The threat to our climate is becoming graver with each passing year. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the decade from 2000-2009 was the warmest on record. Well-known climatologist James Hansen says, “If humanity wishes to preserve a planet similar to that on which civilization developed and to which life on Earth is adapted, paleo-climate evidence and ongoing climate change suggest that CO₂ [in the atmosphere] will need to be reduced from its current 385 ppm [parts per million] to at most 350 ppm.”

That means that in order to have an equitable world decline in consumption, Americans will need to cut their CO₂ emissions (and thus fossil fuel energy use) by 90 percent by the year 2050, or about 3-4 percent per person per year. As the graph at right shows, we in the U.S. need to go from approximately 20 metric tons of CO₂ per person per year, to just 1 metric ton. As the world’s largest emitter of greenhouse gases, we must not only make the largest cuts, we must lead the way.

A worldwide peak in oil production (Peak Oil) is a proposal first formulated in the 1950s that stated oil extraction would plateau due to limited sources, after which production would slow and begin an inevitable decline. “The International Energy Agency (IEA) acknowledged Peak Oil in its 2008 and 2009 Annual Report. The IEA estimates Peak Oil will occur by 2020 unless major new discoveries are found. The Association for the Study of Peak Oil thinks Peak Oil will occur in 2010 or 2012.” Other groups also put the date somewhere between 2010 and 2020. (Read a Q&A on Peak Oil here.)

Even companies that have the most investments in oil, and the financiers who invest in oil exploration, are giving off clear signals that they know Peak Oil is coming. While companies like Shell, ExxonMobil and BP have posted record profits in the last few years, these same companies are spending less and less on finding new oil, as the cost of exploration has already begun to exceed the revenue from the oil discovered. “The great merger mania is nothing more than a scaling down of a dying industry,” said Goldman Sachs in a 2004 report, “in recognition of the fact that 90 percent of global conventional oil has already been found.”

During the fossil fuel age, inequity increased significantly. Fossil fuels brought economic growth, but not to everyone. The theme of economic growth was “a rising tide lifts all boats.” But the advantages of fossil fuel prosperity were not distributed equally. Peak Oil and Climate Change imply a contracting of the economy, posing a challenge to deal with the high inequity that has developed in the past 50 years.

So, given that our insatiable demand for energy is generating climate-threatening levels of CO₂, and that we’re also running out of the fossil fuels burned to create that energy, and given a world population that just keeps expanding with record levels of inequity, what can we do? This is the question we encourage you to ask yourself, and to pose to other members of your community.

Our answer is Plan C, a concept of Curtailment and Community.

Through detailed research we have come to see this as the most effective way to drastically reduce fossil fuel use and alleviate global warming. “Curtailment” refers to the need to dramatically reduce the energy we consume by reducing the goods and services we use. This is in contrast to “conservation” which refers to reducing energy consumption by reducing energy required to produce and use goods and services. Community provides a context of cooperation – a way of being together so that reduced energy use is more easily accomplished.

Read about all our Plan C solutions.