Climate Smart & Climate Ready Conference Community Track #2 on April 20, 2013 at Tompkins County Public Library in Ithaca, NY. Jon Bosak, TC Local. Community Resilience: Developing an Inclusive and Regenerative Strategy. Energy Implications for Climate Change Planning.

1. Resilience Panel: Bosak 20 April 2013 1
Energy Implications for Climate Change Planning
Comments by Jon Bosak, a cofounder of tclocal.org, at the Community Resilience panel of
the Climate Smart and Climate Ready conference, 20 April 2013.
TCLocal has been researching, presenting, and publishing detailed recommendations for
local resilience at tclocal.org since 2006, so I’m not going to repeat that material here.
Instead, I’m going to devote my six minutes to a description of the economic environment
we’ll be working with going forward as we attempt to deal with climate change.
Let’s start with the predictions we were making seven years ago. We said:
 We were about to start running out of cheap energy
 We would begin to rely increasingly on more difficult and expensive methods of
fossil fuel extraction
 The increasing cost of production would cause an inevitable long-term rise in the
price of energy, in particular the price of oil
 The end of cheap energy would ultimately mean the end of long-term economic
growth
I’m sorry to say that these predictions were correct. World conventional oil production did
in fact peak in 2005; we are now relying on techniques like deepwater drilling and
hydrofracking that are both more dangerous and more expensive; and this is driving prices
up over the long term.
The following chart, which I generated from a spreadsheet provided by the U.S. Energy
Information Administration, shows the trend from 2000 to the present quite clearly. The
straight line is a best-fit linear trend line generated by the spreadsheet software from the
EIA data. Note that this is a description of the actual data, not a projection, and it shows
that the enormous
swing in prices
before and after the
economic crash had
no effect on the
long-term trend now
that we can step
back far enough to
see it clearly. This
long-term rise in the
cost of energy is the
key to understanding
the context in which
we will be operating
in trying to cope with
climate change.

2. Resilience Panel: Bosak 20 April 2013 2
Notice that we’re talking about price here, not availability. Price and availability are
completely different issues. Availability has never been the problem; price is the problem.
Or to put it in physical terms: Absolute amount has never been the problem; relative cost
and difficulty of production is the problem. Unconventional methods like fracking and tar
sands have been known for a while now, but they were too expensive to use until the price
of oil and gas hit a certain level, and now our reliance on those methods to keep up sagging
production guarantees that the price is never going to fall much below that level as long as
we keep using the stuff. (Due to a mad cycle of overinvestment, prices of natural gas are
temporarily below the level at which producers can make a profit, but this will correct itself.)
As to that last prediction about the end of cheap energy meaning the end of economic
growth, it looks like that may have come to fruition as well. We’re not seeing a long-term
global economic recovery, and it turns out that our official statistics here in the U.S. are
hiding millions of permanently unemployable people who have taken refuge in disability
benefits.
So what’s the future?
The cost of everything is driven to a large extent by the cost of energy, particularly for
things that have to be grown or transported. The effect of ever-increasing costs is to
strangle the economy and to lower our collective standard of living. In other words: most of
us will become poorer over the long run. Due to increasing population, this is true even if
we can keep energy production constant, which is unlikely.
One commentator, the psychologist Kathy McMahon, has described this as a “sucky
collapse.” In other words, nothing spectacular happens, but life just keeps getting suckier.
The size of a can of tuna gets smaller while the price stays the same. We work harder for
less pay. And so on.
People are amazingly flexible in adapting to this kind of thing — hardship becomes the new
normal. Psychologists call it “reframing.” So you’ll say, “we can’t afford to go anywhere, but
we’re spending more time together”; or “we can’t afford to eat as much as we used to, but
on the other hand, we’re losing weight.”
This reframing can obscure a key fact about responses to climate change, which is that we
are going to have fewer and fewer financial and physical resources with which to do
anything about it. That’s very important to keep in mind, because it’s going to determine the
kind of approaches that are available to us.
Another key understanding is that increasing numbers of people will become unemployed.
This is partly due to a probably inevitable economic decline and partly due to a certainly
increasing number of white-collar jobs being automated out of existence.
A third key to understanding our situation is that we are going to continue to burn fossil fuel
as fast as we can until it really is all gone (meaning: until it takes more energy to extract it
than you get out of it, a point that is reached long before the stuff is actually used up).

3. Resilience Panel: Bosak 20 April 2013 3
There are three reasons (aside from simple greed) that we’re going to burn through what’s
left of the fossil fuel as quickly as we can.
First, as we get further into the stuff that’s harder to produce, more of that energy will be
required just to maintain current production. In other words, you have to keep burning more
fuel to get the same amount of fuel produced. So the rate of CO2 generation keeps
increasing even if production stays constant.
The second reason we’ll burn through what’s left as quickly as we can is that we will want
to use more and more energy to try to solve the problems we will be facing as a result of
climate change. Schemes like seawalls around Manhattan are ultimately futile, but that’s
not going to stop us from trying.
The third reason we will keep extracting natural gas in particular is that methane is what
synthetic fertilizer is made out of. It’s estimated that if we ran out of natural gas today, 40
percent of the world’s population would starve to death.
Long before that happens, it appears certain that climate change will impact our food
supply through drought and weather disasters at the same time that rising fuel prices and a
failing infrastructure will make it increasingly difficult to move food around the country to
cope with local shortages. This makes the relocalization of food production a priority for
achieving local resilience.
The single best response to climate change is a transition to organic food production, not
only because it’s the only method of food production that is sustainable indefinitely, but
because soil improvement is one of the best ways to sequester carbon from the
atmosphere.
Sustainable farming is also the answer to the unemployment problem, because it largely
substitutes manual labor for fossil fuel inputs. It’s been estimated that the transition to
sustainable farming will require 50 million new farmers in the U.S. alone.
A lot of those new farmers are going to be coming right here to central New York, because
we have water and an increasingly milder climate, and they will be joined by the climate
refugees we can expect to move northward and eastward from places that will become
virtually uninhabitable over the next several decades.
This demographic shift is one of several social challenges that we will be facing as climate
change continues. Poverty and inequality are almost certain to get worse because of job
destruction and because there will be physically less of everything due to constraints on
energy inputs. And when people eventually wake up to what’s happening, they won’t have
the myth of the rising tide lifting all boats to fall back on.
So what are we going to do here to build local resilience?
Let’s start with what we won’t be doing: we won’t be transitioning to some alternative forms
of energy production on a scale that will replace what we’ve got now. We no longer have
the resources even to keep our current infrastructure from falling apart, let alone to replace
it with something fundamentally different. We must concentrate on local measures that may
be hard to accomplish but don’t cost much.

4. Resilience Panel: Bosak 20 April 2013 4
In the area of food production, we must encourage community gardens and establish tool
lending libraries for gardeners. And we must protect and encourage local farming in every
way possible in order to build our capacity for local food production. For example, here in
Tompkins County, we must end the replacement of the last good orchard acreage on the
hills surrounding Cayuga Lake with high-end suburban housing.
For local energy, we can recognize what’s right in front of us and rebuild the local capacity
for hydropower that supplied much of the electricity in upstate New York until the big
power conglomerates bought up all the municipal power companies half a century ago.
For example, we can put hydropower on the creeks coming into Ithaca. A committee
appointed by Mayor Peterson a few years ago reviewed engineering and environmental
studies paid for by the City of Ithaca back in the 1980s and concluded that harnessing the
power of Fall Creek and Six Mile Creek would generate all the electricity needed to run City
municipal services, would pay for itself in 13 years, and would provide a continuing benefit
to the City budget of $800,000 annually, in perpetuity, with no damage to the environment,
while at the same time reducing greenhouse gas emissions due to City operations by three
and a half times as much as the City is hoping to achieve with its entire Local Action Plan
for 2016. The only obstacle to the realization of this project is lack of leadership.
Another cost-neutral strategy is to change local ordinances to encourage resilient practices.
This could range all the way from allowing people to raise chickens in the City to requiring
that all future construction be passive solar like the recently showcased Aurora Pocket
Neighborhood project.
Sharing goods and developing local media are other important ways to improve local
resiliency, and you’ll be hearing more about both of those in just a moment from the other
panelists. Thank you.