A presentation given by Professor John Urry, Director, Centre for Mobilities Research, Lancaster University, at the IN-EAST conference, University of Duisberg-Essen, November 2013. The presentation draws on Prof. Urry's 2013 book, Societies Beyond Oil: Oil Dregs and Social Futures. It is also relevant for his project: Low Carbon Innovation in China - Prospects, Politics and Pratice. Find out more: http://steps-centre.org/project/low-carbon-china

1. INNOVATING LOW
CARBON MOBILITY
FUTURES
John Urry
Director, Centre for Mobilities Research,
Lancaster University

2. The problem of energy
Schumacher: ‘There is no substitute for energy. The
whole edifice of modern society is built upon it….it is not
“just another commodity” but the precondition of all
commodities, a basic factor equal with air, water, and
earth’
McNeill notes that: ‘We have deployed more energy
since 1900 than all of human history before 1900’
Stern: climate change is ‘the world’s greatest ever market
failure’ – and ‘peak oil’ is maybe the world’s second
greatest market failure

3. 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

4. Oil descent
The US peaking of oil in 1970 - now imports 75%; UK peaked 1999;
China just peaked
Global peaking of oil per capita in 1999
HSBC'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 2006
Two 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

5. Peak oil discovery

6. Limits of economics in thinking alternatives
First, economic institutions are important often because of their social and
political consequences. Large global corporations have huge interests in the
‘business as usual’ of ‘carbon capitalism’.
Second, economists regard energy as generating about 5% of the GDP of an
economy because this is roughly what it costs. But carbon–based energy is a
unique bundle of non-renewable commodities. Energy is not any commodity.
Third, 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 embodied ‘social practices’ which are hard to reverse
Fourth, changes in habits do occur and they can occur rapidly, such as mobile
telephony. Fixed routines may pass thresholds and turn into their opposite.
Fifth, low carbon systems and lives will only become significant if they become
matters of new fashion ultimately spreading on a global scale – hence a matter
of ‘changing cultures’

7. Theories
• ‘socio-technical systems transitions’. This ‘multi-level
perspective’ interrogates innovation through focusing
upon niches, socio-technical regimes and socio-technical
landscapes whose interactions are crucial. This
perspective examines how to move beyond lock-ins by
developing niches that may turn into new regimes.
• ‘social practices’ situate everyday practices, the specific
elements of these practices – materialities, meanings and
competencies – and well as the interconnectedness
between them at the centre of developing low-carbon
transitions. It is necessary to transform or replace these
very social practices and thereby to reduce energy
‘demand’

8. High carbon social practices
•
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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 rather than in the home/collective canteens
Global friendships
Working on projects with a global team

9. Complex systems
• Systems are dynamic, processual and unpredictable, open rather
than closed, with energy and matter flowing in and out. Complexity
involves studying the consequences of interactions between the
elements of each system. Systems are characterised by a lack of
proportionality or ‘non-linearity’. The ‘normal’ state is not one of
balance; there are positive feedbacks which take systems away from
equilibrium points. New kinds of order may emerge
• So while certain systems are stabilised for long periods through
various ‘lock-ins’, small causes can prompt or tip the emergence of a
new ‘path’. Movement from one state to another may be rapid
• Complexity economist Arthur: innovation typically involves a new
combination of existing elements of machinery, text, technology,
materials and organization (2009). Innovation stems from combining
elements over lengthy periods that are assembled as a new
sociotechnical system.
• Innovation processes are thus not like the linear notions often
deployed by policy makers. Innovation is more combinatory, nonlinear, systemic and often unpredictable.

10. Mobility-systems

11. Habits and systems
Habits derive from systems lying outside ‘individuals’
There is no tendency for systems to move towards equilibrium
Systems significant in the contemporary world are
simultaneously economic, physical, technological, political and
social – sociotechnical
There is increased linking of system components through
software, cybernetic architecture and networking
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
Habits are elements of social practices
Systems are clustered

12. Clustering
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’

13. Finding reverse gear
Moving to a low carbon economy-and-society involves ‘reversing’
most systems/practices/habits set in motion during the C20th. Such
a reversal comes up against:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
7.
8.
systemic carbon interests who themselves are causing the rising GHG
emissions – a wicked problem
the long term path dependencies of existing systems including habits
the ways that low carbon will reduce short term levels of income and
consumption
the difficulty of orchestrating a global polity to reset global agendas
general slowness of societal change – the enduring late C19 car system
states are rarely able to bring about change from the top partly because
of resistance and opposition
lack of time available to make a seismic shift or system reversal since
the atmospheric changes are already ‘in the system’
the need to develop multiple systems simultaneously to generate a new
low carbon cluster

14. Length of system change
US National Intelligence Council: ‘an energy transition, for
example, is inevitable...An energy transition from one type
of fuel (fossil fuels) to another (alternative) is an event that
historically has only happened once a century at most with
momentous consequences’.
Buckminster Fuller ‘You never change anything by fighting
the existing reality. To change something, build a new model
that makes the existing model obsolete’.
Innovations at least presuppose the combining of isolated
islands of an archipelago into a different system. According
to Brian Arthur this takes three to four decades . There may
well not be enough time before different climate, economic,
social and political consequences unfold (see The Nature of
Technology)

15. Complex character of system change
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
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?

16. A low carbon cluster
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‘well being’ beyond GDP
less inequality
reengineering success
post-suburban
‘friendships’ and ‘families’
post-oil agriculture
localising work and education
democratising low carbon innovation
social debts not financialized debts

17. A ‘POST CAR’ SYSTEM?
• shifts in transport policy in cities away from predict
and provide
• new fuel systems for cars, vans and buses
• new materials for constructing ‘car’ bodies
• smart vehicles
• deprivatise cars through city-wide car-sharing,
cooperative car clubs and smart car-hire schemes
• ‘smart-card’ technology to transfer information from
car to home, to bus, to train, to workplace, to web
site
• new social practices
• disruptive innovation

18. New Fuel
Systems
‘Disruptive’
New Materials
innovation
New Leisure/work
practices
New post-car
Smart vehicles
system
De-privatising
vehicles
Digitisation
New
Transport
Policies

19. Synchronisation?
• The key issue is how synchronisation gets to be effected between many
different elements, generating a new order out of apparent chaos.
Synchronisation and the combination of otherwise disparate elements
occur between different kinds of agents and entities located at varied
positions within an international division of innovative labour. What is
important are the processes which over time synchronise innovations
being generated within different ‘industries’ across various cities/societies.
• New systems form, often deriving from apparently unconnected
innovations initiated within geographically distant locations. A set of
changes happens so that the actions of both producers and consumers
come over time and space to be ‘beating to the same drum’.
• Systems are thus not reducible to, nor explained by, ‘new technologies’ in
themselves. There are crucial ‘instabilities’ or ‘ambivalences’ of
technologies
• Strogatz maintains how a: ‘network appears highly stable and resistant to
outside disturbances. Then another seed comes along, seemingly
indistinguishable from the others before it, yet this one triggers a massive
cascade. In other words, near this second tipping point, fads are rare but
gigantic when they do occur’ (2003: 33).

20. Cracks in high mobility systems
‘travel activity has reached a plateau in all eight
industrialized countries’.
societies seem to have reached or even are passing
‘peak travel’.
this is being brought about by high oil prices,
stagnating economic growth, an ageing
population and a renaissance of walking and
cycling
Adam Millard-Ball, Lee Schipper, ‘Are we reaching peak travel? Trends
in Passenger Transport in Eight Industrialized Countries’, Transport
Reviews, 2011, 31: 357-78, pp. 373-4.

21. Vehicle miles travelled in the US 19922011 (billions per day)

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