The extremely leisurely pace of American democracy and the urgency of our predicament

Winston Churchill once remarked that "[t]he United States invariably does the right thing, after having exhausted every other alternative." The assumption behind that remark is that there will be time to do the right thing after all alternatives have been exhausted. This assumption is especially troubling when it comes to addressing such issues as peak oil and climate change.

It is worthwhile to look back a bit and see why Churchill came to his famous conclusion. One issue that threatened the stability of the United States from its founding was slavery. The first attempt to smooth over differences was in the U.S. Constitution. Slaves would be counted as three-fifths of a person for the purposes of determining the number of representatives from each state. Also, the importation of slaves could be prohibited after 1808. That arrangement worked until 1820 when the balance between slave states and free states became a point of fierce contention as the union expanded. Slaveholders did not want to see the federal legislature controlled by representatives from free states. The Missouri Compromise maintained that balance for the time. There was the Compromise of 1850 and then in 1854 the Kansas-Nebraska Act, both attempts to calm sectional tensions. And, of course, finally the American Civil War (1861-65) ended a 70-year experiment with compromise over slavery.

I recite this history because it is emblematic of how slowly American democracy moves on critical, even existential matters. Many women had worked hard for the abolition of slavery and in the aftermath of the Civil War expected to attain the right to vote along with former slaves. But the 15th Amendment failed to mention women. And, it took another 50 years for women to receive the right to vote.

It took another 95 years from the passing of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing the right to vote to all citizens regardless of "race, color or condition of previous servitude" until African-Americans received in fact what they had been given in law by that amendment. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 finally made it possible for African-Americans in the South to exercise their franchise.

It is true that the American federal system was designed specifically to encourage slow, deliberate action. It is far easier to stop something in the U.S. Congress than it is to get anything approved. While the long wait for voting rights for women and African-Americans was a blot on the American historical record and exceedingly damaging and painful to those it affected, neither issue ultimately destroyed the country.

While the Civil War still holds the record for the number of American deaths in a war, that number might end up looking small even as a percentage of the population (2 percent) compared to the number of Americans who will suffer and die in one way or another because of peak oil, climate change, and myriad other environmental threats that now beset us. The problem is that these Americans don't die from immediately discernible causes such as gunshot wounds. Rather their suffering will often only be indirectly and circuitously related to environmental threats and resource depletion. Therefore, it will be difficult for those hit hardest to coalesce into an effective voting block, especially since the fossil fuel and other lobbies have worked hard to confuse them about the resource and environmental issues of our age.

I recently watched the film The American President again. I was struck that this movie released in 1995 took climate change as a given, something the audience would readily accept as an important issue that needed to be addressed promptly. Here we are 16 years later, and only now is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) taking the first baby steps toward regulating greenhouse gas emissions pursuant to a Supreme Court ruling that affirmed its power to do so. Even so a new hoard of climate change deniers in Congress propose to stop the EPA from exercising that authority. (I doubt that they will be able to do so for now.)

In addition, Americans seem to have somehow accepted that oil at $90 a barrel means nothing in particular. This is true even though a decade ago oil at $30 or $40 a barrel was thought to be potent enough to crush the economy. Perhaps we have adapted to these higher prices. But there seems to be no urgency to move the economy away from oil dependence even though the warnings of peak oil activists have been largely borne out.

When will the American democratic machinery actually begin to react to the twin crises of oil depletion and climate change? When there is a calamity directly attributable to one or the other or both, that's when. There are two problems with this approach.

First, it may not be clear that some future crisis is peak oil- and/or climate change-induced. How much of the Hurricane Katrina disaster can be attributed to climate change? No one knows. The damage done to New Orleans is certainly very much what had been foretold by climate modelers as hurricanes intensify and sea levels rise. But even the destruction of a large American city failed to catalyze any action on climate change.

Record high oil prices certainly had something to do with the economic meltdown of 2008. After all, nearly every recession since 1970 has been preceded by a spike in oil prices. But the focus so far has all been on finance. And, little has been done to address the world's oil dependency since 2008.

Second, the damage inflicted on the country and the world by waiting for a discernible crisis clearly linked to peak oil and/or climate change will far exceed the costs of prevention. Imagine what the 2008 financial crisis might have looked like if the country had already largely electrified its transportation system using renewable energy sources. The crisis would certainly still have been bad, but not nearly so ominous and devastating as tight oil supplies made it. And those tight supplies continue to hamper recovery, threatening a second downturn.

Finally, it's worth noting that national emergencies tend to elicit temporary emergency measures that are rarely revoked, some of which may fly in the face of democratic processes. The attacks of September 11, 2001 have spawned a whole raft of such measures, many obviously illegal and unconstitutional, but which the public sustains because it does not understand the true nature of our predicament.

How many more ill-conceived and heavy-handed measures can we expect when the death toll is not 3,000, but 300,000 or 3,000,000--all because we and other nations failed to address adequately peak oil- and climate change-related problems before they became too big to ignore.

Those who block progress on these critical issues in Congress believe--just as those who held slaves and those who opposed women's suffrage--that what they are doing will not bring down the whole system around them. And, they tacitly believe that if they are in the wrong, there will be plenty of time to address peak oil and climate change through compromise in the future.

But, while slaves and women may be made to wait by the hand of oppression, nature recognizes no such limit. Our social divisions may be held at bay for long periods while we work out our differences. When it comes to energy depletion and climate change, it is nature that will prevail in enforcing its will on us without regard to legislative or lobbyist timetables.

The electric car fetish

In lieu of my regular weekly post, I'm referring readers to my latest column on Scitizen entitled "The Electric Car Fetish." Here is the teaser:

Many automobile enthusiasts believe that the electric car is the wave of the future that will help save the environment while expanding the availability of private transport to the world's growing middle class. They are likely wrong on both counts....Read more.

Taking a break--Happy Holidays!

No post this week. I expect to post again on Sunday, January 2.

Will shale gas turn out to be an energy sink?

If you externalize the costs of a business activity, it means other people pay the costs--environmental, social and otherwise--and you get the profits. It goes on all the time in extractive industries such as oil and natural gas and mining. And, it is also a natural strategy for manufacturers who dump their pollution into the air and the water. It's even practiced in finance where the executives of Wall Street banks have managed to collect the bonuses made off a phony boom in the last decade and saddle taxpayers with the losses of the inevitable bust caused by bad and often fraudulent loans, misleading derivative contracts, and leveraged speculation in stocks and commodities.

If the loopholes are there, you can be assured that people in business will take advantages of them. That's exactly what is happening in the business of shale gas drilling. Drillers are exempt from federal clean air and water regulations under a bill shepherded through Congress in 2005 by none other former Halliburton CEO Dick Cheney in his capacity as the then vice president of the United States. (Halliburton is one of the world's largest providers of drilling fluids for shale gas drilling and other oil and gas drilling operations.) That means the drillers can externalize the environmental costs of these hazardous fluids and other materials needed to fracture the shale and thereby free the natural gas. They can foist those costs on nearby residents in the form of ruined water supplies, toxic air pollution, poisoned land, and health problems for humans and animals.

The environmental and health horrors associated with shale gas drilling are now in the news on a daily basis. But I have begun to think about the issue in another way. All of these externalized costs have an energy cost. And, the toxic fracturing fluid--millions of gallons of which are pumped into each and every shale gas well--will stretch out the time frame during which such costs are borne. No one knows what will happen to the half of that fluid which never returns to the surface during operations. There is concern that it could migrate to drinking water aquifers and destroy the drinking water not just for the few who happen to live near a drilling site, but for people living in huge swaths of the United States by polluting water sources for large cities such as New York.

Now, of course, that water could be cleaned up if it becomes toxic. Already shale gas drillers are having to provide filtering systems for people whose well water has become contaminated. In some cases, even this isn't enough, and water must now be trucked in to families whose water is no longer fit to drink even with filtering.

In order to judge whether shale gas will provide any net energy to society, we must first decide where to set its system boundaries. It is hard to know exactly where to stop spatially: Should we, for example, include the energy needs of a family dependent on a worker at a subcontractor that provides software services to the driller? But, it is even harder to know what time frame to use.

One thing is certain. The legacy energy costs of doing shale gas drilling will not disappear anytime soon. The country and its people could be paying the externalized costs of such drilling decades after it ceases to provide any material benefit to society.

If New York city is forced to expend considerable energy to purify its water to clean out toxic chemicals leaching from wells in its watershed 50 years from now, how shall we then judge the presumed bounty of energy that shale gas supposedly represents?

The same kinds of questions have been raised about nuclear energy. If one takes into account the entire energy cost over time of building, operating, decommissioning, and then protecting decommissioned plants and their wastes--wastes that will remain dangerous for conceivably tens of thousands of years--it is possible to understand why some people claim that nuclear energy provides no net energy to society. Rather, it burdens future generations with huge legacy energy costs. We who are alive today get to externalize the energy costs of nuclear power by foisting them on future generations. This is probably the only way that one can consider nuclear power--as it is currently configured--an energy source rather than an energy sink.

I believe we may ultimately find that shale gas is nothing but an energy sink. It will provide net energy for a while to those who are living now while burdening future generations with huge cleanup costs that, in terms of energy, may equal or exceed the energy gain we are currently receiving from this supposedly "clean" energy source.

Why you should read The Biochar Solution

First, you should know that I have an allergy to anything that smacks of geoengineering. And the use of biochar--charred organic matter that can improve soil fertility--to address climate change by interring carbon in farmland on a mass scale strikes me as one of the largest geoengineering projects ever conceived. I always ask, "What will the unintended consequences be? Can we be sure that those consequences won't simply present a new set of problems, possibly catastrophic ones?"

Fortunately, Albert Bates, author of The Biochar Solution, takes these questions seriously and offers a measured endorsement of biochar as one of an array of strategies for responding to climate change. Even in the forward Vandana Shiva warns that "[b]y shifting our concern from growing the green mantle of the earth to making charcoal, biochar solutions risk repeating the mistakes of industrial agriculture."

With this kind of qualified endorsement, why should we read further? The answer is straightforward: Because intelligently and broadly applied and ethically managed, the production of biochar and its incorporation in the soil has the potential to lower carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, not on a millennial time line, but within a few decades. We have the possibility of reversing climate change. It's worth exploring this possibility because some of the most prominent climate scientists in the world believe we have already passed beyond the level of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere that will, if not reduced, move the world into new and much warmer climate.

So, what might one of those unintended and possibly catastrophic consequences be? Bates summarizes an unexpected answer from a prominent soil scientist as follows:

Biochar is too powerful, she told me. Once the industrial complex with its credit markets, government incentives, and subsidies to farmers gets up and running, biochar could become a juggernaut, pushing the soil-atmosphere carbon balance into an overcorrection and ushering in a rapid-onset ice age.

When was the last time you heard someone who is firmly convinced that climate change is a critical issue say that a proposed solution would not simply fail, but could push us into an ice age? If biochar was that potent, I wanted to know more.

And, this leads to a second reason why you should read The Biochar Solution. The book begins with the engaging story of how biochar was discovered but not really understood (by Europeans, that is), forgotten, rediscovered, and finally understood by scientists. The story reads like a combined action/adventure tale and detective novel and shows Bates to be an accomplished storyteller. We are treated to a trip down the Amazon at the time of the conquistadors; to visits to plantations run by expatriate Confederate plantation owners who emigrated to Brazil after The Civil War; and finally to the findings of modern archeologists who uncover the truth about seemingly fantastical historical descriptions of great cities on the Amazon at the dawn of Spanish settlement in the New World.

The remainder of book is something of a handbook on biochar and carbon farming, showing how it might be done and who might do it. Bates introduces us to innovators who think broadly and creatively about how the soil might again become the rich, dense, living provider of fertility it once was. Readers will learn that the side effects may actually turn out to be side benefits: revitalized soils, verdant cities, higher long-term agricultural productivity, increased biodiversity and the reclaiming of desert landscapes. The author also discusses the prospects for agroforestry, an approach to forests that could make them both sustainable and productive for human purposes.

Along the way Bates relates several astounding claims that will keep you reading. Two such claims are as follows: 1) The Amazon rainforest is actually the product of human actions, and 2) the world's cooking stoves--the kind that burn wood and other biomass in most poor countries and currently add to global climate change woes--could be transformed into tools for climate recovery.

Could little pieces of charred organic matter really do all that Bates suggests? He recommends that we give biochar a widespread trial, but in conjunction with deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions. These cuts, he says, are absolutely essential.

While such cuts seem by far the more difficult task, biochar will involve its own difficulties. First, as Bates admits, the production of biochar will have to be regulated to ensure that it is done ethically and sustainably. He gives an example in the book of unregulated production and its potential to do much harm. But, in a world now gripped by the laissez-faire model of economics, it's hard to see how broad-reaching international regulation of biochar production could be achieved.

And yet, if the unfolding climate catastrophe produces a vivid and pivotal moment--say, a sudden collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet--the will to do something as dramatic as seeding a large portion of the Earth's soils with biochar and doing it in an ethical way may actually become politically feasible.

Peak oil and four principles of PR

The following piece appeared previously in the Peak Oil Review.

Peak oil activists and the mass media have had a rocky relationship. Activists often don't understand how the media works and can't fathom why reporters and editors are not better informed about energy issues. Those working in the media are constrained by the interests of their advertisers, their corporate owners and the necessity of focusing on ratings and circulation.

There is a pervading sense in the peak oil community that those in the mass media "just don't get it." And, there is an inclination to criticize them for either their lack of curiosity or their blatant indifference. And, that brings me to my four principles of public relations, the first of which is:

1. Never, ever publicly criticize the media. There's no upside.

My father used to say that it was unwise to pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel. In the age of the Internet we now tend to think in terms of the number of eyeballs attracted to web content. But it comes to the same thing. If the media has the equivalent of a loudspeaker system designed for a heavy metal band concert and you have the equivalent of laryngitis, who do you think is going to win any dispute you have with them in the eyes of the public?

If someone in the media irks you, you can complain all you want to your spouse or spouse-equivalent. But you're a fool to take on the reporter and media outlet publicly. If you do, they may not take out their irritation directly on you. But you will find them far less sympathetic to your point of view in the future and more likely to lean to the opposing side in the way they cover energy-related stories.

If you think a story contains errors or frames energy issues in the wrong way, it is pointless to ask for a correction. Corrections end up in obscure places in newspapers, magazines, and websites, if they end up anyplace at all. And, they almost never get on broadcast media. It is more effective to make yourself into a credible, reasonable, even-tempered source who will be glad to provide information for the NEXT story. That story, if you are lucky, will end up prominently positioned and do far more to overcome misconceptions from a previous story than any correction ever will.

2. Fear triumphs over hope.

The human nervous system is designed to build hope slowly and react to fear quickly. Why is this so? Because those are the characteristics which have enabled humans to survive. It's not that fear always and everywhere triumphs over hope. But our evolutionary heritage makes us prone to react to danger much more quickly and completely than we do to the prospects of gain or pleasure.

Peak oil activists are pretty good at wielding fear, maybe too good. If you emphasize the possible catastrophic outcomes of declining oil, you will frequently get two reactions from an audience. One group will say, "If peak oil is coming so soon and going to be so bad, what's the point of doing anything?" A second group will just go into denial. They'll judge your assessment of the future to be so bleak that it can't possibly be true because lots of other people would be talking about it and they aren't.

Fear has to find its resolution in action. What can I do? How will what you suggest help me weather the storm? When politicians demonize their opponents or scapegoat the helpless and marginalized in society, they are offering voters an avenue for action: "Vote for me and I'll take care of these rascals who are causing our problems." Peak oil activists can certainly do better than that, and many now give detailed practical advice to help people prepare for a post-peak oil world. Perhaps the best way to start with audiences new to the peak oil issue is to give them "no regrets" strategies, ones that will make their lives better whether peak oil hits soon or not. Some ideas include insulating their homes, riding a bicycle whenever practical, sourcing more of their food from local producers, and getting to know their neighbors. All of these things can enhance people's lives no matter what happens, and it puts them on a road that allows successful adaptations which will inculcate a willingness to do more.

3. If you're explaining, you're losing.

Perhaps the most difficult thing for a peak oil activist to do is to keep it short. Now, if you are having a conversation with a group of friends where the object is to hash things out, it's fine to ignore this dictum. If you are performing public education, you are probably talking before an attentive, curious and self-selected audience. They will often put up with lot of explaining. After all, that's what they've come for. But if you are in a public dogfight in the media, you definitely don't want to be the one who is explaining things.

Here's why: When communicating with large audiences, anyone saddled with the task of explaining complex scientific and technical information is likely to turn off the audience. First, the audience will find it hard to follow such explanations. Second, they'll wonder why the person providing the explanation feels compelled to provide such detail. He or she will appear to be on the defensive. This is the key point. The public perceives that those who are prone to excessively long explanations are actually trying to confuse them or hide something. This perception may be wholly without foundation, but it is a hard one to fight.

The best strategy is to force your opponents (who may be physically present or simply quoted alongside you in a newspaper article) to do the explaining. Some possible grenades to lob include the following:

• Explain why many OPEC members mysteriously claimed increases in their reserves by 50 to 100 percent in the mid-1980s without any large discoveries.
• Explain why with the very high historical oil prices of the last decade, we have not seen the predicted glut in oil supply.
• Why does the promised bounty of oil from oil shale never seem to appear even when oil prices scale $100 a barrel?
• Some 80 percent of the world's oil reserves are controlled directly by countries and their government-run oil companies. Many of these countries are run by secretive, authoritarian regimes and do not allow any outside audit of their claims. Why should we be confident about the reserve numbers they report? Is it wise policy to simply take their word for it?

An alert activist can probably think of many more, but you get the idea. Let the other side explain all these things. You're job for now is to plant doubt concerning the official story. Without that doubt most people will never consider the peak oil point of view.

If you have some creative talent, an alternative way of pressing your case is to do it in verse or in song or in the form of a play, a novel, a painting, or a stand-up comedy routine. This is not the same as explaining. It’s storytelling in the classic sense. It’s very hard to argue with a piece of art. People can comment on it. But an antagonistic viewer is forced to choose between aesthetic criticism (which doesn’t really strike at your message) and attacks on your message. Attacks on your message will seem off base to most people since, after all, it’s just a piece of fiction or a song or a work of art, so lighten up! The critic will come off as a killjoy which is perfect for you. This will be especially true if what you are doing is funny.

4. The cover-up is always far more damaging than the screw-up.

This one is simple. If you make a mistake, admit it, apologize for it, if necessary, and then move on. In the context of peak oil activism, this principle is less applicable than the others. Peak oil activists strive to shed light on energy issues, not cover them up. Still, it is possible to screw up, and one of the best ways to do that is to make predictions.

When it comes to making predictions for reporters, I have one word of advice: DON'T! The currently well-established facts are scary enough. If you must talk about the future, talk about it in terms of risks, not forecasts. If you make predictions, you are setting yourself up for a fall, and then the cycle of anger with the media is likely to get hold of you all over again. And, as I've said, there's absolutely no upside to expressing it publicly.

The notion, however, that governments and oil companies are not squaring with the public is a useful idea. But it is reckless to accuse them of some sort of conspiracy of silence. A better way to talk about this is that it is not in the interests of public officials to announce the peak oil predicament since they have no plan to address it. And, it is not in the interests of large international oil companies to talk about peak oil since it would imply that their businesses would soon start winding down, something that can hardly be salutary for oil company stock prices.

Conclusion

While it may seem unfair in some ways that the world of mass communications requires the understanding and application of these principles, it is more effective to deal with the realities of mass communications than to try to change them. Sticking with these principles doesn't always assure you of success, but it does keep you out of a lot of unnecessary trouble.

Literature and Limits

Aristotle wrote that the desires of humans are unlimited. This is completely consistent with the modern notion proposed by Howard Odum of the Maximum Power Principle which states that biological systems seek to maximize their power intake. In the context of evolution it makes sense that those human beings who gathered the most energy to themselves in the form of food, heat, and even tools for self-defense, hunting and later farming were most likely to survive and produce offspring.

Before the fossil fuel age nature provided limits on power intake. And, wisdom was in part an understanding of where those limits lay so as to avoid overstepping them and suffering the inevitable punishment for doing so.

In the industrial age fossil fuels have given us the illusion of no limits, and the Enlightenment provided the philosophical basis for such thinking by imagining the perfectibility of humankind in all ways intellectual and material. The application of reason was the liberating force that would make progress eternal.

Rising material wealth in the 19th and 20th centuries moved questions of material progress to the background in literature and philosophy since such progress seemed assured despite its uneven trajectory and the injustice which accompanied the distribution of its fruits. The seemingly intractable problem of scarcity had been overcome.

And so, the focus of literature moved to the themes of social justice and the psychic drama of the family and the individual. It's not that such themes weren't already in use. But a society believing that its material progress is assured will no longer find the themes of limits and scarcity helpful.

What is missing, therefore, from most modern stories is the notion of physical resource limits. Such limits imply a tragic trajectory, the possibility of failure and punishment for overuse of the physical world. In the last half century the scientific literature has been infused with increasingly ominous warnings about such limits. But popular stories accessible to the mass of humanity, at least in rich countries, still most often champion explicitly or implicitly the ideas of a limitless material future.

There are plenty of tales of technology gone wrong. One the earliest at the dawn of the fossil fuel age was Frankenstein. But this story does not embody the theme of technology failing for lack of available resources. For such a theme we must look to stories of castaways cut off from the logistical supply lines of society.

But now we must look toward a literature in which we all become castaways, severed from the wells of plenty not by a freakish storm, but by the dictates of geology and the limits it is about to place on our primary sources of energy: fossil fuels. For that we must come again to understand that nature can provide a backdrop for what William Catton Jr. calls the “tragic story of human success”--that hubris and nemesis are not merely psychosocial terms implying humiliation, but terms that carry the sting of hunger and want embedded within them.

Peak oil and climate change in 13 minutes

At the recent 2010 International Conference on Sustainability I made a brief presentation focused on using concrete illustrations that explain peak oil and climate change in ways that relate to people's everyday experiences. I have been searching for methods to bring the basics of peak oil and climate change out of the realm of the abstract, and this is my first public attempt to do just that.

What I am most interested in are your ideas for how we all might do a better job of making these important issues more vivid for audiences, especially those who are just starting to learn about them. While my presentation is not the classic "elevator speech" (unless the elevator ride is 13 minutes long and you have room for props), I do think it was a good first step.

Here is the presentation:

Why I wrote Prelude, a peak oil novel

Every culture lives by its narratives. And, these narratives come to us not just in the form of novels, plays, movies and television shows. They also come in the form of news stories, ideology, religious doctrine, theories that are social, political and scientific, and myriad other works which fall under the category of nonfiction. Over time these narratives become outmoded, and new ones emerge, or at least, the old ones are reworked in light of new circumstances.

Prelude, my peak oil novel, is part of a broader, ongoing process that is developing a counternarrative to the dominant one which is driving our global society toward the brink of social, economic and environmental collapse. At first, counternarratives are voiced by the few who perceive changed realities and try to articulate those new realities in ways that will allow a broader group of people to see them. There is an action plan implied by these counternarratives, but their effect on the actual functioning of society is small at this point. Widespread organized and concerted action for change still lies in the future.

In many ways that's where we are in the peak oil story. As concern about peak oil spreads through more and more communities and to the highest circles in industry and government, we are approaching a critical threshold. But will we as a global society choose to pass through it?

As of now the story of peak oil has yet to reach the broad public, most of whom have never even heard the term, let alone contemplated its significance. Without broad public awareness it will be difficult for politicians and policymakers at all levels to find support for initiatives aimed at addressing peak oil.

When I conceived of Prelude three years ago, it was based on the notion that ideas only become widely dispersed in the public mind when they are infused in the arts. Since then several peak oil-themed novels have found their way to the bookstore shelves. Most of these, it turns out, are based either on an apocalyptic vision of a post-peak oil world or on the device of a sudden, catastrophic loss of oil, often through means that have little to do with peak oil production as it is commonly conceived.

I decided to create a narrative set firmly in contemporary society. I wanted a story that would reframe the way people read the daily news and the way they interpret their everyday experience. My premise was that readers would more readily identify with a world familiar to them than one set in the distant future or transfigured by an imaginary crisis.

During the three years it took to write the book, there has been a small, but steady proliferation of peak oil-related art, cartoons, stand-up comedy, theater, songs (here, here, and here), and even some peak oil poetry (here and here). The infusion of peak oil themes into the arts has now begun and appears to be spreading. This development is both a reflection of growing public awareness and a tool to create more awareness. Many more literary, performance, and graphic works of art will have to be married with the peak oil theme before they produce a self-reinforcing spiral that will blanket the public with the peak oil message.

My goal in writing Prelude was to help to create that self-reinforcing spiral of awareness, to break out beyond the peak oil community, beyond even the broader sustainability community, and to reach people who know little or nothing about such issues, but have chosen to read Prelude because they find it a compelling story in its own right. This implies a very broad audience, and my goal is an ambitious one. But success could mean nothing less than a large new group of people open to participating in national, regional and local initiatives related to peak oil and other sustainability issues.

Naturally, I will be gratified if this book finds broad acceptance among those in the peak oil community. Even if it does, it will fall far short of my goal. That's why I'm hoping that those who read it and like it will recommend it especially to those who previously have had little association with peak oil or sustainability. The book was written with such people in mind.

No single work of art can express all the needs of an era. But through the efforts of activists and the continued creative work of artists, performers and writers, I believe we can achieve a much broader awareness of peak oil and other sustainability issues, an awareness that will lay the groundwork for a much more effective response to the daunting challenges that lay before us.

Two-week break -- Book launch imminent

I will not be posting this week or next as I must devote all my time to launching my peak oil novel, Prelude. Naturally, as soon as the book becomes available I'll be announcing it here and elsewhere.