Habits, Systems, Futures

John Urry

Director, Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University

HABITS AND SYSTEMS

Most of the time people do not behave as individually rational economic consumers.

People are creatures of social habituation. And habits can spread within a society through media and advertising.

These habits become widespread and ‘locked in’ to ‘social practices’.

These routine practices are hard to reverse and depend upon often huge energy systems

HIGH CARBON HABITS AND SYSTEMS

• Overseas holidays• Driving to the shops• Showering daily• The school run• Drinking foreign beers/wines• Second homes• Climate control rather than clothing control• Driving through well lit streets• Dining out• Global friendships • Working on projects with a global team

HABITS AND SYSTEMS Habits derive from systems lying outside ‘individuals’

There is no tendency for systems to move towards equilibrium. There is an unpredictability of systems with ‘non-linear’ relations between ‘causes’ and ‘effects’

Systems once established can get ‘locked in’ over decades in relationship to each other

Systems are clustered. David Nye on the USA: a ‘high-energy regime touched every aspect of daily life. It promised a future of miracle fabrics, inexpensive food, larger suburban houses, faster travel, cheaper fuels, climate control, and limitless growth. Even the music of the emerging counterculture was plugged in’

C20th ‘LOCK IN’ TO OIL-BASED SYSTEMS

Oil provides over 95% of transportation energy in the modern world – so making possible mobile social practices - collegial, family and friendship miles

Also fuels the world’s ships that transport most oil, components, commodities and food from afar

Is an element of most manufactured goods (95%)

Is crucial to at least 95% of food production for a rapidly rising world population through irrigation, transport, pesticides, fertilisers

Provides back-up power and lighting

OIL DESCENTThe US peaking of oil in 1970 - now imports 75%; UK peaked 1999;

China just peakedGlobal peaking of oil per capita in 1999HSBC's Chief Economist ‘there could be as little as 49 years of oil

left’CEO of Royal Dutch Shell: ‘My view is that “easy” oil has probably

passed its peak’Fatih Birol, Chief Economist of the IEA: crude oil production has

already peaked in 2006Two trillion barrels of conventional oil; about half now used. 4 barrels consumed for every new one discovered; may soon go

up to 10:1. The largest oilfields were discovered in the 1960s

PEAK OIL DISCOVERY

PEAKING OF CAR TRAVEL IN US?

PEAK TRAVEL?

‘Travel activity has reached a plateau in all eight countries’ (Millard-ball and Schipper 2011)

Caused by high oil prices and seemingly fixed supply, as well as austerity, ageing population and some renaissance of walking, cycling and public transport

Young people less likely to have a car licence, less likely to own or have access to a car, and more favour owning smartphones over cars in recent surveys

SOCIAL GLOBALIZATION ACROSS THE WORLD, 1970-2008 (measured by personal contacts, information flows and cultural proximity

between people living within different societies: ETH 2011)

PEAK STUFFRecent UK research on Material Flow Accounts shows peak year for ‘consuming’ goods and services was 2001.

Since then rate of consumption fallen. By 2009 overall material consumption reduced to match 1970s. Since 2001 British people use fewer materials and generate less waste.

Shown in consuming of paper and cardboard, heat, power, household waste, purchases of new cars, household energy and food. Peak oil in 1999.

Overall although the UK still uses two billion tons of ‘stuff’ each year, this has not increased although income and population risen. Can ‘prosperity’ be generated without consuming more goods and services?

FUTURESIs there a reversal from oil-based system and habits at least in the rich North? If so what systems

might be coming into being? How would we know what is a system change and what is a blip?

Central to many future scenarios are new technologies BUT technologies do not develop for endogenous reasons NOR do they simply transform the economic and social landscape in their own image since there are many unexpected and perverse consequences

Technologies are always embedded in economic, social and political life and depend upon business and sociological models for development. Especially consumer-related systems depend upon fun and fashion

Mobile communications shows how systems and habits can change extremely rapidly but often this is not through a simple substitution. Buckminster Fuller, the futurist, once wrote: ‘You never change anything by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete’

What might be new models emerging alongside oil-based systems that in the C21st would lock in populations to new post oil social practices and habits?

‘new high tech hydrogen worlds’

‘digital worlds’

‘low carbon worlds’

Or will oil/resource wars and MAD MAX 2 be the future?