Rob Hopkins: Transition to a world without oil

175,663 views ・ 2009-11-24

TED


Please double-click on the English subtitles below to play the video.

00:18
As a culture, we tell ourselves lots of stories
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about the future,
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and where we might move forward from this point.
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Some of those stories are that
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somebody is just going to sort everything out for us.
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Other stories are that everything is on the verge of unraveling.
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But I want to tell you a different story here today.
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Like all stories, it has a beginning.
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My work, for a long time, has been involved in education,
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in teaching people practical skills
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for sustainability,
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teaching people how to take responsibility
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for growing some of their own food,
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how to build buildings using local materials,
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how to generate their own energy, and so on.
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I lived in Ireland, built the first straw-bale houses in Ireland,
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and some cob buildings and all this kind of thing.
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But all my work for many years was focused
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around the idea that sustainability
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means basically looking at
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the globalized economic growth model,
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and moderating what comes in at one end,
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and moderating the outputs at the other end.
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And then I came into contact with a way of looking at things
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which actually changed that profoundly.
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And in order to introduce you to that,
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I've got something here that I'm going to unveil,
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which is one of the great marvels of the modern age.
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And it's something so astounding and so astonishing
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that I think maybe as I remove this cloth
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a suitable gasp of amazement might be appropriate.
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If you could help me with that it would be fantastic.
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(Laughter)
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This is a liter of oil.
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This bottle of oil,
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distilled over a hundred million years of geological time,
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ancient sunlight,
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contains the energy equivalent of about five weeks
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hard human manual labor --
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equivalent to about 35 strong people
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coming round and working for you.
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We can turn it into a dazzling array of materials,
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medicine, modern clothing,
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laptops, a whole range of different things.
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It gives us an energy return that's unimaginable, historically.
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We've based the design of our settlements,
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our business models, our transport plans,
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even the idea of economic growth, some would argue,
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on the assumption that we will have this in perpetuity.
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Yet, when we take a step back,
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and look over the span of history,
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at what we might call the petroleum interval,
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it's a short period in history
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where we've discovered this extraordinary material,
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and then based a whole way of life around it.
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But as we straddle the top of this energy mountain, at this stage,
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we move from a time where our economic success,
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our sense of individual prowess and well-being
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is directly linked to how much of this we consume,
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to a time when actually our degree of oil dependency
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is our degree of vulnerability.
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And it's increasingly clear that we
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aren't going to be able to rely on the fact that
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we're going to have this at our disposal forever.
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For every four barrels of oil that we consume,
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we only discover one.
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And that gap continues to widen.
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There is also the fact that the amount of energy
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that we get back from the oil that we discover is falling.
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In the 1930s we got 100 units of energy back
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for every one that we put in to extract it.
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Completely unprecedented, historically.
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Already that's fallen to about 11.
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And that's why, now,
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the new breakthroughs, the new frontiers
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in terms of oil extraction are scrambling about in Alberta,
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or at the bottom of the oceans.
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There are 98 oil-producing nations in the world.
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But of those, 65 have already passed their peak.
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The moment when the world on average passes this peak,
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people wonder when that's going to happen.
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And there is an emerging case
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that maybe that was what happened last July
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when the oil prices were so high.
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But are we to assume that the same brilliance
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and creativity and adaptability
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that got us up to the top of that energy mountain in the first place
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is somehow mysteriously going to evaporate
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when we have to design a creative way back down the other side?
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No. But the thinking that we have to come up with
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has to be based on a realistic assessment
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of where we are.
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There is also the issue of climate change,
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is the other thing that underpins this transition approach.
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But the thing that I notice, as I talk to climate scientists,
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is the increasingly terrified look they have in their eyes,
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as the data that's coming in,
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which is far ahead of what the IPCC are talking about.
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So the IPCC said
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that we might see significant breakup
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of the arctic ice in 2100, in their worst case scenario.
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Actually, if current trends continue,
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it could all be gone in five or 10 years' time.
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If just three percent of the carbon locked up in the arctic permafrost
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is released as the world warms,
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it would offset all the savings that we need to make,
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in carbon, over the next 40 years to avoid runaway climate change.
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We have no choice other than deep and urgent decarbonization.
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But I'm always very interested to think about
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what might the stories be
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that the generations further down the slope from us
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are going to tell about us.
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"The generation that lived at the top of the mountain,
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that partied so hard, and so abused its inheritance."
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And one of the ways I like to do that
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is to look back at the stories people used to tell
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before we had cheap oil, before we had fossil fuels,
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and people relied on their own muscle, animal muscle energy,
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or a little bit of wind, little bit of water energy.
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We had stories like "The Seven-League Boots":
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the giant who had these boots, where, once you put them on,
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with every stride you could cover seven leagues, or 21 miles,
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a kind of travel completely unimaginable
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to people without that kind of energy at their disposal.
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Stories like The Magic Porridge Pot,
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where you had a pot where if you knew the magic words,
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this pot would just make as much food as you liked,
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without you having to do any work,
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provided you could remember the other magic word to stop it making porridge.
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Otherwise you'd flood your entire town with warm porridge.
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There is the story of "The Elves and the Shoemaker."
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The people who make shoes go to sleep, wake up in the morning,
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and all the shoes are magically made for them.
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It's something that was unimaginable to people then.
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Now we have the seven-league boots
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in the form of Ryanair and Easyjet.
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We have the magic porridge pot
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in the form of Walmart and Tesco.
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And we have the elves in the form of China.
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But we don't appreciate what an astonishing
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thing that has been.
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And what are the stories that we tell ourselves now,
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as we look forward about where we're going to go.
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And I would argue that there are four. There is the idea of business as usual,
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that the future will be like the present, just more of it.
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But as we've seen over the last year, I think that's an idea
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that is increasingly coming into question.
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And in terms of climate change,
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is something that is not actually feasible.
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There is the idea of hitting the wall,
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that actually somehow everything is so fragile
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that it might just all unravel and collapse.
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This is a popular story in some places.
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The third story is the idea that technology can solve everything,
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that technology can somehow get us through this completely.
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And it's an idea that I think is very prevalent at these TED Talks,
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the idea that we can invent our way out of a profound
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economic and energy crisis,
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that a move to a knowledge economy
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can somehow neatly sidestep those energy constraints,
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the idea that we'll discover some fabulous new source of energy
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that will mean we can sweep all concerns
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about energy security to one side,
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the idea that we can step off neatly
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onto a completely renewable world.
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But the world isn't Second Life.
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We can't create new land and new energy systems at the click of a mouse.
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And as we sit, exchanging free ideas with each other,
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there are still people mining coal
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in order to power the servers, extracting the minerals
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to make all of those things.
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The breakfast that we eat as we sit down
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to check our email in the morning
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is still transported at great distances,
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usually at the expense of the local, more resilient
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food systems that would have supplied that in the past,
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which we've so effectively devalued and dismantled.
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We can be astonishingly inventive and creative.
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But we also live in a world with very real constraints and demands.
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Energy and technology are not the same thing.
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What I'm involved with is the transition response.
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And this is really about looking the challenges
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of peak oil and climate change square in the face,
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and responding with a creativity and an adaptability
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and an imagination that we really need.
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It's something which has spread incredibly fast.
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And it is something which has several characteristics.
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It's viral. It seems to spread under the radar very, very quickly.
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It's open source. It's something which everybody who's involved with it
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develops and passes on as they work with it.
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It's self-organizing. There is no great central organization
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that pushes this; people just pick up an idea
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and they run with it, and they implement it where they are.
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It's solutions-focused. It's very much looking at what people can do
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where they are, to respond to this.
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It's sensitive to place and to scale.
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Transitional is completely different.
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Transition groups in Chile, transition groups in the U.S., transition groups here,
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what they're doing looks very different in every place that you go to.
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It learns very much from its mistakes.
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And it feels historic. It tries to create a sense
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that this is a historic opportunity
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to do something really extraordinary.
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And it's a process which is really joyful.
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People have a huge amount of fun doing this,
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reconnecting with other people as they do it.
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One of the things that underpins it is this idea of resilience.
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And I think, in many ways, the idea of resilience
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is a more useful concept than the idea of sustainability.
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The idea of resilience comes from the study of ecology.
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And it's really about how systems,
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settlements, withstand shock from the outside.
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When they encounter shock from the outside
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that they don't just unravel and fall to pieces.
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And I think it's a more useful concept than sustainability, as I said.
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When our supermarkets have only two or three days' worth of food in them
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at any one time, often sustainability tends to focus on
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the energy efficiency of the freezers
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and on the packaging that the lettuces are wrapped up in.
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Looking through the lens of resilience,
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we really question how we've let ourselves get into a situation
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that's so vulnerable.
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Resilience runs much deeper:
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it's about building modularity into what we do,
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building surge breakers into how we organize the basic things that support us.
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This is a photograph of the Bristol and District
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Market Gardeners Association, in 1897.
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This is at a time when the city of Bristol,
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which is quite close to here,
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was surrounded by commercial market gardens,
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which provided a significant amount of the food
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that was consumed in the town, and created a lot of employment for people, as well.
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There was a degree of resilience, if you like, at that time,
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which we can now only look back on with envy.
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So how does this transition idea work?
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So basically, you have a group of people who are excited by the idea.
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They pick up some of the tools that we've developed.
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They start to run an awareness-raising program
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looking at how this might actually work in the town.
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They show films, they give talks, and so on.
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It's a process which is playful and creative
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and informative.
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Then they start to form working groups, looking at different aspects of this,
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and then from that, there emerge a whole lot of projects
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which then the transition project itself
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starts to support and enable.
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So it started out with some work I was involved in in Ireland,
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where I was teaching, and has since spread.
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There are now over 200 formal transition projects.
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And there are thousands of others who are at what we call the mulling stage.
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They are mulling whether they're going to take it further.
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And actually a lot of them are doing huge amounts of stuff.
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But what do they actually do? You know, it's a kind of nice idea,
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but what do they actually do on the ground?
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Well, I think it's really important to make the point that actually
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you know, this isn't something which is going to do everything on its own.
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We need international legislation from Copenhagen and so on.
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We need national responses. We need local government responses.
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But all of those things are going to be much easier
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if we have communities that are vibrant and coming up with ideas
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and leading from the front, making unelectable policies electable,
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over the next 5 to 10 years.
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Some of the things that emerge from it are local food projects,
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like community-supported agriculture schemes,
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urban food production, creating local food directories, and so on.
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A lot of places now are starting to set up their own energy companies,
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community-owned energy companies,
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where the community can invest money into itself,
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to start putting in place
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the kind of renewable energy infrastructure that we need.
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A lot of places are working with their local schools.
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Newent in the Forest of Dean: big polytunnel they built for the school;
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the kids are learning how to grow food.
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Promoting recycling, things like garden-share,
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that matches up people who don't have a garden
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who would like to grow food, with people who have gardens they aren't using anymore.
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Planting productive trees throughout urban spaces.
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And also starting to play around with the idea of
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alternative currencies.
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This is Lewes in Sussex,
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who have recently launched the Lewes Pound,
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a currency that you can only spend within the town,
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as a way of starting to cycle money within the local economy.
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You take it anywhere else, it's not worth anything.
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But actually within the town you start to create these economic
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cycles much more effectively.
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Another thing that they do is what we call an energy descent plan,
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which is basically to develop a plan B for the town.
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Most of our local authorities, when they sit down to plan
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for the next five, 10, 15, 20 years of a community,
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still start by assuming that there will be more energy,
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more cars, more housing,
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more jobs, more growth, and so on.
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What does it look like if that's not the case? And how can we embrace that
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and actually come up with something that was actually more likely
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to sustain everybody?
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As a friend of mine says, "Life is a series of things you're not quite ready for."
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And that's certainly been my experience with transition.
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From three years ago, it just being an idea,
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this has become something that has virally swept around the world.
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We're getting a lot of interest from government. Ed Miliband,
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the energy minister of this country, was invited to come to our recent conference
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as a keynote listener.
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Which he did --
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(Laughter)
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(Applause) --
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and has since become a great advocate of the whole idea.
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There are now two local authorities in this country
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who have declared themselves transitional local authorities,
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Leicestershire and Somerset. And in Stroud,
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the transition group there, in effect, wrote the local government's food plan.
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And the head of the council said,
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"If we didn't have Transition Stroud, we would have to invent
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all of that community infrastructure for the first time."
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As we see the spread of it, we see national hubs emerging.
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In Scotland, the Scottish government's climate change fund
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has funded Transition Scotland
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as a national organization supporting the spread of this.
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And we see it all over the place as well now.
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But the key to transition is thinking not that we have to change everything now,
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but that things are already inevitably changing,
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and what we need to do is to work creatively with that,
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based on asking the right questions.
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I think I'd like to just return at the end
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to the idea of stories.
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Because I think stories are vital here.
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And actually the stories that we tell ourselves,
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we have a huge dearth of stories about how to move forward creatively from here.
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And one of the key things that transition does
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is to pull those stories out of what people are doing.
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Stories about the community that's produced
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its own 21 pound note, for example,
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the school that's turned its car park into a food garden,
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the community that's founded its own energy company.
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And for me, one of the great stories recently
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was the Obamas digging up the south lawn of the White House
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to create a vegetable garden. Because the last time that was done,
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when Eleanor Roosevelt did it,
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it led to the creation of 20 million vegetable gardens across the United States.
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So the question I'd like to leave you with, really,
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is -- for all aspects of the things that your community needs
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in order to thrive,
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how can it be done in such a way
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that drastically reduces its carbon emissions,
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while also building resilience?
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Personally, I feel enormously grateful
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to have lived through the age of cheap oil.
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I've been astonishingly lucky, we've been astonishingly lucky.
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But let us honor what it has bought us,
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and move forward from this point.
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Because if we cling to it, and continue to assume
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that it can underpin our choices,
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the future that it presents to us is one which is really unmanageable.
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And by loving and leaving all that oil has done for us,
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and that the Oil Age has done for us,
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we are able to then begin the creation
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of a world which is more resilient,
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more nourishing,
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and in which, we find ourselves fitter, more skilled
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and more connected to each other.
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Thank you very much.
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(Applause)
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About this website

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