book called peak everything a few years ago and our work is really looking at the intersection of a number of the issues that we're dealing with we have the unfortunate you know circumstance i think right now we're  dealing with not just one crisis but actually a multitude of crises that we have to look at now only concurrently but look at how they actually influence one another so we try to take a sort of systemic view of these issues so yes energy issues and constraints around energy is a core focus for us primarily i think because we feel that energy in the discovery and use of fossil fuels has really been the driving force behind certainly the world that we know today but also changes that were  within the energy system are going to ripple out and have a lot of profound impacts on other systems that we rely upon our food system health care trade all kinds of things but we also look at things like  you know public health issues in sustainability around that we look at food systems in and of themselves transportation and the whole range of issues that we even have one fellow who's a neuroscientist to look said human evolutionary behavior and why we make decisions the way we do a book called american mania which is really about what drives us to consume and need ever more things you know to fill our lives so pick peak oil means also peak food and you know it's interesting to think of peak oil as a so much we are on top of that you know that are hitting the maximum amount of oil that we can pull out of the planet easily world and we need to think about a post carbon world and you know one way or another we're going to be in a post carbon world in fifty or one hundred years and you know we can do that gently or we can do that you know in a rough way i think you know  population we're now at seven billion people and growing exponential growth in terms of economic activity exponential growth in terms of our consumption of resources and energy just being one of those resources and so we've been on this kind of crazy ride for the last couple hundred years and we're going through a transition you know in that in that trajectory we're we've bumping up against limits energy being one very key element but there are other limits like for example the climate change which is really the limits the ability to handle you know the the emissions that we're putting out into the planet and so the question i think that we're faced with is not should we transition should we have a world should we live more sustainably but really how will we manage that transition and and i think that that's a that's a reality that people are showing to wake up to i think th production fast enough perhaps are fast enough although it's unfortunate that it takes these things but you know events like hurricanes say in the you know hitting the eastern seaboard just you know a very short period of time you know after another hurricane had had hit that area you know massive drought spread across this country many people sense that around climate i think that the that we're seeing impacts right now and over the last poll was but it's it's somewhere around eighty percent of americans really recognize that climate changes is a real threat you know now does that translate into direct action does it translate into meaningful legislation on the national or international level  it translate into people really significantly changing their behavior hasn't you know obviously you know right now as we're speaking there's a at the they climb some of that they do every years cop eighteen this time and they're there doing it in and cutter but you do not hear very much about it in the news in fact i haven't heard very many environmental activists talking about it because there's just really no traction there you know i think that  so on the one hand no we're not acting fast enough though the evidence continues to mount and i think that people are increasingly recognizing that this is a significant and severe threat but when you look at it on the on the local level i think there are a lot of communities who cannot put a bubble around their community and protect themselves from climate change but are recognizing that they need to sort of take these matters into their own hands and it will be a really interesting  test i think for a community like new york city to think about how they build you know rebuild after an event like this recognizing that these kinds of catastrophic weather events are more likely to happen in the future do they rebuild you know the way  that new york had been before did they think about building differently you know and and so the more and more people are experiencing these kinds of shocks i think the more people recognize that we are not dealing with business as usual anymore you know so we're in that transition and then the question is how do we manage that and in a big part of our work is to try to help people understand the true nature of the challenges that we're dealing with and that unfortunately there are not easy answers but area publications or certainly one of the ways that we try to help build awareness and educate people so we've been publishing books you know regularly every year we do publish reports where actually we're going to report right now looking very critically in a lot of detail at the shale gas quote unquote revolution the world hearing about and and also looking at oil which you know a lot of people are aware of but there's international energy agency just you know last week came out with a report claiming that the united states is going to pass saudi arabia as the world's biggest oil producer you know by by two thousand and twenty and so we're doing reports kind of look very critically at you know is this true will we be able to you know increase our energy independence or energy security through these domestic resources gas and and shale oil and the net energy well net energy is a big issue and it's something that a lot of people are not aware of you know so if you think about you know talking about peak oil so this story of oil in very simple terms is is that the united states used to be the world's biggest oil producer by far is actually the world's biggest oil exporter we were you know we store you know than that in top three in the world right now but the picture of oil production has changed pretty significantly you know everybody has a picture of the beverly hillbillies in their mind you know you you you drill and then you get this huge you know blowout and and suddenly you're rich and and for some people that was what the world discovery stage was like  oil production now in the u s is a very different picture you know when we had the b p oil spill in the gulf of mexico a couple years ago what we didn't hear a lot of talk about was very what i think is a very simple question and that is why were we drilling down eighteen thousand feet in the first place you know and that is because the cheap and easy stuff you know has basically been picked you know and that means that the energy resources that we have to go after now are of lower quality they're harder to get to and we have to exert a lot more effort a lot more capital and a lot more energy to actually get energy out and that's what the concept of net energy is  in the early days you know kinetic energy of of oil production was one hundred plus to one which means that for every barrel of oil we had to put in we would get one hundred barrels out and that's the reason why we you know had the happy motoring era that we did in the united states we built the highway system we speak no build the sprawling suburbs because we had an abundance of the stuff in the just the sheer amount of energy wealth that we got was so tremendous but now it's much lower than that and when you look at things like tar sands which is something that is is an increasing concern particular for climate activists and others concerned about environmental impacts you know the energy return and energy invested of  sands is very low you know one to three yeah something like that i mean it's it's very but it's you know magnitudes you know lower than than the energy return that we used to get you know and and that is in a nutshell is is the oil you know the concept of peak oil is really when you get as you said maximum production and then you are at that top in decline we've been on a plateau now in terms of world well production you know for the last half decade a little bit longer and  and the oil industry is doing everything they can to go after these more marginal harder to get place to keep to keep production up but that's in the face of a lot of depletion you know of of  emitted into that a sphere is just going to wreak more havoc and we cannot keep burning the stuff the way we've been burning it we need to start living in the ground yeah but the thing that i think people have to understand is that we've built this entire world based upon those energy resources you know and it's been in investment of trillions of dollars and decades and decades and decades and and so transitioning away from fossil fuels is not a plug and play type of switch you can't unplug coal or unplug the oil well particular because will is a very difficult thing to substitute in terms of other liquid fuels you can't just employ those things out  saying there's no way that we can replace all the energy we get from fossil fuels with any combination of hydro and solar and what have you there you know that's the thing about energy is that energy there's different qualities to these things you have to look in searching for america sort of didn't now assess of those eighteen different energy resources around ten different criteria and those criteria have to do with things like you know the distribution of that the location of it the environmental impacts you know the energy which i mean g invested in and like i said we will for example in very easy to transport very energy dense you know  there are just certain characteristics about it we didn't have to put in all the effort to actually i mean nature did this for us you know over millions and millions of years you know our effort has been takes tracked it out of the ground you know how many man hours in a barrel oh in a barrel it's it's the equivalent of about five hundred thousand dollars worth of human labor range and if you if you pay someone you know twenty dollars an hour or a king full time you know it's it's just  a you know we complain about gas prices but a gallon of gasoline is a is the equivalent of about you know six weeks or so of hard human labor you know and so we can  we can rail against the fossil fuel industry and there's lots of things really against and particularly the way that they are have made very concerted efforts a pool lock you know significant policies  reducing our consumption frankly because as as you just said we don't see any viable scenario where we're going to be able to continue on this this trajectory that we've been on in terms of ever increasing consumption of energy and we've got we can't forget you know a lot of people in the rest of the world china india other places in developing nations that while the same standard of living that we have you know and we the there are simply not sustain that for a lot of reasons but there's not enough fossil fuel energy or renewable energy to go around to be able to allow that to happen you know so we have to really look at that and so we promote we promote  station as a strategy which means think communities thinking about how the kid you know in this is a strategy both to reduce our dependence and our impacts on the environment the  climate but also to mitigate against scarcity and shocks to the energy system so reloaders ations a strategy to try to sources much of our food from local sources our energy  in other services and goods so we have been publishing a series of books sort of look at ways of people who are doing that when when you look at the situation that we're in and we read and talk a lot about this stuff you can get very despondent about you know the pickle that we're in the one area that i feel a lot of hope is when i look out there in the landscape of people working very hard in places like berkeley you know to take matters into their own hands and there they're doing it with a lot of hard working creativity and do those scale right now they don't scale you know this these efforts are still pretty marginal i mean organic food is one of four percent or some like that of the of the food system and that's with a lot of  investment in a lot of where this but these are these are important places to start and certainly the place that individuals like us can start so we really are trying to help people recognize through the most promising models that are out there and we emphasize community scale because we don't think that it's very viable for people to sort of hunker down board up their houses or head for the hills and then try to withstand the shock  to transition their communities away from fossil fuels and the transition movement started in the in the u k i was started by a man named rob hopkins as one of our fellows who worked with some students  first in kinsale ireland to sort of look at how could they develop a plan for how they would really drastically reduce the community's dependence and use of fossil fuels and then he ended up relocating to town and in england called tautness and it instituted this this process and developed basically a whole methodology in approach for how community can engage its members in this point in this process with the goal of ultimately developing what they called an energy descent action plan but the process i think has been the model has been a real inspiration to people and has been picked up i'm not even sure how many countries it's in probably a couple dozen countries and in the us now probably one hundred twenty or so transition towns of started i think the part of the appeal to for the transition of the transition movement is that it's very participatory you know it through the belief and in transition at its heart is that the future can be better without fossil fuels it doesn't have to be a deficit focus isn't have to be driven by fear it could be driven by a belief that if you unleash the creativity of the people in the community and really tap the assets that exist within the community that these communities can create a future that's better than the one we have right now and i think that there's a lot of evidence that greater consumption of resources and kind of the rat race you know that we are that we are surrounded by you know the feeling people who are making people happy i think that a lot of people it was interesting there was an article actually in l magazine of all places a couple years ago about the transition movement and and i spoke with the woman who wrote it you just talk about her own experience of getting familiar with transition and and i spoke to her afterwards just to get her sense of what the reaction was right because elle readers these are who women who are reading about fashion and all these kinds of things might not in this would be your typical you know transition or types and and so i was curious i'm sure we got a really very strong reaction and response from people in the thing that people responded to was not about climate change or peak oil which were you know the sort of the two pillars that transition the transition movements trying to respond to wasn't about that it was about the fact that they were really intrigued by this idea of building community and i think people really feeling a loss of community  so we have a national hub that's actually based here in northern california and a number of all the organization post coming into to we actually had a program it was called the relocalization that work that i talking about people who will tell you my climate change engine people were asking what they could do and and we were promoting the idea relocalization so they were groups are just sort of naturally formed to try to think about it how to tackle these issues and so we're providing support for those groups and then one transition emerged you know again first in the u k and then and then robert a book called the transition handbook and we're hearing up actually from members of the relocalization network and others that they were really inspired by this model felt like it was something that is sort of a template that they could use it was that we felt that it was it was better for us to sort of throw our support behind that emerging movement here in the united states than to have a separate network so we are going to try to funding and try to help sort of get that the the u s movement sort of off the ground so how does a town start to be a transit you know usually big go through what's called  mulling face so there's in the u s as i mentioned there are probably a hundred twenty or so official transition issues but there are double that in terms of commuter molly you know and again these are driven by people who hear about transition from one way or another you know from friends you know the communities from film screenings or whatever it is that draws them you know to transition and usually what happens is they they initiate some advance you know they they  people explore some of these topics to see if there's any any energy within the community to try to develop this thing and and then initiating a group was formed which is usually a core group of members that  say you know and again these are all volunteers people doing this on you know kind of on top of of their regular lives but come together to you know think about ok how do we first build awareness and i think most transition issues focus on that first they think they focus on doing a benz to build awareness about these issues to promote the transition model and try to create enough energy and excitement in the community to eventually do what's called agreed on the issue which is usually a public event here really to say here we've arrived we've got this this new transition issue formed here and and then eventually there are working groups that are formed you know different transition issues take a different form and there's not  disease sort of blueprint for it but oftentimes there are some structured thinking you know i think we're going to yeah i mean the transition like it like i said the transition network transition us and transition network in the u k had developed tons of resources for people so there are things that they can they can actually implement you know in terms of project ideas and there's also a a lot of resources in terms of following the steps that were there not really you know things around building awareness the formation of working groups you know doing great in the leashing these kinds of things so there's there's activities i would say a lot of the transition issues have have kind of followed and replicated in their own communities but you know that get together you know so they're in various states you know in terms of how far they've come in and what their focus is a lot of them focus on food as kind of a primary way of getting getting people engaged and it's also something that's very tactile and  and is a great community builder so we've seen a lot of food projects you know spring you know the transition is visibility a problem sometimes for sure i mean it's always a problem you know and in the depends again on the community that you're in you know  so and they face different issues i mean so there's a transition berkeley and i think i'd you know i don't i don't speak for them but i think that transition berkeley's dealing with a different reality than a group like transition sandpoint idaho you know which is that berkeley has you know wonderfully hugh no real rich community of environmentalists you know organizations other grassroots groups working on these issues so there's there's a rich landscape of people doing sustainability work and so for transition for transition to come in in a community like berkeley i would think it's more about being a convener than it is about recreating something from scratch whereas a community like the transition same point has a lot you know in some ways in easier you know playing field to work on be because you know they're kind of the first gaming cat in town let's say but they also have to do a lot more legwork in terms of just education and awareness and those kinds of things you know so the issues are very you know and there are transition in los angeles that's a much different animal that's a huge metropolitan area you know and so their challenges are very different you know so it's kind of hard to say that there's a one to one pattern that that's emerged rolled now sure it is this are also feed into the food sovereignty movement it does i mean we you know food sovereignty is something that i would say local food is something that a lot of people have been gravitating towards for a number of reasons you know some people are focused on food sovereignty because of  social justice issues you know and some people are focused on it because of the concern about about energy in peak oil and in the reliance on the food system to to to fossil fuel inputs or climate change so people coming to it from a lot of different perspectives a lot of people are focused on it from a health perspective you know so this yes i mean i think people are coming to this kind of work for different reasons and i think part of our work a postcard an institute i think transition to as you do this a little bit as well and that is to play on the passions of the people in the motivations of the people what's driving them you know to act but then trying to connect that you know into a more systemic understanding of the of the issues in connecting the dots so that that strategies are really looking at the interplay between things you know water and food water food and energy local jobs you know how does that really to look food systems you know how do we ensure that we can get young farmers who desperately need to be able to earn a living wage you know doing this work can they get land those kinds of issues you know so they all they all sort of come together and i think what's really needed is is people to be connecting those dots good well sure we have about a minute left if someone's watching the show and they want to help the post karen institute how can they do that to your website if you take donations our website is post carbon dorg out also suggest that people check at the website we just launched called resilience dot org which has a huge  of articles really and so for us is that we post new ones every day but also has a directory of groups working all over the the u s and abroad on these issues and a lot of resources that we can point to gether in terms of how people can go and