Oil & our survival

Reducing oil use 'our survival challenge'

Expert on oil supply tells receptive Sebastopol audience quick, decisive action needed

By MIKE McCOYTHE PRESS DEMOCRAT

Published: Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 6:03 a.m. Last Modified: Sunday, August 3, 2008 at 8:52 a.m.

It was easy to tell oil supply expert Richard Heinberg was preaching to the choir Saturday.
Parked around the Sebastopol Veterans Memorial building where 250 people crowded in to hear Heinberg foretell the gloomy future of oil and the global economy, one of every five cars was a gas-sipping hybrid.
But unfortunately, Heinberg said, enough of the rest of the world has not caught up yet with what it faces.
The ability of the world to wean itself from the ever-declining production of oil “is our survival challenge for the 21st century,” he said.
Heinberg, 57, a senior fellow with the Post Carbon Institute based in Sebastopol, is considered among the leading voices on the issue of peak oil supply, the time when the world’s supply of oil drops below the amount needed to fuel the worldwide economy.
The impact of that, particularly on individuals, can already be seen in the rising cost of food and the end of cheap travel, he noted.
Foodstuffs are trucked an average of 1,500 miles “from farm to plate” these days, Heinberg said, noting the need to conserve fuel demands that food be grown closer to home.
Airline travel is the same since the cost of fuel for large passenger planes will drive the industry into the red, he said.
Heinberg’s lecture, titled “Kiss Your Gas Goodbye,” was largely an update, a sort of “I told you so” of a lecture he gave at the same site three years ago that predicted a decline in global oil production and intensifying competition and chaos by nations to get it.
Heinberg said things have changed since then. “Most of what we talked about then is now history,” he told the audience.
Three years ago, when he made his prediction and warned that alternatives to oil had to be found, a gallon of gas in Sonoma County cost $2.19.
Today it hovers around $4.30 as the demand for oil increases worldwide while the available supply continues to slip.
Heinberg, who predicts oil exports throughout the world will drop by 50 percent over the next decade, urged that decisive action must be undertaken quickly.
“We’re talking about a civilization-ending crisis,” he said.
Fellow speaker Julian Darley, president of the Post Carbon Institute, however, presented the beginning of a 10-point plan he is developing to soften the blow of the doom-and-gloom Heinberg fears is coming.
“We must begin to live within the means of our planet,” he said.
To do that, he said, individuals must reduce their use of oil and the waste of raw materials; use car-pools; diversify into other sources of energy, including wind, solar and geothermal; and find high-tech ways to store energy.
You can reach Staff Writer Mike McCoy at 521-5276 or mike.mccoy@pressdemocrat.com.

Doomsday Vault

Norway's 'Doomsday Vault' holds seeds of survival

By Tony Paterson in BerlinMonday, 25 February 2008


The name alone makes it sound like a relict from the Cold War or something out of a Bond film: it is referred to as the "Doomsday Vault" and housed in an icy steel and concrete bunker, more than one hundred metres deep inside the mountain permafrost of an Arctic archipelago. Yet the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is man's latest attempt to create a latter-day Noah's Ark, or insurance policy, for the planet in the event of a catastrophe such as devastating climate change induced by global warming.


After decades of planning and construction work, the vault will officially start operating tomorrow. As the world's first global seed bank, it has the capacity to hold up to 4.5 million batches of seeds from all the known varieties of the planet's main food crops.
The vault cost €6m to construct and has been built to withstand nuclear missile attacks and even dramatic rises in sea levels that would result from both the Greenland and Antarctic ice shelves melting simultaneously.


The vault aims to make it possible to re-establish crops and plants should they disappear from their natural environment or be wiped out by major disasters. Cary Fowler, of the Global Crop Diversity Trust which set up the project together with Norway's Nordic Gene Bank yesterday described the vault as the "perfect place" for seed storage.


The vault is made up of three large, airtight, refrigerated cold-storage chambers which are housed in a long trident-shaped tunnel bored through a layer of permafrost in to a mountain of sandstone and limestone on the archipelago.
Norway's Svalbard's islands lie some 620 miles south of the North Pole deep inside the Arctic circle. No trees grow on the archipelago, which is home to some 2,300 people. It was selected because of its inhospitable climate and remoteness. The average winter temperature on Svalbard is around minus 14C. The vault is protected by high walls of fortified concrete, doors armoured with steel plate and a home guard of free-roaming polar bears.
"The facility is designed to hold twice as many varieties of agricultural crops as we think exist," said Mr Fowler, "It will not be filled up in my lifetime nor in my grandchildren's lifetime, but at these temperatures, seeds for important crops like wheat, barley and peas can last for 1,000 years," he added.
The permafrost and rocks surrounding the tunnels are meant to ensure the seed samples remain frozen, even if the plant's refrigeration system fails and global warming raises the outside temperature. "It is an insurance policy for the planet," Mr Carey said.
Tomorrow, when Jose Manuel Barroso, president of the European Commission, and the Nobel Peace Prize-winning environmentalist Wangari Maathai arrive in Svalbard for the project's inauguration, the vault will contain some 250,000 seed samples.
Scientists involved in the project pointed out yesterday that some of the world's biodiversity had already been lost as a result of war or natural disaster. Gene vaults have disappeared in Iraq and Afghanistan following the US invasion and seed banks in the Philippines and Honduras fell to natural disasters.

The Svalbard vault already appears to have survived its first environmental test. Last Thursday what was described as "the biggest earthquake in Norway's history" – a tremor with a magnitude of 6.2 – was registered near the archipelago.