[fiedag]

Today i sent off my submission to the SA Parliamentary Select Committee on Peak Oil. Recipients were Sandra Kanck MLC, Russell Wortley MLC and Michelle Lensink MLC.


Private Submission to SA Parliamentary Committee on Peak Oil
30 June 2008
Disclaimer: The views expressed here are personal, and do not reflect the views of my employer. I am a full-time IT consultant in private industry. I have shares in AMP and GDY and part-own a flower shop. I have no other interests to disclose.

Introduction
I am not an academic or a bureaucrat, and this submission is written in a colloquial style. Please persist with it as is brief, original and to the point. You may use the text as you see fit.

What is in this submission?
There are two (2) valid ideas here, and they deserve your serious attention but first let me start with what is not in the submission:

First, I will not be making a case for Peak Oil. Other people will do that more convincingly. Secondly, I will not speculate when it will happen. The consensus among analysts is that it is either happening now, or up to 5 years away. Finally I will not indulge in speculations about how bad things might get.

I will discuss the following three topics.
1) A helpful conceptual crutch. A simplification which will help to engage us the people in thinking about the issue.
2) A plea to our leaders, which is this: Envision the Best Possible Future. And a way to do that.
3) A general discussion on short-term priorities.

Conceptual Crutch
If we subscribe to the notion of Peak Oil at all, and I will not presume to educate the committee on that point, then it means one thing: that there is a global oil production graph which looks like a bell curve. Let's look at this in more detail. There are three regions on this bell curve. There is an upslope (the past 100 years), a plateau (the present), and a downslope (the future). Opinions differ on where the exact midpoint is but we are almost certainly on the plateau, probably still approaching the midpoint.

Now the bell curve might be symmetrical, or it might not. Meaning that the depletion curve may be more steep than the upslope, or it may be less steep. Or it may be symmetrical. We will not know this until afterwards.

Personally I agree with those industry analysts who are of the opinion that global production will decline more steeply than the upslope, (i.e. showing a positive skew). However I think it is advisable to adopt a policy position which is more simplistic. One of symmetry. That is, that the global production bell curve will have approximately zero skew.

Secondly it is advisable to agree that global production decline will be approximately smooth. That is, it will not have significant fluctuations on the global scale. We can see that even the oil shock of 1974 caused only a small bump and change of slope, of the overall consumption chart.

Note we have ignored all discussion of prices, markets and demand here. I believe it is safe to do this. Certainly oil markets will arbitrage the local and temporal fluctuations, but the public and their policymakers can safely adopt a framework of smooth and symmetrical depletion.

Here is how that would come across in a press release:
Suppose that the midpoint of the production plateau (which is also the exact midpoint of global oil production) is the year 2010.
Therefore we can say that 2011 production is approximately equal to 2009 production, 2012 production similar to 2008, 2013 similar to 2007, and so on.
This simplification is safe, warranted, and timely. It will allow even people with a limited comprehension of the topic to grasp the concept in a very useful way. A high-school student can thereby estimate the global oil production rate in the years ahead.

Why is this useful?
It will make it easier to get consensus on adaptive policy measures. The most important, is the local depletion protocol.

Quite simply, this is a resolution that the local legislature shall take measures to reduce local petroleum demand by an amount at least equal to the global decline profile.

Why should we do this? That is probably the topic of another paper, but in summary: Depletion will destroy our demand anyway, but it will do so in the worst possible way.

If we stay ahead of the monster, it will not eat us.

In summary: The ideas of (1) smoothness and (2) symmetry will assist in widespread acceptance of remedial and adaptive measures, the most important being the local depletion protocol.

Envisioning the Best Possible Future
Finally I recommend a process of envisioning the best possible future, subject to these outlined constraints. A process which is able to involve participants in ways which is future-oriented, and focusses on conjuring the future we want, not on rejecting the future we do not want. One which is not prescriptive, or top-down. One which enrols us all in a process of envisioning the future into being. With minimal ego, cynicism, ridicule or antagonism. One arrived at with a mindset that eschews ego, in favour of sacrifice.

The Short-term priorities
Having just stated that it is wrong to be prescriptive, I want to be prescriptive for a moment.

Firstly, our debate needs to be realistic. Concentrating on public transport and urban planning law reform (while essential) completely understates the seriousness of the issue.

The most serious problem to address is poverty. This is the one area where most of the effort must be directed.

How to adapt to poverty. Not how to prevent it.
This is a huge topic and I don't wish to get into it, except to say that historians have studied economic declines and have drawn some useful conclusions. We should ask them. The spiritual traditions probably also have some interesting contributions to make.

If we can understand the psychological processes which permit a person to reconcile themselves with their own lot in life, then we can help this process along with legislation especially in the public school curriculum.

In material terms, the future will look more like the past, and the process of regressing to the past will be traumatic. It will cause many people pain, frustration, stress, anguish and all the dysfunctions and errors which flow from it. When advocating a new rail service, it pays to remember that. Otherwise we will continue to be surprised by rapidly declining security environment.

The second-most important issue is food security. The dependence of primary industry on availability of diesel and other fuels is such that even minor disruptions at the wrong time may cause harvests to fail.

I suggest that primary producers be empowered to massively increase their on-farm fuel reserves. This seems to be the best choice in terms of logistics and risk management. It puts control of the fuel with those who have the greatest interest in smooth production.

The government may choose to implement this by offering special loans, but there may be better ways.

The third area which should receive attention is urban land use. We will see a general and prolonged contraction of industrial output. The consequence is that large tracts of commercial and industrial land will become vacant. Legislation should be passed compelling the owner of the property to release it for other use. Vacant lots are ugly and demoralising. Unlike other recessions, this time the good times will not come back. Raze the site and reclaim it for other uses, as soon as possible.

Conclusion
I hope this submission is of some use in your deliberations. Please feel free to correspond with me on any aspect of this paper. I would appreciate if you could CC me on any relevant documents or events related to this topic in the future.

Thanks and regards.
Alex Fiedler
Beulah Park
Tel. 0404 827 013
[email protected]

[ROCKMAN]

fiedag,

A very good and level presentation. Is your political system capable of approaching the situation with any real measure of cooperation and civil attitude? I have very serious doubts about the ability of our current political leadership to follow such a course. Our two-party system has made it a mainstay to divide the public into two opposing forces. Both political sides will guarentee a bipolar solution to the problems at hand with each side demand capitulation by the other.

I might be a bit pessimistic but we've just begun the big push towards our presidential elections next November...not an atmoshere conducive to either compromise or cooperation.

[fiedag]

fiedag,

A very good and level presentation. Is your political system capable of approaching the situation with any real measure of cooperation and civil attitude? I have very serious doubts about the ability of our current political leadership to follow such a course. Our two-party system has made it a mainstay to divide the public into two opposing forces. Both political sides will guarentee a bipolar solution to the problems at hand with each side demand capitulation by the other.

I might be a bit pessimistic but we've just begun the big push towards our presidential elections next November...not an atmoshere conducive to either compromise or cooperation.

Thanks Rockman. Yes you seem to have some entrenched problems in the US. I wish you all the best for the November elections. I hope the swing is decisive enough to overcome the electoral anomalies which emerged last time, and which still have not been addressed.

The two-party system is definitely pretty flawed for making rapid turnarounds, however looking at communist China, a one party system fares no better. The two-party system is merely a fixture which forces the legislature to have a public dialog with itself. If the dialog is trite or specious, then it will still lead to poor legislation. And that brings me to my point:

"It's the legislation stupid!". Whatever laws get passed, get followed (for the most part). People generally obey the laws of the land. I wish more people on this page got this message, and started actively pushing their local legislature harder. They might be surprised at how easy it is. And rewarding.

[ROCKMAN]

Very true words fiedag. I get the point about China, as well as Venz and other monopolitical gov't. They work great when the right decisions are made. But lack of discourse/alternative ideas will catch them asleep at the wheel sooner or later. But that's the same problem as I see it here in the states. Despite all the propoganda the two parties really work together perpetuating the same quickly failing model. I see no difference in our legistlative future regardless of which party's nominee wins. I know it's an overused word, but we really are grid locked in our options. IMHO, no appropriate changes can occur until someone explains (and forces acceptance of) PO to the general public. And both parties have made careers by avoiding just that action.

[burtonridr]

The problem I find is that every president we have had in recent history has been of the same social standing. In other words they came from they walked similar paths in life to get where they got.

The problem with that is they create a sphere of influence with little real world outside input. Their mind set is the same, their friends are the same, their enemies are the same, they were groomed from a young age in the same way.....

Another problem is presidential fund raising.... It makes it impossible to keep political favors from happening through their term. They may end up owing someone a favor because of their contribution during their campaign, thus blocking legislation here or passing a law there, to "pay the debt back".

Its freakin ridiculous!

I would like to see an honest, level headed, leader step up as president that will do things in the interest of what is really best for the public. Not a president that does things according to his own presidential agenda. Most of all what we need is a president that actually listens to people that have done research on peak oil and do something about it.

[ROCKMAN]

I agree with you burton except I see the same problem exaggerated in the legistative side. Presidents come and go every 4 or 8 years. Congress lives on forever and even though members are periodically replaced they've become just substitutes of the same inclination/influence. In the end the President doesn't have much power but it's easy to say Bush did this wrong or Clinton should have doen that. But name just one congressman who, in 1986, did jump up and say we needed to change our oil consumption habits. For that matter, how many congressmen can any of us name who's

Last week the approval rating of congress dropped below 10% for the first time in history. But polls the same qeek showed the majoraty of folks liked their congressman. And here we are stuck in the middle again.