The Long Descent (24 page)

FIVE
Tools
for the
Transition

I
t makes a great deal of difference how we come to view the challenge of the next century. On the one hand, it could be portrayed as a struggle to keep modern industrial civilization moving along the endless upward curve of progress. On the other, it could more usefully be envisioned as a matter of managing the end of the industrial age and coping with the decline to a more modest and less ecologically suicidal deindustrial society. We're in much the same situation as family members who have to decide on medical treatment for an elderly parent who has half a dozen vital systems on the verge of giving out. If the only outcome we're willing to accept is keeping Dad alive forever, we guarantee ourselves a desperate, expensive, and futile struggle with the inevitable. People, like civilizations, are mortal; no matter how much money and technology gets poured into keeping them alive, sooner or later it won't be enough.

On the other hand, if we accept that Dad is going to die sooner or later, and we concentrate on giving him the best possible quality of life in the time he has left, there's quite a bit that can be done. The last part of Dad's life can be made better, and so can the lives of the generations that follow him, because the money that might have been spent paying for exotic medical procedures to keep Dad alive for another three months of misery can go instead to pay college tuition for his grandchildren. The same thing is likely to be true in the twilight years of industrial civilization; the resources we have left can be used either to maintain the industrial system for a few more years, or to cushion the descent into the deindustrial future — but not both.

Now, it's sometimes true that the only way to deal with a hard fact is to take the even harder path of acceptance. In at least one sense, this describes the situation we're in right now. The current predicament can't be dealt with at all if “dealing with it” means finding a way to prevent the decline and fall of the industrial system and the coming of the deindustrial age. That option went out the window around 1980, when the industrial world turned its collective back on a decade of promising movements toward sustainability. At this point we've backed ourselves into the trap predicted by
The Limits to Growth
back in 1972; we no longer have the resources to simultaneously meet our present needs
and
provide for our future. When the future becomes the present, we will no longer have the resources to do either one. At that point, catabolic collapse begins in earnest, and industrial society starts consuming itself.

It bears repeating, though, that this isn't a quick process, nor is it a linear one. Civilizations fall in a stepwise fashion, with periods of crisis and contraction followed by periods of stability and partial recovery. The theory of catabolic collapse explains this as, basically, a matter of supply and demand. Each wave of crises brings about a sharp decrease in the amount of capital (physical, human, social, and intellectual) that has to be maintained, and this frees up enough resources to allow effective crisis management — until resource supplies drop further and the next round of crises hits. This same sequence is likely to repeat itself many times over the next few centuries, as industrial civilization slides down the slope of its own decline and fall.

The Strategy of Salvage

The stepwise decline of industrial civilization can be understood in another way, though, and this points toward possibilities for constructive action that can still be pursued, even this late in the game. Civilizations in full flower typically evolve complex, resource-intensive–ways of doing things, because they can, and because the social benefits of extravagance outweigh the resource costs. The infrastructure that serves these functions contains substantial resources that, in a less extravagant time, can be salvaged and put to more prudent uses. As whatever passes for high technology in a given civilization drops out of use, the resources once locked up in high-tech equipment become raw material for simpler and more resource-efficient technologies. People realize that you don't need pyramids to bury a king, or Roman baths to wash your skin; pretty soon, the stone blocks of the pyramid and the plumbing of the Roman baths get salvaged and put to more immediately useful purposes.

This same process bids fair to play a massive role in the twilight of the industrial age. Proponents of the neoprimitivist movement have claimed that as industrial civilization winds down, the survivors will slide all the way back to the stone age, because the last few centuries of mining have stripped the planet of all the metal ores that can be processed by low-tech means.
¹
Even if the people of the future had to rely on ores still in the ground, this wouldn't be true because bog iron concentrated by chemosynthetic bacteria is a renewable resource; it has provided respectable amounts of iron to many past societies. Still, there's no need to rely on bog iron; most of the billions of tons of metals extracted from deep within the Earth are now sitting conveniently on its surface, ready to be salvaged and put to new uses.

Every skyscraper in every city on the planet, just for starters, contains hundreds of tons of iron, steel, aluminum, and copper. In a deindustrial society, this is all raw material ready to be cut apart by salvage crews, hauled away on oxcarts, and turned into knives, hoes, plowshares, and other useful things. The same is just as true of most of the other artifacts of 20th and 21st century technology, from cars to tin cans to the rebar that runs through every concrete structure in the industrial world. As iron turns to rust, it simply changes itself from one form of resource to another — rust is iron oxide, FeO
₂
, a common iron ore that can be turned back into iron with nothing more demanding than charcoal and a good pair of bellows.

In this way, the material extravagance of the industrial age will provide a vital cushion of resources as we move down the curve of decline. The most important limiting factor here is the practical knowledge necessary to turn skyscrapers, cars, and the other detritus of the industrial system into useful goods for the dein-dustrial world. Not many people have that knowledge today. Our educational system (if America's dysfunctional schooling industry deserves that name) shed the old trade schools and their practical training programs decades ago. At a time when the creation and exchange of actual goods and services has become an economic sideline, this comes as no surprise, but it's a situation that has to change if anything is to be salvaged once the first major wave of crises hits.

The range of possibilities open to intelligent salvage can be measured through a practical example. Right now in the United States there are something like 500,000,000 (that's half a billion) alternators. For more than half a century, since they outcompeted generators in the Darwinian world of auto design, every car or truck with an internal combustion engine has had one. Right now, alternators are worth next to nothing; they're old technology, they rarely wear out or break down, and when they do, you can usually make them as good as new by replacing a diode or a few ball bearings.

Old tech or not, they're ingenious devices. You put rotary motion into the shaft, and 12 volts of electricity (six volts in some older models) come out of the terminals. The faster the motion, the higher the wattage, but the voltage always stays the same. In a car or truck, the rotary motion comes from the engine, and the electricity goes to charge the battery, power the cooling fan, run the lights, and so on; it's simply a way to take some of the energy produced by burning petroleum and do things with it that burning petroleum, all by itself, doesn't do well. In terms of the catabolic collapse theory, these alternators are part of the capital our civilization uses to convert petroleum into air pollution and global warming.

Apply the strategy of salvage, though, and alternators become something very different. They stop being part of a car and become a resource on their own. Rotary motion from any imaginable source can be applied to the shaft, and you still get 12 volts of electricity. Since there are half a billion alternators in cars, trucks, and junkyards all over North America, and because those cars and trucks are going to lose their value as capital once petroleum becomes too scarce and expensive to waste on individual transport, the cost of alternators is limited to the time and effort needed to gather them, while their value soars.

In a salvage economy, each of those half a billion alternators is a potential energy source. Take one, add some gears and a chain salvaged from a bicycle and some steel borrowed from an old truck, spend a week carving and sanding a 5-foot length of spruce into a propeller, and you've got a windmill that will trickle-charge a set of scavenged lead-acid batteries and run a 12-volt refrigerator taken from an old RV.
²
Take half a dozen more, add more bicycle parts, wood of various dimensions, and a year-round stream, and you've got a waterwheel-based micro-hydro plant that turns out 12 volts, night and day, at pretty fair wattage.
³

Care to try a solar heat engine? The French did it back in the 1870s.
⁴
Before diesel generators running on dirt-cheap petroleum crashed the market for the technology, France's North African colonies drew up extensive plans to use solar-powered steam engines for everything from pumping water to printing newspapers. Given sunshine, boiler parts, plenty of scrap metal, and alternators, you've got solar-generated electricity that you can maintain and replace with 1870s technology — that is, without access to pure amorphous silicon, monomolecular layers of rare earth metals, clean rooms with nanoparticle-free air, or the other exotica needed to make photovoltaic cells. None of these latter will be readily available in a deindustrializing world. On the other hand, boiler parts, scrap metal, and alternators certainly will.

It has to be said up front that none of these makeshift technologies will provide more than a minute fraction of the electricity needed to support a modern industrial society. None of them work at anything remotely like high efficiency, and it's an open question whether any of them produce as much energy in their lifespans as went into producing them in the first place. Still, in a salvage economy, none of that matters. The only relevant question is whether technologies will repay, on an individual basis, the effort of salvaging them and putting them to work. Is a week's worth of work on a windmill a good deal in exchange for a working refrigerator? In a world where food preservation will once again be a matter of life and death, it's hard to imagine that the answer could be anything but yes.

Such makeshifts look much less impressive than the grand projects for sustainability that have been proposed at intervals since the limits to growth came into sight in the 1970s, but the opportunity for those latter has long since passed us by. The strategy of salvage may not be pretty, by contrast, but it provides us with options that are still within reach. Alternators are useless as a way to keep industrial civilization afloat; that's why there's half a billion of them in good working order sitting in junkyards at this moment. The same thing is true of hundreds of other products of industrial society that can be transformed into resources for a deindustrializing world. A little practical knowledge about how to use salvaged materials, preferably backed up by experiment in advance, would be a good investment for those people who plan on riding the waves of change.

Renewable Energy

The gradual, stepwise nature of the decline ahead of us has to be understood in order to make sense of the possibilities of renewable energy. During the heady days of the 1970s, when it looked as though industrial society might actually face up to the challenge of building a sustainable future for itself, talk about renewable energy filled the pages of more than a dozen now-defunct journals and provided cocktail-party chatter for progressive circles across the industrial world. Solar energy, windpower, and conservation technology briefly counted as significant growth industries, while more exotic possibilities — geothermal, tide and wave power, oceanic thermal energy conversion, and others — attracted their share, or more, of attention and investment.
⁵

All this went away with the political manipulations that crashed the price of oil in the early 1980s. The renewable energy industry wasn't the only economic sector flattened by the Reagan administration's decision to put low oil prices ahead of every other consideration: America's nuclear industry suffered an even more drastic meltdown, and the collapse in oil prices brought a decade of economic crisis to once-booming states around the Gulf of Mexico. In the long view, though, the early death of the renewable energy industry will probably prove to be the most disastrous result of the shortsighted policies of the Reagan era. In 1980, the United States still had some 25 to 30 years to get ready for the worldwide peak of oil production, and its energy demands were much smaller than today's. A controlled transition to sustainability would have been a massive challenge, but it could probably have been accomplished.

At the same time, the hard aftermath of the 1970s alternative energy boom showed all too clearly the shaky numbers behind many overhyped renewable energy technologies. Crucially, too many of them failed the test of net energy: that is, the usable energy they produced turned out to be little more than, and in some cases noticeably less than, the energy needed to manufacture, maintain, and run the technology. A case could be made that it's the net energy provided by a society's energy resources that defines the upper limit of its economic development. More than any other factor, the huge net energy of fossil fuels — up to 200-to-1 for light sweet petroleum from wells under natural pressure — made possible the industrial world and its extravagant energy-wasting lifestyles. Net energy in single digits, which is what the best renewable energy technologies manage, simply won't produce enough spare energy to support an industrial society.