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Saving the Planet, at No Cost to Creature Comforts    [

    Are You Ready for the Energy Crash?
    By Jan Frel
    AlterNet.org

    Wednesday 10 May 2006

The biggest obstacle to getting our petro-dependent society to change its wasteful ways is collective insanity.

    While most of us are preoccupied with the astronomical price of gasoline, a far bigger energy catastrophe is brewing that will make pricey gas seem like a walk in the park. It's "peak oil" - the term for the period after which global oil and natural gas demand outstrips supply and the prices for these commodities become too volatile for modern society to function. (For a primer on the topic, a good place to start is Hubbert's peak oil theory.)

    One writer, James Howard Kunstler, has been particularly passionate - some might say over-the-top - about peak oil. In his latest book, "The Long Emergency," Kunstler addresses our stark looming reality square in the face and analyzes the consequences. While many of the scenarios he describes - the prospect of millions of Americans stranded in suburbia forced to preside over their economic decline as their once normal auto-dependent lives become unattainable luxuries - are no doubt valid, his tone strikes me as overly apocalyptic.

    So I was curious to hear what Kunstler would say at the Local Energy Solutions conference in New York City last month. Aside from Kunstler, I knew what to expect from the rest of the speakers at the conference - ideas and information about how we can best cope after the energy crash.

    Perhaps what was so striking about the speakers and attendants at the conference was their almost angelic goodness and optimism - even though by all rights they are among the most knowledgeable about the scale of the challenge facing our petro-dependent society, and would have the most cause to make a run for all those abandoned cabins constructed in the Yukon after the Y2K nonapocalyptic anticlimax.

    There was Julian Darley, director of the Post-Carbon Institute speaking as softly as a kindergarten teacher about the need to develop currencies based on locally produced energy and decrease our reliance on society's "flesh-based" diet.

    There was Henry Gifford, an expert on "boiler, steam, and hydronic heating systems, water pressure boosting systems, and ventilation systems," calmly discussing how the office buildings and homes we use today are pissing away our natural resources at a rate that left me reeling.

    Yet while I can't dispute the need for massive improvements in the energy efficiency of our buildings and the necessity to localize food production to deal with our coming energy crisis, the biggest obstacle to change seems to be cultural inertia. Most of us are zooming along blissfully in exactly the wrong direction: building more freeways, more malls, more auto-dependent housing developments, increasingly grotesque and demeaning commercial enterprises sucking the meaning out of our lives and American society as a whole. It's the collective insanity of our society that makes it possible for us to drive, consume and build freeways as though we could go on forever.

    It was on that topic that Kunstler delivered his lecture, on what he called the "psychological dimension" of what's needed to get things going on the right track, which he says is "as important as the geological dimension."

    I half expected Kunstler to say that the conference was pointless, that there was no hope for a society that needed to change its energy consumption if it were to survive. But while he was merciless in his critique of American society, I left the conference believing he was as optimistic as the rest.

    Kunstler's rage and disdain was righteous and unsparing. He was pissed and he was eloquent: "We've turned into this nation of overfed clowns, riding around in clown cars, eating clown food, watching clown shows," he said. We're "a nation of cringing, craven fuckups."

    Kunstler singled out one element of the psychological dimension in American life: "The idea that when you wish upon a star, your dreams come true. It's not a good thing for adults to wish upon a star. Right now, this is a normative belief - that you can wish for things, and you'll get them."

    He said that the nation's leading religion has become the "worship of unearned riches, which is based on a very stark idea, the idea that you can get something for nothing."

    If that was the religion, Kunstler said, then the city of Las Vegas is its temple. Why this matters, he argued, is that when we talk about the problems facing our oil-dependent society, the dominant frame of mind is one of pure fantasy - that years of predominance on the international stage has left America smug in the belief that it need only wish to have its problems solved, and that it doesn't have to face challenges that might require a massive change in all aspects of American life.

    Bringing this rather abstract statement directly to contemporary national politics, Kunstler cited a quote he attributed to Dick Cheney about the centrality of our shopping malls and freeway systems to society: that this way of American life is "non-negotiable." Kunstler argued that Cheney's mindset is that of all Americans - that SUVs, fast food, hourlong home-to-work commutes driven alone with the air-conditioning blasting was the best of all possible worlds, and the natural outcome of what our forefathers had dreamed of when they drew up the Constitution.

    It was this kind of collective insanity, Kunstler said, that led CBS' 60 Minutes to run a program telling millions of Americans that the Canadian province of Alberta's tar sands held two trillion barrels of extractable oil that would keep us going for perpetuity - never mind that the infrastructure required for extraction is decades away from being ready, and that the best available technology requires almost as much energy to extract as it produces.

    Kunstler also criticized the arrogance that industrial leaders in the tech sector had about dealing with petro-dependency. He described a visit he made to the Google headquarters in Northern California for a speaking engagement. Here were the execs of a major company, whose ideas and products have received the official stamp of "The Future." Young captains of the tech industry, who, because "they have been megasuccessful - they have very grandiose ideas about what is possible." And what Kunstler saw were a bunch of kids "dressed like skateboard rats."

    Kunstler bemoaned their almost religious confidence in technology to solve society's problems. He said that after he gave his speech outlining the dangers facing our oil-dependent society, the young executives didn't ask any questions but made comments and rebuttals, which Kunstler summarized essentially as, "Dude, we've got the technology."

    Kunstler's final and biggest point was that if we wanted to convince wider society that it has to make a very different set of living arrangements to survive in a post-oil society, we need to find a "vocabulary and syntax" that speaks to its most dogged adherents. He said that rhetoric had been given a bad name, and that it needed to be retrieved from the dumpster of history.

    I think Kunstler was dead right - many of the ideas and practices about how we can make other arrangements are already in existence, but there isn't a wide demand for them. There must be a language that competes with the standing fantasies in our consumer society that makes people want to ditch their cars, stop their consumptive impulses, and make our standing commercialized social narratives as appealing as the idea of taking a bath with a corpse.

    But I wonder if the winning rhetoric involves direct insults, like calling middle Americans who live in suburbia "craven f---ups" to their face. I wouldn't write it off instantly, given the popularity of serial insult artists like Dr. Phil. Kunstler also emphasized that talking about peak oil and automobile dependency just once to someone isn't going to make any converts. "You're going to have to employ repetition ... to an uncomfortable degree."

    I know what I'd do if someone kept telling me I was a craven f---up; I'd react angrily and cling to my way of life all the more desperately. Finding the right rhetoric that makes people want to change is a high art and one of our greatest challenges.

    While Kunstler didn't once preach apocalypse, he did say that there isn't any guaranteed outcome of an energy renaissance or salvation for American society. "We either make it work, or we don't," he said, capturing the total indifference the Earth has regarding our fate. Lucky for us, the attendants at this conference were not as aloof.

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    Jan Frel is an AlterNet staff writer.

 

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    Go to Original

    Saving the Planet, at No Cost to Creature Comforts
    By Sonia Purnell
    The Telegraph UK

    Wednesday 10 May 2006

Mark Barthel's detached home was once like all its suburban neighbours. Sonia Purnell discovers how he was able to turn it into a temple of recycling and energy-efficiency at little cost to himself and the comfort of his family.

    Far from being a sandal-wearing beardie, green guru Mark Barthel is a former City commodities broker and still cuts a dapper figure in his pinstripe suit and crisp business shirt.

    From the front, his modern detached family house on the outskirts of Bracknell, Berkshire, looks no different from its quietly comfortable neighbours on a suburban cul-de-sac.

    Yet, over the past few years, it has been transformed into a temple of recycling and energy-efficiency that has slashed his utility bills and reduced the rubbish output of a family of four to less than one bin bag a week.

    Mark sets an example, in a practical and no-nonsense manner, that David Cameron, and other politicians trying to win the environmental vote, should look to. The 45-year-old decided to leave the City and retrain as an environmentalist after being badly injured in the Clapham rail crash of 1988. Thirty-eight people died in his carriage, including a good friend. He received compensation from British Rail and opted for redundancy from the City, allowing him to go back to university and retrain. He then went on to advise the UN on green issues, and is now a consultant to supermarkets and other companies on green and efficient packaging.

    Most striking of all is that Mark's contribution to saving the planet has come at very little cost in terms of capital or family comfort. In fact far from it.

    On the day of my visit - an unseasonably cold day last month - we were sitting in a large, glass-walled and light-flooded family room in a balmy 19 degrees, despite the fact that the heating had been turned off for nearly three weeks.

    The 20ft glass wall overlooking the garden would in most houses have been leaking heat like water through sand. But when Mark extended his house five years ago, he installed specially E-coated double-glazed Pilkington K glass with invisible red argon gas between the panes.

    "It has about the same thermal qualities as a brick wall but still picks up heat from any sunshine we do get," explains Mark. "It's very, very good. Overall, all my extra thermal insulation in the house put about five per cent on to my construction costs, but I recouped that sum through energy savings within a year.

    "Without all the insulation, my energy costs would have doubled when I added 60 per cent more floor space to the house, surrounded by a lot of glass. But in fact, they have actually gone down slightly." Apart from the special glass, the cavity walls and ceiling are insulated with old newspapers coated with an organic fire-retardant. "Newspaper is highly effective and can be inserted with a sort of gun," he says.

    The flat roof - normally a troublesome feature that brings tears to householders' eyes - is actually a bonus here. "It's called a green roof and is composed of an eight-inch thick mat of sedum and other alpine plants that create another layer of insulation and are also good at soaking up water, helping to prevent problems from storm surges, for instance."

    The green roof, which becomes a mid-air flowering meadow through the summer months, also looks spectacular.

    With so much glass, the need for electric light is restricted to after dark. But Mark has slashed electricity costs by a third simply by installing a low wattage, low ampage ring main through the house to power efficient lighting. "It didn't cost much to instal, only a couple more hundred pounds than a conventional system, and has saved us so much money since," he says.

    The nine ceiling halogen lights in the family room run off this ring, as do most of the other lights in the house. His garden, including a striking heron sculpture made of recycled bicycle frames, is beautifully illuminated at night but again at minimal cost. The tiny LED lights inset in the red cedar decking use only a tenth of the power needed by traditional lights, while other points are lit up by solar-powered path-markers. The bubbling water feature is powered by a low-energy pump, and the water is constantly recycled.

    Not every green gadget, however, has made it into the Barthel household. Mark and his wife Pauline looked at solar power, but had to reject the idea after being quoted 26,000 for fitting photo-voltaic panels. They were, after all, working to a budget and instead opted for insulation. The wind turbine option also had to be ruled out as the local planning officer said they would never get permission to put one in a residential area.

    The couple don't see themselves as being anything out of the ordinary, just practical. "I cannot see a single disadvantage to living a green life and, of course, much of the time we are no greener than anyone else," says Pauline. "Recycling and reusing are good habits to re-acquire. I say 're-acquire' because almost everything I now do to be green, my parents did in their day because that's how you did it: you re-used your shopping bag; kept useful bits of string, screws; put vegetable peelings on the compost heap; used loose tea and composted the dregs - I could go on.

    "I do worry that we are not doing enough and my biggest luxuries are my tumble dryer - so we got one that stops drying as soon as it has dried the clothes - and the central heating. I justify this by reassuring myself that I'm saving energy by not ironing anything. Of course, this is mainly my energy that I'm saving.

    "We purchase our energy from Npower juice [from renewable energy sources developed with Greenpeace] but would like more to be done; we buy our milk from the milkman which means the bottles are re-used." Needless to say, Mark almost always uses public transport for work, but when forced to use the car (about once every two months for work) his car is a hybrid, a Vauxhall Zafira Dual Fuel, which he uses on very high efficiency liquid petroleum gas as often as possible.

    The Barthel daughters - Rowena, 16, and Natalie, 13, - used to be constantly ticked off for leaving the light on in the understairs cupboard. The problem is neatly solved by a simple, automatic off-switch whenever the door is closed.

    Even the windowless garage is lit naturally during the day by a sun-pipe, a tube bringing down light from a hole in the roof and magnifying it 20-fold with a special reflective material. Further natural light comes through ingenious turquoise glass tiles that separate the garage from the family room that serve the dual (but undetected) purpose of feeding light to the garage while forming an attractive feature inside the house.

    The other windows in the house are all triple-glazed, a feature that cuts 15 per cent off heating bills but costs only an extra 400 to install. Underfloor heating was installed downstairs - it produces a more efficient and even heat - with thermal insulating panels fitted below the floor to prevent heat wastage into the ground. "That's one of the biggest wastes of heat," he says. "You need to reflect the heat back up into the house."

    Mark insists that all these devices are both easily sourced - he found many on the internet - and installed. "We just used a local builder, who had done bits of energy-saving work before but not altogether like this," he says. "But it all worked out." The recycling went even as far as the shower room tiles - a pretty mosaic of small dusky-pink and mauve tiles cut ingeniously out of old ones and stuck on to a mesh for easy installation.

    But conserving and recycling does not end with construction. The Barthel family compost practically all kitchen and garden waste, creating a mulch that helps to reduce water evaporation in the soil. Needless to say, most of the plants in the well-stocked garden are in any case drought-resistant to beat the hosepipe ban, but nevertheless hundreds of litres of rainwater are trapped in his series of wall-mounted water butts. Not a drop is wasted.

    Even the "grey" water from the bath, shower and washing machine is channelled into a tank and used to flush the loos. This is a good alternative for people unwilling to adopt the "if it's yellow, let it mellow" method, championed by Ken Livingstone last week when proposing that Londoners save water this summer by not flushing urine.

    "Mark has made sensible choices that have been cost-effective as well as fitting in with family life," says Fridey Cordingley, National Campaigns Manager for Recycle Now. Is there any more they could do to be greener? "They could consider using their compost to grow their own vegetables," she says.

    The Barthels make sure non-compostable waste - such as paper, plastic, tin foil and glass - is all recycled. So are batteries when they come ready-fitted in a new appliance, but they are replaced with rechargeable ones as soon as possible. In over two years, they have got through just a handful of batteries. That's not to say that the Barthels forsake the pleasures of modern gadgets. But their fast-expanding collection of iPods, for instance, have solar-powered chargers.