The Machine, Part 1: how long can this go on?
What if the 21st century American lifestyle is
not sustainable? Houston, we've got a problem.
Sometimes I lie awake at night thinking about
civilization. In my mind I picture a complex machine-like entity that we all
ride on, lumbering up a steep slope. We're sitting on comfortable seats, and we
see the scenery moving outside the windows. We only dimly understand the
workings of The Machine, or what powers it, or even what is crushed beneath the
huge wheels of The Machine as we travel on. We have faith in The Machine; it
has brought us many advancements, from computers to airplane travel to cars that
spin effortlessly from stoplight to freeway. It embodies our monetary system,
which has influence across the entire globe. It similarly is driven by a
relentless advancement in technology: ever smaller gadgets accomplishing ever
greater tasks.
The Machine has, in my lifetime, always faithfully carried us, ever upward. The change in altitude has given us great insights, as we look back at where we've been: a short ways down the hill is the decade of the seventies, a primitive era in which hardly anyone had computers and no one had ever heard of a cell phone. Further down the hill is World War II, in which people received their news via newsreels and radio and newspaper, and The Greatest Generation turned back the tide of fascism. Still further down the hill is where cars came into being, and the Wright brothers tinkered with bicycle frames and aerofoil shapes. Far off in the lower mists people like Laura Ingalls Wilder toiled in the Big Wood or on the Great Prairie, eking out a living on the land. And far, far behind there are other empires and ways of life that we know only dimly about. Patiently, inexorably, The Machine carries us forward and upward.
Lately though, I can't help but feel that The Machine is not running so well. There's a tick in the engine, a slowing of speed, a labored feeling of progress. I lie awake at night, thinking, "Can this really go on indefinitely?" I look backwards and wonder if the whole damn contraption could slow to a clanking, hissing, lurching stop, and then start a tumbling slide down the hill. Sad to say, I've come to have serious doubts about The Machine. How did this happen? Well, eleven months ago I heard Prof. Richard Heinberg ( http://www.museletter.com/ ) speak in San Francisco. Prof. Heinberg is the author of a book called "The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies ." The book is about how energy has shaped our world, and how in the near-term future we are likely to experience energy shortages from which there will be no escaping. In the curious way that we humans have, I heard his message, but I didn't really hear his message: I can still recall looking at his book on the sale table, trying to decide whether I trusted his message enough to even spend sixteen dollars on the book. In the end I bought the book and started reading.
Heinberg's basic premise seemed clear enough: prominent geologists have started to speak about a phenomena called Peak Oil. Peak Oil is a condition achieved when the world's supply of oil coming out of the ground cannot be increased any further by drilling additional wells. Post-peak, oil production will inevitably decline, perhaps precipitously. This will have major impacts on our society and civilization, because oil is a basic energy and feedstock underpinning of modern life.
My initial reaction was, well, of course. I've known about this since 1980, when I took a course in sustainability and ecology, taught strangely enough by a professor in Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Illinois. As a result of that class, I somehow internalized the need to keep my energy usage as low as I could: for years I dried my laundry on a clothesline in the basement, and I still ride a bicycle or mass transit to work. There is, however, a big difference between something you choose to do because you know it's the right thing to do, like trying to tread lightly on the planet, and something that you do because the future looks increasingly uncomfortable and has every appearance of being inescapable. That is the situation that I think we are now approaching: uncomfortable, inescapable, and not even very far off. How soon? As soon as this year, 2005, and perhaps as late as 2007.
My first thoughts about Peak Oil tended to focus on the obvious effects of reduced energy availability on transportation: oh shit, it looks like there is going to be a transportation problem. Gas is going to start going up to $3, $4, $5 a gallon, and it won't be coming down. I wondered if I could reasonably expect to bicycle the fourteen miles to work and back every day of the week. I thought that I probably could build up to it, so perhaps Peak Oil would not be so bad.
However, reading further into the book, I discovered that it is not just a liquid petroleum crisis, it is also a natural gas peak crisis. And natural gas affects our lives in some non-obvious ways: it turns out that modern industrial farming (and indeed, nearly the whole green revolution) depends on inputs of non-renewable oil and gas. Of course, diesel fuel powers the tractors, but pesticides and herbicides are largely created from oil as well. Even worse, nearly all modern fertilizer starts out as natural gas, which is converted to ammonia through something called the Bosch process. If you visit this article, titled "The Oil We Eat " ( http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html ), you find out that it takes about ten calories of non-renewable energy to produce every calorie of food that you see in the grocery store (this figure doesn't even include the energy required to cook food). So, shit, it is likely going to eventually turn into a food problem. About this time I started thinking about gardening a bit more intensively than I had in the past. I found vacant lots in my neighborhood, looked up the owners, and wrote to them offering to purchase their lots. No one replied; we're in the midst of a real estate bubble, and who would take seriously a guy who wants to buy a lot for a garden? Eventually, I concluded that farmland might be a good investment for the long-term future.
Continuing to read the book, I came to Heinberg's argument that our entire monetary system was in grave danger due to Peak Oil. This took me a while to digest; our monetary system seems to work reasonably well, and has been in place for a long time, longer than my life or my parents or even possibly my grandparents. However, our monetary system has some hidden assumptions, the most central one being that it is predicated on endless growth. This shows up most visibly in the use of compound interest, in which it is implicitly assumed that once a loan is made a year later there will be more money in the world with which to pay the interest on the loan. Generally speaking, the way that our money system works is that the central banks try to balance the amount of money that they instantiate out of thin air with the supply of goods that are brought into being (incidentally requiring the expenditure of energy). As we pass the peak of energy production, it is very unlikely that we will be able to produce ever more goods in the face of reduced energy inputs. Yet, the monetary system requires the creation of ever more money to pay the interest on existing loans... this leads to too many dollars chasing too few goods, which is the classic definition of inflation. So, shit, it is going to be the mother of all money problems as well.
And indeed, we seem to be seeing the first signs of this money problem in recent months: asset inflation has been running rampant for a while, driving up the price of housing in almost every market around the world. It is starting to trickle down into commodities that require high energy inputs, and it probably won't be long before inflation is significantly evident even in everyday goods. And once that takes hold psychologically, it will likely take off: people will start to factor high prices into the buying habits, creating yet more demand for limited goods, leading to greater price inflation.
The core problem is that globally and on many fronts, we have a sustainability problem. It's huge, and it involves our energy use, our land, our water, our climate, our fisheries, our style of agriculture, and probably a few other crises waiting in the wings. It just happens that the first of the crises to really step out front and center is likely going to be energy. But the non-sustainability of our use of energy, especially oil and natural gas, is going to be very evident in the near future.
At this point you might be thinking, this guy is not just a pessimist, he's nuts. We've always found a way around a crisis, and we'll find a way around this one. Nuclear energy, or hydrogen, wind power, or even good old-fashioned conservation will become economically viable and fill the breach. Prof. Heinberg devotes a lengthy chapter of "The Party's Over" to deconstructing the alternative energy sources. His conclusions are depressing. Individually, none of those energy types will even come close to changing the course of what is coming; even collectively there is a great deal of doubt. I won't go into repeating in great excruciating detail all the reasons why I think the crisis is upon us; rather, I will just suggest some links that I think contain compelling arguments.
For understanding the finite nature of oil reserves, the presentation by Jack Zagar to the state of Hawaii ( http://www.oilcrisis.com/Zagar/hawaii/ ) is still one of the best. It captures the essence of the problem, and it comes from an actual petroleum geologist with decades of experience.
Another good article is Eugene Marner's "Roller Coaster Ride to Hell :" http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=81&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported . Andrew McKillop highlights the link between our economy's infinite growth assumption and our finite energy supplies in his article "The Heresy of Growth ," archived at http://www.serendipity.li/iraqwar/heresy_of_growth.htm .
If you like a question and answer format, visit Matthew Savinar's www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net web page; he has written a patient introduction to the problem.
Steven Lagavulin has written a couple of very interesting articles for his blog, deconsumption.typepad.com , which I highly recommend. I still like his first posting at http://deconsumption.typepad.com/deconsumption/2004/04/for_this_1st_po.html : in that first posting he recounts how he can no longer be an investment broker in good conscience . After looking at the available facts, it was clear to him that the future we are entering is going to be nothing like the extension of the past we've been living. You'll also find he has written a very plausible scenario for how the next few years unfold, er, crumble: http://deconsumption.typepad.com/deconsumption/2004/05/background_for_.html .
Even Newsweek is starting to write about the unsustainable economic crisis unfolding in front of most of America's tightly shut eyes: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7170226/site/newsweek/ .
James Howard Kunstler ( http://www.kunstler.com/ ) has become an outspoken and colorful commentator on the state of America's sustainability, especially with regard to urban design. He is a central figure in the highly recommended film, "The End of Suburbia " ( http://www.endofsuburbia.com ).
Peak oil stories are now starting to appear with regularity within the mainstream press. Salon , the New York Times , and even the U.S. Congressional Record are just a few of the places that have had articles on finite petroleum resources in the past week. If you would like to keep abreast of breaking news on the energy front, I recommend http://www.energybulletin.net , which is updated daily.
To me, it appears obvious that the unsustainable way we have been living for the last century is likely going to catch up to us, and lead to a collapse. Collapse is a word fraught with negative connotations; here, I am just stating it as a technical term: collapse means a transition to a simpler structure of society. The world has been through many such major collapses (empires in Asia, the Roman Empire, etc). The nature of the collapse (violently, or fitfully peaceful), the timing of the collapse (will it really start to bite in five years, or fifteen?), and the duration of the collapse (Rome collapsed over decades, if not centuries) are all unknowns to us at this point; we will probably only recognize them in hindsight.
Even the best-case scenarios for a collapse are likely to be quite grim: without non-renewable energy inputs and industrial agriculture, we are likely to revert back to 19th-century crop yields. Many people throughout the world will be at risk of starvation, even in places like our own cities. Areas of the country that are naturally inhospitable (Las Vegas in the summer comes to mind) and populated only through the application of electrical refrigeration will be incredibly hard hit. The massively technological way we live depends heavily on electricity produced with oil and natural gas; if we continue to ignore or band-aid the problem, there is no question that the relatively fragile electrical grid will simply cease to function. Without an electric grid, with only highly expensive liquid fuel to power vehicles, and with much of our population focused on survival concerns like food, water, and heat, we won't be very far away from the agrarian society of two centuries ago.
When I talk to people about this crisis of sustainability, naturally folks are very reluctant to consider the worst case scenarios of where we might find ourselves in five or ten years (this is assuming that I can convince someone to listen to my sustainability theories at all). Very naturally, most folks assume that we will muddle through somehow. And we may. John Michael Greer, in his essay "The long road down: decline and deindustrial future ," argues that we most likely will see a gradual decline, not apocalypse ( http://www.energybulletin.net/4624.html ). This isn't much comfort. However, muddling through is by no means a sure thing, and the worst-case type of scenarios, in which oil production drops just as little as five per cent per year, are truly enough to give anyone nightmares.
Clearly, humankind is facing a huge problem. It's a problem that dwarfs the usual political squabbling of the two parties that share power in the U.S. And for the most part it is being totally and systematically ignored within both the mainstream press and the political class.
I think that I'll end this posting here, and pick up in a follow-on posting some responses to this massive problem.
The Machine has, in my lifetime, always faithfully carried us, ever upward. The change in altitude has given us great insights, as we look back at where we've been: a short ways down the hill is the decade of the seventies, a primitive era in which hardly anyone had computers and no one had ever heard of a cell phone. Further down the hill is World War II, in which people received their news via newsreels and radio and newspaper, and The Greatest Generation turned back the tide of fascism. Still further down the hill is where cars came into being, and the Wright brothers tinkered with bicycle frames and aerofoil shapes. Far off in the lower mists people like Laura Ingalls Wilder toiled in the Big Wood or on the Great Prairie, eking out a living on the land. And far, far behind there are other empires and ways of life that we know only dimly about. Patiently, inexorably, The Machine carries us forward and upward.
Lately though, I can't help but feel that The Machine is not running so well. There's a tick in the engine, a slowing of speed, a labored feeling of progress. I lie awake at night, thinking, "Can this really go on indefinitely?" I look backwards and wonder if the whole damn contraption could slow to a clanking, hissing, lurching stop, and then start a tumbling slide down the hill. Sad to say, I've come to have serious doubts about The Machine. How did this happen? Well, eleven months ago I heard Prof. Richard Heinberg ( http://www.museletter.com/ ) speak in San Francisco. Prof. Heinberg is the author of a book called "The Party's Over: Oil, War, and the Fate of Industrial Societies ." The book is about how energy has shaped our world, and how in the near-term future we are likely to experience energy shortages from which there will be no escaping. In the curious way that we humans have, I heard his message, but I didn't really hear his message: I can still recall looking at his book on the sale table, trying to decide whether I trusted his message enough to even spend sixteen dollars on the book. In the end I bought the book and started reading.
Heinberg's basic premise seemed clear enough: prominent geologists have started to speak about a phenomena called Peak Oil. Peak Oil is a condition achieved when the world's supply of oil coming out of the ground cannot be increased any further by drilling additional wells. Post-peak, oil production will inevitably decline, perhaps precipitously. This will have major impacts on our society and civilization, because oil is a basic energy and feedstock underpinning of modern life.
My initial reaction was, well, of course. I've known about this since 1980, when I took a course in sustainability and ecology, taught strangely enough by a professor in Aeronautical Engineering at the University of Illinois. As a result of that class, I somehow internalized the need to keep my energy usage as low as I could: for years I dried my laundry on a clothesline in the basement, and I still ride a bicycle or mass transit to work. There is, however, a big difference between something you choose to do because you know it's the right thing to do, like trying to tread lightly on the planet, and something that you do because the future looks increasingly uncomfortable and has every appearance of being inescapable. That is the situation that I think we are now approaching: uncomfortable, inescapable, and not even very far off. How soon? As soon as this year, 2005, and perhaps as late as 2007.
My first thoughts about Peak Oil tended to focus on the obvious effects of reduced energy availability on transportation: oh shit, it looks like there is going to be a transportation problem. Gas is going to start going up to $3, $4, $5 a gallon, and it won't be coming down. I wondered if I could reasonably expect to bicycle the fourteen miles to work and back every day of the week. I thought that I probably could build up to it, so perhaps Peak Oil would not be so bad.
However, reading further into the book, I discovered that it is not just a liquid petroleum crisis, it is also a natural gas peak crisis. And natural gas affects our lives in some non-obvious ways: it turns out that modern industrial farming (and indeed, nearly the whole green revolution) depends on inputs of non-renewable oil and gas. Of course, diesel fuel powers the tractors, but pesticides and herbicides are largely created from oil as well. Even worse, nearly all modern fertilizer starts out as natural gas, which is converted to ammonia through something called the Bosch process. If you visit this article, titled "The Oil We Eat " ( http://www.harpers.org/TheOilWeEat.html ), you find out that it takes about ten calories of non-renewable energy to produce every calorie of food that you see in the grocery store (this figure doesn't even include the energy required to cook food). So, shit, it is likely going to eventually turn into a food problem. About this time I started thinking about gardening a bit more intensively than I had in the past. I found vacant lots in my neighborhood, looked up the owners, and wrote to them offering to purchase their lots. No one replied; we're in the midst of a real estate bubble, and who would take seriously a guy who wants to buy a lot for a garden? Eventually, I concluded that farmland might be a good investment for the long-term future.
Continuing to read the book, I came to Heinberg's argument that our entire monetary system was in grave danger due to Peak Oil. This took me a while to digest; our monetary system seems to work reasonably well, and has been in place for a long time, longer than my life or my parents or even possibly my grandparents. However, our monetary system has some hidden assumptions, the most central one being that it is predicated on endless growth. This shows up most visibly in the use of compound interest, in which it is implicitly assumed that once a loan is made a year later there will be more money in the world with which to pay the interest on the loan. Generally speaking, the way that our money system works is that the central banks try to balance the amount of money that they instantiate out of thin air with the supply of goods that are brought into being (incidentally requiring the expenditure of energy). As we pass the peak of energy production, it is very unlikely that we will be able to produce ever more goods in the face of reduced energy inputs. Yet, the monetary system requires the creation of ever more money to pay the interest on existing loans... this leads to too many dollars chasing too few goods, which is the classic definition of inflation. So, shit, it is going to be the mother of all money problems as well.
And indeed, we seem to be seeing the first signs of this money problem in recent months: asset inflation has been running rampant for a while, driving up the price of housing in almost every market around the world. It is starting to trickle down into commodities that require high energy inputs, and it probably won't be long before inflation is significantly evident even in everyday goods. And once that takes hold psychologically, it will likely take off: people will start to factor high prices into the buying habits, creating yet more demand for limited goods, leading to greater price inflation.
The core problem is that globally and on many fronts, we have a sustainability problem. It's huge, and it involves our energy use, our land, our water, our climate, our fisheries, our style of agriculture, and probably a few other crises waiting in the wings. It just happens that the first of the crises to really step out front and center is likely going to be energy. But the non-sustainability of our use of energy, especially oil and natural gas, is going to be very evident in the near future.
At this point you might be thinking, this guy is not just a pessimist, he's nuts. We've always found a way around a crisis, and we'll find a way around this one. Nuclear energy, or hydrogen, wind power, or even good old-fashioned conservation will become economically viable and fill the breach. Prof. Heinberg devotes a lengthy chapter of "The Party's Over" to deconstructing the alternative energy sources. His conclusions are depressing. Individually, none of those energy types will even come close to changing the course of what is coming; even collectively there is a great deal of doubt. I won't go into repeating in great excruciating detail all the reasons why I think the crisis is upon us; rather, I will just suggest some links that I think contain compelling arguments.
For understanding the finite nature of oil reserves, the presentation by Jack Zagar to the state of Hawaii ( http://www.oilcrisis.com/Zagar/hawaii/ ) is still one of the best. It captures the essence of the problem, and it comes from an actual petroleum geologist with decades of experience.
Another good article is Eugene Marner's "Roller Coaster Ride to Hell :" http://www.independent-media.tv/item.cfm?fmedia_id=81&fcategory_desc=Under%20Reported . Andrew McKillop highlights the link between our economy's infinite growth assumption and our finite energy supplies in his article "The Heresy of Growth ," archived at http://www.serendipity.li/iraqwar/heresy_of_growth.htm .
If you like a question and answer format, visit Matthew Savinar's www.lifeaftertheoilcrash.net web page; he has written a patient introduction to the problem.
Steven Lagavulin has written a couple of very interesting articles for his blog, deconsumption.typepad.com , which I highly recommend. I still like his first posting at http://deconsumption.typepad.com/deconsumption/2004/04/for_this_1st_po.html : in that first posting he recounts how he can no longer be an investment broker in good conscience . After looking at the available facts, it was clear to him that the future we are entering is going to be nothing like the extension of the past we've been living. You'll also find he has written a very plausible scenario for how the next few years unfold, er, crumble: http://deconsumption.typepad.com/deconsumption/2004/05/background_for_.html .
Even Newsweek is starting to write about the unsustainable economic crisis unfolding in front of most of America's tightly shut eyes: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/7170226/site/newsweek/ .
James Howard Kunstler ( http://www.kunstler.com/ ) has become an outspoken and colorful commentator on the state of America's sustainability, especially with regard to urban design. He is a central figure in the highly recommended film, "The End of Suburbia " ( http://www.endofsuburbia.com ).
Peak oil stories are now starting to appear with regularity within the mainstream press. Salon , the New York Times , and even the U.S. Congressional Record are just a few of the places that have had articles on finite petroleum resources in the past week. If you would like to keep abreast of breaking news on the energy front, I recommend http://www.energybulletin.net , which is updated daily.
To me, it appears obvious that the unsustainable way we have been living for the last century is likely going to catch up to us, and lead to a collapse. Collapse is a word fraught with negative connotations; here, I am just stating it as a technical term: collapse means a transition to a simpler structure of society. The world has been through many such major collapses (empires in Asia, the Roman Empire, etc). The nature of the collapse (violently, or fitfully peaceful), the timing of the collapse (will it really start to bite in five years, or fifteen?), and the duration of the collapse (Rome collapsed over decades, if not centuries) are all unknowns to us at this point; we will probably only recognize them in hindsight.
Even the best-case scenarios for a collapse are likely to be quite grim: without non-renewable energy inputs and industrial agriculture, we are likely to revert back to 19th-century crop yields. Many people throughout the world will be at risk of starvation, even in places like our own cities. Areas of the country that are naturally inhospitable (Las Vegas in the summer comes to mind) and populated only through the application of electrical refrigeration will be incredibly hard hit. The massively technological way we live depends heavily on electricity produced with oil and natural gas; if we continue to ignore or band-aid the problem, there is no question that the relatively fragile electrical grid will simply cease to function. Without an electric grid, with only highly expensive liquid fuel to power vehicles, and with much of our population focused on survival concerns like food, water, and heat, we won't be very far away from the agrarian society of two centuries ago.
When I talk to people about this crisis of sustainability, naturally folks are very reluctant to consider the worst case scenarios of where we might find ourselves in five or ten years (this is assuming that I can convince someone to listen to my sustainability theories at all). Very naturally, most folks assume that we will muddle through somehow. And we may. John Michael Greer, in his essay "The long road down: decline and deindustrial future ," argues that we most likely will see a gradual decline, not apocalypse ( http://www.energybulletin.net/4624.html ). This isn't much comfort. However, muddling through is by no means a sure thing, and the worst-case type of scenarios, in which oil production drops just as little as five per cent per year, are truly enough to give anyone nightmares.
Clearly, humankind is facing a huge problem. It's a problem that dwarfs the usual political squabbling of the two parties that share power in the U.S. And for the most part it is being totally and systematically ignored within both the mainstream press and the political class.
I think that I'll end this posting here, and pick up in a follow-on posting some responses to this massive problem.
Posted: Wed - March 16, 2005 at 01:06 PM
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