The Long Descent (17 page)

Any student of history knows that people tend to overestimate the solidity of the familiar and are commonly taken by surprise when the foundations of an established order crumble away from beneath them. The possibility that the global political scene could change out of all recognition in the aftermath of military catastrophe is hard to dismiss. If that happens, those of us who live in today's United States and its remaining allies could be facing a very rough road indeed.

The Slow Train To The Future

It bears repeating that the predicament outlined in this chapter is not primarily a set of technical problems. Rather, it is a social and intellectual challenge; I might even risk using an utterly unfashionable word and call it a spiritual challenge as well. There are massive technical issues involved in downshifting from an energy-wasting economy and society based on fossil fuels to an energy-conserving–economy and society based on renewable energy resources, but those issues could potentially have been solved if they had been tackled in earnest starting in the 1970s.

Even today, though it's almost certainly too late to manage the transition without wrenching social disruptions and immense human cost, it might still be possible to deal with those challenges and make the leap to sustainability given the social and political will to do so. Every one of the challenges reviewed in this chapter could be mitigated substantially by responses that are well within the power of the leaders and citizens of today's industrial societies. Yet it's precisely the social and political will to deal with the crisis that is nowhere to be found. We need to talk more about why this has happened, and one place to start is precisely with what happened at the end of the 1970s, when the industrial world turned its back on the signs of crisis, and a great many promising steps toward sustainability went into the dumpster.

Part of that sea change in industrial society was political, of course. “Conservative” parties (the word belongs in quotation marks, since today's conservatives have forgotten how to conserve just as thoroughly as their liberal counterparts have forgotten how to liberate) in most of the industrial world realized that they could cut their opponents off at the knees by proclaiming that limits to growth didn't exist and by papering over the energy crises of the previous decade with short-term political and economic gimmicks. Part of the change, though, was a reflection of the success of the sustainability movement of the 1970s. In the aftermath of that movement, defying nearly all predictions, petroleum consumption and energy use per capita throughout the developed world went down and stayed down for much of a decade.

This movement toward sustainability, as much as anything else, made it possible for politicians in the United States and Britain to force down the price of oil to levels that, in constant dollars, were lower than ever before. When oil hit $10 a barrel, alternative energy and conservation technologies that had been profitable at higher energy prices became a quick ticket to bankruptcy. To the extent that the push for energy efficiency in the 1970s helped drive down the demand for oil, the sustainability movement of that decade dropped dead from the consequences of its own success.

It's a useful experience to read through publications on energy issues from the 1970s and compare their confident predictions that permanent limits to growth had arrived with the very different realities of the decades that followed. One of the bits of 1970s nostalgia on my shelves is a thoughtful little book titled
The Rise of the
Welsh Republic
by Derrick Hearne; it's an attempt to imagine the first decade of the history of an independent Wales in the imminent Age of Scarcity.
¹⁸
Hearne did not invent the idea of an Age of Scarcity; it was seen as the logical consequence of the emerging limits to growth by many other thinkers of the same period, and Hearne's proposals mirrored those being discussed in now-forgotten–periodicals such as
Rain
and
Seriatim,
where appropriate technology and organic agriculture rubbed elbows with social criticism amid the last hurrah of the idealism of the 1960s.

Fast forward from these mostly forgotten visions to today's peak oil debates and you might be forgiven a strong sense of déjà vu. Part of the received wisdom in the peak oil community these days is that once worldwide petroleum production peaks and begins its permanent decline, the mismatch between production and demand will cause exactly the same sort of Age of Scarcity that Hearne and so many other thinkers imagined in the 1970s. Now as then, the major issue under debate is whether the changeover to sustainability can be done quickly and thoroughly enough to prevent a crash.

There are good reasons to think that the effort put into this debate will turn out to be just as misplaced as it was in the 1970s — and for much the same reasons. Prophecy is risky business, but it's a risk worth taking on occasion, so I would like to offer the following seemingly unlikely prediction: twenty years after the definite arrival of a peak in oil production, the price of crude oil in Euros will be no higher than it is today, and it may actually be quite a bit lower.

The time frame is more important here than it may seem at first glance. The likely immediate aftermath of a significant decline in world oil production, of course, is skyrocketing prices for oil and everything made or transported with it; the possibility that oil could hit €200 a barrel or higher (even corrected for inflation) is a real one. Price surges on that scale will be a body blow to the economies of most nations in the developed world. Such astronomical prices would also mean that any method of conserving energy or using alternative energy resources in place of oil will be worth much more than its weight in light sweet crude.

So far, these predictions match the conventional wisdom in the peak oil community, but it's worth looking a step further into the future. If economies across the industrial world contract, the demand for petroleum will soften as people are forced to abandon the lifestyle choices that account for much of today's extravagant energy usage. Especially in the United States, where 5% of the world's people use 25% of its petroleum production, a severe economic contraction could readily cause what economists call “demand destruction,” which can be simply defined as the process by which people who can't afford a product stop using it. Meanwhile, in a global market awash with effectively limitless amounts of paper capital, the chance for huge profits in the conservation and alternative energy sectors guarantees that entrepreneurs in these fields will have more money they know what to do with. The most likely result, as these trends start to bite, is that the price of oil will level off and then begin to decline.

Diagram 3.2. Cycles of Descent

This abstract model of a society in catabolic collapse shows the stairstep process of decline that historically is the most common way for civilizations to break down. Each period of crisis causes losses in infrastructure, social organization, information resources, and population; these losses are partly made up during the times of stability and recovery — but only partly. The industrial world has already experienced one period of mild crisis in the 1970s, and a period of stability and recovery in the following decades; the same process, with more severe crises and briefer pauses, is likely to shape the history of the next two centuries or so.

Does this mean that peak oil can be ignored, because it poses no threat to industrial society? Hardly. As oil production worldwide continues to contract, and conservation and alternative energy reach the point of diminishing returns, oil prices will spike upward in turn, rising even higher than before and unleashing another wave of economic and social disruption. Just as the economic contractions of the 1970s and 1980s spawned intractable unemployment in most industrial societies and launched a process of downward mobility from which many families never recovered, each wave of economic contraction will likely force more of the population into a permanent underclass for whom the abstract phrase “demand destruction” plays out in a downward spiral of impoverishment and misery.

In such a future, the periods of apparent recovery that will likely follow each round of energy shortages and demand destruction will provide little room to rebuild what has been lost. Those periods will, however, make it exceptionally difficult for any response to fossil fuel depletion to stay on course, so long as that response relies on market forces or politics for its momentum. Each time oil prices slump, the market forces that support investment in a sustainable future will slump as well, while governments facing calls for limited resources will face real challenges in maintaining a commitment to sustainability which, for the moment, no longer seems necessary. Thus the collapse of public and private funding for the alternative energy sector in the aftermath of the 1970s will likely be repeated over and over again as we stumble down the long downhill side of Hubbert's peak.

Those planning for a future of peak oil, in other words, need to beware of the perils of linear thinking. Much more often than not, history moves in circles rather than straight lines; planning for a future that is like the present, only more so, is a good way to come to grief in the real world. Instead of the express trip to Utopia or oblivion on which so much prophecy and planning has been lavished, we are on board the slow train to the deindustrial future, and the scenery along the route is likely to be a good deal more complex and less predictable than either of our familiar myths have led us to believe.

The upside of this situation, as mentioned earlier in this chapter, is that the crises defined in this chapter will most likely prove self-limiting, at least in the short and middle terms. Energy prices will soar, but not indefinitely and not forever; the economy will come apart and then, slowly and painfully, come back together; public health will slump and then undergo some form of recovery as the economic situation stabilizes; political systems will shatter and then be replaced by others. To judge by past examples, the period of extreme crisis is unlikely to last much more than a quarter century or so. Thus the immediate problem we face isn't how to survive the end of industrial civilization, it's how to get through the next wave of crisis and make it to the period of renewed stability on the other side. This is a much more manageable task, and it makes room for possibilities that fashionably apocalyptic models of our predicament hide from sight.

FOUR
Facing the
Deindustrial Age

P
eople try to anticipate the shape of the future for many of the same reasons that drivers pay attention to the road ahead: it's easier to respond to dangers and opportunities alike if you can see them at least a little in advance. As we move into the poorly mapped territory on the far side of Hubbert's peak, however, differences between the futures we anticipate and the one we are most likely to get may challenge us to our core. I've already talked about the ways our culture's familiar narratives turn into obstacles to understanding in the face of a predicament they fit poorly, if at all. The same factors raise obstacles at least as high to constructive action and help explain one of the most striking differences between the energy crisis of the 1970s and the one unfolding around us today: the disconnect between theory and practice and between proposals for change and the willingness to make change where it counts, in our own lives.

It bears noticing that between 1956, when Hubbert originally announced the approach of peak oil, and the present moment, a remarkable paradox has unfolded. On the one hand, the evidence for the imminence and catastrophic potential of peak oil has grown steadily more convincing. On the other hand, the prospect of any constructive response to peak oil has grown steadily more distant. Despite occasional bursts of lip service, every major political party in every major nation in the industrial world supports economic policies that effectively subsidize increases in fossil fuel use, and thus move the world further away from a transition to sustainability with each passing day. The more imminent and obvious the dangers become, the more stubbornly the world's political and economic systems cling to exactly the policies that guarantee the worst possible outcome in the not very long run.

This astonishing failure of will and vision can be traced to factors already discussed in this book. The mythic narratives and the logic of the monkey trap explored in Chapter 2 have had a potent influence on the way things have worked out over the last three decades. It's crucial to grasp that these are just as much part of our predicament as the petroleum in the ground and the cars on our highways, and they have as potent an influence on what can still be done as do any of the hard, technical facts of the case. The predicament we face is at least as much a social and cultural crisis as a technical one, and its technical side — difficult though that may be — is arguably the least challenging of its dimensions.