Imagine the classic scientist’s petri dish, in which is growing a culture of yeast. Some sugar is introduced into the dish, and the yeast thinks ‘food!’ – so the yeast population expands as it gorges on the sugar. Sadly, there are bounds to the petri dish, and the amount of sugar is limited. The yeast population expands rapidly, bumps into the limits to growth, and then collapses. For the yeast, think of human population; for the sugar, think of fossil fuels; for the boundaries of the petri dish, think of the earth. Put simply, the problem faced by the yeast, and the problem faced by the human community on earth, is the same – exponential growth cannot continue for ever in a finite space. Human society is facing a similar situation, and the only question is – can we do better than the yeast?

Exponential growth occurs whenever something grows at a constant rate – for example, an economy that is growing at 5% a year. So if we begin with 100 widgets of production, and our production grows by 5% then after 1 year we will have 105 widgets. If the growth continues then after another year we will have 110.25 widgets. After another year we will have 115.7625 widgets. Notice that the amount added on increases each time – 5 widgets in the first year, 5 and a quarter in the second year, five and a half in the third year. That is because the underlying quantity has increased. So exponential growth is not simply adding on a fixed amount each year, it is adding on an increasing amount each year.

The interesting thing about exponential growth, and what makes it so marvellous and miraculous and devastating, is something called ‘doubling time’. When a certain percentage of growth is maintained over time then we can expect the underlying quantity to double at a particular rate. For example, if growth is maintained at 7.5% a year then the underlying quantity will double (approximately) every ten years. Which brings us to the famous tale of the chessboard and the king. The tale goes – and it is entirely apocryphal so it has been told many ways – that a great inventor gave the king a chess set. The king was greatly pleased with the gift and asked the inventor what he would like as a reward. The inventor asked that a grain of rice be placed on the first square, two grains of rice on the second, four on the third, eight on the fourth and so on round all the 64 squares of the chessboard, doubling each time, and that he be given the total quantity of rice that would end up on the board. The king readily agreed and asked his treasurer to dispense the rice. After taking some time to work out how much this would be, the treasurer told the king that it amounted to more rice than was available in the whole world – at which point the king decided the inventor was more trouble than he was worth and had his head chopped off.

When a population embarks upon exponential growth in response to a sudden abundance of food ecologists call it ‘overshoot’. In a situation of temporary abundance (the food supply for the yeast) there is a short period of exponential growth leading to a population explosion (lots more yeast); once the temporary abundance has been exhausted then there is a crash while the system returns to an equilibrium (a very small part of the yeast population survives). The human population of the earth has been growing exponentially, and the numbers have exploded through the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first. However, just as with the yeast, exponential growth cannot go on forever and it will come to an end.

This is not a new insight. It was first popularised through work sponsored by the Club of Rome in the early 1970’s and published as ‘The Limits to Growth’. This was a work that was more misunderstood and maligned than actually read and considered. However, time has shown the essential insights of that report to be correct. The conclusion of the report was that, if nothing was done to amend the path that our culture had embarked upon then, in the early decades of the twenty-first century, our economy would start to hit the ecological resource limits and further growth would be prevented. In other words, around about now.

The best way to understand this is to think about physical economic growth as a cancer. Just as a tumour is a part of a body which is growing rapidly, without any regard to the health of the wider organism, so too is exponential growth of our physical economy something which will destroy the wider human and planetary ecology on which it depends. If we continue to pursue economic growth at all costs, then a fate very much like that of the yeast in the petri dish awaits us. Can we do better than the yeast? (Something to ponder at this time of a general election, when politicians promises to restore “growth”).

To my mind, the predicament we face is not a practical problem requiring practical solutions, but a challenge to our values. We need to work out what it is that we really want to preserve in our society, and what we are prepared to do without. This is an essentially spiritual task. More on that in the next issue.

Some of you may have noticed that Richard Branson was part of an industry task force that recently released a report on the dangers of ‘Peak Oil’ – something that will make the financial crisis the equivalent of a ‘little local difficulty’. Personally speaking I’m glad that the message is finally breaking through to the powers that be. Readers with a long memory might remember that I wrote about this in the Courier back in December of 2005!

Consider the supply of oil from the UK fields in the North Sea:

(Production had a dip in the mid-1980s for two reasons: the collapse in the oil price and the Piper Alpha disaster.)

UK production of oil began in 1975, hit a maximum rate of flow (the ‘peak’) in 1999 and has been declining ever since. Since 2006 the UK has been a net importer of oil – we had gone from being a major exporter to an importer in seven years (this is very significant, and I’ll come back to this issue in a later article) – and as a consequence our balance-of-payments as a nation has been crippled, yet one more example of the financial black hole that our country is presently in.

The real trouble is that this issue of an oil-field beginning production, increasing to a peak, and then inexorably declining with malign consequences, isn’t something that only applies to the UK. The US went through the same situation in 1970. For them, it meant losing control of the oil market, ceding that control to OPEC, and living through the consequent energy crises of the 1970’s. In fact, of some 65 nations who produce oil, around 54 have now passed their peak. The real question then is: at what point will oil supply for the world peak? Sadly, the answer to that is ’round about now’ – the world is now in roughly the place that the UK was in in the late 1990s. There is more oil being produced than ever before, and if we simply use the past as a guide to the future, then all seems rosy. Sadly, nature doesn’t allow oil to be extracted forever. There is a limited amount, and we are facing a future with much less available.

What does it actually mean on the ground? Well, to explain Peak Oil to people that have never heard of it before I like to develop an analogy. Let’s say that a new pub opens on Mersea, and this pub has a wonderful new beer selling for £1 a pint. They haven’t done any publicity, so on the opening night, only one person comes along. Of course, he thinks this is marvellous, and so the next night he brings a friend. The next night, they both bring friends; the night after, they all bring friends. The pub is a success! Demand for this wonderful beer is increasing. However, success brings its own problems. There comes a point when the demand for pints is greater than the publican is able to supply. At that point there are realistically only three possibilities:

1. the publican puts the price up, which helps to reduce demand to a manageable level;
2. the publican sets up a rationing system – you can all have two pints each; or
3. the customers start fighting to get to the bar.

This is the situation that we face. We have seen 1) in the price of oil going up to almost $150 a barrel in 2008 – not an insignificant factor in our present recession. We have also seen 3) in the occupation of Iraq and various other realpolitik manoeuvrings by China in particular. In reality, especially after the fuel-tax protests of 2000, the government has already put plans in place with regard to 2) which we are likely to hear much more about over the next decade.

What Peak Oil means is that the supply of oil will first become expensive, and then become scarce. This will have a major impact upon most facets of our lives. Take a moment to think about what you have done today, and then think about how oil has enabled certain things to happen. From the clothes that we wear, to the toothpaste we clean our teeth with, to the food on our breakfast table, to the transport we so often take for granted, oil is the necessary underpinning for our contemporary society. All of this is at risk. The transport sector is the most vulnerable, but the ripples from the peaking of the oil supply extend much more widely.

The US government commissioned a report on Peak Oil which was published in 2005. The exact date of the peak is a matter of controversy – not least because it would have a major impact on the share prices of oil companies, and others – so the researchers were not asked to talk about when Peak Oil would happen, only what the implications were. The report said this: “The world has never faced a problem like this. Without massive mitigation more than a decade before the fact, the problem will be pervasive and long-lasting. Previous energy transitions (wood to coal and coal to oil) were gradual and evolutionary; oil peaking will be abrupt and discontinuous.”

So: what is to be done? More on that in the next issue.

(I’ve started writing articles for the local paper. They’ll be posted here a little while after being published.)

One of the issues on Mersea at the moment is the proposed installation of new nuclear reactors at Bradwell, just across the water. This has raised a lot of strong emotions. But why is the government looking to build new nuclear power stations? The simple reason is that it has belatedly realised that we have entered into an energy crisis and, if it doesn’t build new power stations, a lot of people will be trying to function without electricity in the near future.

Ponder this graph:

This shows the amount of nuclear generating capacity that is expected to go ‘off-line’ over the next decade or so. Simply to maintain a power supply equivalent to what we have today we need to find some 8 Giga-watts (GW) of generation capacity (from a total of around 56GW nationally). Of course, the ‘equivalent to what we have today’ understates the issue. We are facing an energy crunch from several different directions: coal plants (the majority of our generation capacity) are being forced to close down due to EU regulations; the oil supply has almost certainly peaked – hence the price rises – and will become progressively more expensive and scarce; and the same applies to gas, although on a slightly later scale. For comparison, the Gunfleet Sands wind farm that we can see from the beach (phase one) has a maximum capacity of 0.1GW.

Even if we ignore the problematic nature of depending on fossil fuels over the coming years, we are facing a shortfall of generating capacity. This is why the Government indicated in 2006 that they would look to build some new nuclear power stations, as part of the requirement to generate some 25GW of new capacity.

Now, there are many issues associated with establishing new nuclear capacity. BANNG have rehearsed many reasons why Bradwell is the wrong answer to the predicament that we face. My concern, however, is that the wrong question is being asked. Essentially the government is trying to work out a way of continuing business as usual, and this, frankly, is daft. Two principal reasons for why:

First, our present energy infrastructure is built around centralised generation of electricity, which is then distributed through the national grid to homes and industry. Taken as a whole (from energy source to eventual use) this is incredibly inefficient, and is only possible in the context of cheap and abundant fossil fuels. In the context of scarce and expensive energy, the future forms that power generation will take will be both more local and more resilient. For example, Woking has been a pioneer in establishing combined heat and power systems and Mersea is not too small to explore doing something similar. It would certainly be a more reasonable course of action than complaining about both the development of nuclear and windpower at the same time!

Second, there is the proverbial snowball’s chance in hell that we will be able to maintain our present, high-energy lifestyle. This is why the Transition Town process (Transition Island in Mersea’s case!) is so very important. We need, as individuals and even more as a community, to begin to prepare for energy descent – a context within which energy will be both scarcer and much more expensive than it is now. This doesn’t have to be a frightening prospect, rather the opposite. We will be growing much more of our own food, using much more human-powered transport, and enjoying much more human-scale and homegrown entertainment. What we will not have very much of are things like private cars or homes warm enough to wear just T-shirts in the middle of winter.

The real question for us is about what we are going to prioritise. What are the things that are really important for us, that are worth fighting for? What, on the other hand, are we prepared to do without?

Personally speaking, I believe that the government has woken up a little too late to do anything substantial the energy crisis (although I hope I’m wrong), and for that reason we probably won’t be faced with a new nuclear power station at Bradwell. We simply won’t be able to afford one (and bear in mind that nuclear power has never yet turned a profit). Yet that will be a very literal cold comfort when we face a harsh winter again, and people find that they are unable to heat their homes. If we are to face our energy constrained future honestly then we need to focus much more closely on preparations now – such as ensuring that homes are properly insulated, that, wherever possible, we have passive solar hot water supplies installed, and so on.

I plan over the coming issues to explore aspects of this energy crisis in more depth. Next time: an explanation of ‘Peak Oil’ and why it matters.