answer. Maybe we can hope that consumerism dies and is replaced by something more connected to the natural cycles of the Earth. Stranger things have happened in history – but even so, consumerism is a relatively recent phenomenon and, malevolent as it is, an end to consumerism won't mean an end to resource over-exploitation. Some believe that a return to a monastic way of life could be our saving grace, but my pessimistic side tells me that's not likely to happen any time soon.

But perhaps there's a silver lining in the dark cloud that is Peak Oil. The direst predictions of environmentalists such as James Hansen all assume that we will be accelerating our extraction and use of fossil fuels far into the future. Peak Oil tells us that we can't and won't. Indeed, the more one looks into the idea of the decline or collapse of industrial civilisation the more one can see that the forces which power our most rapacious technologies are running out of steam and running out of supporting resources. Furthermore, given that many energy sources, such as coal, have a high level of fossil fuel subsidy in the form of oil, could we soon see these becoming unproductive? Is that why China is importing so much coal right now?

Whatever, given what we know of the likely climate and energy situations we know that we will be hit hard. The question is, do we as individuals let ourselves be knocked down by it, or do we try to roll with the punch? The choice, unlike the fate of global climate deals, is up to us.

Running on almost empty

Greenpeace tried to defeat Cairn Energy but in the end it was Arctic geology that won

Two stories in the past couple of days days illustrate the way two very different political dogs can bark up the wrong tree. The first was from Denmark, where I currently live, in the form of the government setting out its 'roadmap to the future' with regard to energy. When most people think of Denmark they think of wind mills and bicycles. The country has been the poster child for sensible sustainable development since the 1970s, and the latest vision for the future would seem, at first glance, to be a continuation along that path.

The plan, as it stands, is to be entirely free of fossil fuels by 2050. Denmark is an oil producer and exporter, albeit a small player, and imports large amounts of coal to fuel its power stations. Renewable power makes up for a significant minority of energy and the rest is imported from Sweden. So how, one might ask, can it shake off the shackles of carbon? Well, no prizes for guessing that it will be smart grids, more wind power and sophisticated electricity storage systems all the way.

The climate minister (yes, Denmark has one), Martin Lidegaard, when he had finished conjuring up this hallucinatory future did concede at the press conference that the pesky actual details of how this was to be accomplished were not exactly apparent just yet. Smart grids, for example, are still in the chin-scratching phase, electricity storage seems to boil down to vast banks of low-tech batteries and nobody is even asking where the country will get all the rare earth minerals for building millions of new wind turbines. Perhaps they could strike a deal swapping them with China for designer furniture …

So it was a relief to turn to the UK and see that for the Conservative/Lib Dems coalition business as usual was being touted as the only business worth a damn. Chancellor George Osborne, in his Autumn Statement, airbrushed energy and environmental concerns away, announcing a grand new road building plan that would tarmac a fair bit of the remaining non-tarmacked bits of Britain. In a tough talking speech, the young millionaire told the rest of us to expect at least six more years of austerity measures before things get better. And the way to make things better and restore the nation to a path of growth, he seemed to be saying, was by building more roads and airports while slashing funds for renewable energy and environmental protection and letting big polluters and energy hogs off the hook. It wasn't the kind of speech that would go down well in Denmark.

And yet both of these politicians on different shores of the North Sea, in their own different ways, are pinning their chances of re-election on the prospect of growth on a finite planet. Okay, so the Danish version is a bit more fuzzy and warm and at least acknowledges that energy shortages and global warming are issues to be taken seriously, but do either one of them take into account their respective countries' abilities to pay for these grand projects?

To refit the whole of Denmark with smart this-and-thats, pay thousands of PHDs thousands of work years to come up with systems that attempt to bend the laws of thermodynamics and basically keep the whole show on the road is likely to be so expensive that bankruptcy looks a preferable, and altogether more likely, option. After all, it's not as if any country in Europe can particularly afford to squander large sums of money on anything at present and Denmark's North Sea oil bonanza has been declining at an terrific rate and is expected to hit zero in just six years (2018). Six years - that's practically tomorrow! (And Britain isn't far behind with production expected to fall to 1/3 of its peak by 2020.)

George Osborne is equally broke but in a state of denial. He thinks that growth can be restored if we all just man up and try really hard. Never mind that most of the manufacturing industry has been packed up, the service industry relies on consumer spending, consumers have no cash to spend and the much vaunted financial sector is under attack from both itself and everyone else. Where, exactly, is this growth going to come from?

Another story caught my eye today that ties the above two together. The darling drillers of the denialist press, Cairn Energy, who sailed to Greenland with a drilling rig have found, after three test wells and up to a billion dollars of trying … not a drop of oil. The British company, who had to be protected by the Danish navy from Greenpeace protesters, have finally given up and will be towing their rig to somewhere oil is easier and cheaper to get at. Unfortunately places such as those are getting harder to find on the map, and Cairn, whose share price has shot up about 1,000% in the last decade, can expect it to go back down to Earth again pretty soon.

The above is not to poke fun at politicians or oil companies, although God knows they deserve it. Rather it is to illustrate the likelihood that for the next few years and decades we will get to hear increasingly futile promises from politicians whose aim is to restore the energy bounty that we have had in the post war years. That they are no more able to deliver on those promises than I am able to conjure bananas from thin air is by-the-by, but most people will want to believe them and that is how they will retain political power.

But that energy isn't coming back, no matter how much blather is spouted in parliaments and how much City traders manage to talk up the share prices of exploration firms. Simply put, we've picked all the low hanging fruit and what is left will cost more – a lot more- to extract. And when I say 'more' I'm not just talking about money, I'm talking about energy, which is not the same thing.

The best thing for any rational person to do under such circumstances is stop believing the snake oil salesmen and get to work on the task of making their own lives more sustainable and resilient to future shocks in the energy – and by extension food - supply. It's not exactly straightforward to do so and once you embark on the process one realises quite how dependent one is on the fruits of three centuries of industrial materialism, thaumatergic marketing and cheap energy. But the sooner one can make a start the better, and that's what I will be talking about in future posts.

22 Billion Energy Slaves

Hubbert's Peak. Poster courtesy of www.afterpeakoil.com

Welcome to my new blog. The title refers to the ex-oil geologist Colin Campbell's remark that the amount of work we get today from fossil fuels is the equivalent of having some 22 billion human slaves working for us round the clock 365 days a year. That's a lot of service we are getting but the shocking thing is that in the coming years and decades most, if not all, of these slaves are going to go away. What we are going to do as those slaves head off into retirement is the core theme of this blog.

Yes, Peak Oil. It's a term that is being bandied around increasingly these days and, basically, it refers to the fact that humanity has extracted around half of all known accessible reserves of oil and other liquid fossil fuels from the Earth's crust. Unfortunately, not many people take this fact too seriously - after all, if we've used up the first 150 years' worth doesn't that mean we don't have to worry about them running out for another 150 years?

If only. We are right now standing on the bumpy plateau of the oil production curve - or Hubbert's Peak as it's known - names after the late American geophysicist M. King Hubbert who sketched out a bell curve for US petroleum production, which posited that supply would peak in the late 60s or early 70s. His theory proved remarkably prescient, not just for the US but for all major oil fields, and the US did indeed experience a peak and has been in decline ever since. By the same reasoning Hubbert predicted that world oil supply would peak in 1995. He might have been off by a few years, and nobody can agree when or even if the peak was reached, but the International Energy Authority now states that conventional crude oil peaked in 2006.

A potted history of Peak Oil can be summarised as follows:

- In 1955 Hubbert predicted it but was ignored and even vilified.
- In the early 1970s oil shocks sent the industrial world into a panic and emergency measures were introduced to conserve energy
- In the 1980s people who were sick of energy rationing voted in politicians who promised a return of the good times - namely but not exclusively Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Raegan. These politicians pulled out all the stops and, combined with new (and very timely) discoveries in the North Sea and Alaska the industrial world was drowned in cheap oil ... for a time.
- Now, in 2011, with a peak having been reached we suddenly find ourselves in the position that emerging giant economies such as India and China, with a voracious appetite for fossil fuels, are demanding their share of the energy bonanza. That's why oil has gone up from around 10 dollars a barrel to the current price of over 100. Nobody knows how high the price will be in two, five or ten years, but 200 dollars a barrel does not seem unlikely.

Why should any of this matter?

Unfortunately it matters a great deal. Indeed, it's no exaggeration to say that what we must face up to in the coming years will be the biggest challenge humanity has ever faced and there will not be a single one of us whose world will not be turned upside down. Those 22 billion energy slaves will be going away, and there aren't any other kinds waiting in the wings to take over. With a tiny handful of exceptions, every one of us alive in the rich world today was weaned on oil. Our food is grown with it, it powers the way we move around and everything from clothes and medicine is made with it. We might as well call ourselves Homo Petroleus.

It's normally at this point in a discussion that someone politely (or impolitely) points out to me that, don't I realise, the slack from oil will be taken up by renewable energy, nuclear power and other things, like coal.

One of the points of this blog is to detail why that won't be happening.

It's a difficult thing to acknowledge but what we face right now is nothing less than the end of the industrial age. Some people might say 'great' - but we shouldn't romanticise the pre industrial age. For the great majority of us the rest of our lives will consist of one crisis after another as political and financial institutions fall, energy crises rear their heads and ecological catastrophes loom. It won't be pretty and, given that several billion of the world's population rely on fossil fuels for their food production, we can count on there being a lot less of us around in the future.

While recognising these facts is likely the most important thing you can ever grasp, it is equally important not to equate it with some kind of apocalypse. Yes, things are going to get ugly, but it will be a long process. Civilisations generally take a couple of hundred years to die. Ours is unlikely to be exceptional - although we often think it is. But with the right preparation it will be perfectly possible to at least manage our energy descent in a way that keeps us alive and, if we're lucky, comfortable.

These are the kind of hard to stomach facts that I will be presenting in this blog. But one shouldn't despair. The kind of steps I am going to be suggesting generally involve taking charge of your affairs and thus empowering yourself. All of us have been bombarded with the psychological detritus of the industrial age since we were born and learning how to switch off its influence is like lifting a huge load off your shoulders.

A bit about me. I'm 40 years old, a father of two and although I am British I currently live in Denmark. I studied economics at university and went on to become an energy trader but then jacked in the corporate world to become a journalist in Spain, where I started my own environmental newspaper The Olive Press. Since then I have been the editor of a newspaper in Denmark and have been a freelance correspondent for The Guardian newspaper. I have also been an active participant in the Peak Oil blogosphere (so dispersed are its adherents at present that's the main forum for communication) and have studying the implications of what is in store for us for the past couple of years. There are a number of key figures in the Peak Oil scene and most of them are American. Richard Heinberg, author of The Party's Over and Peak Everything, is a favourite of mine, as is another hard hitter Dmitry Orlov, who witnessed the collapse of the Soviet Union firsthand.

There are other names of course but my principal influence, which I will fess up to right from the start, has been and continues to be the Archdruid of the Ancient Order of Druids in America, John Michael Greer, whose book The Long Descent simply blew me away. His weekly Peak Oil blog The Archdruid Report has become an addictive cerebral dose of analysis and food for thought and is read by thousands. Incisive as his essays are, he has always maintained that his analysis springs purely from his own American perspective and acknowledges that other cultures may interpret his ideas in slightly different ways. It's in this spirit that I'm presenting this series of blog posts - or dispatches - from a British perspective. We have our own political system and ways of doing things that can, at times, be quite different to the US. It's going to be quite a journey because the one thing that becomes apparent as you start to explore Peak Oil is that immediately a host of other disciplines and subjects present themselves. Indeed, one might expect a contemplation of Peak Oil to be a never ending procession of production charts and geological analysis. It isn't.

To gain a thorough understanding of the challenges that are beginning to force themselves upon us it will be necessary to explore everything from economics and physics (especially the Laws of Thermodynamics), to religion, architecture, social theory, psychology and ancient history. There will also be large doses of philosophy, analysis of current affairs and DIY. It's going to be an interesting exploration and I hope that you, the reader, will share it with me. There is little time for preparation (that should have started 30 years ago) but I aim to produce one post per week, or more if time allows.

To round off this post I'll give you a little hint of the urgency of our situation. In 2009 the august and dry International Energy Agency failed to mention the term 'Peak Oil' anywhere in its 600 page annual report on the state of the world's energy supplies. In the 2010 report is casually mentioned Peak Oil for the first time and stated that it had already happened. In the 2011 report, which came out a few days ago, comes with a number of dire warnings suggesting that if we don't change our ways quickly then much of humankind will have been wiped out by the end of the century. If that sounds alarmist then that's because it is. If a report could have a flashing blue light on it and an air raid siren then you can guarantee that this one would.

But did you read that in the news? No, I thought not.

Peak Oil and Denmark's response to it

H.G.Wells said that he felt hope for the human race every time he saw an adult riding a bike. If he were alive today (or perhaps came to visit in a time machine from one of his stories) he’d no doubt be horrified to see people driving around in SUVs and Humvees. Bring him over to Copenhagen though and I’m sure his spirits would be restored.

Why? Well, everyone knows that Denmark is famous for its bicycles. It’s probably fair to say that this is the best country in the world for getting around on two wheels – and for once, no exaggeration is needed – and when I leave one day, as I inevitably will, it’ll be the bikes that I’ll miss the most.

Consider this. According to the British motoring organisation the RAC, the average annual cost of running a car in the UK is £5,689 (or nearly 50,000 kroner, or 6,500 euros), including the cost of depreciation, insurance, fuel and tax. I’m sure the figure would be far higher in Denmark, where all of these factors cost more – especially the well-known 200% motor vehicle sales tax.

If I did a similar calculation for running my bike, which I bought from a supermarket for about 1,500 kroner (180 euros) a few years ago, the figure would be ridiculously small. For a start I don’t have to pay tax or insurance, so that’s a zero figure, it runs on fuel I would otherwise have ‘put in the tank’ anyway (peanut butter and jam sandwiches and pasta, mainly) and its value is so low that I don’t have to worry about depreciation or it getting stolen. What’s more, there are no parking fees, no road tolls and I’d have to be really unlucky to get a ticket. In fact, the only thing I really have to spend money on are repairs, which usually amounts to a few hundred kroner a year to replace tubes, the chain (which gets rusty due to all the salt they put on the roads in winter) and brake blocks.

So even if I assume that I spend 1,000 kroner a year keeping my trusty ‘Stallion Classic’ on the road, it is still over fifty times cheaper than running a car.

And Copenhagen is certainly the best city to ride a bike in. When I lived in London for five years I would cycle through thick traffic every day with nary a bike lane in sight. This culminated in a year where I worked in the West End but lived way out beyond the northern suburbs, making it a 24 mile round trip every day through some of the most ferocious traffic imaginable. My basic premise was that everyone was out to kill me – and London’s lunatic black cab drivers almost succeeded on two occasions.

So when I moved to Copenhagen, with its 350km of dedicated bike lanes, its little traffic lights just for cyclists, its millions of bike parking spaces and a law that’s on your side if you’re on two wheels, I thought I’d pedalled into paradise. I quickly realised that there was no separate bike culture here, bikes were simply part of the culture. That meant no more squeezing into Lycra or buying flashy mountain bikes. Instead it meant getting kitted out with a rusty old clanger with a comfortable seat and just sitting back to enjoy the view. I loved it so much that I even spent a summer working as a bicycle rickshaw driver, although I gave it up when I realised this simply meant transporting drunk (and usually very heavy) Swedish businessmen to the red light district and ‘waiting outside’ for them.

So it came as a bit of a surprise to me to find out that some foreigners moving here didn’t take advantage of this. Indeed, what came as something of a shock was to discover that some people couldn’t actually ride a bike at all and regarded doing so as something for children! How had they been getting around all these years? (I know, I know).

So why do so many people in Denmark cycle?

Well, it’s not to do with wanting to protect the environment, as some people think. The truth is that Denmark, being mostly flatish, has been ideal for cycling ever since bikes became popular in the 19th century. This all began to change with the advent of cheap motoring, and by the 1960s the roads were given over mainly to cars, buses, trams and trucks. But the oil price shocks of the 1970s showed the dangers of becoming over reliant on motorised transport and, while practically every other nation hit the snooze button and rolled over Denmark got to work on building an infrastructure that reduced its reliance on oil. Driving cars was banned on Sundays (for a while) and bike lanes were built across the land. People were housed in highly insulated apartment blocks within cycling distance of urban centres and bike repair shops sprang up on every corner. The resurgence of the bike age had begun.

What did other nations do by comparison? Massive highway projects, tax breaks for motorists, suicidal rezoning plans ensuring that today’s dormitory suburb is tomorrow’s exurban nightmare: the list goes on.

The fact that Denmark realised that oil was running out and actually did something about it sets it apart in this respect from other nations. While the rest of the western world got swept up in the gimmickry of Thatcher/Reaganite politics (whose particular political good fortune was the discovery of large amounts of oil in the North Sea and the Alaskan North Slope) Denmark stuck to the task in hand of preparing for a world without much oil. That’s why almost half of short journeys today are by bike.

So it wasn’t particularly out of an environmental concern (although this was a pleasant side effect) rather than a concern about the prospect of Peak Oil. This is a fascinating subject in itself, and one that I will be devoting much more of my time and writing to in the future, but the key point I want to make here is that in a system that has become overly complex and reliant on finite resources (i.e. oil), the most sensible decision you can make is to limit the complexity and return a rung down the ladder to a more stable and tested technology – the humble bike.

And there lies the genius of Denmark’s sticking to its guns over oil depletion. The price of petrol could rise to 100 kroner a litre tomorrow, but most of us would still be able to get to work. Contrast that with the US, where people commute from far away suburbs driving on motorways in cars that have woefully low fuel efficiency. Things are almost as bad in Britain, where it has been reported that 1 million people gave up driving their cars in 2010 because the cost was becoming too high. It’s almost certain that this figure will rise in 2011 and each successive year as the price of oil marches steadily upwards over the coming years. Who looks silly now?

Einstein would approve of the Danish approach, after all, he said: “Any intelligent fool can make things bigger, more complex, and more violent. It takes a touch of genius – and a lot of courage – to move in the opposite direction.”