Read Part One of this series here.

Listen to David reading this piece here:

The Peak Oil story

Despite the complexity of all the aspects of petroleum, as a result of my obsession with oil I came to the conclusion that the geology and logistics were very well understood, because the world depended on them, but the main problem was at the geopolitical and financial levels. Critical datasets that would allow modelling of when the world would hit the peak in production (after which geology would trump finance and geopolitics to force a decline) were national and corporate secrets. The other problem was how to measure and compare the real value of different energy sources to predict a peak in energy, and consequent peak in net energy per person, after the needs of the energy harvesting industries are met. 

For me, Odum’s eMergy accounting was the most scientifically sound and useful analysis, but it remained at the academic and policy fringes. I never gave up mentioning how resource depletion, especially the king resource of oil, could hopefully force a shift to what the little-acknowledged conceptual father of permaculture, Howard Odum, called “a prosperous way down”. 

In contrast, global climate is a massively complex system, so I saw Peak Oil as more certain than a heating climate due to greenhouse gases (GHG). This was the exact opposite of what most environmentalists, scientists and even permaculture colleagues thought. In general, my peers seemed to be mostly taking note of discussions about one vs the other in the media and by colleagues they trusted. If they went beyond that, they looked at the scope of science funding, policy and strategic planning in the public domain and other signs in society about what was important and what was less important. 

Energy Descent defined 

In Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability, I coined the term ‘energy descent’ as the most honest way to describe human futures shaped by a continuous, if erratic, decline over many generations in the energy supply, which would amplify the similar depletion of essential minerals and other resources extracted from the earth and nature. I made it clear that I saw the depletion of the king resource of oil and increasing instability of climate, most likely driven by anthropogenic GHG emissions, as just two of the most powerful factors driving an energy descent future for humanity. 

Further, I saw that energy descent could play out in many different ways from relatively benign and positive to horrific. I found it interesting that when explaining energy descent futures, people often responded by saying in apparent recognition “Oh you mean Mad Max”, the 1970s road movie that had been filmed in our region. I had never seen the film and when I did, I found its energetic implausibility intensely annoying rather than entertaining. At the time I thought the reference people made to Mad Max showed how intellectually stunted were the conceptions of the potential for energy descent futures by most well-educated people, including the rising environmental intelligentsia. 

Overseas connections and insights

In the early 2000s we put a lot of effort into promoting the self-published Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability throughout Australia. We also promoted it on teaching and study tours overseas in Japan (2004), Europe and North America (2005) and Latin America (2007). In the process, I made many connections in permaculture and kindred networks, spending most of the time in rural places close to nature where people were more sensitive to climate and its changes. In Japan I marvelled at the idea that we needed to take umbrellas because “the rainy season starts today” and seeing farmers scrambling with improvised irrigation systems for small field crops that are normally rain-fed, after rainy season didn’t start on cue (see my 2004 essay ‘Permaculture in Japan’). 

The English language atlas of Japan I bought included data for Tokyo on the average number of rainy days in each 10 day interval of the year. While it would be possible to generate equivalent data for Melbourne, or any other Australian city, it would be statistically meaningless because of our more erratic weather and climatic patterns. These are partly a characteristic of the southern hemisphere but most extreme in Australia, a point I always discuss in teaching climate on Permaculture Design Courses (see Part 5 of this climate essay series). After many discussions about apparent seasonal irregularities, I wondered if Japanese farmers would adapt to the loss of clockwork seasons in part by adapting strategies that Australian cropping farmers currently take for granted. Everywhere in the world I heard stories about changing climate that seemed to confirm my 2004 presentations listing climate change, somewhat controversially, as already happening.

Food and agriculture in the climate story

My connection to telling the climate story was mostly back home, especially through the Sustainable Living Festival in Melbourne. at which I was a regular speaker including early articulations of my RetroSuburbia strategy and Future Scenarios work, bushfire resilient design and urban food growing which was back on the agenda big time after decades in the sustainability wilderness. Many themes and threads come to mind that shaped and refined how I saw the climate story.

The return of food and agriculture to the climate story is often attributed, in retrospect, to what is disparagingly called the ‘cow fart scare’ by red meat-eating climate sceptics; that is, enteric emissions of methane that are variously classified as twenty to 100 times more GHG intensive than carbon dioxide. 

Before that evidence came to the fore, there were other more subtle but important processes. One of the key results of Agenda 21 was to train  a large number of environmental facilitators employed in local government, NGOs and community groups to facilitate local and grass roots initiatives to reduce GHG emissions, through organisations such as CERES in Melbourne. The training of most of these people was in the art and science of behaviour change in individuals, groups and communities, more than the tech side of things. Out in the community, they found there was often as much interest in composting, organic food growing and keeping animals, as there was in solar panels and insulation. With the strategic view that you have to start where people are at, these facilitators checked out these personal interests of the climate abatement folk. Even if it was not the priority for the techy types or the policy wonks, they were mostly happy to acknowledge that fresh food grown on site and certainly composting household waste aerobically, rather than it going into landfill where it anaerobically generated methane, was a step in the right direction. 

Perhaps as a result of this grass roots push, and the not insignificant influence of decades of permaculture design, teaching and practice, food and agriculture re-emerged from below into the sustainability agenda. During those wilderness years before its revival, it had been the social, community building and health benefits that sustained and even increased the validation of, and funding for, backyard, school and community food production. The hidden reality was that many of those projects were started and/or maintained by folks who saw food production outside the centrally controlled corporate system as a hedge against the day when ‘the shit would hit the fan’, whether due to climate change, peak oil, financial collapse or geopolitical disruptions. Until recently it was unacceptable in polite society, including the sustainability establishment, to discuss such dark possibilities.

Consumption models of the economy

In any case, a series of studies, some overseas, some Australian, including one commissioned by the Australian Conservation Foundation (ACF), found that the food supply chain from farm, through processor, wholesaler and retailer, along with household preparation and disposal, was the biggest single contributor to GHG emissions, ecological footprint and the new metric of ‘embodied water’. That study for ACF by Lenzen and Foran, Australia’s foremost system modellers, created a consumption model of the economy that attributed all economic activity back to the population by local government area. This produced very different results from economic sector analyses that showed the electricity sector created the majority of Australia’s GHG emissions. 

While I felt permaculture and kindred groups’ continual focus on food had been validated, the deeper learning for me was how the primary assumption and ways of organising data can have a strong impact, even a predetermining one, on the conclusion of any evidenced-based decision making. The ACF online Consumption Atlas allowed viewers to see how their government area compared to others, but the findings received very limited media attention. I believed that its contradiction of several sustainability sacred cows was the reason for the lack of interest. 

The Consumption Atlas showed that city residents had, on average, higher GHG, embodied water demand and ecological footprint than suburbanites who had a higher impact than regional and rural dwellers when adjusted for income level. This completely contradicted the assumptions of the urban planning profession and their strategies to concentrate populations in cities to reduce environmental impact and achieve more efficient provision of services, especially sewerage and transport. This is not the place to explain why this is the case, other than to say from a systems thinking perspective, including permaculture and general knowledge about how things are grown, made and maintained, plus the ecological history of the development of cities and urbanisation, it should have been the default position until proven otherwise. 

The harshest result of that study was also a no-brainer; that there is a straight-line relationship between monetary income and environmental impact. On the other hand, along with many practical rural folk, I believe there is probably little, if any, correlation to politics. Voting Green is not a sign of lower GHG emissions. Of course even the scent of hypocrisy in these matters leads to politicians appealing to disgruntled suburban and rural battlers by suggesting that jet setting, inner urban, chardonnay sipping, Green voting elites are hypocrites that needed to put their own house in order before telling the rest of society what to do. I personally am more socially connected to inner urban environmentalists who live in share houses, eating what they grow, forage or find in the skips, bulked and spiced up with purchases from organic co-ops, getting their clothes from op shops and who ride second hand bicycles that they maintain, often having experienced road rage and injury in the process. So of course generalisations are problematic simplifications of complexity that focus our attention, often to the detriment of other perspectives. 

However, the problems in trying to encourage others to change their behaviour rather than deepening one’s own role as the guinea pigs for radical experiments has been a recurring theme for me since the early days of attempting to moderate permaculture evangelism. The problem with efforts to create a mass movement of people demanding more effective responses to what became ‘the climate emergency’ amplified these problems many fold. This became a theme in my discussions with colleagues more strongly committed to bringing about action to avoid severe climate change.

Energy peak or climate emergency? 

In early conversations with colleagues fully focused on climate change and how to stimulate a mass movement demanding change, I pointed out this would be, in essence, a movement shouting for less while all mass movements in history were essentially demands for more resources, rights etc. I thought there were serious ethical issues in such a process which led to building up expectations that the renewable energy transition will be a shift to more and better outcomes for ordinary citizens than fossil fuels have afforded.

I also tried to introduce peak oil as the equally important other face of the two-faced Janus god of environmental limits. In doing so, I suggested that peak oil was an inherently better story to tell than climate, because people are more interested in the fuel they put in their tanks than the exhaust that comes out the tail pipes, just as all of us animals are more interested in what we eat than what we excrete.

Changing behaviour to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels gives us direct resilience benefits in the face of cost rises and potential curtailment of supply, while reducing our greenhouse gas emissions doesn’t in any way give us a stable and safer climate; a classic case of tragedy of the commons. The other problem I had with emergency framing of climate change was that it implied the need for urgent action, but after that there would be some return to normal conditions, like after a war (where we win). These ethical minefields were informed by my Energy Descent framework for humanity’s future.

Probably the most in-depth of these conversations was with Peter Harper from the Centre of Alternative Technology (CAT) in Wales, the place that inspired Chris Ryan, architect from RMIT, to envisage a similar centre in Melbourne; just one of the threads that led to the creation of CERES in 1978. As an organic gardener and ecologist, Peter Harper had been one of the friendly critics of permaculture in Britain and in 1994 hosted us at CAT, introducing me as from the “no bullshit school of permaculture”. I always enjoyed our engagement and friendly debates. Peter claims to have coined the term Alternative Technology (in a pub in London in 1970) so we both go back a long way in this business. 

During a visit in 2004 Peter told me he was convinced that the world was facing a ‘climate emergency’ and how he was contributing to a large team project producing a comprehensive plan for a Zero Carbon Britain. I found the plan far more interesting, and challenging, that the equivalent plan for Australia (to which I had given some critical feedback). In addition, Peter loved discussion and debate whereas the Beyond Zero Emission group in Australia suggested I needed to get with the program rather than sniping from the sidelines, a theme that has become more intense around the climate question in recent years.

I told Peter about peak oil and, like so many who went through the ‘false alarm’ of the 70s oil crises, he had not been tracking the evidence that had been hidden by producer corporations and nations who understood how much their power depended on their supposed ‘reserves’.

When Peter was next in Australia in 2007, the Millennial drought was gathering intensity, the rate of sea ice melt in the Arctic had accelerated, and Phillip Sutton and David Spratt had called a ‘climate emergency’ requiring all levels of government and the whole of society to have all hands on deck. I conceded that it looked like the acceleration of climate change was happening. He was aware of my round-Australia speaking tour with Richard Heinberg. Richard focused on the bad news of peak oil, while I gave good news of permaculture-powered RetroSuburbia through my light-hearted Aussie Street soap opera.

And with oil prices heading ever upwards, the invasion of Iraq appearing to be driven by control of oil, and greater awareness of the peak oil story, Peter admitted that maybe oil supply might trigger financial seizure of the economy. However he thought that without a co-ordinated global response, the rest of the carbon in coal would still send us into the climate cooker. Meanwhile, my reading of the financial system tealeaves suggested financial seizure, due to the virtual dynamics of faith that bind fiat monetary systems, was definitely looming. In that at least I was about two years ahead of the economic and finance talking heads in the mainstream media, mostly from listening to economic analysis on forums like The Oil Drum.

Even if many strategies work to mitigate both pollution and depletion, without a head of steam in the collective consciousness and officially sanctioned validity, the peak oil story had no chance of displacing the climate story once the GFC cut demand and thus dropped the price of oil.

For many commentators, the scale of the shale oil boom in the US killed off the peak oil story. While the shale oil boom caught many of us peak oilers by surprise, it was underpinned by slashed environmental standards, borrowed money at close to zero interest rates, and just straight corruption of numbers. Investors were thus herded into plays that had little prospect of ever paying off the borrowed money from the revenue before the very rapid depletion that is characteristic of shale oil fields in their post-peak production. 

Machiavellian strategies for leveraging the Climate Emergency

So while giving the caveat that I was not personally motivated to work towards creating a mass movement for anything, I suggested that for those who thought it a priority, some Machiavellian strategies were in order. In particular, I recommended when the next big natural disaster hit the country, whether bushfire, flood or cyclone, then the media message, especially to those directly impacted, was to hit them hard about ‘this is what climate change looks like’ while they were still in a state of shock. The response I received was that this would be unethical and, in any case, no specific weather event can be scientifically attributed to climate change. I shrugged and suggested that this was how power elites through the ages had leveraged changes in mass populations. 

In 2009 during the Black Saturday bushfires, the then premier and rural property owner John Brumby was on the fire line when a reporter pushed a microphone in his face, into which he gasped, ‘this is what climate change looks like’. I believe this was probably an honest response under stress rather than a calculated projection, but it did trigger a reaction from powerful interests in Australia threatened by the climate story. For two weeks, the Murdock press wheeled out retired forestry professors to claim the greenies were responsible for preventing fuel reduction burning that could have controlled the fires; factually incorrect but effective at wiping the climate meme out of the public mind. While the timber industry was perhaps a small stakeholder with positions on the forest debate (that in my opinion have some merit), I suspected there were more powerful stakeholders in the national economy, such as the coal industry, that felt threatened by the climate change driven disasters meme. 

I think the first calculated, if genuine, use of the climate disaster meme by a high profile person was during the Brisbane floods of 2011 by Bob Brown leader of the Greens, for which he was roundly criticised by conservative politicians for worsening the trauma of the victims. This is a theme to which I will return.

In reviewing interactions with various interlocutors over the preceding decade I wrote the following in December 2011 (in an unfinished essay ‘Permaculture as political activism’):

As the evidence on unfolding climate change became stronger and world growth continued to accelerate GHG emissions, climate activists became more desperate and shrill in their efforts to both bring about top-down political change and create a mass movement shouting louder to demand change. Personal behaviour change had a role to satisfy the demands of the average middle class environmentalist wanting to do something positive. Environmental organisations and activists promoted a collection of actions to reduce personal carbon footprints that were mostly crafted to be easily adopted by the average concerned citizen without requiring much effort, skill or deprivation in the hope that through mass adoption they would become significant in reducing emissions. Other activists regarded these actions as symbolic but ineffective at bringing about structural change. 

My occasional critique of some of these strategies and the absence of more fundamental ones, such as home food production, often result in puzzled looks. On one memorable occasion my response to an early version of a visionary engineering plan to make Australia’s energy sector completely powered by renewable energy led to an angry suggestion that radical thinkers such as myself were throwing ‘spanners in the works’. This might be seen as an old political debate and cultural divide between those concerned with pragmatic efforts to bring about macro change vs those concerned with the ideological purity of radicalism, but my response was to use systems theory to interpret the issue. 

If the crisis (of climate) and more generally of limits, was a single, if complex, problem for which we already have a solution, then it can be argued that the most important strategy is to mobilise all resources behind the immediate and widespread implementation of that solution. This is implicit in much sustainability thinking; that a step-by-step change to a new system solves the problem. 

If on the other hand, humanity faces a cascading change process, then we should limit resources allocated to implement what the current consensus views as appropriate, and substantial resources should be devoted to innovation that creates new strategies and techniques that may allow humanity to move sideways, redefine the critical issues and not put all our eggs in one basket. 

Innovation, almost by definition, comes from the fringe not the mainstream. Since I believe humanity is facing this second situation, it is incumbent on those working on mainstream solutions to acknowledge the value of, and provide support for, more radical innovation and experimentation rather than issuing strident demands that everyone support the mainstream as the only viable solution.

Clearly such arguments never carry much sway with those already at, and those rushing towards, whatever is the current gravitational centre of action, status and power. My articulation (in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways) of the original design principle of benefits of edges (in landscape at multiple scales) as Use edges and value the marginal was a very clear effort to counter this gravitational pull to the centre and instead value the marginal action as a source of innovation by which human and ecological evolution progresses in times of eruptive change.

The failure to acknowledge the social margins as the source of some of the most celebrated characteristics of modernity such as democracy and libertarian capitalism is a subject addressed by David Graeber in his brief book Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia showing how pirates based in Madagascar raiding trading ships created the first modern models of democracy, not the European elites whose wealth they stole. This and other cases of unacknowledged adoption of ideas from the fringe require us to be very suspect of the history handed down to us by its victors.

The renewable energy rollout

Meanwhile, renewable energy was growing rapidly in Australia from small beginnings to a major industry. This is a huge story, and even my parts in it is a subject in itself, but they have informed my attitudes to the climate story and the solutions unfolding to address the question.

In 1979, renewable energy was a major issue in designing Venie’s off-grid place (see Part 2 of this climate essay series). Passive solar design for heating, cooling and even food storage, along with wood for hot water, supplementary heat and cooking, provided the foundation. The site was too sheltered for wind power and photovoltaics were very expensive and exotic but over the following decade, tech genius friends, and later local commercial installers, upgraded the various iterations of PV power along with the mandatory generator back up to provide Venie with the modest conveniences not so different from what PV is currently providing in villages across the Two Thirds World. 

When we built Melliodora from 1986 to 1988, passive solar and wood were the foundation of our energy supply and still are (including our cool cupboard and cellar). We treated electricity as special and expensive energy restricted to lighting, electronics and very modest refrigeration but took it from the grid as the most cost-effective and environmentally best available source. Our power use in those years was 3kWhrs/day. In 2003 we became part of the first government subsidised rooftop solar rollout with a 1.1kW grid feedback system costing $14,000 with a $10,000 subsidy from the taxpayer. 

In 2008 I was a speaker at a local event that kicked off the fundraising for Hepburn Wind, Australia’s first community owned wind farm. As a family, we were early investors but the experience has been a mixed one. For us the community owned co-op model was a more important factor in our support than the technology, which is complex tech manufactured on the other side of the world. The hope was this would become a template for communities around Australia. We also experienced firsthand local opposition to the farm of two turbines, perhaps more intense than the resistance to the big corporate wind farms. One of the organisers against the project was a close friend and we managed to keep in contact and understand the nature of his and others’ concerns, but agreed to disagree. 

In 2011, Hepburn Wind turbines began feeding the grid but in building the ‘Studio’ at Melliodora for Venie we decided to go off-grid, with a modest 2kW system and 750amphr lead acid battery bank rather than a 100m underground connection to the grid costing much more.

In 2018, our 1.1kW grid tied Sunnyboy inverter at the main house died on cue aged 15 years, and we bought one of the thousands being pulled off roofs to replace it ourselves. It seemed the now-massive rooftop solar industry was just a super-regulated Lego assembly business installing new bigger better systems and throwing away existing components that worked.

Reflection

Currently, our BP solar panels are still working and although we are getting to the point of an upgrade, it will probably be using second-hand components because even the commercial installers with the best ethics and environmental values are locked into the throw-it-away structure of the ‘renewable’ but not very environmental, push to go all electric. I continue to advocate for a diversity of energy sources, especially my passion for wood, but at times it seems like a hopeless cause as the religion of renewables remains joined at the hip with corporate-controlled mining, manufacturing and global logistics, allowing the middle class to believe they can consume their way to a zero carbon heaven.

Deep water ports connecting the world

Permaculture has always been focused on the here and now, but with an eye out for emerging futures. Over the decades that thinking has led to many actions that didn’t prove to be necessary or even advantageous. For example, one of Mollison’s arguments I remember him giving in encouragement to join the Tagari community located in Stanley, Tasmania, the village of his birth, was that it was a deep water port and so could remain connected to the world in low energy futures, just as it was at the start of the 19th century. Over the 1980s he and others at Tagari struggled somewhat in their efforts to run an international networking and publishing business from this ‘backwater’ location. Decades on, the internet makes Stanley almost as good as any other place on earth to attempt such tasks but the advantages of deep water ports for connection to the world remains a future potential.

For many moving to the country in those decades, marginal land in remote locations was often the choice, not just because of price but also to avoid toxins from intensive agriculture, restrictions on one’s legal and social licence, or even the risk of societal breakdown. While it is easy to judge these apparently foolish actions in retrospect, we are all prone to single factor analysis where we become obsessed with one particular issue which we project forward on a possible pathway and then make strategic life decisions without understanding the diverse futures that path might lead us to. Professionals in the futures field know that whatever you say about the future will most likely be proven wrong but as General Eisenhower famously said ‘plans are useless but planning is essential’.

Articulating energy descent

In my own trajectory about futures in Permaculture: Principles and Pathways Beyond Sustainability I had pinned my colours to the mast by clarifying the energy descent future assumptions behind permaculture as an adaptive pathway to futures of less (rather than more) energy and resources. Beyond being a pathway for radicals and adherents of voluntary frugality and minimum eco-footprint, I saw permaculture, in ethics and principles, if not strategies and techniques, as the pathway for humanity in general to gracefully adapt to non-negotiable energetic and ecological realities. 

As a result of that work, and especially the round-Australia speaking tour with Richard Heinberg in 2006, I was invited to contribute to an academic work on Urban Energy Transitions. My subject was the RetroSuburbia strategy for people and society to adapt to rapidly unfolding futures: retrofitting the built, biological and behavioural fields of their lives and kickstarting renewed and invigorated household and community non-monetary economies of self and collective provision. It was informed by historical examples of past adaptations to hard times and the unique opportunities created by generations of past affluence, especially excess building stock.

While my aim was catalysing enlightened self-interest at the household level, the justification for any acceptance in academic, policy, and governance circles would depend on how the ideas addressed the climate question driving the urban energy transition. My aim at the time was to balance this myopic focus on the modelled climate impacts of fossil fuels with the largely ignored or actively derided depletion issues that I and others recognised as reshaping the world almost on a daily basis. 

Future Scenarios: the over the horizon radar

Consequently, the manuscript for Urban Energy Transitions grew into a monster that passed the deadline for the book so I passed it to peak oil and permaculture activist Adam Grubb for review. Under the name Adam Fenderson, he was the founding editor of Energy Bulletin, an early online news aggradation service which was my main source of information on energy and environment in those years. Adam suggested the big picture near-term future scenarios aspect of the text needed publishing immediately, which he helped us do at the free access futurescenarios.org website which remains as a record of my take on how the intersections between Peak Oil and GHG emissions driven Climate Change might generate quite divergent scenarios over the following one to four decades. Over the ensuing years, my role as a futurist took off giving presentations and workshops mostly through permaculture, transition and kindred networks but more occasionally in academia and local government. In those workshops I outlined the characteristics and relationships between my four energy decent scenarios, Green Tech, Brown Tech, Earth Steward and Lifeboat, as well as relevant sub-scenarios for workshopping, such as oil supply crisis, bushfire, flood, and cyclone, property bubble burst etc. 

Sea level rise

While some sub-scenarios were inherently fickle and unpredictable in when and how they might occur, some, such as sea level rise, seemed no-brainers. If rising global average temperatures was the most fundamental prediction of all climate models, and there was strong evidence that the high latitudes were already warming more than those closer to the equator, then the ice melting from the Greenland ice sheet (for which there seemed to be strong evidence of acceleration) and Antarctica (for which the evidence was mixed), then a rise in sea levels was a simply physical result that didn’t require complex assumptions or calculations to model. Of course the variable most in question was how much melting would occur, which led to official estimates of 0.5 to 1 metres by century’s end, through to 5-10 metres by Hanson and other well-credentialled climate scientists. Even the lower figures would have dramatic impacts on vast numbers of people and much of the world’s most elaborate coastal infrastructure. Simple contour map models on the internet showed areas potentially affected.

With only the slightest of ironic pleasure, I would point to how the problem of flooded coastal apartment blocks might turn into fantastic substrates for a marine permaculture of seaweed, bivalves and other sea resources being harvested, dried and processed in the upper levels at least for the decades, if not centuries, before the concrete cancer from salt water threatened the structures.

In the absence of any serious policy change at state and federal government levels, some local governments were attempting to respond, just as some had done their own due diligence about peak oil in the absence of action from state or federal governments or international agencies. In my workshops, I speculated that a sell-off on upmarket coastal real estate, precipitated not by owners’ concerns about their luxury homes being flooded or damaged during their tenure, but more through the recognition that the value might decline rather than rise and thus other less vulnerable properties might be a better investment. 

In the context of what I recognised as a massively overheated property market, I imagined this sell-off of coastal real estate could trigger a broader decline, if not collapse, in the property market, all grist for the mill of my RetroSuburbia strategy. The sea level issue and the continuing robust prices for upmarket coastal real estate is an issue I will return to later in this essay series.

Several consistent patterns emerged from my Future Scenarios workshops here and elsewhere in the world:

• Firstly, it takes workshop participants a while to move beyond a sense of human agency and power in creating futures as a result of conscious, rational and co-ordinated human choices, to an understanding of them being emergent as a result of complex factors without conscious planning. 
• Secondly, the distinction between the rapid change that occurs in a crisis like a war and the meta-stability of any resulting scenarios that might persist for enough decades to develop some recognisable characteristics, takes some time for many participants to grasp. 
• Third, the idea that different scenarios could be unfolding simultaneously, not just in different countries but according to an organisational hierarchy from the household, community, bioregion or larger nation state, is not immediately understood.

Reflection

That there were no globally-scaled scenarios in my model reflected my interpretation of systems theory that such scenarios would, by definition, not be Energy Descent, but either Tech-Stability or Techno-Explosion scenarios within my larger framework (see ‘Futures Framework for RetroSuburbia’). I chose not to consider these because almost all other serious futures work is located in those territories. If all of this makes no sense, people can read my original Future Scenarios (2008) and/or later essays to understand the logic of my top-down macro systems interest in the climate change subject rather than the more specific predictions of the models, let alone the models themselves.