Last week’s post on the contemporary culture of apocalypse
fandom was also, more broadly, about the increasingly frantic attempts being
made to ignore the future that’s looming ahead of us. Believing that the world
as we know it is about to crash into ruin, popular as it is, is only one of
several strategies put to work in those attempts. There’s also the claim that
we can keep industrial civilization going on renewable energy sources, the
claim that a finite planet can somehow contain an infinite supply of cheap
fossil fuel—well, those of my readers who know their way around today’s
nonconversation about energy and the future will be all too familiar with the
thirty-one flavors of denial.
It’s ironic, though predictable, that these claims have been
repeated ever more loudly as the evidence for a less comfortable view of things
has mounted up. Most recently, for example, a thorough study
of the Spanish solar energy program by Pedro Prieto and Charles A.S.
Hall has worked out the net energy of large-scale solar photovoltaic systems on
the basis of real-world data. It’s not pleasant reading if you happen to
believe that today’s lifestyles can be supported on sunlight; they calculate
that the energy return on energy invested (EROEI) of Spain’s solar energy
sector works out to 2.48—about a third of the figure suggested by less
comprehensive estimates.
The Prieto/Hall study has already come in for criticism,
some of it reasonable, some of it less so. A crucial point, though, has been
left out of most of the resulting discussions. According to best current
estimates, the EROEI needed to sustain an industrial civilization of any kind
is somewhere between 10 and 12; according to most other calculations—leaving out the optimistic
estimates being circulated by solar promoters as sales pitches—the EROEI of large scale solar photovoltaic
systems comes in between 8 and 9. Even if Prieto and Hall are dead wrong, in
other words, the energy return from solar PV isn’t high enough to support the
kind of industrial system needed to manufacture and maintain solar PV. If they’re right, or if the actual figure
falls between their estimate and those of the optimists, the point’s even
harder to dodge.
Similar challenges face every other attempt to turn
renewable energy into a replacement for fossil fuels. I’m thinking especially
of the study
published a few years back that showed, on solid thermodynamic
grounds, that the total energy that can be taken from the planet’s winds is a
small fraction of what windpower advocates think they can get. The logic here
is irrefutable: there’s a finite amount
of energy in wind, and what you extract in one place won’t turn the blades of
another wind turbine somewhere else. Thus there’s a hard upper limit to how
much energy windpower can put into the grid—and it’s not enough to provide more
than a small fraction of the power needed by an industrial civilization;
furthermore, estimates of the EROEI of windpower cluster around 9, which again
is too little to support a society that can build and maintain wind turbines.
Point such details out to people in the contemporary green
movement, and you can count on fielding an angry insistence that there’s got to
be some way to run industrial civilization on renewables, since we can’t just
keep on burning fossil fuels. I’m not at
all sure how many of the people who make this sort of statement realize just
how odd it is. It’s as though they think some good fairy promised them that
there would always be enough energy to support their current lifestyles, and
the only challenge is figuring out where she hid it. Not so; the question at
issue is not how we’re going to keep industrial fueled, but whether we can do
it at all, and the answer emerging from the data is not one that they want to
hear: nothing—no resource or combination of resources available to humanity at
this turning of history’s wheel—can support industrial civilization once we
finish using up the half a billion years of fossil sunlight that made
industrial civilization briefly possible in the first place.
Green activists are quite right, though, that we can’t just
keep on burning fossil fuels. We can’t
just keep on burning fossil fuels because fossil fuels are a finite resource,
we’ve already burnt through most of what’s economically viable to extract, and
the EROEI of what’s left is dropping steadily as quality declines and costs
rise. Back in the day when most petroleum on the market was light sweet crude
from shallow onshore wells, its EROEI could be as high as 200; nowadays, a
large and growing fraction of liquid fuels comes from deep offshore fields,
fracked shales, tar sands, and other energy- and resource-intensive places, so
the average for petroleum as a whole is down somewhere around 30 and sinking.
A common bad habit of contemporary thought assumes that
gradual changes don’t mean anything until some threshold slips past, at which
point things go boom in one way or another. Some processes in the real world
happen that way, but it’s far more common for gradual shifts to have gradual
impacts all along the trajectory of change. A good case can be made that EROEI
decline is one such process. For more
than a decade now, the world’s economies have stumbled from one crisis to
another, creaking and groaning through what would likely have been visible
contraction if the mass production of paper wealth out of thin air hadn’t been
been cranked into overdrive to produce the illusion of normality.
Plenty of explanations have been proposed for the current
era of economic unraveling, but I’d like to suggest that the most important
factor is the overall decline in the “energy profit” that makes modern
economies possible at all. EROEI is to a civilization what gross profit is to a
business, the source of the surplus that supports the entire enterprise. As the overall EROEI of industrial
civilization contracts, habits that were affordable in an era of abundance
profit stop being viable, and decline sets in. Long before that figure drops to
the point that an industrial system can no longer be supported at all, most of
us will have long since lost access to the products of that system, because
every drop of liquid fuel and every scrap of most other industrial resources
will long since have been commandeered for critical needs or reserved for the
wealthiest and most powerful among us.
The twilight of the industrial age, in other words, isn’t
somewhere conveniently far off in the future; it’s happening now, in the slow,
ragged, uneven, but inexorable manner that’s normal for great historical
transformations. Trying to insist that this can’t be happening, that there has
to be some way to keep up our extravagant lifestyles when the energetic and
material basis of that extravagance is rapidly depleting away from beneath us,
may be emotionally comforting but it doesn’t change, or even address, the hard
facts of our predicament. Like the
fashionable apocalypticism discussed last week, it simply provides an excuse
for inaction at a time when action is necessary but difficult.
Set aside all those excuses, and the hard question that
remains is what to do about it all.
Any answer to that question has to start by taking seriously
the limits imposed by our situation, and by choices made in the decades already
past. Proposing some grand project to get the entire world ready for the end of
the age of abundance, for example, is wasted breath; even if the political will
could be found—and it’s been missing in action since 1980 or so—the resources
that might have made such a project possible were burned to fuel three decades
of unsustainable extravagance. While new systems are being built, remember, the
old ones have to stay functional long enough to keep people fed, housed, and
supplied with other necessities of life, and we’ve passed the point at which
the resources still exist to do both on any large scale. As the Hirsch report
pointed out back in 2005, a meaningful response to the peaking of petroleum
production had to begin at least twenty years in advance of the peak to avoid
catastrophic disruptions; that didn’t happen in time, and there’s no point in
pretending otherwise.
Any response to the twilight of the industrial age, in other
words, will have to function within the constraints of a society already in the
early stages of the Long Descent—a society in which energy and resources are
increasingly hard for most people to obtain, in which the infrastructure that
supports current lifestyles are becoming ever more brittle and prone to
dysfunction, and in which most people will have to contend with the
consequences of economic contraction, political turmoil, and social
disintegration. As time passes, furthermore, all these pressures can be counted
on to increase, and any improvement in conditions that takes place will be
temporary.
All this places harsh constraints on any attempt to do
anything constructive in response to the end of industrial civilization. Still,
there are still options available, and I want to talk about one of those
here: an option that could make the
decline a little less bitter, the dark age that will follow it a little less
dark, and the recovery afterwards a little easier. Compared to grand plans to
save the world in a single leap, that may not sound like much—but it certainly
beats sitting one one’s backside daydreaming about future societies powered by
green vaporware, on the one hand, or imaginary cataclysms that will relieve us
of our responsibility toward the future on the other.
It’s only in the imagination of true believers in the
invincibility of progress that useful technologies can never be lost. History
shows the same thing with painful clarity:
over and over again, technologies in common use during the peak years of
a civilization have been lost during the dark age that followed, and had to be
brought in again from some other society or reinvented from scratch once the
dark age was over and rebuilding could begin. It’s a commonplace of history,
though, that if useful technologies can be preserved during the declining years
of a society, they can spread relatively rapidly through the successor states
of the dark age period and become core elements of the new civilization that
follows. A relatively small number of people can preserve a technology,
furthermore, by the simple acts of learning it, practicing it, and passing it
on to the next generation.
Not every technology is well suited for this sort of
project, though. The more complex a technology is, the more dependent it is on
exotic materials or concentrated energy sources, and the more infrastructure it
requires, the less the chance that it can be preserved in the face of a society
in crisis. Furthermore, if the technology doesn’t provide goods or services
that will be useful to people during the era of decline or the dark age that
follows, its chances of being preserved at all are not good at a time when
resources are too scarce to divert into unproductive uses.
Those are tight constraints, but I’ve identified seven
technological suites that can be sustained on a very limited resource base,
produce goods or services of value even under dark age conditions, and could
contribute mightily to the process of rebuilding if they get through the next
five centuries or so.
1. Organic intensive gardening. I’ve commented before that when future
historians look back on the twentieth century, the achievement of ours that
they’ll consider most important is the creation of food growing methods that
build soil fertility rather than depleting it and are sustainable on a time
scale of millennia. The best of the current systems of organic intensive
gardening require no resource inputs other than locally available biomass, hand
tools, and muscle power, and produce a great deal of food from a relatively
small piece of ground. Among the technologies included in this suite, other
than the basics of soil enhancement and intensive plant and animal raising, are
composting, food storage and preservation, and solar-powered season extenders
such as cold frames and greenhouses.
2. Solar thermal technologies. Most of the attention given to solar energy
these days focuses on turning sunlight into electricity, but electricity isn’t
actually that useful in terms of meeting basic human needs. Far more useful is
heat, and sunlight can be used forheat with vastly greater efficiencies than it
can be turned into electrical current. Water heating, space heating, cooking,
food preservation, and many other useful activities can all be done by concentrating
the rays of the sun or collecting solar heat in an insulated space. Doing these
things with sunlight rather than wood heat or some other fuel source will take
significant stress off damaged ecosystems while meeting a great many human
needs.
3. Sustainable wood heating. In the Earth’s temperate zones, solar thermal
technologies can’t stand alone, and a sustainable way to produce fuel is thus
high up on the list of necessities. Coppicing, a process that allows repeated
harvesting of fuel wood from the same tree, and other methods of producing
flammable biomass without burdening local ecosystems belong to this
technological suite; so do rocket stoves and other high-efficiency means of
converting wood fuel into heat.
4. Sustainable health care. Health care
as it’s practiced in the world’s industrial nations is hopelessly
unsustainable, dependent as it is on concentrated energy and resource inputs
and planetwide supply chains. As
industrial society disintegrates, current methods of health care will have to
be replaced by methods that require much less energy and other resources, and
can be put to use by family members and local practitioners. Plenty of work
will have to go into identifying practices that belong in this suite, since the
entire field is a minefield of conflicting claims issuing from the mainstream
medical industry as well as alternative health care; the sooner the winnowing
gets under way, the better.
5. Letterpress printing and its related
technologies. One crucial need
in an age of decline is the ability to reproduce documents from before things
fell apart. Because the monasteries of early medieval Europe had no method of
copying faster than monks with pens, much of what survived the fall of Rome was
lost during the following centuries as manuscripts rotted faster than they
could be copied. In Asia, by contrast, hand-carved woodblock printing allowed
documents to be mass produced during the same era; this helps explain why
learning, science, and technology recovered more rapidly in post-Tang dynasty
China and post-Heian Japan than in the post-Roman West. Printing presses with movable type were made
and used in the Middle Ages, and inkmaking, papermaking, and bookbinding are equally
simple, so these are well within the range of craftspeople in the deindustrial
dark ages ahead.
6. Low-tech shortwave radio. The ability to communicate over long
distances at a speed faster than a horse can ride is another of the significant
achievements of the last two centuries, and deserves to be passed onto the
future. While the scientific advances needed to work out the theory radio
required nearly three hundred years of intensive study of physics, the
technology itself is simple—an ordinarily enterprising medieval European or
Chinese alchemist could easily have put together a working radio transmitter
and receiver, along with the metal-acid batteries needed to power them, if he
had known how. The technical knowledge
in the amateur radio community, which has begun to get interested in low-tech,
low-power methods again after a long flirtation with high-end technologies,
could become a springboard to handbuilt radio technologies that could keep
going after the end of industrial society.
7. Computer-free mathematics. Until recently, it didn’t take a computer to
crunch the numbers needed to build a bridge, navigate a ship, balance profits
against losses, or do any of ten thousand other basic or not-so-basic
mathematical operations; slide rules, nomographs, tables of logarithms, or the
art of double-entry bookkeeping did the job.
In the future, after computers stop being economically viable to
maintain and replace, those same tasks will still need to be done, but the
knowledge of how to do them without a computer is at high risk of being lost.
If that knowledge can be gotten back into circulation and kept viable as the
computer age winds down, a great many tasks that will need to be done in the
deindustrial future will be much less problematic.
(It’s probably necessary to repeat here that the reasons our
descendants a few generations from now won’t be surfing the internet or using
computers at all are economic, not technical. If you want to build and maintain
computers, you need an industrial infrastructure that can manufacture
integrated circuits and other electronic components, and that requires an
extraordinarily complex suite of technologies, sprawling supply chains, and a
vast amount of energy—all of which has to be paid for. It’s unlikely that any
society in the deindustrial dark ages will have that kind of wealth available;
if any does, many other uses for that wealth will make more sense in a
deindustrialized world; and in an age when human labor is again much cheaper
than mechanical energy, it will be more affordable to hire people to do the
routine secretarial, filing, and bookkeeping tasks currently done by computers
than to find the resources to support the baroque industrial infrastructure
needed to provide computers for those tasks.
(The reason it’s necessary to repeat this here is that
whenever I point out that computers won’t be economically viable in a
deindustrial world, I field a flurry of outraged comments pretending that I
haven’t mentioned economic issues at all, and insisting that computers are so
cool that the future can’t possibly do without them. Here again, it’s as though
they think a good fairy promised them something—and they aren’t paying
attention to all the legends about the way that fairy gifts turn into a handful
of dry leaves the next morning. We now return you to your regularly scheduled
Archdruid Report.)
Organic gardens, solar and wood heat, effective low-tech
health care, printed books, shortwave radios and a facility with slide rules
and logarithms: those aren’t a recipe
for the kind of civilization we have today, nor are they a recipe for a kind of
civilization that’s existed in the past. It’s precisely the inability to
imagine anything else that’s crippled our collective ability to think about the
future. One of the lessons of history, as Arnold Toynbee pointed out, is that
the decline and fall of every civilization follows the same track down but the
journey back up to a new civilization almost always breaks new ground. It would
be equally accurate to point out that the decline and fall of a civilization is
driven by humanity in the mass, but the way back up is inevitably the work of
some small creative minority with its own unique take on things. The time of that minority is still far in the
future, but plenty of things that can be done right now can give the creative
minds of the future more options to work with.
Those of my readers
who want to do something constructive about the harsh future ahead thus could
do worse than to adopt one or more of the technologies I’ve outlined, and make
a personal commitment to learning, practicing, preserving, and transmitting
that technology into the future. Those
who decide that some technology I haven’t listed deserves the same treatment,
and are willing to make an effort to get it into the waiting hands of the
future, will get no argument from me.
The important thing is to get off the couch and do something, because
the decline is already under way and time is getting short.
