Rick Balfour VPOE July 6, 2009

Since the SSP series was started in the Vancouver Planning Commission (Strategic Sustainable Planning Committee, 2005 and 2006), and since the SSP Manual came out (Balfour & Keenan, Old City Foundation Press, 2007), a couple of revisions have collapsed the elapsed time for planning for radical social change. While we have to admit we lost a generation of opportunity by not listening to the warnings of 1970s, (Club of Rome et al), we really do have even less time to prepare for impacts from Peak Oil and Climate Change.

Peak Oil by itself, long denied, now exposed as real and imminent, is more dire due to the EROEI; or Energy Returned on Energy Invested is plummeting. The escalating cost of recovery of what is hard to get at, and much poorer quality oil means that the downside of the oil consumption curve is steepened; we run out sooner and price of all energy will escalate sooner. From a planning perspective, the pattern of community we must radically and rapidly change in order to even survive the end of cheap energy now has to be done ‘overnight’. To not make the changes only deepens the problem; it will not just be uncomfortable, civil and economic unrest becomes well unavoidable.

Climate Change also is accelerating even while talks go on to maybe do something about man made carbon loading of the atmosphere and the ocean now at it’s own limit on carbon absorbing as oceans turn acidic and coral reefs, then fish die off.

The IPCC even ‘conveniently ignored” one of the most significant areas of climate impact by not having ‘enough confidence’ in reports from Antarctica of ice sheet slippage into the seas, now HIghly Likely to cause a 60 to 73 meter ocean rise in a 70 to 100 year period. A report for three US government departments in 2008 corrected these oversights and admitted the Highly Likely scenario now. Discussion in the US about abandoning Federal funding for projects below the 60 meter level shows somebody realizes there can be no more business as usual. With all the combined and self reinforcing disasters, we need to move and rebuild just at a time when resources are running out, making such change more and more difficult to achieve.

Population overshoot by humanity is the driving force; speculation about populations soaring into 9 billion before tapering off is becoming more unlikely; the systems that would allow this are collapsing too fast.

Agriculture, already under threat from the end of the Green Revolution as it was based on oil derived pesticides and fertilizers, also has growth of deserts, loss of major aquifers, and now rising oceans which take out precious coastal farmlands.

All of these factors unavoidably trigger mass migration. While this will happen in waves in response to multiple areas of collapse and destabilization, it means that highly attractive areas that now look the most sustainable on the planet will be at risk of invasion by refugees, leaving no oasis without risk. The notion of growth for growths sake is replaced with how to do anything to slow down or divert growth as a survival strategy.

The experts in all these silos of study do not talk to each other in the silo, often overlooking the most drastic impacts as not yet totally provable. This means the folks we depend on for good data cannot depend on themselves. Then there are even fewer instances of leadership and insight where all these factors are put into a comprehensive format for discussion and so we can prepare for the ultimate disaster where the tipping points in any of these areas exacerbate the impact in the others.

This graph is an update to the SSP series and the first edition of the SSP Manual. It is subjective and speculative in some areas due to the nature of the information on hand and the uncertainty of the degree of impact on a global scale of each area of concern on the other. The Y axis of course has multiple values and curves are shown without numbers, just to give a snapshot of most likely general trend lines in each area. The crossover lines of multiple impacts of change are very close to us now and the interval for planning change is not decades, but a few years. The multiplicity of conclusions anyone comes to has to make change by all of us an automatic response.
ssperoicmurphy11
Richard Balfour maibc
B&A • Strategic Planning
Vancouver Peak Oil Executive