Peak Everything (6 page)

In recent years the field of happiness research has flourished, with the publication of scores of studies and several books devoted to statistical analysis of what gives people a sense of overall satisfaction with their lives. International studies of self-reported levels of happiness show that once basic survival needs are met, there is little correlation between happiness and per capita consumption of
fossil fuels. According to surveys, people in Mexico, who use fossil fuels at one-fifth the rate of US citizens, are just as happy. (See
Figure 15
.)

The opportunities to continue to enjoy current (or even higher) levels of happiness and to reduce work hours may seem pale comforts in light of all the enormous social and economic challenges implicit in the peaks discussed earlier. However, it is worth remembering that the list above details things that matter very much to most people in terms of their real, lived experience. The sense of community and the experience of intergenerational solidarity are literally priceless, in that no amount of money can buy them; moreover, life without them is bleak indeed — especially during times of social stress. And there are many reasons to think that these two factors have declined significantly during the past few decades of rapid urbanization and economic growth.

In contrast with these indices of personal and social well-being, Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita is easily measured and shows a mostly upward trend for the world as a whole over the past two centuries. But it takes into account only a narrow set of data — the market value of all final goods and services produced within a country in a given period of time. Growth in GDP is used to tell us that we should be feeling better about ourselves and our world — but it leaves out a wide range of other factors, including damage to the environment, wars, crime and imprisonment rates, and trends in education (like whether more or fewer people graduate from high school or college, and the quality of the education received.) Many economists and non-governmental organizations have criticized governmental reliance on GDP for this reason, and have instead promoted the use of a Genuine Progress Indicator (GPI), which does take account of such factors. While a historical GDP chart for the US shows general ongoing growth up to the present (GDP correlates closely with energy consumption), GPI calculations show a peak around 1980 followed by a slow decline.
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If we as a society are going to adjust agreeably to lower rates of energy flow — and less travel and transport — with minimal social disruption, we must begin paying more attention to the seeming intangibles of life and less to GDP and the apparent benefits of profligate energy use.

Figure 15
. How self-reported levels of happiness vary according to per-capita annual energy consumption in various nations.

Figure 16. US Gross Domestic Product and Genuine Progress Indicators compared, 1950 to 2002.

Addressing the economic, social, and political problems ensuing from the various looming peaks is no mere palliative and will require enormous collective effort. If it is to be successful, that effort must be coordinated, presumably by government, and enlist people by educating and motivating them in numbers and at a speed that has not been seen since World War II. Part of that motivation must come from a positive vision of a future worth striving toward. People will need to believe in an eventual reward for what will amount to many years of hard sacrifice. The reality is that we are approaching a time of economic contraction. Consumptive appetites that have been stoked for decades by ubiquitous advertising messages promising “more, faster, and bigger” will now have to be reined in. People will not willingly accept the new message of “less, slower, and smaller,” unless they have new goals toward which to aspire. They must feel that their efforts will lead to a better world, with tangible improvements in life for themselves and their families. The massive public education campaigns that will be required must be credible, and will therefore be vastly more successful if they give people a sense of investment and involvement in formulating those goals. There is a much-abused word that describes the necessary process —
democracy.

As another way of mitigating our paralyzing horror at seeing our society's future as one of decline in so many respects, we should ask: decline to
what?
Are we facing a complete disintegration of everything we hold dear, or merely a return to lower levels of population, complexity, and consumption? The answer, of course, is unknowable at this stage. We could indeed be at the brink of a collapse worse than any in history. Just one reference in that regard will suffice: the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, a four-year analysis of the world's ecosystems released in 2006, in which 1,300 scientists participated, concluded that of 24 ecosystems identified as essential to human life, 15 are “being pushed beyond their sustainable limits,” toward a state of collapse that may be “abrupt and potentially irreversible.”
¹³
The signs are not good.

Nevertheless, a decline in population, complexity, and consumption could, at least in theory, result in a stable society with characteristics that many people would find quite desirable. A reversion to the normal pattern of human existence, based on village life, extended families, and local production for local consumption — especially if it were augmented by a few of the frills of the late industrial period, such as global communications — could provide future generations with the kind of existence that many modern urbanites dream of wistfully.

So the overall message of this book is not necessarily one of doom — but it is one of inevitable change and the need for deliberate engagement with the process of change on a scale and speed beyond anything in previous human history. Crucially: we must focus on and use the intangibles that
are not peaking
(such as ingenuity and cooperation) to address the problems arising from our overuse of substances that
are.

As we have seen, just a few core trends have driven many others in producing the global problems we see today, and those core trends (including population growth and increasing consumption rates) themselves constellate around our ever-burgeoning use of fossil fuels. Thus, a conclusion of startling plainness presents itself:
our central survival task for the decades ahead, as individuals and as a species, must be to make a transition away from the use of fossil fuels — and to do this as peacefully, equitably, and intelligently as possible.

At first thought, this must seem like an absurd over-simplification of the human situation. After all, the world is full of crises demanding our attention — from wars to pollution, malnutrition, land mines, human rights abuses, and soaring cancer rates. Doesn't a monomaniacal focus just on fossil fuels miss many important things?

In defense of the statement I would offer two points.

First, some problems are more critical than others. A patient may suffer simultaneously from a broken blood vessel in the brain
and a broken leg. A doctor will not ignore the second problem, but since the first is immediately life-threatening, its treatment will take precedence. Globally, there are two problems whose potential consequences far outweigh all others: Climate Change and energy resource depletion. If we do nothing to dramatically curtail emissions of greenhouse gases soon, we will almost certainly set in motion the two self-reinforcing feedback loops mentioned previously — the melting of the north polar icecap, and the melting of tundra and permafrost releasing stored methane. These would lead to an averaged global warming not just of a couple of degrees, but perhaps six or more degrees over the remainder of the century. And this in turn could make much of the world uninhabitable, make agriculture impracticable in many if not most places, and result not only in the extinction of thousands or millions of other species but the deaths of hundreds of millions or billions of human beings.

If our dependence on oil, natural gas, and coal continues unabated the post-peak decline in their availability could trigger economic collapse, famine, and a general war over remaining resources. While it is certainly possible to imagine strategies to develop alternative energy sources and mandate energy conservation on a massive scale, the world is currently as reliant on hydrocarbons as it is on water, sunlight, and soil. Without oil for transportation and agriculture, without gas for heating, chemicals, and fertilizers, and without coal for power generation, the global economy would sputter to a halt. While no one envisions these fuels disappearing instantly, we can avert the worst-case scenario of global economic meltdown — with all the human tragedy that implies — only by proactively reducing our reliance on oil, gas, and coal ahead of depletion and scarcity. In other words, all that is required for the worst-case scenario to materialize is for world leaders to continue with existing policies.

These two problems are potentially lethal, first-priority ailments. If we solve them, we will then be able to devote our attention to other human dilemmas, many of which have been with us for millennia — war, disease, inequality, and so on. If we do not solve these two problems, then in a few decades our species may be in no position to make any progress whatever on other fronts; indeed, it will likely be engaged
in a struggle for its very survival. We'll be literally and metaphorically burning the furniture for fuel and fighting over scraps.

My second reason for insisting that the transition from fossil fuels must take precedence over other concerns can likewise be framed in a medical metaphor: often a constellation of seemingly disparate symptoms issues from a single cause. A patient may present with symptoms of hearing loss, stomach pain, headaches, and irritability. An incompetent doctor might treat each of these symptoms separately without trying to correlate them. But if their cause is lead poisoning (which can produce all of these signs and more), then mere symptomatic treatment would be useless.

Let us unpack the metaphor. Not only are the two great crises mentioned above closely related (both Peak Oil and Climate Change issue from our dependence on fossil fuels), but, as I have already noted, many if not most of our other modern crises also constellate around fossil fuels. Even long-standing and perennial problems like economic inequality have been exacerbated by high energy-flow rates.

Pollution is no different. We humans have polluted our environments in various ways for a very long time; activities like the mining of lead and tin have produced localized devastation for centuries. However, the problem of widespread chemical pollution is a relatively new one and has grown much worse over the past decades. Many of the most dangerous pollutants happen to be fossil fuel derivatives (pesticides, plastics, and other hormone-mimicking chemicals) or by-products from the burning of coal or petroleum (nitrogen oxides and other contributors to acid rain).

War might at first seem to be a problem completely independent of our modern thirst for fossil energy sources. However, as security analyst Michael Klare has underscored in his book
Blood and Oil,
¹⁴
many recent wars have turned on competition for control of petroleum. As oil grows scarcer in the post-peak environment, further wars and civil conflicts over the black gold are almost assured. Moreover, the use of fossil fuels in the prosecution of war has made state-authorized mayhem far more deadly. Most modern explosives are made from fossil fuels, and even the atomic bomb — which relies
on nuclear fission or fusion rather than hydrocarbons for its horrific power — depends on fossil fuels for its delivery systems.

One could go on. In summary: we have used the plentiful, cheap energy from fossil fuels, quite predictably, to expand our power over nature and one another. In doing so we have produced a laundry list of environmental and social problems. We have tried to address these one by one, but our efforts will be much more effective if directed at their common root — that is, if we end our dependence on fossil fuels.