Review - The Post-Carbon Reader, by Richard Heinberg

Richard Heinberg at EcoBuild.

Main Thesis / Main Idea:
A world without commonplace hydrocarbon fuels is well on its way here -- and it's going to be markedly different from the world we know now.

Ideas Addressed:
--Can we transition into a society that doesn't rely on fossil fuels?
--What can we do to start transitioning?
--How abrupt will the transition be and how will it affect my life in the developed world?
--How will people find food, build homes, get to work and just live in a world without cheap, easy-to-find fuel?
--Simply put...how screwed are we?

Crammed full of sourced facts.
An unflinching look at the evidence we now have for peak oil.
This is the go-to primer for anyone interested in how peak oil has/will affect us globally.
Covers almost all concievable angles of energy-transition in everyday life.
Occasionally a little disheartening -- but never without a sense of hope and compassion.

Discusses dealing with social problems we currently have but makes little mention of new problems that will inherently develop in a post-carbon world.

Is it too soon to start hoarding water supplies and cans of beans?

Aspects of society ranging from the heavy-hitters in carbon-dependency, like transportation and agriculture, to those often less associated with fossil fuel decline -- like future health issues and green architecture -- are laboriously undertaken and written about not just explicitly, but entertainingly in the Post Carbon Reader. You'll find post-carbon adaptation strategies for alternative energy, waste management, water purification and freshwater acquisition, the aforementioned green architecture, health adaptations, transportion and agricultural initiatives -- and large, hot-topic issues like overpopulation and urban argiculture transformations.

In each section you'll find a brief-but-information-dense synopsis of the issue at hand, how we're currently coping with it -- how we should be coping with it -- and estimates at how well we're bound to do at it. Whether you're a newcomer to the field of sustainability and want a primer for all the issues humanity is currently facing (and will be hardpressed to face in the not-so-distant future), or if you're well-read in the topic, there is literally something for everyone in Heinberg's Reader.

Sustainable Energy
Fridley's section on alternative energy is as eye-opening as it is profound. The scalability issues inherent to a transition to renewable energy sources have been so-often overlooked in public debates and technological dependence problems that coincide with that same transition are unflinchingly exposed. Fridley covers the hurdles we'll face in the scalability, commercialization, substitutability and the caveats of a reclining return-on-investment that we'll face as renewable energy sources are tackled by both federal and local governments.

Between Fridley's exposition of renewable resource issues and Hughes' milestone article on the future of hydrocarbons in North America, the picture is one that's bleak but hopeful.

"North America’s massive energy diet is largely made up of hydrocarbons—a full 83 percent comes from oil, gas, and coal, and if we include nuclear energy, 91 percent comes from nonrenewable fuel sources.

Ultimately, the potential flow rate of a resource is more important than its purported size— and the reality is that the flow rates of North American unconventional-oil sources and oil in difficult locations (such as deep water offshore) cannot be scaled up rapidly enough to significantly compensate for declines in the flow rate of conventional oil." (Hughes)

The general consensus is that we're dependent on fossil fuels such that even though we're (slowly) transitioning to "better" sources, the requisite amount of the former will render the latter ultimately ineffective. This is not to say that Hughes and Fridley are pessimistic naysayers who are prepping for some kind of doomsday scenario. But their point that we're going to have to do better -- and do it faster -- is undeniable.

"The fossilized sunshine that hydrocarbons represent is an extremely convenient, dense form of energy for which there are no alternatives at the scale of energy throughput we enjoy at this point in humanity’s existence. Forecasts of continuing availability of hydrocarbons for the next couple of decades for business-as-usual levels of consumption are tenuous at best and wishful thinking at worst. Solutions to the pending decline in the availability of hydrocarbons rest on rethinking and radically reducing our levels of energy consumption." (Hughes)

Agriculture and Food
Jackson's article covering the impact of highly industrialized agriculture reads like a powder-keg of ideological treasures. Not only will Jackson tell you all about the problem, its scope and socially-crippling nature -- but unlike many enviromental doomsayers out there he's trying to offer some solutions.

"Wendell Berry, Fred Kirschenmann of Iowa State Univeristy’s Leopold Center, and I took a fifty-year farm bill to Washington, D.C. in 2009 and proposed the perennialization of the American farmscape, with the hope that this could catch on and go around the world. The idea is to use the current five-year farm bills as mileposts towards this goal. The five-year farm bills currently are devoted to exports, commodities, subsidies, some soil conservation, and the food programs. Our fifty-year farm bill would protect soil from erosion, cut wasteful use of water, cut fossil-fuel dependence, eliminate toxic chemicals, manage nitrogen, reduce dead zones, and restore an agrarian way of life. It would do this largely by shifting the makeup of U.S. agriculture from being 80 percent annuals, as it is today, to 80 percent perennials in fifty years. In the short run we need only to change the subsidies so that we increase the amount of perennials and rotations gradually, and then in about twenty years our perennial grains begin to be available." (Jackson)

Offering some kind of feasable solution becomes a hallmark of the Post Carbon Reader, as each writer attempts to offer some sage advice from their own field and years of experience toward curbing and ultimately solving the problem.

Allen's section on community food systems is inspiring -- insofar as I had no idea these programs were so prominent and widespread. It gives me hope to know that there's a widespread adoption-in-progress of urban agriculture, urban farming and a general decline in reliance on 'far-away foods'.

"…typically the community is the last to know what is being planned on its behalf. This is a backwards process. We advocate first identifying who needs to be involved: Who is not at the table, and needs to be? Who are the stakeholders most impacted? Who is going to operate this system? What are the ways that you can create food security within the city, and also create an opportunity for farmers? How do you connect the rural and the urban? We go through that process and start to form relationships. So it is a community- scale effort, and it dovetails with other efforts to build community resilience." (Allen)

When you comb through articles in the Reader like Bomford's post-carbon food piece, you get a sense that we're pretty well screwed when the scope of the problem is such that we're literally only meeting currentl levels of agricultural output due to techniques dependent on fossil fuels. You get a sense that we're literally eating fossil fuels when Bomford debunks agricultural myths like greenhouse saviours, high-tech vertical farms that seek to guarantee nonreliance on transportation, etcetera.

"These fantastical vertical farms would be obscenely expensive structures, dependent on synthetic fertilizers, heating fuel, electric grow lights, pumps, water purifiers, and computers. Like Dutch-style heated greenhouses, they appear to ignore the energy cost usually incurred when we attempt to replace free ecosystem services with human ingenuity. Although vertical farms can almost certainly produce high yields of hyper-local food, their ecological footprint would far exceed that of field-grown products transported to urban centers from land-based farms that depend on sun, rain, soil, and other gifts of nature." (Bomford)

But there's a silver lining.

Authors like Bomford, Allen and Jackson covering the agriculture problem offer tips for a safe transition away from the typical nightmare scenario espoused in like-minded literature. Community involvement, reliance on 'free' energy sources and innovative farming techniques are covered in an attempt to draw a future from the ashes.

The Water Supply
Few issues are as hard-hitting as that of freshwater scarcity. The unfortunate fact is that, unlike high-tech gadgets and fancy buildings, we simply need water to survive. One of the fundamental components of human life simply cannot become a problem, or else -- and there's no shortage of literature on this -- society could literally devolve and unravel into barbarism. Postel's section on freshwater scarcity is sometimes downright scary.

Postel covers the scope of the problem:

"Most of Earth’s water is ocean, which provides a multitude of benefits but is far too salty to drink, irrigate crops, or manufacture computer chips. Only a tiny share of all the water on Earth—less than one-hundredth of 1 percent—is fresh and renewed each year by the solar-powered hydrologic cycle."

"As world population grows, the volume of water available per person decreases; thus, between 1950 and 2009, as world population climbed from 2.5 billion to 6.8 billion, the global renewable water supply per person declined by 63 percent. If, as projected, world population climbs to 8 billion by 2025, the water supply per person will drop by an additional 15 percent.9"

He covers the human response, which is by and large simply been a matter of drilling deeper wells, building bigger dams, or moving river-water to ever-further locations.

Postel also covers the solutions -- which, aside from promoting better discovery and acquisition of freshwater, lessen our reliance on some of the alternative leeches of the freshwater supply (agriculture is a big one).

(1) Irrigate more efficiently;
Some [water] seeps back into aquifers or nearby streams, while some evaporates back to the atmosphere. There are many ways to reduce the waste: Irrigation can be scheduled to better match crop water needs, for example, or drip irrigation can be used to curb evaporation losses. Reducing irrigation demands by even 10 percent could free up enough water to meet the new urban and industrial demands anticipated for 2025.33

(2) Boost yields on existing farms, especially rain-fed lands;
Postel suggests that we augment low-rain-fed lands with just a little more irrigated water to dramatically increase their yield.

(3) Choose healthy, less water-intensive diets;
Diets high in meat use up more water than those that don’t, which would guarantee equal nutrients.

(4) Use trade to make the smartest use of local water.
Some water-scarce regions may find it makes better economic and even environmental sense to import more of their food, rather than grow it themselves, and reserve their water for drinking and manufacturing.

There are also solutions sections for transportation, waste management, and community involvement that are so voluminous that stating some here and there within this article simply wouldn't do them justice. My only advice is to grab this book and check them out for yourself. Ultimately, the Post Carbon Reader's real focus isn't whether or not environmental degradation and a decline in our standard of living will occur...but that these things are simply going to happen. This is more of a guide on how we should deal with it.