Since last years' Community Solution conference, world concern with climate change has grown at a truly unprecedented rate. A Stanford study earlier this year found that the percent of the population seriously concerned about global warming and climate change had gone from 16% to 33% in one year. This was a record number for speed of change compared to any other social issue they have studied in their history.

Two weeks ago, Al Gore and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) won the Nobel Peace Prize. It was appropriate that they received the peace prize because the combination of Peak Oil and climate change could well result in wars for resources as well as revolutions within countries. A couple of months ago a New York Times article quoted Al Gore as saying that he couldn't understand why there aren't rings of young people blocking bulldozers and preventing them from constructing coal fired power plants. What's implied is that in the pursuit of peace in the world there may need to be massive demonstrations to stop the process of building more and more machines to consume more and more fossil fuels and generate more and more CO₂. Next month the IPCC is to release an update to their February report that is rumored to show more concern than the very bleak February report.

There is still a question if what the Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) calls "regular oil" peaked in May 2005, a category that does not include natural gas liquids. Energy Watch of Germany announced a few days ago that Peak Oil occurred last year. Oil hit $92 a barrel today and a price of $100 may be very close. At the ASPO conference held in Ireland two months ago Dr. James Schlesinger, former Secretary of Energy under Carter, gave a talk saying "We are All Peakists now" noting that in his many contacts with oil company executives they acknowledged Peak Oil in private while continuing to mislead the people in public. This is basic to the corporate model – the corporate CEOs will decide when climate change and Peak Oil are to be discussed publicly.

Peak Oil and climate change are now worldwide issues. The only question is when key events occur and their severity. But the powers that be have yet to inform the people – in fact, they continue to try dis-inform them. Exxon-Mobil funded the anti-climate change people for a decade. Chevron has switched its ads from actually talking about the limits of oil resources to celebrating population growth and extolling the human spirit which can presumably rise above physical depletion of resources – acknowledging that they don't really have a plan but stating that it will be the giant corporations who will decide what to do. British Petroleum just paid a $300 million fine for price fixing and environmental crimes. Corporate disinformation to the America people is an accepted way of communication now. But the rich and powerful know the situation is severe, both in terms of depleting resources and in terms of climate change. And they are busy trying to figure out what to do about this – while maintaining the position that there is no problem or that technology will fix it.

It's important for us to understand how power operates in this country. We are manipulated by media to criticize the government, viewing it as inefficient and incompetent and supporting the underlying corporate goal to privatize everything. The government does not spend $250 billion a year in advertising – business does. The power in Washington is with the thousands of corporate lobbyists. It is the corporations like GM and Ford who have built gas guzzlers and fight the introduction of mileage standards. It is the oil and coal companies like Exxon and Peabody that have lied about the effects of energy on the environment and are against any carbon restrictions. The corporations rule the world and are responsible for the resources and climate crisis, not the government.

Community Solution has spent less and less time in our writings, seminars and conferences talking about the coming peaks of oil, gas, coal and uranium. The dye is cast on these subjects. And in reality, the ideas of oil or gas or coal peaking is less important today because it's becoming increasingly clear that we dare not burn all the fossil fuels still remaining in the ground. Peak Oil will affect us economically, that is, our material way of life. But climate change is a threat to our life itself. So we are looking at life-sustaining ways of being, not ways to find new fuels.

Two years ago the conference subtitle was "The Journey Home" and expressed how we viewed the need to return to the roots of an earlier time. And by roots I mean values and attitudes toward life. Last year the subtitle was "Beyond Energy Alternatives" pointing out that the continued focus on alternatives and renewable energy (hoping to continue the wasteful way of living) was not something on which the nation or people should focus its limited attention and resources. This year's theme is "Planning for Hard Times" and it recognizes that the government and business leadership are really not going to do something for us in the near or intermediate future.

That's one of the reasons we invited David Korten to be our keynote speaker tonight. Until we understand that the corporations have continually misled us about resources and environmental degradation in order that they can continue to create harmful products, we cannot make the systemic change that is necessary to create a low energy world. One of David's earlier books, When Corporations Rule the World, is a must read along with his latest book, The Great Turning. To make a successful transformation to a low energy world cannot happen as long as corporations maintain control of society.

Tomorrow I will open the morning session with a talk on the End of Industrialism and the Industrial Food System. For the last three years I have tended to focus on buildings and transportation. This year I finally realized that food is going to be at the core of what we do. It's the core of our life and it should be the core of our way of life. The modern food system has done more damage to people than cars and leaking houses since it has struck at our physical health. More and more people should be changing their diets as well as the ways they produce food.

Larry Halpern will follow with his talk on a low energy home retrofit and the personal changes he has made. Larry, and his wife Gail, are not just focusing on buildings. He is busy reconstructing his entire way of living. As I was preparing this I thought Larry would be a stand out. But I realized so many of our other speakers are living "energy frugally." They may or may not talk about their own experiences as Larry does. But so many of the people here are simply doing the work that needs to be done, not anxiously worrying about an unsatisfactory way of living.

Last year I presented a concept called the "Smart Jitney." There are articles on that in the book store for those who may be interested. It simply reflects the obvious solution of carpooling and increasing the number of people in every vehicle. We can talk about rapid transit but it is way too late for something that will take many decades to implement. So a convenient cell phone-based, safe, rideshare system that could be developed in a few years was proposed.

My biggest worry was that it would be too radical. Fortunately Bob Steinbach of the Miami Valley Regional Planning Commission heard of the concept and contacted me. He wanted to tell me that the seeds were already in place in our culture. This was a tremendous and welcome shock. There are already components of a ridesharing system available at the local and regional level. Something else we can get done without waiting for corporate permission and national government funding. I was thrilled with this and look forward to Bob's talk.

Next we will hear from Linda Wigington, a key player in the formation of an organization called Affordable Comfort or ACI. In January of this year I published a paper discussing the need to address the energy aspects of our 100 million homes, arguing that the green building movement is too little too late. In April I went to an ACI conference and found a group of people who working on introducing a German concept called "Passive retrofitting," a method of cutting energy use 80 percent in existing buildings. Linda was the leader in that activity. Later ACI invited 100 experts from around the country to a conference to formulate plans for deep retrofitting. I was part of that and a white paper that Linda wrote will be published soon in Home Energy magazine. Linda and her organization are taking the lead in this deep retrofitting effort of which the consumer is only beginning to be aware. She and I will attend the Second Annual Passive House conference next weekend in Illinois.

Sharon Astyk will talk about curtailment in practice. I use the term curtailment rather than conservation to communicate a need to make very big reductions in energy consumption. Sharon is a tremendous example for that. In her own life and in her years working in the third world she has developed a no nonsense attitude towards our paranoid fixation with "stuff." She is a person who finds great satisfaction in what some might call a simple way of living but which Wendell Berry points out is actually a very complex way of life. Wasting energy makes life simple. Conserving it requires thought and attention and good habits – a way of living that is complex in its patterns but frugal in its living.

We'll then break into some workshops which will include local community supported agriculture (CSA) farmers Jessica Bilecki, Kat Cline, Andrew Manieri, and Doug Christen.

I am always looking for innovative new thinkers in this great change – this great turning that is upon us. Two discoveries this year were Thomas Princen with his books, The Logic of Sufficiency and Confronting Consumption, along with Avner Offer, a British economist, who wrote The Challenge of Affluence. We can't get through this mess we have created with the way of thinking we have made for ourselves. We need not only new techniques but new thoughts and a new world view. This is core and the academic world of sociology is proposing new ways of looking at things. For example, they propose that frugality may not just be a virtue but also a most satisfying way to live.

Richard Heinberg, the leader of the Peak Oil awareness movement in the U.S. in my opinion will talk about Peak Everything. This is a very powerful book and like all of his it's a must read for people who want the history of how we got here and ideas of what kind of people we must become to deal with the crisis. Richard has spoken at all of our conferences, reflecting the point that he and Faith and I conceived of the idea for these conference in Paris at an early ASPO Europe conference.

Next Judy Wicks will describe a different economic system and way of organizing our lives and our goods and services. She offers a vision of strengthening ties between independent, community-rooted enterprises as an alternative to the corporate-controlled global economy. She co-founded the national Business Alliance for Local Living Economies (BALLE). Back home, she started the Sustainable Business Network of Greater Philadelphia, and White Dog Community Enterprises, a non-profit dedicated to building a local living economy. I had the pleasure of staying at Judy's wonderful city home above her fabulous restaurant last year when I gave a talk in Philadelphia last year. Just as we can discover ridesharing and conservation techniques in our culture we can discover people like Judy who have been decades ahead in designing new economic systems.

Megan Quinn Bachman of Community Solutions will close out the conference with a talk about curtailment and community as the most vital strategies to address Peak Oil and climate change. She'll explore systemic and personal changes in the areas of food, housing, and transportation, contrasting dangerous false solutions with viable options. She'll also describe the importance of community in both achieving large-scale energy reductions and as a vision of a more enriching way to live. Her talk is an inspirational call to action to implement what we've learned here in our lives and communities.

In addition, in one of the workshops, Jeanne Courtney and Faith Morgan will discuss the psychological and sociological issues dealing with making major lifestyle changes.

I hope you all enjoy the conference and learn from it. Community Solution is offering an important alternative to that of business-as-usual corporate-driven technology either the "black" version (more fossil fuels) or the "green" high-tech versions, all of which we support but none of which can sustain this level of consumption. We know it's not about simply cutting energy use – it's about creating a new society. Or, as David will point out, it's about a Great Turning and an Earth Community.

– Pat Murphy is the executive director of the Arthur Morgan Institute for Community Solutions, a non-profit based in Yellow Springs, Ohio, USA which provides knowledge and practices to support low-energy lifestyles, with a primary focus on reducing energy consumption in the household sectors of food, transportation and housing.