Peak Everything

by Richard Heinberg

  “The Psychology of Peak Oil and Climate Change” arose from scores of conversations with people about their experience of the awakening process. Clearly, humanity is addicted to fossil fuels, and this essay offers some suggestions on what sorts of group therapy might help us kick the habit.

  I was inspired to write “Bridging Peak Oil and Climate Change Activism” after participating in two days of meetings in San Francisco in the fall of 2006, in which prominent Climate Change and Peak Oil activists attempted to form common strategies. It was my impression that the discussants often did not understand one another well, hence my effort to sort out the issues and point toward potential paths for better communication and coordination of efforts.

  “Boomers’ Last Chance?” is both a personal mea culpa and a plea to the other members of my demographic cohort. We may belong to the peak generation, in that we will have consumed something like half the world’s nonrenewable resources during our lifetime. We have enjoyed an unprecedented party, but the privilege of having a place at this greatest banquet in history implies an enormous responsibility to future generations.

  “A Letter From the Future,” originally published in 2000, is of the genre of the classic novel Looking Backward: 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy, which imagined, from that writer’s perspective in the late 19th century, life in our time. Bellamy’s vision inevitably proved myopic: while Looking Backward was popular and influential (it sold over a million copies and inspired many Progressive reforms throughout the next two decades), it did not successfully anticipate the world of the early 21st century. Bellamy saw our era as one in which government would control the means of production and divide wealth equally between all people and in which all citizens would receive a college education and be given freedom in choosing a career, from which they would retire at age 45. In short, Bellamy foresaw a socialist utopia and entirely missed the realities of globalization, sweat shops, and environmental devastation. My own effort is likely to be just as inaccurate — though while Bellamy’s failed by being too sanguine, I hope mine proves too dire.

  “Talking Ourselves to Extinction” is a meditation on the power of language — a tool whose development and use has shaped us as a species. Cultural evolution occurred primarily because language enabled us to coordinate our efforts to respond quickly to environmental challenges and opportunities. Words have given us power over nature, and have given some human groups power over others. Today, if we are to survive, we must change our collective behavior radically and swiftly; only our species’ unique linguistic talent is capable of orchestrating such an evolutionary shift. This book is a testament of hope that words can help us recognize the limits of nature, and the limits of power itself, before it is too late.

  ON TECHNOLOGY, AGRICULTURE, AND THE ARTS

  1

  Tools with a Life of Their Own

  NEARLY EVERYONE complains from time to time that our tools have become Sorcerer’s Apprentices; that we have come to serve our machines instead of the other way around; and that, increasingly, our lives are regimented as if we ourselves were mere cogs in a vast mechanism utterly beyond our control.

  We are not the first people to feel this way: criticism of technology has a history. The Luddites of early 19th-century England were among the first to raise their voices — and hammers! — against the dehumanizing side effects of mechanization. As industrialization proceeded decade-by-decade — from powered looms to steam shovels, jet planes, and electric toothbrushes — objections to the accelerating, mindless adoption of new technologies waxed erudite. During the past century, books by Lewis Mumford, Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Kirkpatrick Sale, Stephanie Mills, Chellis Glendinning, Jerry Mander, John Zerzan, and Derrick Jensen, among others, have helped generations of readers understand how and why our tools have come to enslave us, colonizing our minds as well as our daily routines.

  These authors reminded us that tools, far from being morally neutral, are amplifiers of human purposes; therefore each tool carries its inventor’s original intent inherent within it. We can use a revolver to hammer nails, but it works better as a machine for the swift commission of mayhem; and the more handguns we have around, the more likely it is for inevitable, daily personal conflicts to go ballistic. Thus, as clashes over human purposes form the core of ethical and political disputes, technology itself, as it proliferates, must inevitably become the subject of an increasing array of social controversies. Battles over technology concern nothing less than the shape and future of society.

  In principle, those battles, if not the scholarly discussions about them, reach all the way back to the Neolithic era, and perhaps to our harnessing of fire tens of thousands of years ago. Lewis Mumford drew a through-line emphasizing how modern megatechnologies are externalizations of a social machine that originated in the pristine states of the Bronze Age:

  The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever the eventual cost.1

  John Zerzan goes further, asserting that it is the human tendencies to abstract and manipulate, which are at the heart of our tool-making ability, that cut us off from our innate connections with the natural world, and therefore obscure our own inherent nature.2

  This effort to show how our current technological crisis is rooted in ancient patterns is certainly helpful. But it is important also to keep in mind the fact that the discussion about mechanization’s nasty side effects has intensified relatively recently, due to the scale of technology’s intrusion into our lives and its toll upon the environment having grown enormously in just the past two centuries.

  Some techno-critics have sought to explain this recent explosion in the power and variety of our tools by tying it to developments in philosophy (Cartesian dualism) or economics (capitalism). Strange - ly, few of the critics have discussed at any length the role of fossil fuels in the industrial revolution. That is, they have consistently focused their attention on tools’ impacts on society and nature, and on the political conditions and ideologies that enabled their adoption, rather than on the fact that most of the new tools that have appeared during the past two centuries are of a kind previously rare, deriving the energy for their operation not from muscle power, but from the burning of fuels.

  Mumford, one of my favorite authors, devoted only one comment on one page of his 700-page, two-volume masterpiece The Myth of the Machine, to coal, and neither “petroleum” nor “oil” appears in the index of either volume.3 My own 1996 book, A New Covenant with Nature, which was largely devoted to a critique of industrialism, does no better: “coal,” “oil,” and “energy” are absent from its index.4

  And yet it appears to me now that, in assessing and understanding technology and its effects on people and nature, it is at least as important to pay attention to the energy that drives our tools as to the tools themselves and the surrounding political-ideological matrix. In short, we who have been criticizing the technological society, using the tools of historical analysis, have missed at least half the story we are attempting to weave when we fail to notice the energetic evolution of tools.

  This chapter is a brief attempt to make up for these oversights. It will also discuss why the impending peak in global oil production will pull the plug on the kind of “progress” we have come to expect, providing an historic opportunity to reshape humanity’s relations with technology and with nature.

  Classy Tools

  It is helpful for our purposes here to classify tools according to their energy inputs. The following four categories, outlined in my book The Party’s Over,5 correspond very roughly to four major water-sheds in social evolution:

  A. Tools that require only human energy for their manufacture and
use. Examples: stone spearheads and arrowheads, grinding tools, baskets, and animal-skin clothing. These sorts of tools are found in all hunter-gatherer societies.

  B. Tools that require an external power source for their manufacture, but human power for their use. Examples: all basic metal tools, such as knives, metal armor, and coins. These tools were the basis of the early agricultural civilizations centered in Mesopotamia, China, Egypt, and Rome.

  C. Tools that require only human energy for their manufacture, but harness an external energy source in their use. Examples: the wooden plow drawn by draft animals, the sailboat, the fire drill, the windmill, the water mill. The fire drill was used by hunter-gatherers, and the wooden plow and sailboat were developed in early agricultural societies; the windmill and water mill appeared at later stages of social evolution.

  D. Tools that require an external energy source for their manufacture and also harness or use an external energy source. Examples: the steel plow, the gun, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the jet engine, the nuclear reactor, the hydroelectric turbine, the photovoltaic panel, the wind turbine, and all electrical devices. These tools and tool systems are the foundation of modern industrial societies — in fact, they define them.

  For thousands of years, human beings have engaged in a constant struggle to harness extrasomatic energy (that is, energy from sources other than the food they eat). Until recently, such energy came mostly from the capture of work performed by animal muscles. In the US, as recently as 1850, domesticated animals — horses, oxen, and mules — were responsible for over two thirds of the physical work supporting the economy. Today the percentage is negligible: virtually all work is done by fuel-fed machines. Slavery was a strategy for capturing human muscle power, and the end of most formal slavery during the 19th century was more or less inevitable when Class D tools became cheaper to own and keep than human slaves — or domesticated animals, for that matter.

  In early civilizations, agricultural workers sought to capture a surplus of solar energy on a yearly basis by plowing and reaping, and between 70 and 90 percent of the population had to work at farming in order to provide enough of a surplus to support the rest of the social edifice, including the warrior, priestly, and administrative classes. The extraction of coal, and especially of oil and natural gas — substances representing millions of years of accumulation of past biotic energy — has often provided a spectacular net-energy profit. With fossil fuels and modern machinery, only two percent of the population now needs to farm in order to support the rest of society, enabling the flourishing of a growing middle class composed of a dizzying array of specialists.

  Increasing specialization was also enabled by a flourishing of differing types of machines, and over the past few decades that differentiation was itself in turn fueled (quite literally) by the availability of cheap energy to make the machines go. Labor productivity increased relentlessly, not because people worked longer or harder, but because they had access to an increasing array of powerful extrasomatically powered tools.

  The availability of Class D tools produced excitement and wonder — initially among the few people wealthy enough to own them, and also among the crafty and highly motivated inventors available for hire. These tools were, in a sense, alive: they consumed a kind of food, in the form of coal or oil, and had their own internal metabolism. Gradually, as mechanized production showed itself capable of producing more gadgets than could possibly be soaked up by the wealthy elites, the latter devised the strategy of creating a consumer society in which anyone could own labor-saving machinery. The rank and file were soon persuaded of the dream of eliminating drudgery. And, due to the scale of the energies being unleashed, the fulfillment of that dream seemed well within reach.

  Lewis Hines’s classic 1920 photo of a powerhouse mechanic was likely an inspiration for Charlie Chaplin’s set designs for “Modern Times.” The image and the film portray humans in industrial settings as slaves to their machines.

  That scale is difficult to comprehend without using familiar examples. Think for a moment of the effort required to push, for only a few feet, an automobile that has run out of gas. Now imagine pushing it 20 miles. This is, of course, the service provided by a single gallon of gasoline, which contains the energy equivalent to at least six weeks of human labor (much more than this by some accounts). The amount of gasoline, diesel, and kerosene fuels used in the US in one day has the energy equivalence of roughly 20,000,000 person/years of work. If the building of the Great Pyramid required 10,000 people working for 20 years, then the petroleum-based energy used in the US on an average day could — in principle, given the necessary stone and machinery — build 100 Great Pyramids. Of course, we don’t use our oil for this purpose: instead we use it mostly to push millions of metal cars along roadways so that we can get to and from jobs, malls, restaurants, and video rental stores.

  With computers and cybernetics, we managed to create tools with not just a life, but a mind of their own. Now our tools not only “breathe,” “eat,” and do physical work; they also “think.” Increasingly we find ourselves in synthetic, self-regulating (if not yet self-replicating) environments — shopping malls, airports, office buildings — in which non-human multicelled biota are present only as ornaments or pests; in which human work consists only of the few tasks for which we have not yet invented profitable automatic surrogates. The wonder of seeing drudgery eliminated is accompanied by the nuisance of being managed and bossed about by machines, and of being rendered helpless by mechanical failures or — horror of horrors — power outages.

  It’s the Energy, Silly

  What does it take to enable these techno-miracles? It takes 85 million barrels of oil per day globally, as well as millions of tons of coal and billions of cubic feet of natural gas. The supply network for these fuels is globe-spanning and awesome. Yet, from the standpoint of the end user, this network is practically invisible and easily taken for granted. We flip the switch, pump the gas, or turn up the thermostat with hardly a thought to the processes of extraction we draw upon, or the environmental horrors they entail.

  The machines themselves have become so sophisticated, their services so seductive, that they are equivalent to magic. Few people fully understand the inner workings of any given tool, and different tools require their own unique teams of specialists for their design and repair. But what is more important, in the process of becoming dependent upon them, we have become almost a different species as compared to our recent ancestors.

  Eniac (short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), unveiled in 1946, was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer able to be reprogrammed to solve a range of computing problems.

  Infrastructure Matters

  To understand how we have become so different, how different we have become, and also how the end of cheap extrasomatic energy is likely to impact us and the society in which we are embedded, it is helpful to draw another lesson from cultural anthropology.

  Comparative studies have consistently shown that human societies are best classified on the basis of their members’ means of obtaining food. Thus we commonly speak of hunting-and-gathering societies, horticultural societies, agricultural societies, fishing societies, herding societies, and industrial societies. The point is, if you know how people get their food, you will reliably be able to predict most of the rest of their social forms — their decision-making and child-rearing customs, spiritual practices, and so on.

  Of course, from a biological point of view, food is energy. And so what we are saying (once again, but in a slightly different way) is that understanding energy sources is essential to understanding human societies.

  Anthropologist Marvin Harris identified three basic elements that are present in every human society:

  • infrastructure, which consists of the means of obtaining and processing necessary energy and materials from nature — i.e., the means of production;

  • structure, which consists of human-to-huma
n decision-making and resource-allocating activities; and

  • superstructure, consisting of the ideas, rituals, ethics, and myths that serve to explain the universe and coordinate human behavior.6

  Change at any of these levels can affect the others: the emergence of a new religion or a political revolution, for example, can change people’s lives in real, significant ways. However, the fact that so many cultural forms seem consistently to cluster around ways of obtaining food suggests that fundamental cultural change occurs at the infrastructural level: if people switch, for example, from hunting to planting, or from planting to herding, their politics and spirituality are bound to shift as well, and probably in profound ways.

  The industrial revolution represented one of history’s pivotal infrastructural shifts; everything about human society changed as a result. This revolution did not come about primarily because of religious or political developments, but because a few prior inventions (steel, gears, and a primitive steam engine — i.e., Class B and C and simple Class D tools) came together in the presence of an abundant new energy source: fossil fuels — first coal, then oil and natural gas. Ideas (such as Cartesian dualism, capitalism, Calvinism, and Marxism), rather than driving the transformation, achieved prominence because they served useful functions within a flow of events emanating from infrastructural necessity.

  What Hath Hydrocarbon Wrought?

  What have been the structural and superstructural impacts of industrialism?

  Because only a reduced portion of the population is required to work the land in order to produce food-energy (now with tractors and harvesters rather than oxen), a large majority of the populace has lost direct connection with the land and with the cycles of nature. If hunters get their food-energy from hunting, we get ours from shopping at the supermarket.