Thank you very much for the opportunity to be here. The talk is being billed as talking about Albertan demand and so forth, and, actually, what I'm going to do is position the energy situation that we face in the world - I'm going to give you that wider world position. I'll say something about the Albertan and Canadian situation, but it would be a little curious for me to come to Alberta - as a non-Albertan - and tell you about Albertan oil and gas in too much detail, but I am going to show you how it fits in to the wider picture. So, you're going to see more about the world. Can I just ask is there anybody here who is not familiar with the term "peak oil"? Very few. Great! All right, well, I've got some standard slides about peak oil. But, I've got some data that you've seen from other perspectives, but I've done a couple of different graphs, which, I think, put it in an interesting way, and underline the situation that we're in. Here in Edmonton - and it would be the same if we were in Calgary, or if I were doing this talk in Fort MacMurray - you're obviously in a curious situation: there is a vast amount of hydrocarbons around, and, therefore, to come and talk about energy difficulties in a place like Edmonton - you've also got coal, of course - is potentially a curious thing to do, and so you're - here, particularly in Alberta - you're in a rather different position than most other places in the industrialized world. There aren't many exceptions. Ole's going to talk a little bit about Norway, which is also blessed and cursed, but these are unusual situations.
So, I wanted to do a couple of things to make sure I do them, and I don't run out of time. My book, "High Noon for Natural Gas", I wrote it because almost no one was talking about natural gas - neither in America, nor in the world. Wasn't quite true, actually. The American government was already quite worried about gas by 2002/2003 - although, you didn't see much in the newspapers about it. So, that's why I wrote this book. I wrote this book as a public service, and that's really why Post Carbon Institute exists, and all the other things, like Global Public Media - that's why they exist as a public service, for the common good, for the public good, and I'm very glad that that's in the mantra and tagline of Parklands Institute about this idea of the common good because we're going to have to refine that. So, this is an example of somebody doing something for the common good, because even though it's sold quite well, I have to tell you that you won't be buying any islands in the Bahamas on the back of most books that you write. However, it's still worth it.
Outside on the table I've placed, with the permission of Parklands Institute, some of our materials. There's a card about the Relocalization Network - which I'll talk about a bit more - a card about the Oil Depletion Protocol, and you can download this Relocalization Network introduction package. There's also a sign-up sheet if you're interested in getting more involved, and hearing more about the work we do at Post Carbon Institute, and all our initiatives and programs. So, I wanted to say that because when I get to the end, if one ends on a nice flourish, then it seems rather banal to have to offer these extremely important communication materials at the end. So, I've done it at the beginning. Otherwise I get into trouble. Usually get into trouble for one reason or another, but this is one less reason.
So, I've entitled this "Energy Futures: More Questions Than Answers". Now, we tend to be anthropocentric - we see the world from out point of view - and in some ways that's not surprising. But this is what we look like to the planet, a fairly astonishing curve here, we see us leaping up in our numbers to about 6.5 billion - the CIA has very decently done this very rough estimate down to the last person in July - they're busy, they have to go around and count everybody - it's a big job - and then put a tag on them, and listening device, it's important work. So, we know exactly how many people there are on the planet, on that date in July. And this is pretty serious. In virtually no area of the political spectrum, or philosophical spectrum, is it particularly popular to talk about the sheer numbers of human beings that there are on the planet. So, that's why I knew we'd start with something about population - and, by the way, it's just not those naughty people in India and China, who seem to be multiplying too quickly - it's the industrialized world, because it isn't just the number of people, it's the amount of resources we consume that really affects the impact on the Earth - and that one is not likely to go away any time soon. Now, part of the way we increase that impact on the Earth, and part of the way that we get to these numbers, living in this kind of a way, with all this technology that we have, is that we've replaced muscle power. Here - this is the U.S. from 1850 - muscle power has virtually disappeared. I can see this little tiny red line of labor here, at 1970, but if you're in the back I doubt if you can. In other words, virtually 100% of the energy that we use in our lives, in our economy, in our provisioning system, virtually 100% of it is external, if you like - exosomatic, outside the body. So, if that external energy system gets into trouble, then we might just have a spot of bother, too. Now, then, another spot of bother is - I hope this the basic outline of this is familiar to all of you, I like this one from Professor Farley because it has these nice clouds in it, which looks much more cheerful. But here we see another enormous line racing up, here. These are parts per million of carbon dioxide. It's not the only greenhouse gas; it's rather an important one; it's not as powerful a greenhouse gas as methane, for instance - CH4 - but it lasts longer. Actually, methane is about 20 times more powerful. This is heading to 400, 450, 500, 550 parts per million - no one really knows. It looks like we've got the highest levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere for hundreds of thousands, possibly, millions of years, and who can doubt that this is a result of the burning of fossil fuels? Well, we all know who can doubt it, but I don't doubt it. Not naming names. One tries to be non-partisan. Now, this is very interesting. It suggests that we, as human beings, are basically using more than the Earth's ecological capacity. I don't think this is any doubt about this - we're doing it by using historical energy, the very fossil fuels that we're going to be talking about, and at some point in the last 20, 30, 40, 50 years we crossed the line of the number of Earths which can support us. So, we're certainly exceeding the number of Earths required to keep this number of human beings going. And, of course, the only way we're able to do it is by using hydrocarbons, and although a lot of electricity and other energy is supplied by coal, it is really the liquid hydrocarbons - particularly oil - which is what fuels our industrial civilization. That's what allows it to go so fast. So, if you're somebody who enjoys and likes what I neutrally call kamikaze capitalism, if you like that system, then it requires oil - it requires a lot of natural gas, too - but it really requires oil to go fast. If you believe that we must keep going and keep increasing the way we are - we're looking at a rate problem. We're looking at how big is the tap, how big can we get that tap to be. It's a flow problem. It's not just about how much have we got, it's how fast can we make it flow through the system, and burn it up, and basically throw it away. That's what we're looking at here.
So, how fast? Well, we can see, here, an absolutely dramatic rise in the amount of total energy - the primary energy - consumed by the world. It's pretty astonishing. It's virtually gone up by a factor of three in the last forty odd years. And a very great deal of that - as you can see - is oil and gas. The rate of coal increase was not nearly as quick, and you'll see a graph that points to this - coal is now the fastest rising source of primary energy, and has been for some years. But the other big one in there is that gas has risen very fast. Gas has gone up by nearly a factor of four in just forty years - so, gas has really been one of the unseen (of course, being a gas, it is unseen - most gases are invisible - certainly methane's invisible) - it's certainly been one of the unseen drivers of the economy.
Now, by sheer coincidence - and it's not my fault - I was born in 1958, and it just turns out that since I was born, 90% of oil is the amount we've used - that's the bit that's not my fault - only a little bit is my fault. Of course, I've used quite a bit too, like all of us. 90% in 48 years, and this shows you the cumulative increase in the amount of oil that we've used. 50% of it in just the last 20 odd years. We've gone through half of it in 20 years. So, anybody looking at this would say to themselves, this doesn't look like a sustainable system - and it's not! Now, one of the reasons why there's been some excitement in the last couple of years is that gasoline prices have reached unheard of heights - outrageous, isn't it? - you're paying almost the price of milk for gasoline. Actually, it's certainly nowhere near the price of coffee from one of those big chains of coffee purveyors, but it's considered a form of absolute outrage that one should be paying a dollar or more for a liter of gasoline - or down in the U.S., now, it's topped $3 a gallon. Of course, as many of you know, in Europe, this would be regarded as absolutely dirt cheap, and an amazing bargain, and I should say it doesn't really make a very great deal of difference to European driving habits - it doesn't crimp them nearly as much as you expect. However, that's one of the reasons why there's attention to this subject, at last.
So, of course, the price of gasoline is related to petroleum, and here's petroleum price for the last, nearly ten odd years, and you can see that sometime in 1999 - early in 1999 - the price fell to just over $10, and at this point The Economist magazine in Britain made the magnificently accurate prediction that it would soon to fall to $5 - there we are, here it is, falling to $75. So, they were only out by an enormous factor. And so it probably doesn't take a twin PhD mathematician to draw some kind of a trend line through this, and you can see the prices basically rocketing up. It's at various stages - earlier on this year, it'd gone up practically one digit for each year, so it'd gone up by a factor of seven in seven years. It's fallen back a little bit at the moment, but that's exactly to be expected. It's going to be a very bumpy time for the price of oil. But the trend line - as long as demand keeps trying to rise, the trend line will be upward as we go into this tightness as it's sometimes called.
Another good word you'll hear from the oil companies is "challenged", by the way - they talk about challenge, much less about the famous "challenge and opportunity" because the opportunities are shrinking. Challenge. And challenge, by the way, is a code word for two things: it's a code word for peak oil, and it's a code word for "we don't know what the hell to do". So, whenever you hear the oil companies talking about a challenge, you can remember, "uh, we don't know what to do!" This is the price going back about 60 odd years, 70 years, and you can see their highest price was just over 80 - this is adjusted price because it's really down in the 30s to 40 region, about 25 years ago - and, in point of fact, we nearly touched this same price just earlier on this year, and this is around the time of the - one of the Iranian businesses, when the Shah of Iran left unexpectedly, and there were various other problems, and many of you will remember or know that the time of the 80s was very troubled economically, and so we know that when there are big disturbances, upward disturbances, of the oil price, we're likely to see economic problems. It's not as simple as that - there aren't any simple thresholds, it's also, once again, to do with rate, how quickly does the price go up, and there are other factors going on as well. But it has an effect. Often takes about three years, by the way, for these things to work through, so this is when things really got going, around about 3 or 4 years ago. So, we could just be looking at about the time when these price changes start to really work through the economy. We'll see.
Now, I imagine this is familiar to most of you. What we see on this graph is discovery in the Lower 48 in the U.S., what was the world's foremost petroleum extractor/producer power in the world for so long, and it peaked in 1930 with this field in East Texas, this discovery. So, you can see that there's sometimes called a bell shape - roughly a bell-shape curve of discovery, and it's a banal truth that you cannot produce or extract oil, if you haven't already found it. Now, economists - this is a secret, don't tell economists 'cause they don't know this - I know there are some economists in the room and you do know this - but, by and large, from Adam Smith onward, economists have fabulously ignored energy, and they think that money runs the economy, and makes the world go around - there's even a song to prove it. But it's wrong. Energy makes the world go around - quite literally, energy makes everything work, inanimate and animate - if anything moves, it's due to energy. And so, energy is also what makes the economy go, and so if there's less total energy in the economy, we're going to see, I suspect, some changes in the amount of economic activity that there is. So, if you have to find it before you can extract it, then little wonder that the production pattern - extraction pattern - looks something like the discovery pattern, and so it does, and here we see that predicted in 1956, to great horror and derision, by M. King Hubbert that oil would peak in the U.S. around about 1970, and so it did. And this is from the Lower 48, and it's fallen ever since. So, this is a kind of pattern that we need to bear in mind. Now, then, people say, well, what about Alaska? What about Alaska? Did it bring back America to the peak? No, it didn't! It was the biggest find in North America - ever! And it still couldn't pull back to the peak, and it's fallen away precipitously down to here. It's much smaller than it used to be, and now we're getting the same talk with this recent finding in the Gulf of Mexico, the Jack 2 find. Merely at 30,000 feet, and under 7,000 feet of sea, this is regarded as a wonderful thing that we should be so dependent on something that's six miles down. I don't think that's the message we should be taking. So, even deep water is going to form a sort of pimple or carbuncle here on production, and then it's going to fall away as well. You see, you never get back - it's very, very rare - you have to find another enormous oil province to get back to where you were. It's also sometimes said that you peak when the reserve is about half depleted. Roughly, yes, it's about 53% on average, but there's no magic number about 53% - it can happen anywhere between 40% and even 60% or 70%. It depends on the characteristics of the reservoir, and also technology, and economics, and so forth. It's not a bad number, but it's not a magic number.
Now, this is one of the graphs that I just recently did thanks to the kind data of Colin Campbell, and I haven't seen it shown like this before, and you'll read, for instance, in the Cambridge Energy Research Associates recent paper challenging peak oil - and suggesting by association that it's a myth - that this is certainly not the beginning of the end of the age of oil. I think they're wrong about that - some people will disagree with me, even from the peak oil camp about that - but what I think this graph really shows - quite dramatically - is it's absolutely the end of the age of oil discovery. I don't see how anyone can argue with that. It basically all happened within a hundred or so years, and that's it on there. And it peaked in 1964, but the years of the '50s, '60s - and to some extent the '70s - were years of enormous discovery, and the years more recently have been tailing off. Again, it does not take a genius to see that the trend line through this discovery pattern on the downward side is very, very stark, and severe. So, that's it - the twentieth century was the age of oil discovery; the twenty-first century is going to be about something else. And we're just using up what we found in the last century, and we are using it up quickly, as you see. This is looking at it a different way - this is the discovery of oil, and here is the extraction/production of it, with some predictions, and you can see - here we are around about 2006 - all the light sweet growth has gone - we're probably in the decline of light sweet - and what we see here is that deep water is going to have some effect, maybe this much, or maybe it'll be smoothed out - there are continual problems with bringing it on stream, and the only other extra part which pushes it up higher are these natural gas liquids, and these are complicated things from the point of view of putting them on the discovery chart because they're partly in oil and partly in gas discovery. But, yes, they can go to the refinery, and they do make a difference, but you see again, they don't really make very much difference to the overall peaking picture, which is going to be sometime between now and 2010/2015, but it could be much sooner. And that's less to do with geological reasons - although there may be some waiting in the wings to surprise us - but also to do with the way the economic situation works, and technology, and so forth. I shouldn't say, I'm not expecting any great revelations in technology - it's just more the way it's deployed. So, that's what we're looking at. This is from the International Energy Agency. I think this is done to suggest that if we're not absolutely at peak, we're in the plateau phase. It's going to be a bumpy plateau. Don't know how long. But I think we've begun the plateau. I think the plateau began in 2005. We've had a surge to about 85.3 million barrels a day just recently. We'll see what happens. But I think this is where we are now - I think we're probably in the plateau. There are a lot of other factors - there are also a lot geopolitical factors which are hard to guess at. Just wanted to remind you of that again, that we got through so much of it so recently.
And who are the people who are most heavily dependent on oil? Obviously, it's the people over in the Netherlands and Iceland. Oh, wait a minute! Aha! There's all of North America. So, it's interesting that commentators and analysts suggest that the poor benighted Third World that is going to be so badly affected by rising oil prices. Well, they are affected by it. But they've done much better than was expected in many places, partly because some of them are producers and extractors. So, we'll see. I'm not saying it won't be difficult for them - partly because of the agricultural situation, which they've been hooked on to by us. So - here we are - oil is most heavily used in North America. But more than a quarter of it is used by North America. So, this is the overall picture, then, laying on Canada and tar sands and deep water. And you can see, I think that - if you pardon the pun - we are, indeed, in deep water in North America because this is the picture of generally declining oil extraction, overall, despite what the tar sands may add.
This is the picture of Canada. And, remember, it's very important that it's the stuff that flows quickly. Oil, I mentioned, but within oil - especially the light sweet crude - a large part of conventional - and this is the picture for Canada. There was a great peak in the early 1970s, about just after the U.S. peaked, and then there was a drop and a very bumpy plateau, and now the conventional is in fairly stark decline, now. And this is very, very important. It's the conventional stuff - this is the easy stuff to get out, it's relatively easy to refine, it's what most refineries are set up to do. This is what makes the economy go. Other things will move stuff around, but this is what makes it all really run at the speed that we want, and the easy flowing stuff is such that as you open the tap up more, it flows faster. So, Canada, of course, one of the world's great oil producers, and a considerable exporter, isn't it? Well, oops, the only trouble is that Canada, as has been mentioned, is also a huge importer - it's importing nearly a million barrels a day, and again, let us look at the trend line - it's going up - pretty starkly. It's more than doubled in the space of about 20 odd years. And, in point of fact, these imports to the East Coast, which the powers that be decided would not be laden with oil for some strange reason - this million barrels a day is almost exactly what the conventional production of Canada is. So, without the tar sands and the heavy oil, and so forth, which is so much more problematic, Canada would already be in some trouble. And certainly wouldn't be able to export very much at all. So, this is all part of a much more complex picture. Canada is one of the most complex places to look at in terms of hydrocarbons and in terms of oil, because of this strange situation with heavy oil and tar sands on the one hand, and huge imports to the East Coast on the other hand.
Now, tar sands depend very heavily on natural gas for all their extraction and upgrading procedures, so let us turn to natural gas and spend a few minutes on that because it gets short shrift, and it shouldn't, especially here in Alberta, because guess what? A great deal of the revenues, which makes Alberta so rich, as your friend Mr. Kline keeps pointing out, actually come from gas, not from oil, and certainly not from the tar sands, as was pointed out last night. So there's a very interesting multiple dependence. There's an economic dependence on natural gas, and the tar sands themselves would more or less - not quite - but more or less cease operating tomorrow morning if the gas spigot got turned off. They're working on other things, but I think it's years away from any major change. Gas is regional, it's hard to transport, especially across oceans, so you more or less have to rely on what you can put down - steel pipes - which means it's landlocked. It's very important, difficult and expensive to transport. You must rely on your local supply. So, what's happening there is what we're going to be looking at. Why do we use natural gas, and what do we use it for? It's fantastically convenient for industry, it's a wonderful process fuel, it's great for heating houses (about 80% of Canadian homes are heated with gas), it's very nice to make electricity with - you can use it for both base load and peaking (you can pull on a gas turbine really fast, and that can take care of your peaking problems). So, it's amazing stuff, and, of course, it's the main feedstock for nitrogen fertilizer, which is such a big part of industrial agriculture. Gas is really, really important, and the other major use for it is in the making of plastics and many other synthetics, including fabrics and vast number of uses for it in the petrochemical industry, which we are heavily, heavily dependent on, even if we aren't fully aware of it. And one should also notice that according to both of these projections from the Canadian government, they're expecting a great increase in the amount of gas - a great increase. Here's a very interesting graph - several of these graphs come from Dave Hughes who's a wonderful petroleum geologist in Canada who's been speaking out loudly and clearly on these issues of world oil and gas, and Canadian oil and gas, for a number of years, now. He actually works for the Canadian government. It's unusual for somebody who works inside, as it were, to be speaking out. So, we're very grateful to him. This shows, by the way, how gas is used in the tar sands operation. Tar sands is about mining and melting - that's how I put it. Mining takes slightly less than about a thousand cubic feet per barrel of synthetic crude, and the in situ, here, takes much more. In situ - some of you are bound to have been to the tar sands - I spent a very interesting few days there a couple of years ago. What is becoming, or will become, the dominant way of extracting the bitumen - it's not oil, that's why I refuse to call it oil sands - that's PR snow job. It's bitumen. I've got some in a little glass jar in my room. It doesn't flow. In order to make it flow, you have to melt it, and that's what this in situ matter is about (Steam Assisted Gravity Drainage is the main way of doing it). It takes a lot more gas to do it - slightly less gas to upgrade it - but a lot more gas to heat all that underground. If you ever get the chance to go there, by the way; if you're really lucky, like I was, you can go under the tar sands because some out of work Welsh miners were brought over after Maggie Thatcher had dealt with them, and they dug a 650 ft odd deep shaft, and you can go down it, and go under the tar sands, and that's a pretty amazing experience. That's one way that was being tried to get this stuff out. It kind of shows you our desperation - that we were going to dig under the resource and try and pull it out from underneath - it's a pretty unusual thing to do. This shows how much gas demand is expected to go up. So, given all of this, you would think that Canada and - the story's pretty much the same for the U.S. - that these U.S. and Canada would have enormous amounts of gas to spare, and everything would look rosy. But the situation is this: that North America has about 4% of world reserves, it's extracting about 29%, and using 30%. The difference comes in through liquefied natural gas. Canada itself has 1% of the reserves, and it's the world's third largest producer at the moment. This is just simply not a situation that can carry on. And it's reaching crunch point round about now. And this graph helps to explain why. It's a little complex. I'll just take you through it. What it is is the blue line is discovery of North American natural gas. It's shifted over to roughly match the extraction and production pattern, so you can see how discovery and production - how closely linked they are. And you can see that there was a peak in North America of natural gas discovery in about 1960, and production has roughly followed that discovery pattern, and it's peaked - in about, U.S., 2001, Canada , 2002. I'll show you that in a bit more detail in a second, and you can see how quickly the discovery pattern fell off. Will the production follow that, and go down as quickly as that? No one can be sure. I don't think it'll go down that fast. But I think we're clearly at a shoulder moment - and is it a shoulder like that, or is it a shoulder like that? And if it's a shoulder like this, where gas production is going to go down fast, North America is in terrible trouble. This shows that the U.S. has been declining at about 1.7% per year since 2001, and people will say, "Oh, well, it's cyclic; it'll go back up again; it went back up after 1973" - yes, that was because of unconventional and tight gas and Coal Bed Methane. This graph, I think, shows what deep trouble the U.S. is in. The reason why it demonstrated so clearly - the yellow bar show you the number of wells which are producing the gas, and you can see that's going up, even as production is declining. And this is an absolute sure sign that a province or a system of extraction is what is called mature, but in my language, I would call it senile, I'm afraid. No disrespect to aging. After all, I'm nearly at my half century, so I have something at stake here, too. This is very bad news if you're interested in keeping a system going, not only at full bore, but actually increasing. And with the recent price falls in natural gas, actually, drilling activity has started to tail off. So, I think we're going to see some double trouble here, not only is the geological system itself showing signs of maxing out, or has indeed, but we are now drilling less in response to price. Of course, that could change again. So, I think it's going to compound that.
Now, from the point of view of the U.S., there would have been a gas crisis a long time ago had it not been for good old Canada. And you can see, here, that Canada has been exporting more than half its gas for quite a long time, and, as was pointed out last night, the NAFTA treaty forces Canada - what the nature of that force is we'll see - but Canada has to keep exporting the same proportion of the gas that it has been exporting on average for the last three years. So, here, you can see these are imports of Canadian gas into the U.S., and it's been a really important part of saving their necks, basically. So, of course, it would be a bit of problem for Canada and for the U.S. if Canadian gas were in trouble. Guess what? It's in real trouble! Same thing, you can see that the number of producing wells has nearly doubled in the last few years and, yet, Canadian gas has peaked in 2002, and it's in a bumpy decline. It's made some recovery, but I think we're going to see, now, with the decline in drilling, a really serious fall in Canadian gas, at least because of that, and maybe because of underlining factors as well. And people shouldn't be deluded - they say, "Oh, we've got all this wonderful British Columbian gas" - yeah right, there it is, down there, it's all part of the Western Canadian Sedimentary Basin, anyway. "Oh, what about all the Eastern gas?" There it is - don't miss it! Down there, at the bottom. And that's in trouble, too. So Canada is in real trouble for gas. And one of these days, it's going to be challenged for its exports, and one of these days it won't even be able to meet its own internal consumption of gas. This is, I think, completely ludicrous, and this is unlikely too - gas extraction is going down, and the question is, where will it meet domestic consumption? - by which time all exports will have ceased. This is really soon. I mean, this is going to happen sometime in the next 20 years - and I reckon it could happen a lot faster than that. This is going to produce a political turmoil, because it's going to challenge NAFTA, it's going to challenge the way Canada does business, it's going to challenge the way people manage to not die in their homes in winter, which is a serious matter. Here we are in Edmonton. I often give these talks in America, where it's a hundred degrees outside, and it doesn't feel like a problem. But it's not a hundred degrees outside. This is a very recent projection in the last few days from Colin Campbell showing one of the starkest declines that I've ever seen in natural gas in North America. And this is one of the reasons why I wanted to spend some time on it this morning with you because if a projection like this plays out, there is going to be a massive problem. And eyes are turned to oil at the moment, and to the tar sands. We depend on this stuff, and I think people are going to miss this picture. They're going to say, "Oh my God, what the hell hit us?" We finally confess that global warming is a problem, and we see that there might be some difficulties with oil, but we will rely on natural gas to save our lives - and it's certainly not going to happen in North America. Nor, I'm afraid, is it going to happen in Europe. Here, we are at 2006, and Europe right at the peak of its gas production - the UK is already in precipitate fall. Only Norway has a great deal of spare capacity left. We're going to hear more about that, I imagine, in a few minutes. But this is the situation in Europe. So, here we have the two great economic empires of the U.S. and the E.U. all in decline. I think it spells great trouble.
Now, with this situation, the idea is we'll turn to the world, won't we? - and get more gas in that way, particularly by liquefied natural gas. World gas discovery peaked in 1970. That's been in precipitate fall. It looks like there was a recovery, but, in fact, it's fallen right back. So, oil and gas discovery has really been in stark decline. Very recently the recovery was short lived. Again, this spells real trouble. We started using more oil than we discovered in 1981, and it's more or less considered unbroken ever since then - that situation past for gas just a few years ago. So, we're already using more gas than we're discovering worldwide. This is a very, very stark warning signal. This is a view of combined oil and gas picture, peaking sometime in the next few years, basically - this shows a peak around about 2010. This is what makes the whole system go, this oil and gas picture, and it's coming soon, and we're going to go into decline fairly soon.
Let's remind ourselves again of human population. It's amazing how it reflects the rise in oil and gas extraction - amazing. Is it a coincidence? I don't think so. So, the picture we're looking at is extremely different from the one that we learned about in the twentieth century. We're in deep overshoot, as our earlier graph showed. What we would need to do is move into what I call safe carrying capacity. The ecosystem limits are clearly shrinking, mainly because of our activity, so if we were to have anything like a sustainable species, we'll have to move into a much smaller area, well within the ecosystem limits, which I call safe carrying capacity. Bill Catton's work on carrying capacity is amazing. He describes it as an environment's carrying capacity is its maximum persistently supportable load. And this is what we've got to move to understand, this carrying capacity, and how much more limited than it is, and we've developed a policy idea and a practice as well, called "relocalization", which we think is one of the only ways of getting within this safe carrying capacity. This will mean reducing consumption and producing locally. Reducing consumption of, basically, everything, and producing locally our vital goods and services. Relocalization, we can define as reducing your consumption, while aiming to meet your daily needs by local production. Again, I know this sounds odd in Edmonton, because your local production, if you count the 450km away in the tar sands. It's all around you, anyway, all the way down to Calgary and beyond - your local production includes some of the world's great oil and gas resources. So, your situation is different. But, generally in the world, this is what pertains. Much of our site about relocalization is contained in our forthcoming book, "Relocalize Now!", and I'm just going to spend the last three minutes giving you a quick overview of some of those things.
The Oil Depletion Protocol was originally proposed by Colin Campbell, and we're working on it with Richard Heinberg and others to try and make this a reality in the world. It's basically a global rationing system. There is a card about it, here, outside on the Parklands table. We're just finishing writing what we believe will be the first guide book for municipalities responding to what is called "energy vulnerability" - that's a code word for peak oil and gas. Municipalities are going to be in the front line, so we hope this is going to be a really important resource. And it's also there for citizens, too. Car sharing is a very good way of getting down your transport oil consumption very quickly. Vancouver has an amazingly good car sharing system, a car co-op. I recommend these to all industrialized countries. They take some setting up, but they're amazingly effective, and they teach you to do something that is the only quick way of reducing energy consumption is the "S" word. And we've kind of removed it from our vocabulary - it's quick, it's easy, it's "sharing". Once you start sharing, you get your consumption down amazingly quickly, but it challenges notions of individualism, it challenges notions of every kind of economic system that's out there that's based on industrial growth. Sharing is the way we're going to have to go. We're quite good at it, we do squabble about it, but we're going to have to re-learn how to share, and car co-ops and car sharing is a jolly good way of practicing that. It's going to need a lot more coordination as well - I probably won't have time to talk about that. We are working on the primary resource site. We're looking at this huge problem of, as we start switching to biofuels, will we not just grab food land and more forest and more natural habitat - what's left of it - and just turn that into biofuels. That's a grave danger. So, we're spreading a network of energy farms, first across North America and beyond into the world. We're going to try to experiment - we are experimenting, first in Vancouver, now we have one in Willits, California - with growing more food on less land, so we can make that spare land - if you like, spare available - for fuel, and feedstock, and fiber plant growing, and also try and give some back to forests, as well. By forests, I don't just mean timber stands - I mean forests. I count a forest as something you leave alone for a thousand years - that's not the usual definition. What we're trying to do is local energy farms with near zero petroleum product inputs as we possibly can - and it's quite a challenge, I can tell you. What's interesting, I think, is that there's some good news and there's some bad news about this. The bad news is we're going to have to get our fingers dirty. The good news is we're going to have to get our fingers dirty. We're going to have to go back to making stuff ourselves. This knowledge economy stuff - here we are in a university - this knowledge economy is largely froth - it depends on the molecular world. We've kind of been ignoring that. So, I don't believe it's all that gloomy. For one thing, we're going to have to get practical - when you get your fingers dirty, it releases chemicals into your bloodstream free and for nothing, and it's not illegal, and it makes you feel better - it really does - it's amazing. We had to do some emergency weeding in the summer, in the fairly hot sun in Vancouver. It was amazing how fast you can weed by hand. Amazing how good you feel afterwards, especially if you sit down and do it the right way, and if your beds are laid out the right way. It's quite extraordinary. And the trouble is you can't commoditize that. So, it goes outside the economy. There is some good news. These places: Copenhagen, Groningen, and so forth - Venice, *****[40:40], are largely laid out before Petroleum, and they work moderately well - of course, they still have a fairly large eco-footprint, and they don't grow very much in the center of them, but this is a much better way of organizing a city - it's very dense and compact and in the olden days you would grow your food and your other vital feedstocks around it - it's more of a concentric model - I regard the grid model as a complete disaster. We need a concentric model where the density's in the middle, and the growing happens round the edges. Now, I haven't lived in any of those places, but I've lived in all these places: Rome, Munich, Bratislava, Paris, San Sebastian, a few more besides. And these places will work, I think, quite reasonably without petroleum. It'll take some adjustment because they were laid out before petroleum. This is one of the dark secrets of North America, it's been largely laid out with petroleum in mind, and that's going to cause us huge problems. The only way we're going to get our petroleum consumption down seriously is by making some arrangement changes in how we've laid things out, and that's going to be really, really hard. If there are there are any planners in the room - these days I have the pleasure of speaking to a lot of planners and architects and developers and municipal electives, and so forth. It takes decades to make these changes. Please let's not delude ourselves. You can do it quickly. It's called the Luftwaffe, but I don't recommend it. My late mother was a midwife in the Blitz in East London - it wasn't much fun. These are some more places which operate - or can operate - without a lot less petroleum. These are the places we want to go and see, after all. These are nice places to live. Okay, they're not dominated - in fact, they've got the car largely excluded from them. This is a very important lesson. "Good cars make bad cities" is a nice line from Richard Register, and I think it's a good one.
Sweden has pledged itself to be fossil free by 2020, Oakland in California is attempting something similar, by the way. Sweden has had a head start - it's already been doing it for 35 years. And a lot of its architecture and geometry is making that easier. It won't be easy for them, but they're trying really, really hard. So, I think there are some really hopeful notes there. I spent more time on the resource site than I normally do in this, but I think it's particularly important in Alberta to drive the message home that there are many more problems - and the problems out there in the world are made - there are also problems here in Alberta, and they will have a huge impact, and it may be very unexpected. So, with that, thank you very much. There are some resources you can go to: www.globalpublicmedia.com has been, for several years now, featuring interviews with experts in oil and gas. My book's been mentioned, "Relocalize Now!" is coming. By the way, the last third of the book is scripts for how to do things. It's the practical, get your fingers dirty, stuff. It's all up on the web. It's all available on www.relocalize.net, which you can see more about on these little cards outside. So we put the back practical third of the book up on the Net for you to comment on, and we will be increasing that collection of practical ideas - we've called them scripts. So, if you don't mind rolling your sleeves up and starting to use your muscles again, and I'm sorry gym owners, I don't think you've got a very good future lined up. We're going to have to get back to growing things, get back to making things, get back to, at least, some light industry - there are there are lots of problems with industry. But if we don't make it, then somebody in the Far East is going to make it, and it's ruining their lives and ruining their environment and, anyway, they're in trouble for oil and gas, as well. We've got to start making our daily necessities once again, and that will transform everything. It will transform everything, and that is the note that I want to leave you with. We're going to have to get busy, and it's going to be quite exciting, and I think it's going to rebuild friendship and society, if we start planning again and stop leaving everything to this extraordinary market economy figment. Thank you very much indeed.
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