POST CARBON INSTITUTE

Visualize gasoline-powered civilization arising as if by some maniacally accelerated evolutionary process. It all began so recently, in the mid-nineteenth century, and spread across the globe in mere decades. Automobiles mutated and competed for dominance on vast networks of roads built to accommodate them. Shopping malls and parking garages sprang up to attract and hold them. And powering it all was an ever-widening but mostly invisible river of gasoline--the poisonous blood of 700 million dinosaur-like machines that now dot landscapes around the world.

I’ve been giving lectures on Peak Oil for over a decade now, and always look forward to the question period after the main show. It’s an opportunity to interact with the audience and take questions...Here are the top 11, along with brief sample replies and some resources for further reading.

The United States has reached an historic moment. The exurban development explosion that defined national growth during the past two decades has come to a screeching halt, according to the latest US Census figures. Only 1 of the 100 highest-growth US communities of 2006--all of them in sprawled areas--reported a significant population gain in 2011, prompting Yale economist Robert Shiller to predict suburbs overall may not see growth "during our lifetimes."

I’m writing this on a plane, on my way home from four conferences on the “new economy.” The UN conference on “High Level Meeting on Wellbeing and Happiness: Defining a New Economic Paradigm,” organized by the nation of Bhutan, was especially noteworthy.

I had the sense of being at a milestone event, at which a couple of heads of state and several high-level national government representatives were saying almost exactly what ecological economists like Herman Daly have been telling us for years. Here is a nation—a tiny one, but a nation nonetheless—making its voice heard in the international community, calling for an end to the monomaniacal pursuit of GDP growth above all else. Despite the difficulties ahead, this is a cause worth celebrating and supporting.

• By 2015 China will be importing more oil than the United States does that year.
• By 2030 China will be absorbing all available global oil exports, leaving none for the US or Europe.
• In just 8 years China will be burning as much coal as the entire world uses today.
• Natural gas will be virtually free in the US by 2015.
• Officially assessed US natural gas reserves will be exhausted by 2025.

As a contribution to this ongoing refinement of the concept, I recently formulated five axioms (self-evident truths) of sustainability. My goal was simply to distill ideas that had been proposed previously and put them into a concise, easy-to-understand form.

The First Axiom
Any society that continues to use critical resources unsustainably will collapse. Exception: A society can avoid collapse by finding replacement resources. Limit to the exception: In a finite world, the number of possible replacements is also finite.

World coal production and consumption data for 2011 are not yet compiled and published, but one key number is in. China’s Ministry of Industry and Information Technology reports that the country’s coal output rose 8.7 percent from 2010 to reach 3.88 billion short tons last year. For comparison, US consumption in 2010 was just over 1 billion tons—and holding steady (mostly due to cheap natural gas prices). If the current trend continues, China will burn well over 4 billion tons of coal in 2012, four times as much as the US.

Here in northern California gasoline is now retailing for $4.20 a gallon. Prices haven't been this high since mid-2008. Forecasts for $5 per gallon gas in the US this summer are now commonplace. What's driving prices up?

We’re excited to announce the publication of our first Community Resilience Guide: Local Dollars, Local Sense: How to Shift Your Money from Wall Street to Main Street and Achieve Real Prosperity by PCI Fellow Michael Shuman. This book series will be part of a larger new effort we have launched—the Community Resilience Initiative.