As the supply of cheap fuel dwindles, organic farmers in Wales prepare the rural town of Lampeter for ‘energy descent’
There is, as the ads say, no Plan B. The age of cheap oil is drawing to a close, climate change already threatens, and politicians dither. But the people of Lampeter, a small community in the middle of rural Wales, gathered together earlier this week to mobilise for a new war effort. They decided to plan their “energy descent”.
It was in fact the biggest public meeting in Lampeter anyone could remember. West Wales has a long tradition of alternative living, but the scale of this was different. More than 450 people filed into the hall in a place where the total population is just 4,000. They had come to turn themselves into a Transition Town - one of a rapidly growing network of places that have decided not to wait for government action, but to prepare for life after oil on their own.
First, the coordinator of the Transition Town movement, Rob Hopkins, told them how urgent the crisis is. Hopkins, who helped create the earliest Transition Towns in Kinsale, Ireland, and Totnes, Cornwall, and advises the 20 or so others that have signed up, describes himself as an early topper.
He’s one of those who think that in the next five years we will have reached peak oil - the point at which half the world’s oil reserves have been used up. After that production goes into irreversible and rapid decline and our main source of energy starts running out. Since we have not so far identified another viable energy source to replace it, the only rational response, he said, is to plan our energy descent. “Life after oil will have to look very different.”
The world, he explained, divides into early toppers and late toppers. The early toppers, made up largely of former industry geological experts, calculate that world oil production has already or will very soon peak. The end of oil is nigh, in other words.
The late toppers, made up mostly of more optimistic oil companies, governments and economists, predict we have longer, with peak oil some 20 to 30 years away. “I tend to believe the people with no vested interest, but either way this is one of the most dramatic shifts humanity has had to face,” Hopkins warned.
By now the people of Lampeter, from ageing hippies to young activists, were shifting in their plastic seats (made with oil) and drawing anxiously on their water bottles (made with oil) if not reaching for their medicines (made with oil). Hopkins told them they were likely to experience a range of common symptoms that accompany initial peak oil awareness.
One might be an irrational grasping at infeasible solutions. At hydrogen, for example. No good, running the UK’s cars on hydrogen would need 67 Sizewell B nuclear power stations or a wind farm bigger than the south-west region of England. Or what about biofuels? No again, it would take over 25m hectares of arable land to run the UK’s vehicles on biodiesel, and the UK only has 5.7m hectares of arable land. We need to eat too.
Unfortunately, British farming has evolved “into a system for turning oi