Richard Heinberg - Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels

Praise for Afterburn

With rare insight, clarity, and compassion, Richard Heinberg helps us face the music. Over the years, since The Partys Over, his books have earned our trust with their accuracy in delineating the limits of the possible. Now in this bold collection of essays, he helps us see the landscape being bequeathed us by the Great Burning an understanding that is necessary to the Great Turning and will save us considerable time and confusion. With ever more gratitude I bow to those who shake us awake.

Joanna Macy, author, Coming Back to Life: The Updated Guide to the Work That Reconnects.

Afterburn gives us a sense of a survivable future hope fed by Heinbergs realistic deeper analysis, a sense of the trends ahead, and a bold (largely local) plan. Few are as good at the craft of synthesizing this powerful package then Richard Heinberg. This book will help fuel the future.

Randy Hayes, Rainforest Action Network Founder & Director of Foundation Earth

In my business we have a saying: hope is a terrible investment strategy. Lets go further and say hope alone is a terrible strategy, period. Yet most of society continues to simply ignore the freely available and terribly important information about where we are headed on this planet, and simply hope that things will work themselves out somehow. They wont, and we all know that now on some level. Afterburn bravely and thoughtfully examines the predicament we face, one idea and one fact at a time. Those who can stir in a few facts along with their hope will be able to both understand and foresee what the future holds. Pick up this book. Read it. Discuss it. Let it sink into your bones, and then understand that this book is not asking you to abandon hope, it is inviting us all to greatness.

Chris Martenson, PhD, Co-founder of Peak Prosperity

Afterburn is like a Richard Heinbergs Greatest Hits compilation, drawing together a selection of his prolific output from the last few years. To choose what went in must have been to pore over an embarrassment of riches, given his seemingly untiring creativity and brilliance. He writes with incision, with passion, with rage, with compassion, and Afterburn captures in one single publication why hes such a shining light of insight in times of much darkness. The Partys Over changed my life. Perhaps Afterburn will change yours.

Rob Hopkins, founder, Transition Town movement and author, The Power of Just Doing Stuff

AFTERBURN

Copyright 2015 by Richard Heinberg. All rights reserved.

Cover design by Diane McIntosh.

Background texture: (image #44848082 Ess) C iStock propeller;

Flames: (image #18007634 Ess) C iStock -M-I-S-H-A-(Essentials Collection)

First printing January 2015.

New Society Publishers acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund (CBF) for our publishing activities.

Inquiries regarding requests to reprint all or part of Afterburn should be addressed to New Society Publishers at the address below.

To order directly from the publishers, please call toll-free (North America) 1-800-567-6772, or order online at www.newsociety.com

Any other inquiries can be directed by mail to:

New Society Publishers

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LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Heinberg, Richard, author

Afterburn : society beyond fossil fuels / Richard Heinberg.

A collection of 15 essays written in the years 20112014 and previously published on the websites resilience.org, commondreams.org, and earthisland.org, and in Orion magazine.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-86571-788-6 (pbk.).ISBN 978-1-55092-584-5 (ebook)

1. Social ecology. 2. Economic developmentEnvironmental aspects. 3. Economic developmentSocial aspects. 4. Social change. I. Title.

HM681.H44 2015 304.2 C2014-906816-6

C2014-906817-4

New Society Publishers mission is to publish books that contribute in fundamental ways to building an ecologically sustainable and just society, and to do so with the least possible impact on the environment, in a manner that models this vision. We are committed to doing this not just through education, but through action. The interior pages of our bound books are printed on Forest Stewardship Council-registered acid-free paper that is 100% post-consumer recycled (100% old growth forest-free), processed chlorine-free, and printed with vegetable-based, low-VOC inks, with covers produced using FSC-registered stock. New Society also works to reduce its carbon footprint, and purchases carbon offsets based on an annual audit to ensure a carbon neutral footprint. For further information, or to browse our full list of books and purchase securely, visit our website at: www.newsociety.com

Contents

Thanks to Scott Steedman for copy editing the manuscript of Afterburn and to Ingrid Witvoet of New Society Publishers for shepherding this project through the publication process.

My appreciation also goes out to my colleagues Asher Miller, Daniel Lerch, and Ken White of Post Carbon Institute, who offered valuable suggestions on each of the chapters. Our conversations often spark ideas that grow to become essays and even books.

Finally, once again (as with previous books) I offer thanks to and for my wife Janet Barocco, for her support and encouragement, and for making our home a place of creativity and beauty.

W E LIVE IN THE TIME OF WHAT MIGHT BE CALLED THE GREAT Burning. However, we tend to ignore the tremendous inferno blazing around us. Most of the combustion occurs out of sight and out of mind, in hundreds of millions of automobile, truck, aircraft, and ship engines; in tens of thousands of coal- or gas-fired power plants that provide the electricity that runs our computers, smartphones, refrigerators, air conditioners, and televisions; in furnaces that warm us in the winter; in factories that spew out products we are constantly urged to buy. Add all this burning together and it amounts to the energy equivalent of torching a quarter of the Amazon rainforest every year. In the United States, the energy from annual fossil fuel combustion roughly equates to the solar energy taken up by all the biomass in the nation. Its a conflagration unlike anything that has ever occurred before in Earths history, and it is the very basis of our modern existence.

Obviously, it would be impossible to continue consuming the worlds forests, year in and year out, at a rate that far outstrips their pace of regrowth. Wed soon run out of forest. Yet the Great Burning has persisted and grown, decade after decade, because its fuel consists of millions of years worth of stored and concentrated ancient biomass.

The burning of fossil fuels cannot go on forever, either. Coal, oil, and natural gas are depleting, nonrenewable resourcesthey dont grow back. While we are not about to run out of them in the absolute sense, we have extracted the cheapest and best-quality fuels first, leaving the more expensive, dirtier, and harder-to-produce fuels for the next years takings. As I argue in the first chapter of this book, we have already reached the point of diminishing returns for investments in world oil production. And oil is the most crucial of our nonrenewable resources from an economic standpoint.