Localisation as a response to peal oil and climate change a sympathetic critique

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Localisation as a response to peal oil and
climate change a sympathetic critique

• Peter North
• Department of Geography,
• University of Liverpool

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The argument

• The need to respond to peak oil and climate
  change represents an end to the conditions that
  underpinned the twenty to thirty year period of
  globalisation
• Under globalisation, new communications
  technologies, cheap oil and externalised
  emissions, led to a global political economy
  based on a spatial fix of restoring
  capitalisms profitability by, where possible,
  relocating economic activity from high to low
  cost locations, with labour and environmental
  regulations seen as compromising efficiency.
• While the global economy has gone through a
  process of time-space compression (Harvey 1992),
  the need to cut emissions and reduce energy use
  means it now needs to go through a process of
  time-space re-extension where transport costs
  again become significant in terms of both finance
  and emissions.
• Currently very cheap goods produced through
  globalised production networks will become, and
  remain, more expensive. The currently near will
  become further away, again, in a process of
  reverse globalisation or localisation.

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Local economic development the current
consensus

• Cities must see themselves as like businesses and
  win jobs and resources.
• Specialisation, Insertion into global economy
• Infrastructure development to win footloose
  transnational investment.
• Handle the challenges of the BRICs
• Knowledge/information/cultural economy.
• Place marketing, festivals.
• Does this meet the needs of all citizens?

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• Its like Liverpool winning the Champions
  League, Everton winning the Double and the
  Beatles reforming all on the same day and
  Steven Spielberg coming to make a Hollywood
  blockbuster about it.
• Chief Executive Mike Storey, 23rd June 2003

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The new consensus ignores

• The need to avoid dangerous climate change,
  meaning that some activities we currently take
  for granted are deeply unsustainable
• the end of the era of cheap and plentiful oil,
  with the knock on that will have for
  carbon-fuelled economies, cheap transport, less
  long-distance tourism, and the need to focus more
  on local production of that which can be produced
  locally. 
• The credit crunch?

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Unsustainable? the irresponsible face of
capitalism?
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global warming

• Warming is unequivocal, as observed from global
  temperature measurements, widespread melting snow
  and ice, and rising sea levels (IPCC 2007)
• Even if emissions are stabilised, global
  temperature rises of 0.2C a decade are expected.
• With emissions set to rise its is "very likely"
  the increase will be twice that - 0.4C higher by
  2030.
• Adaptation and mitigation.
• By the end of this century, temperatures could be
  between 1.8 and 6.4C higher than in 1999.
• Anything above 2C is dangerous climate chaos.
• Need an 80 cut in emissions by 2030.
• Technological or radical, anti-systemic response?

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Feedbacks, thresholds and sleeping giants

• Warm climate may increase rate of permafrost
  melting and deep ocean ice hydrate release, so
  increasing release of methane
• Greenland Icecap melting may speed up and become
  irreversible leading to 7m sea level rise.
• Runaway Carbon dynamics. Warmer atmospheres lead
  to more plant growth, more CO2 release biomass
  becomes a source of carbon, not a sink all
  positive feedback.
• This could bump us from uncomfortable but
  survivable 2o warming to a catastrophic 5o, or
• Warmer atmosphere may lead to melting of ice-caps
  and disruption of Gulf Stream leading to colder
  Europe.

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• There were many that set up boothes and
  standings upon the ice, as fruit-sellers,
  victuallers, that sold beere and wine, shoemakers
  and a barbers tent

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Peak Oil
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Peak Oil

• Peak Oil is NOT We have run out of oil
• Peak Oil means we are burning (much) more oil
  than we are discovering.
• Peak Oil means the end of cheap, plentiful oil.
• The oil price is also affected by
• Extraction and prospecting technologies.
• Demand from the BRICs and the global middle
  class.
• Refining capacity.
• Geopolitical events.
• Stock market expectations and speculation.
• This means we can expect considerable short term
  price volatility, but the trend is clear.

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Its not just oil and climate change
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Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Change

• taken together, climate change and peak oil
  make a nearly airtight argument. We should
  reduce our dependency on fossil fuels for the
  sake of future generations and the rest of the
  biosphere but even if we choose not to because
  of the costs involved, the most important of
  those fossil fuels will soon become more scarce
  and expensive anyway, so complacency is simply
  not an option Heinberg (2007)
• http//www.energybulletin.net/node/24529

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double whammy or false apocalypse?

• This is not the first time doom has been augured,
  and did not arrive.
• Real problems are rarely anticipated.
• Life is lived forward and understood backward.
• We worry about the future, constantly.
• Technological optimism and ecological
  modernisation are alternative paths .
• .. As is barbarism or collapse.

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Run for the hills?
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• I don't see that the survivalist response is
  really any kind of a realistic response to this
  situation. One might see it as some kind of an
  option for a very small number of people in a
  country with lots of space like the US, but here
  in the UK, your choices are somewhat limited! Not
  too much gleaning to be had on Dartmoor or
  Snowdonia! I see this as a challenge that is
  about coming back to each other, learning how to
  talk and work together again. When you talk to
  people who lived through the Second World War,
  you hear about how once the petrol was rationed,
  what became important was the people around you,
  the community, its resources and skills. I think
  we have to focus on our communities, and on
  preparing them for this inevitable and historic
  transition, because without them, we have no
  chance at all. (Hopkins 2007)

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Four scenarios

• Agree and ignore Business as usual last man
  left standing.
• Technologically optimistic ecological
  restructuring. New jobs from environmental
  industries is the new win/win.
• Localisation a thirty year process of
  developing the capacity of local economies to
  meet more needs locally..
• Lifeboats. Invest in border control and
  surveillance.

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OK so what would YOU do different?????
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Progressive adaption

• Not New Orleans or Paris.
• Local, International and intergenerational
  environmental justice,
• Lifeboats or safe havens?
• Sharing limited resources.
• Collective, not individual adaptation.
• Adaptation and quietism.
• Climate restructuring for labour?

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Progressive mitigation

• Ecological modernisation and smart growth -
  specialise in the new green technologies. Jobs
  overblown?
• Low carbon collective services so its easy to
  be green.
• A new role for the private sector.
• A local green new deal.
• Localisation.

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What is localisation?

• Making location decisions with emissions and fuel
  prices properly factored in.
• Working with local people to establish new
  economic activities.
• Starting with local needs, local skills, local
  aspirations not the need to develop exports.
• Stressing, or insisting on, local control.
• Reduce leakage of money out of the locality.
• Build community-owned assets.
• Not seeking integration into the world market
  but self reliance.

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Localization

• Localization does not mean walling off the
  outside world. It means nurturing locally-owned
  businesses which use local resources sustainably,
  employ local workers at decent wages and serve
  primarily local consumers. It means becoming more
  self sufficient, and less dependent on exports.
  Control moves from the boardrooms of distant
  corporations, and back to the community where it
  belongs.
• Shuman (20006)

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Localisation

• Some imagine the aim of economic localization
  is complete self-sufficiency at the village
  level. In fact, localisation does not mean
  everything being produced locally, nor does it
  mean an end to trade. It simply means creating a
  better balance between local, regional, national
  and international markets. It also means that
  large corporations should have less control, and
  communities more over what is produced and that
  trading should be fair and to the benefit of both
  parties. Localization is not about isolating
  communities from other cultures, but about
  creating a new, sustainable and equitable basis
  on which they can interact.
• Ed Mayo (in Douthwaite 1996ix)

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Local rather than global

• I sympathise with those who would minimize,
  rather than with those who would maximize
  economic entanglements among nations. Ideas,
  knowledge, science, hospitality, travel these
  are things that of their nature should be
  international. But let goods be homespun whenever
  it is reasonably and conveniently possible, and
  above all, let finance be predominantly
  national.
• JM Keynes, National
• Self-Sufficiency 1933

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• modern mass production processes can be
  performed in most countries and climates with
  almost equal proficiency
• As an economy develops, tradable goods become a
  smaller part of national wealth compared with
  houses, face-to-face personal services and local
  amenities which cannot be traded internationally.
  
• Decadent international but individualistic
  capitalism is not a success. It is not beautiful,
  it is not just, it is not virtuous, and it
  doesnt deliver the goods.

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"What is happening in credit markets today is a
huge blow to the credibility of the Anglo-Saxon
model of transactions-orientated financial
capitalism." (Wolf, 2007)
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Economic arguments

• The North preaches fair trade, practices
  protectionism.
• The South is structurally disadvantaged.
• Value is added by processing, not producing raw
  materials and exporting.
• In an open system wealth moves from poor
  people/places to profitable and rich ones.
• More diverse jobs are created by many small,
  local businesses than by large multinationals.
• Local multipliers and supportive local
  networks/ecosystems generate wealth.
• Infant protection vs invasive species.
• Mature firms are more locally dependent than they
  admit they cant easily move.

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• Free trade for a country which has become
  industrial, whose population can and does live in
  cities, whose people do not mind preying on other
  nations and, therefore, sustain the biggest navy
  to protect their unnatural commerce, may be
  economically sound (though, as the reader
  perceives, I question its morality). Free trade
  for India has proved her curse and held her in
  bondage.
• Mohandas K Gandhi

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Ecological arguments

• Trade often means moving similar goods around,
  discounting externalised ecological costs and
  dependent on cheap oil (ignoring social issues).
• Global transport is responsible for 13 of
  emissions, only area set to grow from Kyoto
  baseline (1990).
• 21 of UK emissions embedded in goods produced
  elsewhere in poorer environmental standards, so
  more emissions (before transport).
• Jet aircraft even more damaging 4 to 12 times
  the impact of equivalent land-based emissions.
• Diversity in the case of crash rather than
  dependent monocultures .
• Peak Oil/Global Heating means no choice?

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Democratic arguments

• Local economies are more convivial based on
  trust and community, not economic rationality.
• Businesses that live and trade locally will be
  more ecologically and socially responsible.
• Local control is more democratic.
• Multinationals have no commitment to place.
• Local jobs meet local needs, based on local
  specifics/advantages.
• Building local networks increases community
  feeling and commitment.
• Increasing local incomes.
• Retain local population.
• Retain local culture and distinctiveness.
• Comparative advantage is always a race to the
  bottom.

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Localisation and scale

• Localisation is a relative term. It means
  different things to different people and depends
  on context. For example, your local TV station is
  likely to be further away than your local corner
  shop. For some of us local refers to our street.
  For others it means our village, town, city or
  region. However we think of it, local usually
  connects to a group of people and the things they
  depend on whether shops, health services,
  schools or parks. Think of local as that
  surrounding environment and network of facilities
  that is vital to our quality of life and
  well-being.
• Woodin and Lucas (200469)

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• By localization, we mean a set of
  interrelated and self reinforcing policies that
  actively discriminate in favour of the local. In
  practice, what constitutes the local will
  obviously vary from country to country. Some
  countries are big enough to think in terms of
  increased self reliance within their own borders,
  while smaller countries would look first to a
  grouping of their neighbours. This approach
  provides a political and economic framework for
  people, community groups and businesses to
  rediversify their own economies Localisation
  involves a better-your neighbour supportive
  internationalism where the flow of ideas,
  technologies, information, culture, money and
  goods has, as its end goal, the protection and
  rebuilding of national economies worldwide. Its
  emphasis is not competition for the cheapest, but
  co-operation for the best.
• Woodin and Hines (200430)

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immanent and intentional localisation

• immanent Localisation localisation as a
  pragmatic and sensible reform in response to peak
  oil and climate change, and achievable without a
  major transformation of the power relations of a
  market economy. Supply and distribution chains
  shorten and are decarbonised in response to
  market signals, but the logic of capitalism is
  unchanged. New business opportunities in climate
  change.
• intentional localisation peak oil and climate
  change mean that neoliberal global capitalism is
  doomed and the current crisis offers the chance
  to build a better world. Localisation as both
  necessary and desirable the climate and peak oil
  crises could lead to a more human-scale,
  steady-state, convivial, ecological and
  egalitarian society than highly dynamic but
  unstable, unequal, consumption-driven and
  unsustainable capitalism.

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Reversing globalisation

• Globalization is reversible. Higher energy
  prices are impacting transport costs at an
  unprecedented rate. So much so, that the cost of
  moving goods, not the cost of tariffs, is the
  largest barrier to global trade today. In fact,
  in tariff-equivalent terms, the explosion in
  global transport costs has effectively offset all
  the trade liberalization efforts of the last
  three decades. Not only does this suggest a major
  slowdown in the growth of world trade, but also a
  fundamental realignment in trade patterns.
• (CIBC World Markets 2008)

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• With brutal efficiency, the oil price is
  beginning to duff up a monster of the 20th
  century globalisation. The extraordinary rise
  in the price of crude oil is wrecking outsourced
  business models everywhere and distance from your
  customer is no longer merely a matter of dull
  logistics. Whether you are selling coiled steel
  or cut flowers, the cost of transport is a
  problem.
• (Time World Business Briefing 2008)
• But just as globalisation was limited by
  stickiness (Cox 1997), so will reversing
  globalisation.
• A new regional global economy manufacturing to
  low wage areas closer to their markets?
• The weightless, service economy that does not
  require propinquity (Friedman 2004).

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Coca Cola in China

• Think local, act local ethos.
• From importing to local production.
• Local managers encouraged to develop local
  products for local tastes and markets.
• Diverse cultures do not allow for
  standardisation/McDonaldisation.
• Advertising locally controlled.
• Finance and assistance to develop localised
  sourcing. Only 2 imported.
• http//www.chinabusinessreview.com/public/0107/wei
  sert.html

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The green region

• There are new opportunities for integrated
  regions meeting more of their needs, minimising
  waste and transport costs.
• Cradle to cradle production.
• Waste becomes an input.
• Local, supportive co-operative networks fostering
  innovation and endogenous development.
• New greencollar jobs.
• (Hudson 2007, nef 2008, Friedman 2008)

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The Simpler Way - Trainer

• We need to convert our cities into thriving
  regional economies which produce most of what
  they need from local resources. They would
  contain many small enterprises, such as the local
  bakery, enabling most of us to get to work by
  bicycle or on foot. Much of our honey, eggs,
  crockery, vegetables, furniture, fruit, fish and
  poultry production could come from households and
  backyard businesses engaged in craft and hobby
  production. It is much more satisfying to
  produce most things in craft ways rather than in
  industrial factories. There would be many little
  firms throughout and close to settlements, some
  cooperatives but many could be private firms.
  They would mostly produce for local use, not
  export from the region. Market gardens could be
  located throughout the cities, e.g. on derelict
  factory sites and beside railway lines.

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The simpler city

• We should convert one house on each block to
  become a neighbourhood workshop, including a
  recycling store, meeting place, surplus exchange
  and library.
• There will be far less need for transport, so dig
  up many roads, greatly increasing city land area
  available for community gardens, workshops,
  ponds, forests etc.
• Most of the neighbourhood could become an "edible
  landscape" crammed with long-lived, largely
  self-maintaining productive plants, fruit and nut
  trees.
• A high level of local energy self-sufficiency,
  through use of alternative technologies and
  renewable energy sources such as the sun and the
  wind.
• There would also be many varieties of animals
  living in our neighbourhoods, including an entire
  fishing industry based on tanks and ponds. Many
  materials can come from the communal woodlots,
  fruit trees, ponds, meadows, etc. These would
  provide many free goods.

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Problems with localisation the neoliberal
critique.

• Since rise of capitalism autarky is not serious.
• In the 1930s this lead to competitive rounds of
  retaliatory protectionism and the depression.
• The South should be able to trade its way to
  prosperity we need fair trade, not
  localisation.
• Trade barriers limit growth.
• Trade barriers are an authoritarian limit on
  freedom.
• Global competition means the best ideas win out.
• Paying more for expensive locally produced goods
  rather than the most competitive thats
  inefficient
• Pays producers at expense of poor consumers.

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Krugmans trade theory

• Even similar countries import AND export similar
  goods why?
• Economies of scale, and
• Consumers love of choice are competing tensions.
• With no trade, economies of scale would benefit
  the larger economy. Wages rise.
• People move, creating a core/periphery problem.
  Will localisers ban migration?

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The current danger of protection

• As our nations carry out this plan we must
  ensure the actions of one country do not
  contradict or undermine the actions of
  another,""In our interconnected world no nation
  will gain by driving down the fortunes of
  another. We're in this together, we will come
  through it together.""I'm confident that the
  world's major economies can overcome the
  challenges we face," he said. "There have been
  moments of crisis in the past when powerful
  nations turned themselves against each other,
  started to wall themselves off from the world.
  This time is different. George W Bush, 11th
  October 08.

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Left critiques

• Small is not necessarily beautiful.
• Community obscures local dominations.
• A Smithian local economy is utopian. Capitalism
  requires growth.
• Who is the localiser?
• Liberal or apolitical conception of change.
• Post political?
• Militant particularism?
• uneven endowments
• uneven development.

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• self-sustaining communities cannot produce all
  the things (people) need unless they return to
  a backbreaking way of village life which
  historically always prematurely aged its men and
  women with hard work and allowed them very little
  time for political life beyond the confines of
  the community itself.
• No community can hope to achieve economic
  autarky, nor should it try to do so. Divested
  of the cultural cross fertilization that is often
  a product of economic intercourse, the
  municipality tends to shrink into itself and
  disappear into its own civic privatism Small is
  not necessarily beautiful

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• We were aware of a senior Marxist geographer
  sitting in the back row, listening attentively.
  Near the end of the question and answer period,
  after some urging, he made his intervention. Our
  material was interesting, he said, but it wasnt
  compelling. We failed to acknowledge the power
  of global economic dynamics and the force of
  political conservatism that could squash
  alternative economic experiments of the kind we
  had described. We seemed oblivious to the many
  historical examples of local endeavors that had
  ended in disbandment, defeat, and disgrace.
• an incredulous Pacific historian derided us
  Do you really think that by earning 1,000 a
  year from selling village craft goods to
  international tourist resorts, rural Indonesian
  households will be able to prevent their
  daughters from being exploited in the Nike
  factory across the Straits?
• Gibson-Graham (2002)

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• George Monbiots generally excellent book Heat
  does not show is how to create the agency, the
  active mass force, that can compel the
  governments of the world's most polluting states
  to implement such measures. He puts forward a
  generally excellent political programme for a
  political force that does not exist. (Harman
  2007)
• we need a mass movement to compel those in power
  to change track - or replace them with people
  that will (Neale 2008)

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Agency

• Immanent localisation business decisions,
  state/local regulation.
• NGO-led lobbying.
• Strong localisation CRAGs
• Direct Action.
• Zero carbon Communities.
• Transition Towns.
• A new mass movement?

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Geographical critiques.

• Localisation privileges one scale, seen as a
  container, or part of a wider nested assemblage.
• If space is constructed relationally, can you cut
  a bit off? Where does the local stop and the
  global begin?
• If its a flowing network that has temporarily
  solidified ,does it make sense to try to capture
  it?
• The local is produced through global
  influences, and the global is produced in
  localities.
• Some local spaces have a global reach/influence
  and hence global responsibilities eg the City.
• The local trap is this the best scale to act?
• dont we do this? Getting a baby sitter?

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Conclusion

• Is a dichotomy useful? Is it a spectrum?
• Focus on the network, not the scale?
• Some networks are heavy, some more weightless
  what is the nature of weight in terms of fuel
  burned?
• Emissions and oil consumption will matter more
  than price in economic decisions.
• Doing things more locally, not discounting
  emissions and oil usage, is necessary. But
• Some forms of localisation break the limits of
  the (capitalist) system, some dont.
• The gift economy or allotments with machine guns?
• How necessary, or attractive, is intentional
  localisation?

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.. but still a limited appeal, man?
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• Pity the residents of what New Labour
  politicians think of as the strong and joyful
  ecotowns, they will also be the subject of
  unprecedented scrutiny by quango folk who, in a
  holier-than-thou spirit, will check on just how
  "eco" ecotown folk will be. Thermographic cameras
  will be used to check which homes lose heat, says
  Cabe, the government's ever-expanding Commission
  for Architecture and the Built Environment. Will
  Cabe wardens be sent to patrol ecotown
  cul-de-sacs squealing "Shut that door" and "Put
  that bloody tungsten light out"? This busybody
  quango also plans to monitor the ecological
  footprint of the diet of 100 randomly selected
  residents, as well as calculating C02 emissions
  from transport within any given ecotown.
  Ecotownies partial to lamb cutlets and to cream
  on their strawberries might yet be watched as
  closely as al-Qaida suspects. (Glancey 2008)