POST CARBON READER MANAGING THE 21ST CENTURY'S SUSTAINABILITY CRISES
CONTENTS
Foreword
Asher Miller
ASHER MILLER is executive director of Post Carbon Institute. Previously he served as partnership director at Plugged In, international production coordinator at Steven Spielberg's Shoah Foundation, ghostwriter for a Holocaust survivor, and consultant for a number of other nonprofit groups. He currently serves on the board of Transition US, the hub of the Transition movement in the United States.
Preface
Daniel Lerch
DANIEL LERCH is program director of Post Carbon Institute and the author of Post Carbon Cities: Planning for Energy and Climate Uncertainty (2007), the first major guidebook for local governments on peak oil and global warming. He has delivered presentations and workshops on local responses to peak oil to elected officials, planners, and other audiences across the United States, as well as in Canada, the British Isles, and Spain.
A NEW GAME
The post–World War II global economy has experienced its share of crises, from the oil shocks and “stagflation” of the 1970s to the Asian financial crisis and “dot-com” bust of more recent memory. Each time, the economy has rebounded and gone on to bigger and faster global growth. But something changed in the summer of 2008. Global economic and energy trends started changing faster and more worryingly than even most pessimists expected. Framed by an oil price spike to nearly $150 a barrel in July and the beginning of the Wall Street collapse in September, that summer has proved to be a major turning point. Few, however, seem to fully understand its significance.
Most analysts of this crisis assumed we were merely in the downward part (albeit a particularly deep one) of a curve of economic activity that would inevitably go back up, if only we could keep the economy from slowing down too much. Despite all the debate about the federal stimulus package in 2009, two underlying assumptions went unquestioned: that the economy would recover within a few years, and that it would function pretty much the same as it had before the crisis (except perhaps for more wind turbines, more solar panels, and a dazzling new selection of fuel-efficient family cars).
And yet, the same people hoping to solve the economic crisis with more spending and/or tax cuts also increasingly acknowledge that we face unprecedented (and growing) energy and climate crises. In fact, the problems at hand require not a few trillion dollars thrown at them but instead fundamental changes in how the modern industrial world works.