Richard Heinberg on The Reality Report (transcript)

Transcribed by Brian Magee

Jason Bradford: Welcome back. We have on the line Richard Heinberg from Santa Rosa. You're in Santa Rosa now, Richard?

Richard Heinberg: That's right.

JB: I know you travel a lot and welcome back home, I guess.

RH: Yeah, well, thank you.

JB: So, we're going to talk to Richard Heinberg here about his latest book, and other things, Peak Everything. I really had a good time reading your latest--all your works, really--starting from The Party's Over. I guess you've had some books before that, also. But the last one I found very interesting because it's titled Peak Everything and, yet, when I expected something with that title to have chapter-by-chapter accounts of resource depletion, that's not what I found. Only really in the introduction you survey the key resource levels of the globe, and then you have a quote that says, "Our starting point then is the realization that we are today living at the end of the period of greatest material abundance in human history." And that, "we are at the beginning of the period of overall societal contraction." Can you briefly explain how you came to these conclusions?

RH: Yeah. Well, I've always seen peak oil as only a part of a much larger picture. I came to peak oil not from the world of petroleum geology or the oil industry but out of environmental work, and it's been plain to me for a very long time, at least since the 1972 "Limits to Growth" study, that society's on a fundamentally unsustainable course in terms of growth of population and per capita consumption. The fact is we live on a finite plant and you can't continue growing forever on a finite planet. So, clearly we, at some point, are going to reach those limits and everything will change. Well, with peak oil it becomes clear that those limits are well within view. It's not something theoretical. We're not talking about the end of the 21st century or centuries from now. We're talking about our lifetime and the years immediately ahead.

So, once I saw that peak oil was really the breaking point, the resource depletion story that would break open this larger discussion about society's general direction, then I decided to focus primarily on peak oil in my work. But with Peak Everything I've really come back around to looking at that larger picture. And what I try to do in the book is help readers understand that larger context and come to terms with it, on a, not just an intellectual level but also at a kind of gut level.

We've lived our whole lives in this world of constant growth and just amazing abundance of resources and technology and so on, and that world is going to be changing dramatically in the years ahead. So we have to somehow have some tools to help ourselves wrap our minds around that, and not just our minds but our very being.

JB: Yeah, so what I found is this book is really about the social ramifications of peak everything. And I guess you felt the need to write this kind of book now because a lot of the technical stuff you've gotten out of the way and other people are dong that. Is that why you did...?

RH: Yeah, yeah. There's some excellent analysis going on now with regard to oil and natural gas and coal. Web sites like The Oil Drum are taking this up on a daily basis and doing fabulous analytical work. And now with oil at $100 a barrel a much larger and still growing segment of the population is beginning to understand peak oil. But many of them still are seeing it as a technical problem. You still see people saying, "Well, you know if we apply this techno-fix or that new energy source or there's this new breakthrough is solar photovoltaic that'll solve everything and we'll be able to stay on the same growth trajectory in the future that we're on now." And to me that misses the entire point because it's not just a question of how to do we keep the cars on the road, how do we keep the economy ticking along. We really have to think in larger terms about how do we make our society fundamentally sustainable. And that's a much bigger discussion.

JB: Yeah, it sure is. That's a lot of what this show, The Reality Report, has been about, historically, is sort of really fundamentally what does it mean to be sustainable and sort of using these issues like peak oil and climate change to kind of question, I guess, this idea that we always have to have more.

RH: Right.

JB: Well, I really found the most important chapter to me, personally, was the first one because you really did a great job of elucidating the connections between energy tools and culture. And I noticed you drawing from the work of anthropologist Marvin Harris. Why was it necessary to begin with this kind of overview?

RH: Well, this is the kind of discussion I always start with with my students at New College. I think it's important that we get the big picture first. And Marvin Harris, who's, I think, widely considered the dean of American anthropology, cultural anthropology, passed away a few years ago. But I think he really made a science out of anthropology in a way that it hadn't been previously. He's been a huge influence on me.

My initial question in, not just in this book but in my whole intellectual life, is very similar to what Jared Diamond poses in Guns, Germs and Steel, which is, why are human societies the way they are and how and why do human societies change over time? And I think Marvin Harris answered these questions more fully and systematically, actually, than Jared Diamond did in his much more famous book, Guns, Germs and Steel. Diamond has sold millions and millions of books and a lot more people are familiar with his work than are with Harris, and I think that's unfortunate.

But, anyway, what Marvin Harris did, he showed that societal forms come mostly from environmental circumstances. In other words, if you have a group of people that are getting their food primarily from hunting-gathering, as a result of that they're going to have very predictable social forms: relationships between men and women, the size of the society, their economic relationships, even down to things like their beliefs about the sacred, and relationships with the plants and animals around them. All will be very accurately predictable on the basis on how they get their food, which is basically how they're relating to their environment.

If people are getting their food from agriculture, a whole different set of social forms inevitably follow from that. So food really, ultimately, boils down to energy; that's our most basic energy relationship with the environment. So what we're really saying is, all of human society derives from energy. And once you have that fundamental information then it makes a lot of things very clear. How and why has the industrial revolution been such a overwhelming, dramatic, in some ways catastrophic, event in human history? Well, it's because so much energy was unleashed so quickly as a result of our using fossil fuels. That's changed everything--quite predictably if one understands the energetic basis of society.

JB: Yeah. You have this phrase in Chapter 1 goes, "We have become almost a different species compared to our recent ancestors." Why don't you unravel that phrase a bit.

RH: Right. Well, our tools, our technologies enable us to take over a variety of ecological niches. Other animals have to, basically, evolve biologically in order to change their fundamental behavior in relationship to the biosphere. In other words, if birds were going to fly they had to evolve wings. Human being fly, but we didn't have to evolve wings we just needed to build airplanes. And it's like that with all of our technologies. We have developed tools to enable us to capture more and more of earth's resources with clothing--which are a form of technology or tools--with clothing we can live in nearly all climates on earth. And at the same time by adopting new tools, new technologies, we also change ourselves because we have to adapt then to the new tools. So it's kind of a... it's a rapid cultural evolution that really has overwhelmed and supplanted biological evolution in the case of human beings. And it's enabled us to act as though we are thousands of species when in fact we are only one species.

JB: Right. Our impact on the plant is as if we're, like you're saying, thousands of species--the amount we take from the planet, our impact. So, I find this analysis refreshing. What basically you're coming back to is the Marvin Harris argument that the culture basically ends up selecting its ideology and it's sort of a response to the energy availability it has, rather than the other way around. And, in other words, ideology is used mainly to justify whatever technology you have available and not the creator of it. Can you give us some examples of how this works, a little bit more in detail?

RH: Sure. Well, maybe the most dramatic example would be economic theory. We tend to think of economics as a science, as though it were sort of like physics or geology, people just went out, just like they were studying rocks or electricity or something. They studied the economy and figured out how it works and created theories and tested them and so on. But actually that's not how economic theory evolved at all. It came out of moral philosophy, actually. And it still is formally a category of moral philosophy, even though it wraps itself in the clothing of a science.

Well, economic theory developed historically during the last couple of hundred years of dramatic growth in population and energy and extraction and consumption of other resources and the technological revolution of the industrial period and so on. And so economic theory took these things as a given and said, "Well, growth is a natural process in economies, and, in fact, growth is inevitable and necessary to the health of the economies." Now this is a conclusion that, I think, economists would not have come to if they'd been developing their theories, say, 500 years ago, when basically human societies were at almost a standstill in comparison to what we've seen over the last couple of hundred of years. They were evolving very, very slowly and the amount of energy that was used per capita was basically the same one year to the next, one decade to the next, one century to the next. But because economists were operating in this furious climate of growth and change they assumed that this was natural and inevitable and that has become embedded in economic theory. And so now every country in the world has an economy that's based on the assumption of continued limitless growth. And this has been embedded not only in economic theory but in our monetary system and our economic institutions and so on.

JB: Yeah. And it's interesting, as someone working in--historically--in actual sciences and biology...just find that so amazing. I mean, I can go back to Darwin and then ecologists of the early 20th century and their models basically showed limits to all of this but it never seemed to filter in to those economic theories, which is pretty astounding. Now earlier you were talking about how important it is to look at how people get their food as a predictor of essentially what the rest of their social organization will look like. Can you describe some of the social consequences of different food systems in terms of, say, social complexity, division of labor, gender roles, and religion?

RH: Sure, yeah. Well, starting with hunter-gatherer society, basically, the amount of food available from nature for hunter-gatherers is such that size of societies is limited. Most hunter-gatherer bands are 15-50 individuals, something like that. And as a result of that, relations in hunter-gatherer bands tend to be pretty egalitarian. If any one person starts to lord it over everyone else, well, everyone else can, more or less, just pick up and leave because everybody has access to food from the environment; there's no one person who can withhold access to food from everybody else. And so people generally make their decisions on a sort of consensus basis. And there's no division--full-time division--of labor. People develop specialties; there are some people who may be better at hunting, other people are more familiar with the local herbs and healing, and practices and so on. But everybody knows how to do just about everything.

When the food basis changes to first horticulture and then agriculture--well, especially with agriculture, which means, basically, field crops--growing single crops over large areas usually using plows and draft animals. Well, this is men's work, so the women tend to be staying at home raising the children. Men have less to do with child rearing than was the case previously. And it also produces seasonal surpluses which then are gathered up by specialists who are then developing ways of keeping track of these food surpluses so that they can later be doled out in times of need. So writing is invented to help keep track of the surpluses.

And then because there are food stores then there's the temptation to raid them. If another group of people on the other side of the hill is starving, well, if they know that there's a group nearby that has some food stored up for the winter, there's a big temptation to go and raid those storehouses. So this creates the need for full-time specialists in violence, either to organize raids or to defend from raids.

So society becomes sort of pyramid-shaped. You have most of the people on the bottom of the pyramid who are producing food and then on the upper levels of the social pyramid you have people who are soldiers and police and managers and administrators, people who look after the food surpluses and keep track of them and so on. And then at the very top of the social pyramid you have the royal class, the kings and queens and so on.

All of that comes just from the fact of agriculture. And now, of course, we have still a further development which is industrial agriculture based on fossil fuels, where instead of most of the people being at the bottom of the social pyramid producing food, we have the huge middle class--we have 2% of the people actually farming. And because of fossil fuels and tractors and all of that, everybody else can now be flipping burgers at McDonalds or working in Wal-Mart, or whatever, or sitting in front of a computer all day. And we all get our food from the store.

JB: Right, yeah. So what you have then is this situation where people are almost entirely disconnected then from what actually keeps them alive...

RH: That's right.

JB: ...the soil and the sunshine and the hydrological cycles and...

RH: That's right. And so, as society as a whole become disconnected from nature and goes on a path that's fundamentally unsustainable from an environmental point of view, nobody notices.

JB: Yeah, they don't even realize what they're doing.

RH: Yeah, they're all caught up in flipping the burgers or working at Wal-Mart or sitting in front of their computer, and maybe one or two percent of the population that actually has to interact with nature on a daily basis notices what's going on. But for everybody else, as long as the paycheck keeps coming and as long as the food store is still there, everything's fine as far as they're concerned.

JB: And that's one of the problems, I guess, is that the crises that we're talking about build over centuries, essentially.

RH: That's right.

JB: And so, you have generations and generations that developed an whole set of expectations and ideology that is unsustainable and yet since it's lasted so long people assume that, "well, it must be sustainable because it hasn't failed us yet."

RH: Right. And we pay attention to what's right in front of our faces. If you pick up a newspaper there aren't headline stories about how environmental systems are collapsing around us and so on. Instead it's about the latest straw poll in Iowa, on a good day. On a bad day it's all about local murders and things that are really completely irrelevant to our long-term survival.

JB: You are listening to KZYX Philo, KXYZ Willits and Ukiah. This is The Reality Report and I'm you're host Jason Bradford. Our guest today is Richard Heinberg, faculty member of New College of California, fellow of the Post Carbon Institute, and author of the books The Party's Over, Power Down, The Oil Depletion Protocol, and most recently, Peak Everything. Today we're covering many of the topics in his latest book, which more than others considers the social implications of energy decline.

Now one of your most provocative lines of reasoning is that many more people will need to be engaged in home gardening and agriculture as energy declines. And on the surface, of course, this seems ridiculous; it goes against the established trends of urbanization. I mean, even in poor countries people are migrating away from the fields. So how could this happen?

RH: Yes. Well, essentially we're going to see a reversal of that trend because it relies entirely on cheap energy. What made urbanization the dominant social trend of the 20th century was cheap tractor fuel, the fact that you could replace between 10-100 agricultural workers with one machine. As tractor fuel becomes more expensive, less available, as there are shortages, it's inevitable that we'll have to produce food using more human muscle power. And that means a reversal of the trend of urbanization.

Now it's true that some countries that use a fairly trivial amount of energy compared to the U.S. are very highly urbanized countries, and that would tend to sort of undermine the scenario I just painted. But those countries rely heavily on food imports. Generally, if you look at the larger picture--and I know you've done a study on this--in general, using less energy in the form of fossil fuels means using more human muscle power. So that's an astounding conclusion to come to because we're facing a century ahead where the amount of energy available will be declining one way or another. I mean, we can do this in an intelligent way where we transition to renewable energy sources and so on, or we can do it in a very foolish way, relying on bio fuels and coal-to-liquids and all of these sort of things. But one way or another we're almost certainly going to have much less energy on a total and also per capita basis as this century unfolds.

So how are we going to manage food production in that kind of situation? Well, we're going to have to have a lot more farmers; we're going to have to be more familiar with how our food is grown, grow more of it locally, and do more of it ourselves in back yard/front yard gardening, urban gardening and so on. They did this in Cuba--and I'm sure you've probably talked about this on your show--during the Special Period of the 1990s. I think we're going to have to do something very similar to that on a much larger scale all around the world over the course of the next few decades.

JB: And many people haven't quite followed your line of reasoning and they argue that the only way out of this mess, whether energy scarcity or climate change or habitat destruction, is not to abandon technology and go back to some agrarian past, but to embrace technology. And we just have to take these tools that we're used to and run them on renewable energy, or coal power plus carbon sequestration. And we shouldn't want to go back. I mean, progress has meant more social equality among genders--the argument goes, I'm saying--less racial divisiveness, lower infant mortality rates, and a wealth of scientific knowledge. So what is your view on this critique of your perspective?

RH: Right. Well, I'm not suggesting that we abandon all of our sophisticated tools and go back to living as we did in the 19th century or the 15th century. We're going to have to make it up as we go along and try to preserve as much as possible of what we have achieved. And I think we've achieved a lot. This brief period of abundance of cheap energy has given us the symphony orchestra, it's given us....

JB: You play the viola, right?

RH: Yeah, right. ...it's given us scientific knowledge about our planet and the rest of the universe. I would hate to see all of this somehow lost. But the fact is we are going to be living in a lower energy society. We are going to see peak population--we're going to see this century. We're also going to see dramatic impacts from climate change. And we have to find practical ways of responding to these problems. And I think the overall--the overarching--trend of our response is going to be controlled societal contraction. We're going to be seeing the end of growth in the way that we've known it, and the beginning of a trend in the opposite direction. Now, how we handle that is a huge question.

You mentioned some of the societal benefits that have come during this period. For example, equality between the genders. This is something very important. Women in the 19th century had to work very hard. They were living in an agrarian society which meant that they typically had very little social power. Now, what happened during the 20th century was because of the factory system and the need for more labor, and then overproduction as the result of the factory system, and the need for more consumers. Therefore, society needed women to be more educated, to be part of the workforce and so on.

JB: Rosie the Riveter.

RH: Exactly. And so feminism was a very predictable result of all of that. Well, I wouldn't want to abandon women's rights as we move back to a lower energy society. But we're going to have to find practical ways to solve the problems that were solved back in the 19th century by, basically, women's servitude. We're going have to find practical ways to solve those problems in a different way. We can't just ignore those problems and hope they go away because they're inconvenient to the way we now think. So, in short, we need a plan. We need to understand the general trend of the coming century, which is the trend of societal contraction. And then we need to plan for that.

JB: You outline that a bit in Oil Depletion Protocol, for example.

RH: Absolutely.

JB: Okay, let's say events unfold the way you envision in your bad case scenario, here. We're in the midst of a system collapse due to resource scarcity, we have financial instability, warfare, natural disasters are wrecking things around us--what goes on psychologically to a culture in such a situation, especially one like ours, steeped in these expectations of growth and prosperity? Do we have any clues from history of what to be expected and how to prepare?

RH: Well, history suggests that it could be very bad. And that's why I included in the book one chapter called "A Letter From the Future," which is, sort of... it's the only piece of fiction I think I've ever written. And it's written from the perspective of somebody in the year 2107 looking back 100 years at what happened in the meantime. And it's a pretty pessimistic look at how the world might evolve over the course of the next few decades.

I think it's important that we understand what the worse case scenario is so we know what we're up against. But at the same time I think we can learn from history, we can learn from how previous human societies failed to appreciate the worse case scenario and plan for it. And we can also use the tools that are available to us that previous societies didn't have. We have statistical tools, we have analytical tools, we have all sorts of ways of understanding what's going on around us and responding in intelligent ways. So if we can do that, then I think a book like this is fully justified. I mean, from time to time we have to look in the mirror and see where we really are, who we are, how we're doing. And even if it's not a very pretty picture that kind of reality report is absolutely essential because if we don't have that then we're living in fantasy land, we're disconnected.

JB: So what are some of the things that we have to look out for then, and what might be the good way to respond, would you say?

RH: Right. Well, obviously the main thing is just this obsession with growth. And I come back to that again and again because I think that is really the nexus of our difficulties.

JB: I agree.

RH: You don't hear the candidates out on the campaign trail talking about how we have to plan for economic contraction. No politician will ever let those words pass between their lips because no one will vote for them if they do. And yet that's the one thing that we need. If society is going to survive over the course of the next century, the one thing we need is a rational, realistic plan for societal contraction, and yet that's the one thing that's politically impossible. So how do we get around that? The only way that I can see is for a large and growing portion of the population to understand what we are up against, to understand the overview of how we got to where we are and where we are going. And once they do that I think that there is a constituency for controlled contraction.

Now you don't need to call it that. You could call it self-sufficiency, you could call it energy independence. There are all kinds of ways of making it sound more palatable. But what we're really talking about is undoing the transportation system, the agriculture system, that we currently rely on and replacing it with something much simpler that's much more energy efficient and that's probably going to be slower and more localized than what we've been accustomed to or what we've come to expect in the future.

JB: Yeah. So some way of making people feel better about the new situation. Maybe rallying over some other kind of values that people have...

RH: That's right.

JB: ...social networking and cohesion and family time, or whatever...

RH: Yes.

JB: ...making them feel good about consuming less somehow. That's a tall order considering how much Madison Avenue has been pushing us the other direction, of course.

RH: I know, and frankly I don't think we're going to get there without some pretty serious hiccups in between. In other words, my guess is that it's going to take some years of real economic privation and upheaval before people are willing to think seriously along these lines. But it's important that there are people who are proposing these things now and who are making these kinds of alternatives available and talking about them so that when those years of privation come, and they're probably not that far away, that's part of the discussion.

JB: And then I guess having then, you might say activists, who are already in communication with those who have the hands on the levers of the bureaucracy and the business community. You think that's important, then, to setup?

RH: Absolutely. And I think there's place for both proactive and reactive strategies, here. Proactive in the sense of looking at how we can take a city like Willits or Portland, Oregon or Oakland, California, how we can use policy to begin to make that city a post-petroleum city. Those kinds of efforts I think are absolutely essential. And, frankly, I think they're only likely to go so far because they're likely to bump up against the political limits that we were talking about just a moment ago. Those are the proactive strategies.

I think we also need reactive strategies so that there are folks who are working on the question of, well, when the crunch does come, when the bottom falls out of the economy and oil goes up to two-, three-, four-hundred dollars a barrel and there are shortages, lines at the gas pump, the trucks are failing to bring the food to the supermarkets, and things are getting really grim. Policy-makers at that point need access to plans that are sensible and rational, and they're not likely to have that kind of advice unless people are thinking along those lines now, anticipating when those events come to pass.

JB: Right. And you have a chapter in the book about some of the people who are thinking along these lines: peak oil activists, climate change activists. And you've also written some new material about this. Do you want to give us an overview of the distinctions between activists on these issues and why a more coherent approach is stronger?

RH: Sure. Well, in my experience the climate activists tend to have a pretty narrow picture of the world. They look at the world through the emissions lens: essentially, anything that produces more emissions is bad and anything that reduces emissions is good. And who could disagree with that? Certainly, climate change from a sort of long-term geological/climatological/biological perspective is the biggest thing happening on the planet now. It's the largest threat to our overall long-term survival.

However, just looking at the world through the emissions lens can be a little distorting because anything that will reduce emissions, therefore, looks like a good thing. And so if you can make the argument, for example, that bio fuels will reduce emissions, then climate folks will jump onboard. Or if you can successfully make the argument that nuclear power will reduce CO₂ emissions, then a sizeable portion of the climate community will jump on board that view. I'm of the view that we have to take a larger look at things and, of course, coming from the peak oil side, I tend to think that people who have spent a while in the peak oil discussion tend to have a better understanding of energy issues than the climate folks. And that's not always the case, and maybe that's a little prejudice showing through, but that's been my experience so far.

So looking, for example, at clean coal, which is a solution being proposed by a lot of the climate folks. Well, that makes sense if you can, from a technical standpoint, separate off the carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide from the coal and somehow sequester that in the ground for very long periods of time. That seems to be solving the problem. But if you look at coal from a depletionist perspective, well, that doesn't make much sense because in fact the latest studies on coal suggest that global coal production is going to peak probably around 2025/2030.

JB: Yeah. That mostly came out about this year, huh?

RH: Yeah, that's right. And that pretty much undermines the economic viability of the clean coal argument. And also the fact that adding clean coal technology means that electricity from coal is going to be much more expensive and the amount of energy that we can get from coal on a volumetric basis will be significantly reduced. So, from an energy standpoint clean coal really doesn't make much sense, and yet in the climate discussion it's really taken center stage.

JB: Now, some people are holding out the hope that fossil fuel depletion will save us from the worst effects of climate change. What are your thoughts on that point of view?

RH: That's a very tricky discussion, and there's been some very good analysis by Dave Rutledge at Cal Tech who says that on the basis of the latest estimates of global coal supply we're probably not going to get up to much more than about 460 or 470 parts per million of CO₂. And if you look at that from that standpoint of the sort of standard IPCC analysis, which is what governments are using, well, that's very good. Because that means that just the supply constraints alone will prevent what policy makers are assuming will be the limits of catastrophic climate change.

JB: Yeah, usually the figures given are 450 parts per million, so we're within a stone's throw from that just from depletion.

RH: That's right.

JB: So people throw up their hands and say, "Hallelujah, we're good."

RH: However, it's not so simple because that's assuming a level of climate sensitivity. In other words, what's the relationship between parts per million of CO₂ and temperature increase? Well, we don't know, really. But we're assuming that we can we can keep the temperature increase down to 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels if we keep CO₂ at 450 parts per million. That's an assumption. And it's probably more of a political assumption than a scientific assumption. Of course, it is based on some science, but it's not the most recent science. The most recent science suggests that the climate sensitivity could be much higher. And, in fact, we may already be locked into a much higher temperature increase than 2 degrees Celsius just on the basis on the CO₂ that's already been emitted.

And then there's the problem of feedback loops. And we're starting to see this in the arctic, of course, where something like half of the volume of the arctic ice has been lost just over the last couple of decades. And then as that arctic ice melts in the summer then that means that more solar energy is then being absorbed by black ocean water which causes the ice to melt even faster so, again, this creates a kind of positive feedback loop, or reinforcing feedback loop. And there are several of those feedback loops that appear to be kicking in. And if that's the case, then, sort of, all bets are off. And that's why we're seeing these things happen so much faster than even the most strident of the climate scientists had been predicting.

JB: Yeah. James Hansen, apparently, gave a Power Point that environmental writer Bill McKibben saw that said actually it should be more like 350 parts per million, not 450...

RH: That's right.

JB: ...because these feedback loops are kicking in earlier than we thought. So even though we are not up to 2 degrees Celsius, which was thought to be that threshold, the things that were going to be happening, that were going to be really bad at 2 degrees Celsius, are already starting to happen.

RH: That's right. And so the climate activists are taking this and saying, "Well, what we really need are 100% reductions in emissions in very short order." But people who are familiar with energy and policy look at that and throw up their hands and say, "Well, it would be, essentially, economic suicide. Nobody's going to do it."

JB: That's where it gets really grim to me. So, do you think your message is coming across as so grim to most people who hear it that they don't really want to listen? I mean, I've heard many argue that people need to be given positive messages, not doom and gloom, because the bad news causes stress, leading to depression, and then denial, and, therefore, no action. I'm sure you've heard this many times.

RH: Absolutely.

JB: Any response?

RH: Yeah, well, I think we need both. I have to confess I get a little frustrated with people who say we only need the cheery messages--we need somebody to paint a picture of how much better the world could be, how much happier we could all be if only we were using less, and going slower, and not polluting the environment, and so on. And, frankly, I don't think it's possible to paint a happy message that will motivate us to make the kinds of changes that we need to make. I think there has to be a stick as well as a carrot. People need to understand that if we continue going the way we are with carbon emission, reliance on fossil fuels, and all the rest, we do face a very grim future indeed. One in which, perhaps, we may not even survive.

That being said, at the same time I think there is an important place for those cheery messages because if all you have is that grim picture of the future, then what's the point. Many people I think could just say, quite literally, "eat, drink and be merry for tomorrow we will die." So, we do need, I think, a vision of how we could be, how life could, in fact, be happy and fulfilling and so on in a world of less per capita consumption, smaller populations, a world where we live in more localized economies and know the people who make the things for us and so on. And hopefully those two messages, the grim messages and the cheery messages, together can keep up on track and keep us motivated as we make these, what realistically are very, very serious changes.

JB: Yeah. It really comes down to very deep questions about what's our purpose in being here, really, at some point. Why are we even alive? What fulfills us? And I guess a lot of people once they start going through this process sort of realize that they're not necessarily fulfilled by what we're told should fulfill us, in other words.

RH: Absolutely.

JB: I mean, how many times have you had people talk about how burdened they are by all the stuff they've got, and yet whenever the certain season they have to get more stuff, they feel obliged, in a sense.

RH: And then they'll go on vacation to someplace like Bali...

JB: To get away from this stuff.

RH: Yeah. ...where people are living a simpler lifestyle, and they'll go, "Oh, isn't that charming. Oh, I wish I could live that way all the time." And yet they'll come back home and get stuck back in the same rat race.

JB: Right. Well, I'd like to finish up in the last few minutes we have by offering some suggestions for people listening. How would you suggest people might begin to process and then deal with this information?

RH: I think that's a very important question and that's why I ended the book with a chapter on the psychology of peak oil and climate change because I think the psychological dimension is very important to all of this. As people wake up to this whole range of information that we've been talking about, it changes everything for them. And I've seen it in my students at New College over the years, I see it in audiences that I speak to. Once this information is grasped it's traumatizing to know that the world that you're living in is one that is headed toward catastrophe. And that unless it changes the future is going to be incredibly grim, not only for ourselves but for children and grandchildren.

So I see a successful psychological response to this information as being almost like a spiritual practice. It involves the willingness to see the truth of our situation and yet at the same time to adopt optimism as a kind of deliberate strategy. Because if we respond to this information with despair and cynicism it doesn't help anyone, ourselves included, and we don't have a very good time. If, in fact, we are headed into the dust bin of history, the least we can do is enjoy ourselves while we're in the process of going down.

And the people that I see actually having the best time with this are the people who adopt optimism as a deliberate strategy and spend their time making changes in their own lives, modeling changes for others, and engaging with the people around them in positive efforts. Where I see people who are doing that I see people who are psychologically functional, happy, who generally have good family relationships and so on. Where I see people who are in denial about this information I see dysfunctional relationships. People who are maybe outwardly going through the motions but inwardly suffering really deep depression and stress.

JB: Yeah. And I think it also helps to have been... It's hard to do this by yourself.

RH: Absolutely.

JB: So, another thing I say is you have to find friends who will support you in sort of the change and the process you go through to deal with this.

RH: That's so important. And I feel so fortunate in my work to be in contact with people like yourself and folks in Post Carbon Institute and people all around the world who are awakening to these things and devoting themselves to making change. Over the last few years I've met some absolutely wonderful, dedicated, brilliant people who are devoting themselves to his kind of work.

JB: Well, Richard, I want to thank you so much for... you have really impressed me so much and changed my course of life and want to thank you for being on the show and spending an hour with us today. I know you're really busy and this is part of what your mission is.

RH: Yeah, absolutely. Well, it's my pleasure to do it, Jason. I admire what you're doing and more power to you.

JB: Well, thank you so much. I just want to direct people to your web site, richardheinberg.com, for information, more about your writings, and other links. And say thank you very much for listening to KZYX Philo, KZYZ Willits and Ukiah. And this show and other are archived at www.globalpublicmedia.com. And so, thanks, Richard Heinberg, our guest today. Thanks to our underwriters and our fine members of this station. Have a great week, everybody.