Is Electricity Really the Lifeblood of Civilization?
Sharon June 26th, 2008
I don’t think there are a lot of people who, except in their most facetious tones, refer to me as anything along the lines of “Little Sharon-Sunshine.” And yet I actually consider myself a strong optimist, and by the standards of the peak oil movement, I certainly am. I believe that a way of life is very much on its way out, that the transition will be painful - more painful than it had to be, but that’s just the reality of the world. I think we are currently in a deep and horrible disaster, being visited on the world’s poorest and the tentacles are gradually crawling up the anchor to take down the rest of the ship. But I also think that there is a good deal of reason for hope - we have vast capacities, vast resources and vast imagination. Peak oil and climate change could, if we work really hard at it, be pretty much the end of the world. But there’s no reason to believe that we will, in fact ,work quite that hard - we’re lazy and the odds are good that the edifice that allows us to destroy ourselves may preceed most of our lives to the grave. That thought alone gives me hope.
And because I am an optimist, because I take joy in being a ray of light ;-), I generally dissent from the final prognostications of the Olduvai Hypothesis, while agreeing that we are on the downswing of a certain kind of industrial civilization. I differ from Richard Duncan in several respects, while giving him credit for articulating the danger of peak oil long before most of us had ever heard of it. I differ most of all on his conclusion, rearticulated here in this article by James Leigh, that it is necessarily the case that,
“The permanent blackout of electricity is crippling. Without oil to continue to fire up our industrial society we will be without: public electricity, transport, industry’s processed products (food, clothing, packaging, and machinery), communication and computer services. A little bit of brainstorming shows that the society and its systems would come eventually to a standstill. A totally paralyzing set of circumstances with hunger and deprivation on an unprecedented worldwide scale.”
I don’t honestly know whether, as the Olduvai Hypothesis postulates, after 2012 we’ll experience widespread, permanent blackouts. I suppose it is possible, and for the purposes of this article, we’ll assume that that’s the case that electricity could be the marker point for our collapse. As Duncan argues in this paper, electricity is more defining than transport:
“As we have emphasized, Industrial Civilization is beholden to electricity. Namely: In 1999, electricity supplied 42% (and counting) of the world’s end-use energy versus 39% for oil (the leading fossil fuel). Yet the small difference of 3% obscures the real magnitude of the problem because it omits the quality of the different forms of end-use energy. With apologies to George Orwell and the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics — “All joules (J) of energy are equal. But some joules are more equal than others.” Thus, if you just want to heat your coffee, then 1 J of oil energy works just as well as 1 J of electrical energy. However, if you want to power up your computer, then 1 J of electricity is worth 3 J of oil. Therefore, the ratio of the importance of electricity versus oil to Industrial Civilization is not 42:39, but more like 99:1. Similar ratios apply to electricity versus gas and electricity versus coal.”
My own intuition (and I’ve given it fairly little thought so that’s all it is) is that Duncan is right about the weighted importance of electricity to our present model of society, but wrong in his extrapolation of the long term consequences of short term adaptation to living without electricity. And I think because Duncan was prescient in peak oil circles, his conclusion (which comes down to “we’re all doomed” has had disproportionate weight in the debate - in fact, there are a number of peak oil writers who have spent a lot of time arguing that “we’re all doomed” is the majority opinion in the peak oil world, and spend a great deal of time debunking this perspective - and inadvertantly giving Duncan’s conclusions far more emphasis than they actually merit among a range of far more nuanced and complex range of thought.
Part of the problem is Duncan’s timeline for industrial civilization. He imagines that it began in 1930 - but, of course, the beginnings of industrial society existed in the US for at least 100 years before that, and of course, in Britain for quite some time before that. I lived for a few years in a building converted to apartments from the old Lowell Massachusetts textile Mills, and I can attest that the structures, and the city of Lowell in the 19th century were indeed industrial. It is true that a majority of people didn’t live in “industrial society” in the US until the 1930s - but of course, Duncan is speaking of the world as a whole, and a slight majority of people in the world only began living in industrial society last year - that’s when the urban population worldwide finally exceeded the rural one.
Industrial society long preceeds electricity - even if we imagine that we will rapidly run out of the capacity to produce electricity, we have to recognize that Industrialization itself did not depend on electric power. On the other hand, nor would I be the first to argue that life without industrialization sucked - parts of it undoubtedly did - I’m very fond of cloth making machines, for example, and have no particular desire to spin every thread my family wears. On the other hand I could, given the urgent necessity of doing so, and I could teach others. I could even make a primitive (not as nice as mine) spinning wheel (a huge jump in speed over the drop spindle, which I can make with three sticks) out of an old bicycle rim. And if low tech little old me, who flunked birdhouse building in woodshop, could do that, how long before the spinning jenny and the massive industrial looms of the 19th century get recreated by some bright chick who likes to tinker?
There’s a tendency, I think, when talk about going to a lower energy society to imagine that we then become a lower-knowledge people, that we rapidly lose the germ theory of disease, the ability to do algebra and the capacity to build bicycles - and maybe that’s true - John Michael Greer has argued that a long term collapse may drop our knowledge base back further than we think. But at a minimum, returning to illiteracy is going to take a couple of generations of huddling in our caves banging rocks together so we can forget all that other stuff, like how to build an efficient stove and an arch or two. We’re going to have to work at it.
But let us assume that Duncan is, in fact, correct - that we’re going to fall off an energy cliff. That we are facing a world without electricity - I’m not sure I think it likely, but I’m willing to accept the hypothesis. Does that lead immediately to Duncan’s envisioned conclusion? Leigh plainly thinks that the results would be catastrophic, from the construction of the below sentence:
“Pause for a moment – just imagine the catastrophic consequences of no electricity: no phones or computers, no industry which is electricity based, no dairy products or processed foods, no refrigeration, no water as the water pumps won’t work, no cars or transport because the petrol pumps won’t work, no schools or universities, no banks which can’t electronically process transactions, no employment, no income – dwindling stocks of everything as society collapses to unprecedented levels of chaos and deprivation.”
It is certainly the case that if we go in a single step from air conditioning and cold beer today to total blackout tomorrow, the transition will be extremely difficult, and the period of reorganization and the scaling up of other technologies will be stressful. It is, however, unlikely to happen overnight. But let’s take a look at these assumptions. Would, in fact, we be thrown, as Duncan has argued, back to the Stone Age?
Let’s see…no phones or computers. Check! That means communication would have to rely on…mail? Wow, that’s just horrible, because after all, we’ve had phones for thousands of years, and there’s no evidence at all that we can live without them…oh, wait, maybe there is. No computers - well, that means no math, right, because we didn’t invent calculus until…oh wait. No industry which is electricity based - well, that means we’re back to banging rocks together, because we never built or produced anything before electricity, right? No dairy products? You mean cows run on electricity? Woah, you learn something new every day. Or perhaps he means no fridges, which means…we’d have to eat cheese. Dear G-d…not that!!! No processed food. Well this one is true - I can’t think of a single means to produce a Hostess Sno-ball without fossil fuels. Do not ask for whom the bell tolls…it tolls for thee and they Sno-balls.
No refrigeration…yup, that means we’re going to have to cook differently and eat differently. Of course, billions of people do that now because they don’t have refrigerators, but who’d want to be them? No water - now that will be a tough nut to crack, unless, say we have any time between now and 2012 to deal with it…after all, it isn’t like water falls from the sky or something. No cars or transport. That’s right, before cars, everyone just sat on their asses where they were born until they were up to their knees in their own feces. No schools or universities. Yup, no one had literacy before electricity - those ancient Greeks, they were writing in 1935. That’s why we call them ancient, right? No banks which can electronically proces transactions - true, and I’m sure that means there will be no currency, since money and markets were invented in 1985 by the folks who brought us the TSR-80, right? No employment - of course, there’ll be nothing to do but sit around drooling and waiting for death. And no income - didn’t you know Henry Ford invented work?
Now I’m being sarcastic here, and it would be an easy accusation to say I’m minimizing the difficulties of making a transition from an industrial society to a less industrial one, and that’s fair - sarcasm is never the most nuanced of genres. But this stuff really toasts my buns, because it is so damned ignorant.
I’m reminded of an essay by Chuck Trapkus in _The Plain Reader_, he tells the story of doing an demonstration of spinning, and a woman telling her children “This is how they used to make clothes, long, long ago.” Trapkus responds with,
“She’s right, of course,” I’m thinking. “But this is how I make clothes. Today.”
He goes on to add:
“But lest we in our ignorance make the same assumptions the woman made while watching me spin, let’s be clear on one thing: Not everyone makes bread in an electric breadmaker. Not everyone has access to a phone. Not everyone has a refrigerator, a car, a toaster, a chainsaw. Billions of humans right now, sharing this same Mother Earth, get by with far fewer electric/atomic/petroleum-powered gadgets and appliances that we United States citizens. They may not all grind their own flour or weave their own cloth, but then, millions of them do. So when w ask how they ever did anything then, we should ask how they still do it now, and acknowledge our profound collective ignorance in so many basic matters of human sustenance”
Let us not bullshit ourselves - if we had to suddenly, rapidly transition to no fossil energies at all (very, very unlikely for most of us), it would suck and be destructive. But it would not send us back to Olduvai Gorge. Many people would probably die in an overnight transition (also wildly unlikely) but most people probably wouldn’t. Some people would curl up, unable to bear this world they lived in, but the rest would get to work reorganizing into something else, bringing back and recreating older technologies, using human and animal power, changing their work, building new economies and markets. And not only could we survive, but we might not think that our lives were suddenly without meaning - electricity is not the defining characteristic of our beings, merely of our economy. And economies are remade all the time.
The part of this that I find most troubling is the offensive notion that living without all the above-listed goodies makes life completely untenable. Because that implies that the lives of our great-grandparents, and the billions of lives that don’t have electricity are an unmitigated hell, a place we wouldn’t even be willing to visit, that all that is “civilized” about our lives began in 19-freakin’-30. If our past, and the lives of the world’s ordinary poor are utter doom, we are doomed. But what if they aren’t? Let us acknowledge a vast and difficult transition, and a great deal of potential and probably real trouble and misery a’coming. But let us not start with the assumption that “modern industrial civilization” is equivalent to “civilization” itself. And let us not seperate ourselves from everything that came before us and everyone now who lacks what we have as though some barrier keeps us from reaching out to them.
Can we kill ourselves off in the coming decades? Sure, I never wish to underestimate the stupidity of our collective humanity. Is that a likely and inevitable consequence of even sudden, extreme depletion and shortage - no. Only if we choose the worst possible forms of mismanagement (and grant you, there’s some good bit of evidence for this), only if we race headlong towards doom in a concerted effort can we create the consequences that Duncan and Leigh imagine are the simple results of the loss of electricty and other energies. Electricity is a goodie, a sugar coating. It makes a few lives possible - lives that would be lost in a world without it, and that is at tragedy. But mostly, it makes lives easy and convenient, and grows the economy - and that’s pretty much it. It is not our life or our blood.
Sharon
- peak oil
- Comments(57)
It’s the pervasiveness of computers that worries me. Think how many things are controlled by computers - how much information is ONLY stored on computers these days. Without some way to power those machines, I think we’re really in trouble, because we’re chucking all the analog options into the landfill AND forgetting how to build and run them.
Goodness, no work without electricity? Where do I sign up?
Thank you! I have ranted this exact rant every time I’ve come across Olduvai-oriented Peak Oilers. Electricity=civilization! Screw Shakespeare! If we lose electricity, god help us, we will immediately forget about asepsis and the scientific theory and inclined planes and iron smelting! All of our engineers and doctors and teachers and scientists–and textbooks, textbooks for sure–will spontaneously go up in flames!
I’m going to assume that these people have a basic distrust of humanity (okay, well, you can’t blame them to a point) and believe that our natural default is barbarism. I’m not actually huge on humans in large numbers myself, but fortunately, the evidence suggests that our natural default is inertia. In the midst of the worst of the Black Death, most people just kept going to work, because, well, that’s what you do, and if you don’t, you KNOW you’re toast. Surely we can hope to do better than 30-50% dieoff? And surely, if our ancestors could plod along through that, we can manage?
I would hope we could manage to make something more humane than the cloth factories of Lowell, in our new world - though the evidence from eletrical-powered clothing sweatshops is not hopeful in that regard. We can always raid all the defunct gyms for treadmill motors to attach to windmills, like that kid in Malawi with the out-of-date electrician’s textbook did.
I do take great comfort in the knowledge that on New Years Eve, 1900 the Minneapolis Cycle Club rode a 100 mile round trip pleasure ride on unpaved roads, on bikes produced in small shops (industrial shops, but on the craft level), largely in the dark, mostly on WOODEN tires. Bikes aren’t going to disappear even if we end up making them on hand lathes with rope “chains”. Worried about pasture? Bicycles are “the poor man’s horse”.
But I also don’t think we’ll give up computers or electricity entirely, despite climate change - I hope we will scale it back a lot, looking more like the people in Always Coming Home with their electric recording devices and “Machine People” outposts that sound a lot like public library computer kiosks. But we are awfully attached to electricity - I actually worry more that we’ll continue to choose having power to waste over having a livable climate.
Thanks, Sharon, for these thought-provoking posts.
As encouraged by worthy spiritual traditions, individuals and societies must forgive fellow human beings — whether middle class, lower class or upper class — if we want to spiritually evolve and attempt to reduce or eliminate our anger and wars. Having said this, however, we (individually and collectively) have a moral obligation to acknowledge our complicity in the destruction of the Earth because of the affluent and bourgeois lifestyles we have chosen to follow. These lifestyles, primarily promoted by Western Civilization and today mostly by the USA, we have chosen consciously or subconsciously perhaps due to the brainwashing tactics of our predatory capitalist culture or whatever. Nevertheless, our acts have been and are destructive of our souls and the Earth.
In a large sense, I’m not grateful for my or our middle class lifestyle. It enslaves us to things and to our egotistical addictions. By extension, our middle class lifestyles make us forget or ignore the essence and the suffering of other sentient beings and the part each and everyone of us individually and collectively (as part of Western Civ. and as part of US culture) play in their destruction, and the destruction of ourselves and of our Earth.
~Vegan
We do have a few relevant historical examples of societies abandoning advanced technologies and reverting to simpler, earlier forms. We all know about the Japanese giving up firearms, and the Chinese giving up oceangoing ships. There are also the numerous examples of isolated, small populations having to gradually give up technologies that their ancestors knew; Diamond talks about this in Collapse, and Jane Jacobs also talks about this in Cities and the Wealth of Nations. With the exception of those societies that collapsed into oblivion, for the most part life went on. Having a critical mass of population so that some specialization can continue to be supported appears to be critical. As Jacobs describes the process, when there are very few people that you have any contact with, and all of you have to focus on mere subsistence, then there is a continuous giving up and forgetting of one technology after another, as life gets poorer generation after generation.
Thus, my take on things is that whether or not we continue to have grid-delivered electricity (which is not the same thing as no electricity at all, btw) isn’t my primary concern. Of greater concern is the extent to which we will be able to maintain the web of communications & trade, and thus the extent to which specialization can continue. Life in a society where there at least are small towns, and trade between those small towns, is going to be a lot better than a society in which there are only small subsistence farmers spread out across the landscape. Life in a society where we can still manage to maintain some cities (even if just of relatively modest scale) will be even better still. You are right in pointing out that such patterns of habitation existed long before electricity was invented, and that we could revert to them again. It is not likely that we can do so with as many people concentrated in the large cities as we have at present, though. Some redistribution, and long term decline, in population is going to be necessary.
Thanks for the post Sharon! I can always count on you to give me hope :).
Of course we CAN live without electricity! The question is, can most people learn how to fast enough, and will the resources (which are much LESS energy dense than fossil fuels) be available? After all, the last time we were living without electricity, we had what - only 2 billion people?
Computers, phones, clotheswashers, etc. - luxuries. But we will always need energy to cook. People in our country would have a very hard time without electric/gas cooking and refrigeration if there were no infrastructure or food networks to support life without those things. Most people can barely cook for themselves without a package, much less cook over a campfire on a regular basis. In other words, how quickly would the landscape turn into a moonscape?
Even in the Olduvai hypothesis, some people would survive. And even in our current situation, some people die. It’s a question of how many.
When I read that article on Energy Bulletin yesterday, I too wondered about electric cows. Thanks for the reassurance.
Long term things may totally fall apart but I would suspect that we will have some power for a considerable amount of time. I think it’s safe to expect that what ever portion of your regional power that comes from hydo and wind will be the bare minimum we fall to.. As long as this is enough to keep basic needs like, hospitals, pharma, basic phones, I won’t mind too much.
I can live without can openers, bread makers, this damn box.
We all should take it as a challenge to remove one electical appliance from each room. Why not have a wind up alarm clock rather than a digital/clock radio/ cd player?
Why not air dry our hair? I do it even in winter when I walk to the commuter train at -30
Why not make a cake, cookies, bread by hand, not only do you get a micro workout and save power you reduce your clutter?
I suspect however that we’ve grown so soft that far more people will just curl up than we can imagine and society will be in no shape to take care of them even if we only fall part way.
I would also comment on today’s money Since it’s mostly electronic if you do fear regional or rolling blackouts make sure you have a stash of money at hand.
Personaly I think banking and our currencies will collapse long before we run out of power because of debt, missmanagement and such. If you accept that we could be reverting to the OLD ways without power maybe you should consider placing some of your savings(if any) into silver and gold that your goverment can’t devalue away or your bank can’t lose in bankruptcy or with the loss of electronic records
Today, most money is electronic as are the records, if power goes poof then the only money will be paper currently in circulation and metals, and I know which I’d prefer to recieve if things came apart.
Two mini-points:
1) I’m less afraid of losing electricity, conveniences, etc than I am losing my house. Yes, it’s old (1959), yes it’s mortgaged. We’re paying as fast as we can, but I don’t see it being paid off any time soon.
2) Green Assassin, I also have cash put aside, because I figure at first people will still be accepting it because they’ll assume that “society” will be right back. But I’m not holding gold or silver because I just can’t see any value in any sort of money if things get quite bad. So I’m putting aside the proverbial “toilet paper, razors, soap and whiskey”. At best there’ll be no peak oil and I’ll be the cleanest, drunk with silky smooth legs you ever did see
Wow, you are such an optimist….
No, seriously: I’m worried that we have destroyed so many of the structures which allowed people to live without industrialization that we will have a difficult time getting back. But of course you are right that there are a lot of bright chicks (and maybe even bright roosters) out there who will invent the world anew inspired partially by the brilliance of the old. Thanks for the note of hope.
Green Assassin Brigade has a point about money; local hard cash, especially in a form that has immediate tradeable value in a wide variety of situations, is a much better idea than electronic liquidity. Also, it’s better to get such alternate economic systems going now, *before* we absolutely have to have them.
I just commented on a thread about local currencies over at John Robb’s blog, and how having a functional local economy with local currency could be a major force in preventing general social collapse. As I said there, local currency is a great tool for changing the way people think about the economy and their participation in it - for relocalization.
And Sharon, although I absolutely agree with you that electricity does not spell the doom of all civilization, I do have to say that I believe the loss of the Internet is the single saddest thing that is probably likely to occur as a result of the powerdown.
I don’t necessarily need objects shipped from China, or Mexico, or Poland, but I do think human society is bettered by communication, and will suffer from the loss, perhaps more in the long run than from the loss of electric light or easy transportation. I think of losing even just Wikipedia - how many thousands of hours of collectively-generated knowledge! - and just want to cry like a minor deity had dropped dead in front of me.
I dimly recall a Star Trek episode where they arrived on a planet that appeared at first glance to be “primitive” - pre-industrial, nearly everything made by hand, small villages - but then is discovered to have a hidden set of extremely high technology that is used primarily for communications, medical emergencies, and as a repository of knowledge. That’s my bright future wish: that we get our act together in time to save what’s really important, and that ain’t SUVs.
namaste.
oops, in that third paragraph it should have said loss of electricity does not spell the doom of all civilization. I imagine most of y’all got that anyway. ;-/
NH, like lowell and other parts of MA, is chock full of old mills. I have long marveled at the genius of powering those mills with nothing but the river running next to it. We could very easily restore those mills and the canals to run them and the rail to transport the finished goods and from a production standpoint at least not miss electricity in the least. And I’m not so sure electricity is going out anyway, even in New England we have the capacity to have houses and businesses generate enough of their own solar energy to be off grid. Mount Washington is the windiest place I’ve ever been. The seacoast generates enough wind, solar and perhaps even perpetual motion generated power from the tides (maybe). This is just New Hampshire. I expect other areas have equally rich resources if we’d only stop talking about how we’re going to loose our electricity and look for newer ways to generate it.
I have to agree about the loss of the internet. Granted, there’s quite a lot of garbage on the web that we could all do without, but many of us (myself & family included) consider it primarily as a resource and a learning tool. If there is something we don’t know how to do, someone on the web does, and we can learn from that without the need to keep endless piles of books and such. I do realize that we could go back to learning in the format, but it will take some serious retraining for us.
Thank you for a well written commentary that amounts to a common sense reality check. I am an engineer whose model of reality all to often consists of numbers, trends, and graphs and I rely on people like Sharon to articulate concepts that I feel in my gut, but simply do not have the verbal skills to articulate on my own. For that, I am forever grateful for your writing.
Yes, we will all be forced to adapt our way of life as the situation changes. Perhaps radically. We can make an assumption that we will be unable to adapt, but I think that this worldview overlooks people’s adaptability and resiliency. People radically change their lifestyle all the time. Nine years ago, my wife and I had our first child at age 38 after 13 years of marriage. Neither of us had ever even been around small children. So to say our lives radically changed is a vast understatement. The change in lifestyle was like trying to step onto a fast moving platform, but like everyone else on the planet that has ever had their first child, we adapted. We adapted because our situation required us to. We had no other choice. And now, our lives are much better because of it.
Whenever I get too worried about the rapid adjustments that our society is going through, I remind myself what I wise person once told me; “The morning after the end of the world as we know it, somebody, somewhere, is going to wake up and want breakfast.” Take a deep breath, and get to work. Life will go on.
I don’t think learning from books is necessarily harder or something you would have to retrain yourself to do, Tara. The big loss there is the information itself. There is *plenty* of info on the internet that you can’t get within your area, that would simply be out of reach for us were it to go down. And I also think it’s worth noting that our family and friends are more spread out from us than ever before, and losing the internet would in a very real way be losing those people for many of us.
Personally, as an aspiring film archivist (oh and I am fully aware what a horrific career choice that is on this board, but at some point you just have to pursue the dream job, dammit) you can imagine where my heart lies. I don’t even care if we don’t make new films, but never being able to watch “It Happened One Night” again? Breaks my fucking heart, that does.
Hmm, I don’t know which I like better: “Toasts my buns” (a la Sharon) or “Grinds my crackers” (a la Crunchy Chicken). In the textbook I’m using for my upcoming Critical Thinking class, there’s a section delightfully similar to the one you dissect, and it certainly toasts my crackers (hey, best of both worlds). The book is otherwise very good, but I do plan to spend a goodly bit helping my students understand that before The God of Science arrived, we did indeed have things like analgesics, ways to purify water (er–boiling?!), indoor plumbing, and that life itself won’t end if you must use *gasp* candles for light after dark.
Great gods, how much weaker do we think we are now than we were even 50 years ago?
MissyM
If the currency seems sound when/if the lights go out some people will accept it but with the current economic troubles there is already a growing numbers of investors and common people placing money in foreign or in metals. In troubled times governments usually print money to give away or spend on fixes which will devalue existing money.
I do see the value of local currencies if they are managed properly and not over issued, and barter will certainly be a major factor in PA trade. The book Deep Economy had a good chapter on local currencies.
Metals however do have several key attributes that put them above paper or barter.
metals are durable, paper and chickens less so
they are a store of wealth which can be stored indefinately, chickens cost you labour, feed and eventually die.
metals are small for their relative value. Paying your taxes if there are still taxes in chickens, not so easy.
Metals are very hard to counterfeit and devalue, Without the special pens and black lights to foil him a guy with a colour copier and a honda generator can print money on a whim just as the government does.
IN the long run investing your money in education and training of OLD skills, buying land, tools, livestock etc is your best choice, you can’t eat gold. But once you get beyond that point I still feel metals are better than gov paper. In the last 5 years the U.S. dollar lost 40% of it’s buying power, gold has trippled vs the dollar. Gold is money/economy insurance ask anyone who’s lived through a crisis in asia or south america. N.A. has been lucky but bad crap can happen to us too.
Great post with lots to think about!
Survival without electricity will be quite a challenge- just think about your daily life and basic necessities. Yes, we can all more or less get thru a black out and some of us manage to live off grid. But there’s a lot of (indirect) input from electricity.
Think about it: Grow a garden - great but how do you get water to it without water lines and hoses? Can your own food - lovely- but where do those glass jars come from? Food storage without plastic? Medical care without antibiotics and surgical supplies? Feed for animals without balers and baling twine?
I think electricity has worked its way into our lives in a million large and small ways that we never consider.
Ronald Wright has written about a future without easy access to power in a Scientific Romance (http://www.amazon.com/Scientific-Romance-Novel-Ronald-Wright/dp/0312199996). Interesting book (once you get past introductory section).
So long as the rivers run and the wind blows, I don’t see electricity going away. Maybe New England will be the industrial center of the US again.
Yes, yes, YES! Thank you, for this fabulous commentary.
Oh, and I gotta say…the bit about cows running on electricity? I laughed so hard I almost wet my pants. Seriously.
An important aspect of this issue is curiously lacking in the post and the comments. Whether the shift from cheap energy abundance to cheap energy scarcity is fast or slow, partial or complete, there is still the issue of Earth’s carrying capacity. I too believe this “end of civilization” is not an end to humanity, but a (welcome) change in our civilizational structures (social and technological). But if we believe we can sustain the earth’s current population without cheap and accessible energy – specifically oil because of its portability and durability – we are indeed fooling ourselves.
And it is not just the decline of cheap energy that defines the catastrophe to come. Cheap energy has allowed us to remove or deplete the majority of all readily accessible resources such as potable water, metal ores, topsoil, and timber while despoiling the environment leaving dying oceans, polluted air and water, melting ice shelves, and habitats in crisis. Certainly many of these conditions could reverse over time and some of the renewable resources will regenerate but this takes time and what will support current global population levels until such time?
To use the given example of using candles for light, how do you suppose any major city or population center could be supplied with even a fraction of candles needed (or even the materials to make their own candles) without relatively cheap mass transport of goods and materials over considerable distances. Yes, there were large population centers (but nothing like what we see today) prior to the age of oil and electricity but these were supported by a slow, organic growth of a particular infrastructure, based on the technology and resources of the time, to support it. We can, and likely will get there again but not after significant time passes without such structures. In that transition time, the practical carrying capacity of the earth – in its present state – will be greatly diminished.
Humanity can survive this. Even civilization (albeit radically altered) can survive this. But I cannot see how this can come about without wringing through a particularly nasty period of die-off, and further damage to the earth as we all try to survive the transition as best we can.
I got a chuckle out of MissyM’s post. I too am going more for the things to barter end.
I hadn’t yet run into the group that thinks our creativity and brains are run on electricity - they must never have been camping or to to see the inguinity of the 2/3’s world.
And by the way, I know the cow where my milk comes from and I havn’t seen plugged into any electric outlets - though her owner looks a tad frazzled at times and so I do spell her by doing my own milking chores.
Sharon,
Thanks for the post as always.
On the matter of pumping water anyone interested might want to visit this website:
http://treadlepump.blogspot.com/
It has plans on how to build a treadle pump, basically a pump attached to a stairstepper with no electricity involved with parts available at HomeDepot. I plan to build one in then near future. A pump like this is many times more efficient than hauling water by hand. They are widely used in Africa and Asia but I have found no supplier for these in the US.
DM
70% of the electricity generated in New Zealand is from renewable resources, mainly hydro. (Which works okay until you get a dry year and the lakes start to run low). So I can’t see the lights going out here due to a lack of oil.
Of course with an economy largely dependent on long distance agricultural exports, that is where we are going to be in trouble…..it may be my civic duty to assist our nation’s farmers by subsisting on a constant diet of grass-fed lamb.
Dear Sharon,
I loved your deconstruction of James Leigh’ s vision of life without electricity - hilarious! The sobering comments of “Nightfishes” toned the laughter down, but since about the only certainty is the uncertainty of the future, I think we have to go with adaptability. Brian’s comment on adaptability going on all over the place when people have their first child was right on. Perhaps we also need to work on attitude. Living with less, living differently doesn’t have to be seen as an unmitigated disaster, and the challenges of making do, or reinventing ways to do things can actually be rewarding.
Corinne
I was actually commenting to my husband today that so many of life’s modernizations have come with their own pitfalls and problems yet folks feel that we cannot possibly live as our ancestors did. It’s almost like people today think we sprang from the loins of the earth during a technological age. Nope, we had to get here and we survived just fine before electricity. Now to convince others it can actually be done.
Worldwide, only a few percent of the electricity is generated by oil. Mostly it’s coal and gas. Even nuclear is bigger than oil in electricity generation.
The blackouts are supposedly caused by the lack of oil because oil’s required for the vehicles which maintain power lines, bring coal to power stations, and so on. Part of the system gets run down, and the system collapses.
The problem with that idea is that it assumes, as I said, that we stumble blindly towards the cliff, that if fuel is short we just let it be short and continue happily burning it whenever we can, who gets to burn it? Well, we let the market decide, who pays the most and buys first wins.
Whereas in fact what we see when a country suffers fuel shortages is that the government steps in and priorities are set, to ensure that maintenance vehicles, fire brigade, police and so on can still get around. SUVs can’t get diesel, but diesel trains carrying people and freight still can.
So we end up with a lot of disruption and trouble, but we don’t have rolling blackouts, we survive. This is especially so if the depletion is gradual rather than overnight.
Don’t get me wrong - our electrical grids are fragile systems, they require good management to work, and are easy to fuck up. We’ve done it across the West many times, and they regularly fail in the Third World. But it’s largely because of poor management. For example in Auckland they had four main power lines going into the city, the management said, “aha, let’s save money by not maintaining them.”
Then one line got worn out and failed.
“That’s alright,” said the management, ignoring the engineers, “we’ll just put all the power through the other three!”
So a second failed, “Just put it through the other two!”
Then a third, then the whole city had a blackout.
Nothing about peak oil makes that stuff more or less likely.
As Sharon said, if oil is necessary to an industrial society, how did we ever enter the industrial revolution? That was begun with water, then they brought in wood, and finally coal and gas. Oil’s a late arriver. Oil’s only needed for lots of personal transport and cheap plastic crap.
Recently, I came across a comment by someone who said they’d commit suicide if faced with a life without the trappings of cheap energy. As someone who grew up largely off-grid, I felt vaguely offended. I mean, yeah, life was different for us. When it got hot, we didn’t snap on the AC or even a fan- we hung out in the pond for hours on end. But to say that life wasn’t worth living? I’ve been fully on grid for decades now, to the point I flip if the power goes out for a couple of hours (this disturbs me). I agree with those who say that the internet would be the largest loss of a world without electricity- all that information at your fingertips is invaluable. But there was life without the internet. Stock up on books, people! They’re so cheap at thrift stores. I find that when I’ve got a seriously good book going, I could care less about the internet, electricity, or anything but the book.
Well, look at you being all Miss Positively! I, too, appreciated the “toasting my buns” comment. I might have to borrow that one for variety’s sake.
As to loss of electricity… people are more likely to approve increased nukular power generation than accept being plunged into darkness. Additionally, it’s more likely that people will actually have to pay attention to how much electricity they are consuming given increased costs and hopefully a healthy dose of conservation will kick in. Now there’s a novel thought. You mean I can’t leave all the lights on in my house all the time?
For some strange reason (which doesn’t exactly fit my evolutionary model) some individuals get trapped in the mindset that they couldn’t possibly live without this or that: I can’t survive with my air conditioning set higher than 76! And, Lawsy Mercy! I just might die if I don’t have access to Google 24/7! I mean how else am I going to operate on this planet? What about easy access to porn? And discussion groups about needlepoint? What about them, huh? And there’s the, um, there’s the, oh, never mind. I guess I can find all that out the old-fashioned way.
So, how do we live without all the trappings of electronics? I know! Ask my mother. She’s been doing it for 68 years (okay, I admit she has a nasty television habit, but otherwise she’s pretty much living in the dim ages).
Anyway, faced with the actual event, I’m fairly sure the majority will just make do. The initial shock might overwhelm some, but eventually they’ll snap out of it, learn how to adapt and make do. Homo sapien sapiens is a resilient species. Look what we’ve accomplished so far
Thankyou Sharon for shareing, I read you just about everyday, and you always give me nutritious food for thought, steve
Sometime in the antediluvian past (the 70’s or 80’s) there was a satirical radio program about a post apocalyptic, post-oil future which included the hilariously-rendered aural image of a cult of frustrated air travelers hauling a jetliner (imagine hundreds of people pulling on huge ropes) across the desert to the rim of the Grand Canyon with the expectation that they could all climb aboard and launch the plane off the rim — and it would fly without fuel!
The scary element in this farce is the idea that millions of people would, instead of working to build a new economy, would focus all their efforts on “bringing back” the petroleum economy and trying to recover/retain all the conveniences and pleasures they enjoyed when oil was cheap and plentiful.
Not only would these people not be working on the projects necessary to get the new economy going, they would would be actively interfering with the efforts of those who are working to build the new economy and sucking up the dwindling resources needed to build that new economy.
And there’s no reason to believe that these “cargo cultists” would seek to hold onto these conveniences/pleasures non-violently. It’s easy to imagine them taking the dwindling stocks of tools, goods, food, etc, at gunpoint and forcing other people to provide the labor once provided by “labor-saving” appliances, automobiles, and factories.
We could wind up with a sort of grotesque slave-labor simulacrum of modern society for a generation or two while our last chance to build a sustainable society goes down the drain.
I hate to be the negative one, but we need to inject some common sense into this good vibe, love-fest. First of all, I see nothing wrong with existing without electricity altogether. In fact, it will largely be the end result of our fling with fossil sunlight.
Now, that being said, you must first of all notice that when you mention that we used to do without electricity and all it afforded us, you fail to mention that population pre-electricity was less than one billion world-wide. You fail to mention that pre-electricity ninety-five percent of the population lived outside of cities. You fail to mention that virtually everyone had some basic knowledge of gardening, farming, animal husbandry, as well as a myriad of other skills, skills that back then were all but considered standard operating information. You fail to mention that the small family farm was the standard operating methodology.
They were doing fine without electricity because they never had their paradigm completely shifted by it. Chicken and egg my friend, chicken and egg.
Should electricity be cut off the resulting chaos and damage would be immense in the electrified world. The non-electrified world would also feel effects but of a different nature. Remember, Iowans import ninety-five percent of their food from other states.
Yes, eventually, after an immense shakeout likely involving the deaths of millions, if not billions, we will once again hew to the firm hand of nature and collect our water from the sky (which we will have to because at this time some 95% of all waterways are polluted beyond potability), we will grow food locally, and we will do everything locally with minor trade here and there.
But, you must know that we do not have a ready stock of traction animals, let alone trained traction animals, nor do we have the traces, harnesses, barns, stables, fields devoted to feeding the animals, or humans trained in the art of managing, training, and keeping healthy traction animals.
I could go on and on about then and now pointing out why your argument is no argument, but I think anyone with a working knowledge of our world can grasp the horror that would be the world deprived of electricity overnight.
If, as Richard Heinberg says, we had thirty years to prepare, then yeah, but we don’t have thirty years.
Telling people that everything will be hunky dory because people in the past were fine without electricity is playing to the pollyanna streak that every techno-addict harbors, the belief that something will save us, that we, yes we of the great techno-nation, can never suffer mass starvation, never be let down hard, or be made to suffer, but we can.
Using your own techniques, we can look at the past to inform us as well. You will see people starving by the millions at every age and epoch and at every technological level. WE ARE NOT SPECIAL.
To assume we will be fine and then tell people to go back to sleep is dangerous at best and cruel at its worst.
This is not a drill nor a made for television movie. This is happening.
My main plea is to look at where we want to end up, which I assume from your blog is a place with localized, self-reliant communities. We will end up there one way or another, but it is precisely the way that is important. We can ignore the possibility of a massive die-off, or we can assume that, if we take the wrong tack, that we may well end up there. What do we do? We use the relatively cheap energy that is available now to build localized infrastructure, train people in permaculture, animal husbandry, wetland waste processing, local manufacture of all goods, and recognize that we do not have the land to accommodate everyone. There will be hard times for many people who will not be able to eat unless we act now, act swiftly, and act rightly.
And, whhheeeewwww, that all being said, I firmly believe that we will not do any of the above on a scale meaningful enough to prevent massive, catastrophic suffering. We are, as a species, simply too short-term oriented.
I am sorry. May the invisible sky-being of your choice have mercy on your soul, or whatever you call that thing that gets all tingly when you see your children smile.
Mmm… That’s a TRS-80. TSR is the company that brought us Dungeons and Dragons. Yes, I’m a geek.
We wait to see.
History vindicates all truth.
However, even though I enjoyed all your comments, and learned from them, I have an uneasy feeling that many underestimate or are in denial of the level of catastrophe coming due to Peak Energy!
James leigh
James Leigh is right! He did not say there will be no “electronic” cows”. He said there will be no dairy products. Machines are used to milk the cows, and refrigeration and transport is needed to deliver the product to distant markets.
This will be unworkable, and for the hundreds of millions who live in suburbia, with no possibility for family production of food, this will be very drastic to say the least.
We need to think of what James Leighs is saying, and some of it needs contemplation to think the consequences through, and not shoot from the hip in entertaining, but tragically misleading comments.
Oh yes Leigh’s closing statement - we need to move on this: “However, what we really need is for us all to cooperatively take urgent steps to ameliorate this looming situation and prepare for how we will live in a post-energy world and its civilization. A whole new sustainable, localized and agricultural based civilization is needed; with a new mindset of cooperation and care, and harmonious social behavior, along with alternative fuels for a less fuel-hungry society.”
Harry — why do people living in suburbia have no possibility of home production of food? It’s difficult in really dense urban areas, but even possible there, and most of suburbia is houses neatly sectioned off on family-size plots of land. Most people insist on growing lawn grass instead of potatoes on those plots, but even if they’ve irrevocably poisoned it with pesticides they can grow stuff in buckets. A couple of goats would be quite happy on a suburban plot.
James, thanks for your moderate comments. It is quite possible I’m overly optimistic, of course, although usually I get the other accusation. And as Harry points out, we have a general agreement in the root solution.
Cherenkov and Harry - My claim is not that we will magically transition without suffering (in fact, I say this over and over again above), but that the Olduvai hypothesis overstates the dangers of that particular loss. I don’t think we can rely on any magical solution to deal with the population problem - and of course, I’m plenty implicated, but the truth is that the fact that the planet supported 1 billion people before industrialization does not logically mean that if we remove part or even all of our fossil fuel platform, the population will rapidly decline to the same levels - among other things, the nitrogens, artificial and natural, excreted in our urine will allow us to keep food production up high enough to meet population needs for some time to come if we are even slightly less idiotic than our maximum. Organic low input can match or exceed current yields quite consistently and can ramp up in a matter of one or two seasons - there’s ample research on this subject. While I think the long-term carrying capacity of the planet is considerably lower than 9 billion, the idea that we lose fossil fuels and immediatelly magically drop to 1 billion or lower is unrealistic - in fact, I think it operates as a way of saying we don’t actually have to deal with population.
As for the rest - of course we don’t have the knowledge, tools or draft animals. But we have a lot of human beings, which is why I think that small scale human production will probably have a larger role than draft animal agriculture - but it won’t take more than a decade to change that, odds are. It will take a far shorter time than that for people to recognize that if they don’t learn to grow food, they won’t eat.
Personally, I think a rapid transition to a minimally fossil fueled world might be better for us than a slower one, which would allow us to do further damage to the carrying capacity of the planet. People will suffer and die anyway, but I have a preference for me doing the suffering, rather than passing it off to future generations. What I worry about is a slow grind, in which people have no incentive to adapt, because it always looks like the electricity will come back on tomorrow.
I think it is clear that while we disagree in details, we agree in essentials about the conclusion, as Harry points out. I don’t think we’ll have any trouble getting together on that.
Crunchy, I think American opposition to nuclear will be entirely overcome - but far too late to actually produce enough nuclear power plants - nuclear doesn’t scale rapidly and it is hugely fossil fuel dependent. It is already high priced without massive subsidies, and those costs will only rise as energy costs do. I agree people will prefer nuclear to sitting in the dark. I think that like billions of people in the world who right now would be fine with the risks of nuclear power, our ability to do anything about our new comfort levels will be pretty limited. Certainly in this scenario, it won’t play.
Sharon
Hi Sharon,
From your first response to my article many would think that we are miles apart.
In fact not true!
I am a college teacher here in Cyprus and live on an orachard, with about 150 fruitful trees (olive, fig, apricot, apple, plum, orange, mandarine, almonds etc) and we have a house vegetable garden, and a good supply of bore water (unfortunately with an ELECTRIC turbine to bring water up from 250 feet below) for all this to be sustained in the Middle East desert.
I certaily believe in local agricultural based self sufficient community based human groupings (and all that it means) for our future, but I believe the transition process will be much more bitter and agonizing than most anticipate. This is particularly so if we add in civil strife, world geopolitics and cilvilization clash. See my webpage for some articles on these.
But in spite of ourselves maybe, we will get to the other side to a much better civiization that we have now.
I am the ultimate optimist!!
See you there, James Leigh
We will shortly as a nation have to prioritize our remaining energy reserves. I for one would strongly advocate putting electric generation near or at the top of the list. In it’s way human history resembles nature in that it is conservative. Natures recapitulates and reuses and builds from the past. So do we.
My point being that we can in no regard go back to a past way of life which was built on experiences and techniques handed down or directly taught by living practitioners. A way of living which at most points in time were based on inherited skills and proven devices.
We don’t have the skills and have not had them for several generations. So don’t bother asking your grandfather how he used to do it because he didn’t. The closest people I know of in North America who have thrived intact for several hundred years living a life long gone by and have done so without electricity are the Old Order Amish but…and it’s a big one, they use propane! Yup, they are also on the grid in a sense.
So, forget about the simple life. It’s GWTW.
Protect and support electric generation or we will never make it long enough
cont’d.
to learn to live without it.
Thanks for giving people the benefit of the doubt instead of reiterating how much we need appliances, gadgets, etc. I would like to think that, first and foremost, humans are adaptable, and that we will indeed adapt to the changes ahead. I know that many of us are already trying to adapt in small ways–driving less, making things for ourselves, not relying on television for entertainment. After all, how do we imagine people have lived for thousands of years, and how some people still live (and perhaps even happily) today? Thanks for the little shot of optimism. It is greatly needed and appreciated.
God (or the devil) is in the details. So how do extract ourselves off the horns of transition dillemas that still exist in the current world.
If self-relliance and sustainability is the insurance policy to the world as we know it collapsing, what’s the insurance policy for action if it doesn’t, or doesn’t quickly enough to validate our decisions? How are we navigating the mundane decisions of the interim period, with children, jobs, parents? Like….
With a teenager four years from college, and another five years behind, do we start saving or assume college won’t exist.
Pull out our (admittedly very modest) retirement savings into gold or paper - or do we use all of it to invest in our homestead? Do we do Half half?
While anticipating the (imminent) needs of aging parents, how do we position ourselves to care for them? Heck, my husband is closing in on 50 - how do we position ourselves to care for us, also, as we age?
We have a well built brick house on 4 acres, half woodlot, with two woodstoves. Do we invest thousands in slapping solar onto a house not designed for it in order to have some modest electricity if the big lights go out?
I can get my head around the critical what do you put in the wagon?” question in Heinlein’s Time enough for Love, but I have a great deal more difficulty when a) we’re not setting out on the prairie b) no one else can even see the wagon and c) making decisions for family and resources in the existing world, while anticipating another potential one, are more complex than that scenario addresses.
What’s the plan b for the Plan B?
Cherenkov said, “Yes, we of the great techno-nation, can never suffer mass starvation, never be let down hard, or be made to suffer …”
Cherenkov, you just described the arrogance of American culture.
Sharon, I suspect that as you said “a slow grind in which people have no incentive to adapt, because it always looks like the electricity will come back tomorrow” is the most likely scenario. I hear people all the time saying, for example, that gasoline prices will come down and that the economy has always gone through cycles and that everything will be fine, etc. And, of course, the media, powerful elites and politicians promote similar views. Those in power have always deceived the masses throughout history, as you know.
False hope combined with US empire-culture arrogance will lead to an inevitable die-off in the US, but more so throughout the world.
Ultimately, I am an optimist (ouch!). I think that if our species makes it through the projected climate change in whatever numbers, we will be better human beings and will probably have learned that we are part of nature and must live in harmony with nature.
Probably future generations will say, “How stupid were those ancestors of ours who created nuclear weapons, fought resource wars, and developed industrial-technological civilization.” If great literature and art survive, however, they will be awed by it. This is the paradox of our species.
Namaste!
~Vegan
Cherenkov Quote - “…we will once again hew to the firm hand of nature and collect our water from the sky (which we will have to because at this time some 95% of all waterways are polluted beyond potability),”
Electricity, coal, oil, energy are all meaningless finite commodities we have driven ourselves to become Dependant on… Great nations and powers will rise and fall from basic ignorance of what is and what is not infinite.
Yet we historically ignore the obvious things that are vital to existence… clean air & water.
Our current existence is a only “gloomy” because we treat ourselves like a the expendable commodities we have been given and choose to simply throw away.
All the doom and gloom, hate and horror can go away if we just use common sense, care, compassion and treat our finite planet and people with the respect they deserve.
I know it is not popular to talk about but we have ways to produce clean abundant energy for a another century (no not solar, hydrogen, or wind hype and hoaxes).
We need to stop sweating the small stuff and focus on the things we have no answers for.
Clean Water - when it is gone, so are we.
Good post! That guy’s essay was bothering me, thanks for putting out some good points in response to it, Sharon!
Eva asks: Think about it: Grow a garden - great but how do you get water to it without water lines and hoses? Can your own food - lovely- but where do those glass jars come from? Food storage without plastic? Medical care without antibiotics and surgical supplies? Feed for animals without balers and baling twine?
Answer: I have mulch (hay chaff off the floor barn) on the garden to keep watering needs down, and can truck over water by hand from the rainwater barrels if needed. It takes a few trips for sure, but it isn’t a daily task (especially right now with all the rain we’re getting :P). Thanks to dark_matter for the treadle pump link though!
Canning’s a problem, but not in the short-term, as the jars and lids aren’t going to disappear overnight — same with plastic storage containers. Long-term, well, hopefully some artisans will see the need and start producing containers — not a hard hope in this area, where some of that is already happening, in glass, wood, and ceramic.
Medical care is definitely a much tougher one, and why a number of folks I know are getting into growing and/or learning to use herbal remedies and preventive medicine. Mortality rates might go up, and undoubtedly will in different places, depending on what supplies and skills/knowledge are available in a given area.
Feeding animals without baling and twine? We’re already doing some of that on the farm, but we do currently bale hay for the area. Still, before that the hay was stored loose, and we still have the equipment for doing that on the farm. Heck, we still have the old buckboard wagon in storage. Other folks will need to take their loose hay delivery and either fine a place in their barn for loose hay, or they’re going to have to build haystacks.
I’m not trying to make light of the questions, especially the medical one — these and other things need thinking about, and folks who want answer had best be going out and doing research on them. No one answer will be the solution for each and every person. And the questions won’t all be the same for everyone either.
The big cities are definitely going to have problems with transitioning, and how successful they are will depend on the people and the city. I certainly have concerns about how well our local hospitals will hold up, since they use a lot of power. The answer may be that some things will no longer be used — MRIs are already endangered because of a lack of sufficient technicians to repair them. Transitions are likely to be uneven in the future just as they are now — looking at the mortgage problems right now, not every place is suffering them to the same degree as every other place.
I like the internet, it’s been helpful in finding information, reading useful blogs and sites (like this one, for instance), ordering in seeds and stuff that I couldn’t get locally (and yes, I’ll be saving seeds, of course). I’m personally working on a library of useful info, be it books or stuff I found online that I’m assembling into a binder or three for offline referencing. Books are great because I can look at one whenever I feel like it, much more quickly than turning on the PC. Although at night I might need a candle or other lighting of course…
Nightfishes brings up the valid point that getting sufficient lighting to cities (candles) would probably be impossible. There is more than one option for lighting, but it’s still a valid point. I expect “nightlife” might be a bit different in the future, with folks turning in earlier. I will say though that since I know where most things are in my apartment, I often don’t use a light to get something from the kitchen, pantry, or wherever. When I first started inventorying, storing, and trying to figure out how long supplies would last, I thought I’d be out of candles after a year, but I’m not. A small part of that is because we still sometimes use a single electric light to work by in the evening, but apparently we just don’t need to use candles as much as I thought we would. And of course I didn’t account for changes in the season (longer days vs. shorter days) in my original formula, or for being able to find and do things in the dark (it adds up over the course of a year).
Oh, and as for emailing, it’s incredibly handy, but I do have a fair bit of stationery patiently waiting for me to use it. It might take longer things to get places, but even before steam engines we had mail. And on the other side of things taking a while, there’s the anticipation of things coming in the mail — a definitely ‘thrill’ when I was kid, before we had the internet and it became so easy to order things. For folks interested in voice and data communications alternatives, you might consider becoming amateur radio operators. The requirement to learn Morse code (CW) was dropped for the basic class, so you can learn to communicate and send data packets without the internet. Although you can still learn CW if you like of course, and many folks do… Check it out at: http://www.arrl.org
Anyway, the only way to really figure that stuff out is to try things and see what habits develop, I guess.
Dear Sharon, I long wished to see the kind of common sense like what you wrote above! Charlatans like “Doctor” Richard Duncan have since long discredited many valid concepts (like peak oil) which “orthodox” authorities cynically dismiss as being fringe. He is typical of the old American travelling circus quacks, who styled themselves as doctors and professors, and sold fake potions and powders to ordinary unsuspecting and uneducated people whom they impressed with their bluster. Duncan and his so-called one man “institute’s” pronouncements about the 1930-2030 timeframe of industrial civilisation and “returning to the stone age” without oil or electricity provide such ammo for the establishment. They also behove of Duncan’s lack of real education. After all, ancient Egypt, Greece, Rome, Galileo, Shakespere, Mozart and Tchaikovsky, to name but a few only - all lived before the present petroleum-electrical age; yet, were they stone age savages?
Duncan even contradicts himself and his die-off theories. It is correct that the use of fossil fuels have increased population levels; that began from about 1750 onwards when Britain started becoming the world’s first industrial power - and by 1804, the global population had exceeded 1 billion for the first time. But that increase wasn’t due to oil and electricity, it was because of the large scale use of the first fossil fuel, coal.
So it is “postmodern” American consumerism and Hummers that will die with peak oil, and not the Bolshoi ballet or Vivaldi’s music.
Sharon,
While on the subject of energy, I just wanted to say that I hope you’ll write more about nuclear in the near future. I remember you mentioned you were planning on that at some point.
Nuclear energy sounds about as smart as Russian roulette to me, but I don’t have any good answer to people who say, ‘Oh well, we’ll just shift to nuclear when petrol gets too expensive. Besides, it’s much safer than it used to be.’ I’d really like to be better educated on this topic.
I’m much enjoying your blog. It has inspired small but steady changes in my family’s life.
Thank you.
[…] and from the ever-astute Sharon Astyk: […]
[…] so I am reading Causabon’s Book about peak oil and how we will lose electricity and natural gas in 2012, how there is a whole network of people convinced that we are near the end of easy oil […]
Hello Sharon! Been awhile, eh? Ok, I think you’ve missed the point behind Duncan’s theory.
The Olduvai theory states that the industrial civilization will have a lifetime of less than or equal to 100 years (1930-2030). Gee, that 1930 date is mighty close when electrical generation was coupled to machines of mass production, eh? This theory was first introduced to by Richard Duncan PH. D. in 1989 (almost ten years after my formal education), and divides human history into three phases. The first “pre-industrial” encompasses most of human history when simple tools and weak machines (like the photo posted earlier), limited economic growth. The second “industrial” phase encompasses modern industrial civilization where machines temporarily lifted all limits of growth. The final “de-industrial” phase follows where industrial economies decline to the point of equilibrium with nonrenewable resources and the nature environment.
The decline of the industrial phase is broken into three sections: 1) The Olduvai slope (1979-1999), 2) The Olduvai slide (2000-2011), this marks escalating warfare in the Middle East and the peak of world oil production, 3) The Olduvai cliff (2012-2030), by 2012 an epidemic of permanent blackouts spread worldwide, first there will be waves of brown outs and temporary blackouts, then finally the electric power networks themselves expire. Finally culminating to a world population of 2 billion circa 2050.
When did the modern industrial environment, or movement really begin in earnest when it started to have this profound effect on the land? I would dare say some where in the early 1900’s, especially when machinery transformed the previous agricultural movement by replacing the energy that up to then was produced by men and livestock.
Back at the old school house, the instructors thought there were only two men who actually changed the world, benefiting mankind. They are often called the “fathers of the modern industrial society” and were the best of friends. They are Henry Ford and Thomas Edison, together these two men actually transformed the world, more than anyone else, in the history of mankind.
Henry Ford, often thought of the father of the automobile was much more than that. Actually, he is the father of modern assembly lines used in the mass production of uniform parts. Thomas Edison, often thought of the father of electricity, was actually one of the first inventors to apply the principles of mass production to the process of invention. Through electrical generation, this would provide the power needed to produce parts and products in mass quantity. Ford held a global vision, with consumerism as the key to peace. It was Ford, who thought that by coupling innovation and a higher wage for workers, would enable those workers to buy the products being made.
Even though Ford’s dream was a noble one, it was doomed to fail from the start. Probably unknown to him or Edison, was that the earth’s resources are limited, making consumerism unsustainable. It’s very likely both men held a linear view of the future, that through new innovation the human race would ever progress. Also, I can’t imagine that both men could foresee the “elephant in room”, that was created during this movement.
Back to Duncan’s Olduvai theory, the first phase of human history basically was when simple tools and weak machines limited economic growth. The second “industrial” phase encompasses modern industrial civilization where machines temporarily lift all limits to growth. The final “de-industrial” phase follows where industrial economies decline to a point of equilibrium with nonrenewable resources and the natural environment. Our modern industrial environment started when cheap fossil fuels made it economically feasible to couple electrical generation with mass production of uniform parts. Take any one of these out of the equation and we don’t have this environment any longer. If we don’t have this environment, we cannot support the people that was produced by it. It’s just that simple. People will have to find another environment and try to adapt to it.
Sharon, I do hope this may be of some use to you.
Thanks, yooper
Thanks, yooper
Without access to cheap NH3, the productivity of, say, many corn fields could drop from the now common 200 bushels per acre, to the 20-25 bushels per acre considered a bumper crop back in the 1820s. Worse, considering the extensive damage we have done to the overall humic layer in formerly productive soils across the continent, even this may be ambitious.
Prior to the discovery of artificial nitrification, farming was in two camps. The first was the intensivist groups, primarily Europeans and slave owning southern farmers. The reason for this was that tilling the land with primitive composts was labor intensive. The other group was strictly American, and primarily consisted of those who were western bound. Exploitative techniques were predicated on the economic condition of land being cheap and abundant, while labor was expensive. This schism became moot as the discovery and exploitation of lightweight, cheap artificial fertilizers quickly became essential to staying competitive.
Artificial nitrification, and boosts from soluble chemical amendment - all products of chemical warfare research prior to WWI - allowed farmers to plant the same uniform products season after season. The net consequence was not only dramatic swings in soil chemistry, and minerals concentration, but dramatic erosion problems, waterway nitrification from erosion of unbound additives, and general decreases in the thickness of humic layers, along with general decreases in critical native soil biota.
The silver lining is that the knowledge about low input methods can sustain our productivity levels somewhere between these two extremes, while protecting and rehabilitating the productivity of previously sterilized soils. Hundreds of millions of people will make the slide into the category of chronically malnourished every year before this transition is fully underway, however. People still widely believe in silly things like religion, so it’s unlikely that technical knowledge about how to survive and prosper will propagate rapidly to where it is needed the most. It’s strictly the availability of cheap energy that has allowed the global population to increase dramatically from about half a billion persons at the dawn of the Enlightenment, to almost seven billion persons.
People don’t usually starve to death. They get malnourished. They get weak and can’t work. Their immune systems become compromised, and they die from pneumonia and other illnesses. Meanwhile, they try to think of other strategies of survival that cannot be sustained. Examples include predating upon the local megafauna where prey are already scarce, deforestation for wood fuel where woody vegetation is already scarce, or burning down tropical forests in regions with oxisols in order to cheaply and temporarily restore usable nutrients for farming purposes. Oh, and humans also tend to go to war with their neighbors in order to survive.
Any way you look at it, things are going to get quite messy.
I’m with you on this one Sharon, all the way!
What civilization?? Where??
Generally the word connotes some kind of intelligently, rationally, equably structured social organization. Yes?
Sorry, I don’t see any.
I don’t believe that the grid could “be gone” within a few years, unless we start a nuclear war that comes back on us. My friends in countries that have rolling blackouts have been dealing with infrastructure problems for years without losing all power, much less turning into starving cannibal hordes. While we will be forced to adjust to reduced carrying capacity and energy resources, I see no reason to believe that that decline will be precipitous, and Americans in particular could easily cut 50% or more from our domestic consumption almost immediately. I have been reading survivalist literature long enough to have seen the dieoff meme in three or four repetitions. Many of its promoters, like Kunstler, fixate on one approaching doom after another as each one fails to perform as anticipated. Imagine how people must have felt who took Gary North’s advice and blew their teenage kids’ college funds on stockpiling their rural bunker with gold, guns, tools, and wheat because Y2K would be the end of civilization.
As for loss of skills in case of a genuine mega-crisis, the first thing I think of is Pol Pot. During the Cambodian genocide, people were killed because they wore eyeglasses - because it implied that they might be readers. More than a few inhabitants of our own country have an overt hostility both to educated “experts” and to religious/ethnic minorities, and would need very little excuse to go on a rampage targeting many of the very people who hold valuable skills. A longer-term concern is that there is no list of skills that must be preserved - of course, it would be subject to enormous debate - and some knowledge that might be critical is rarely practiced and likely to be overlooked. For example, John Michael Greer (whose writing I admire so greatly that I’m thinking of joining AODA) once used lens grinding as an example of a narrowly applicable skill that might have lower priority. I would argue, though, that while we could preserve basic medicine and public health in the total absence of electricity, we could not do so without lens grinding. I suspect that within a few generations without microscopes, you would lose the germ theory - or at best, “germs” would be just another variety of invisible demons that cause illness and must be warded off by ritual behaviors like handwashing, boiling water, stoning neighboring witches, etc.
So if I get about 3 kW of photovotaic I’ll be like the king of the hill. By the time it all gets this bad hopefully enough solar electricity to run a refrigerator won;t be too expensive. The refrigerator is probably the single most important piece of technology for survival. But with 3 kW of solar I can still watch TV; well maybe just DVD’s there won’t be enough to power DirectV or the cable company but now that I think about it I can do without that stuff. Seriously, if there is no or limited amount of food available like gets real ugly ie. big cities.