Peak Everything

by Richard Heinberg

  The ensuing proliferation, first of factory work and later of specialized occupations, has led to the development of universal compulsory public education and the idea of the “job” — a notion that most people today take for granted, but that seems strange, demeaning, and confining to people in non-industrial cultures.

  With the expansion of the educated middle class, simple monarchical forms of government soon ceased to be defensible. By the latter part of the 18th century, a trend was well established, within incipient industrial nations, of revolution and the widespread and growing expectation of democratic participation in governance — though of course that expectation was quickly hijacked by the nouveau mercantile elites. Somewhat later, the economic exploitation of labor that typified both previous agricultural civilizations and the new industrial states also became the target of revolution; once again, the primary effect of revolution was primarily merely to rearrange the deck chairs: people’s actual daily work and psychic life were still being shaped by machines, and, at a deeper level, the energy sources that propelled them.

  We must remember that industrialism followed on the heels of the European takeover of the resources and labor of most of the rest of the world during centuries of conquest and colonialism. Thus the experience and expectation of economic growth had already insinuated itself into the minds of members of the European merchant class before industrialism took hold. Once the fuel revolution began, with vastly more energy available per capita, economic activity achieved seemingly perpetual exponential growth, and economic theories emerged not only to explain this growth in terms of “markets,” but to affirm that now, because of markets, growth was necessary, inevitable, and unending. World without end, amen. Fractional-reserve banking, based on the wonder of compound interest, served as the fiscal embodiment of these new expectations. In effect, within the minds of society’s managers and policy makers, faith in technology and markets supplanted previous religious faith in the hallucinatory agricultural and herding deities that had presided over Western civilization for the previous couple of millennia.

  In the early 20th century, as mechanized production mushroomed to swamp existing demand for manufactured products (among people who mostly still lived rurally and fairly self-sufficiently), elites began experimenting with mass propaganda in the form of advertising and public relations. Later, television would dramatically increase the effectiveness of these efforts, which amounted to nothing less than the regimentation of the human imagination according to the demands of the industrial system.

  George Stephenson’s “Rocket,” built in 1829, was the world’s first steam locomotive, which opened the way to fossil-fueled travel and transport.

  Since women were now needed both as consumers and workers in order to continue the perpetual expansion of that system, feminism (via the destruction of old domestic roles and the promotion of new ambitions and consumer tastes) became an inevitable byproduct.

  In short, just as we would predict on the basis of the theory of infrastructural determinism, when fossil fuels deeply altered humanity’s means of obtaining sustenance from the Earth, everything about human society changed — from child rearing to politics; from cultural myths to personal dreams.

  Of course, many of these changes were destructive both of people and nature. And so, while many of the political struggles of the 20th century centered on questions of the distribution of power and wealth (as had been the case since the first agricultural surpluses were laid aside over 7,000 years ago), many of those struggles also grew from efforts to control technology’s caustic impacts, which were linked by social critics both to tools themselves and to people’s attitudes toward them.

  This cover of Modern Mechanix and Inventions from June, 1936, typifies the techno-optimism of the mid-20th century.

  Technological politics focused on a range of issues: nuclear weapons and nuclear power, polluting chemicals, ozone-destroying chlorofluorocarbons, greenhouse gases, and the genetic engineering of food, to name only a few familiar examples. The most radical of the techno-critics were inspired by the writings of anthropologists such as Stanley Diamond, who evinced profound admiration for the world’s remaining hunter-gatherers. For the anarchoprimitivist philosopher John Zerzan, all technology is damaging, debauched, destructive, and demeaning, and only a return to our primordial, pre-linguistic, pre-technic condition will enable us to recover fully our innate freedom and spontaneity.7

  On the other hand, techno-optimists proclaimed that humanity was in the process of overthrowing age-old limits of every kind — to population growth, levels of consumption, ease of movement, quickness of communication, access to information, and so on.

  But the techno-critics and the techno-boosters, from the mildest to the most extreme, have all tended to assume that, for decades hence, barring intervention, humanity will pursue a continued trajectory of technological change: the only thing that could thwart this ongoing “progress” would be the awakening of a new moral sensibility (misplaced, in the view of the techno-boosters) leading humans to reject technology, entirely or in part.

  Peak Oil and the Limits of Technology

  With the discourse on Peak Oil that has commenced since the beginning of the new millennium has come a focus on energy as the determining factor in social evolution — rather than technology per se, or ideas, or political struggles. And with that shift has also come the sense that resource limits will eventually drive basic cultural change — rather than moral persuasion, mass enlightenment, or some new invention.

  As oil and gas prices rise, signaling the start of the peaking period, we continue to see the rollout of new inventions in the form of the latest iPhone, the next generation of nuclear bombs, improved surveillance tools, and so on. However, there is also evidence that the stream of new inventions, like the global stream of oil, is starting to dry up.

  Physicist Jonathan Huebner of the Pentagon’s Naval Air Warfare Center in China Lake, California, has for several years been studying the pace of technological change and invention, using innovations catalogued in The History of Science and Technology. After applying some elaborate mathematics, he has concluded that the rate of invention of significantly new and different tools peaked in 1873 and has been dwindling gradually since then. Huebner calculates our current rate of innovation at seven important technological developments per billion people per year — about the same rate as prevailed in Europe in 1600. If the trend continues, by 2024 the innovation rate will have declined to that of the Dark Ages.8

  Figure 18.

  Assuming Huebner is right, it would seem that the 19th-century adoption of fossil fuels led to an early-peaking wave of invention, and we are living on its trailing edge. As fossil fuels peak and decline, we are unlikely to see another such burst of similar kinds or degrees of innovation; instead, we will see adaptation to a lower-energy cultural environment. And that adaptation may occur by way of versions of older cultural patterns that resulted from previous generations’ responses to similar levels of available energy.

  Peak Oil will be a fundamental cultural watershed, at least as important as the industrial revolution or the development of agriculture. Yet few mainstream commentators see it that way. They discuss the likelihood of energy price spikes and try to calculate how much economic havoc will result from them. Always the solution is technology: solar or wind and maybe a bit of hydrogen for green-tinged idealists; nuclear, tar sands, methane hydrates, and coal-to-liquids for hard-headed, pro-growth economists and engineers; Tesla’s free-energy magnetic generators for the gullible fringe dwellers.

  But technology cannot solve the underlying dilemma we face as a result of our application of fossil fuels to every human problem or desire. We are growing our population, destroying habitat, undermining global climatic stability, and depleting resources in ways and at rates that cannot be mitigated by any new tool or energy source. The only way forward that does not end with the extinction of humanity and thousands or millions of other species is a
scaling back of the entire human project — in terms both of human numbers and per-capita rates of consumption.

  How dramatic a pullback are we talking about? No one knows. It depends to a large degree on how we manage the inevitable collapse in financial and governance systems, and whether the nations of the world can be persuaded to adopt a global Oil Depletion Protocol; or whether instead they fight mercilessly over the last petroleum reserves until even the “winners” are utterly spent and the resources in dispute have been used up or destroyed in the conflict itself.

  In the worst case, Zerzan’s ideal of a return to hunting and gathering may be realized — though not by moral choice, but by cruel fate.

  If Class D tools fueled by cheap oil eliminated drudgery, life without abundant extrasomatic energy will imply more labor — certainly for food production. The return of slavery is a frighteningly real possibility. Such nightmare scenarios can only be averted by careful, hard, cooperative work.

  Staring at Techno-Collapse

  In the meantime, what should we expect and what should we do?

  Realistically, I think we can expect to see some of the worst excesses of human history, but perhaps only briefly and in certain places. Within a few decades the governmental and corporate structures capable of perpetrating such outrages will have crumbled for lack of fuel. We can also anticipate — and participate in — localized cooperative attempts to reorganize society at a smaller scale.

  Under the circumstances, efforts to try to bring industrialism to ruin prematurely seem to be pointless and wrongheaded: ruin will come soon enough on its own. Better to invest time and effort in personal and community preparedness. Enhance your survival prospects. Learn practical skills, including the manufacture and use of Paleolithic tools. Learn to understand and repair (as much as possible) existing tools — including water pumps, farm implements, and woodworking tools — that are likely still to be useful when there is no gasoline or electricity.

  Preserve whatever is beautiful, sane, and intelligent. That includes scientific and cultural knowledge, and examples of human achievement in the arts. Nobody can preserve it all, or even a substantial portion; choose what appeals to you. A great deal of it is currently captured on media with dubious survival prospects — magnetic disc or tape, compact laser disc, or acid-soaked paper. If someone doesn’t make the effort, the best of what we have achieved over the past centuries and decades will be gone along with the worst.

  In the best instance, the next generations will find themselves in a low-energy regime in which moral lessons from the fossil-fuel era and its demise have been seared into cultural memory. Like the Native Americans, who learned from the Pleistocene extinctions that over-hunting results in famine, they will have discovered that growth is not always good, that modest material goals are usually better for everyone in the long run than extravagant ones, and that every technology has a hidden cost. There is no free lunch. One hopes that, like the Iroquois, who long ago concluded that fighting over scarce land and resources only means the endless perpetuation of violence, they will also have learned the methods and culture of peacemaking.

  We humans tend to learn really tough lessons only by bitter experience. These are tough lessons indeed. If we learn them, perhaps the bitter experience of addicting ourselves to fossil fuels and then having to go cold turkey will not have been entirely pointless.

  2

  Fifty Million Farmers

  THERE WAS A TIME not so long ago when famine was an expected, if not accepted, part of life. Until the 19th century — whether in China, France, India, or Britain — food came almost entirely from local sources and harvests were variable. In good years, there was plenty — enough for seasonal feasts and for storage in anticipation of winter and hard times to come. In bad years, starvation cut down the poorest and the weakest — the very young, the old, and the sickly. Sometimes bad years followed one upon another, reducing the size of the population by several percent. This was the normal condition of life in pre-industrial societies, and it persisted for thousands of years.1

  Today in America, such a state of affairs is hard to imagine. Food is so cheap and plentiful that obesity is a far more widespread concern than hunger. The average mega-supermarket stocks an impressive array of exotic foods from across the globe, and even staples are typically trucked from hundreds of miles away. Many people in America did go hungry during the Great Depression, but those were times that only the elderly can recall. In the current regime, the desperately poor may experience chronic malnutrition and may miss meals, but for most the dilemma is finding time in the day’s hectic schedule to go to the grocery store or to cook. As a result, fast-food restaurants proliferate: the fare may not be particularly nutritious, but even an hour’s earnings at minimum wage will buy a meal or two. The average American family spent 20 percent of its income on food in 1950; today the figure is 10 percent.2

  While this is an extraordinary situation, it is the only one that most Americans alive today have ever experienced, and so we tend to assume that it will continue indefinitely. However, there are reasons to think that our current anomalous abundance of inexpensive food may be only temporary; if so, present and future generations may become acquainted with that old, formerly familiar but unwelcome houseguest — famine.

  The following are the four principal bases (there are others) for this gloomy forecast.

  The first factor has to with looming fuel shortages. This is a subject I have written about extensively elsewhere, so I shall not repeat myself in any detail. Suffice it to say that the era of cheap oil and natural gas is coming to a crashing end, with global oil production projected to peak around the year 2010 and North American natural gas extraction rates already in decline. These events will have enormous implications for America’s petroleum-dependent food system.

  Modern industrial agriculture has been described as a method of using soil to turn petroleum and gas into food. We use natural gas to make fertilizer. We use oil to fuel farm machinery and power irrigation pumps, as a feedstock for pesticides and herbicides, in the maintenance of animal operations, in crop storage and drying, and for transportation of farm inputs and outputs. Agriculture accounts for about 17 percent of the US annual energy budget; it is the single largest consumer of petroleum products as compared to other industries. By comparison, the US military, in all of its operations, uses less than half that amount. About 350 gallons (1,500 liters) of oil equivalents are required to feed each American each year, and every calorie of food produced requires, on average, ten calories of fossil-fuel inputs. This is a food system profoundly vulnerable, at every level, to fuel shortages and skyrocketing prices. And both are inevitable.

  An attempt to make up for fuel shortfalls by producing more biofuels — ethanol, butanol, and biodiesel — will put even more pressure on the food system, and will likely result in a competition between food and fuel uses of land and the other resources needed for agricultural production. Already 14 percent of the US corn crop is devoted to making ethanol, and that proportion is expected to rise to one quarter, based solely on existing projects-in-development and government mandates.3

  The second factor potentially leading to famine is a shortage of farmers. Much of the success of industrial agriculture lies in its labor efficiency: far less human work is required to produce a given amount of food today than was the case decades ago (the actual fraction, comparing the year 2000 with 1900, is about one seventh). But that very success implies a growing vulnerability. We don’t need as many farmers, as a percentage of the population, as we used to; so, throughout the past century, most farming families — including hundreds of thousands and perhaps millions that would have preferred to maintain their rural, self-sufficient way of life — were forced to move to cities and find jobs. Today so few people farm that vital knowledge of how to farm is disappearing. The average age of American farmers is over 55 and approaching 60. The proportion of principal farm operators younger than 35 has dropped from 15.9 percent in 198
2 to 5.8 percent in 2002. Of all the dismal statistics I know, these are surely among the most frightening. Who will be growing our food 20 years from now? With less oil and gas available, we will need far more knowledge and muscle power devoted to food production, and thus far more people on the farm, than we have currently.

  The third worrisome trend is an increasing scarcity of fresh water. Over 80 percent of fresh water consumed nationally goes toward agriculture. California’s Central Valley, which produces the substantial bulk of the nation’s fruits, nuts, and vegetables, receives virtually no rainfall during summer months and relies overwhelmingly on irrigation. But the snowpack on the Sierras, which provides much of that irrigation water, is declining, and the aquifer that supplies much of the rest is being drawn down at many times its recharge rate. If these trends continue, the Central Valley may be incapable of producing food in any substantial quantities within two or three decades. Other parts of the country are similarly overspending their water budgets, and very little is being done to deal with this looming catastrophe.

  Fourth and finally, there is the problem of global Climate Change. Often the phrase used for this is “global warming,” which implies only that the world’s average temperature will be increasing by a couple of degrees or more over the next few decades. The much greater problem for farmers is destabilization of weather patterns. We face not just a warmer climate, but climate chaos: droughts, floods, and stronger storms in general (hurricanes, cyclones, tornadoes, hail storms) — unpredictable weather of all kinds. Farmers depend on relatively consistent seasonal patterns of rain and sun, cold and heat; a climate shift can spell the end of farmers’ ability to grow a crop in a given region, and even a single freak storm can destroy an entire year’s production. Given the fact that modern American agriculture has become highly centralized due to cheap transport and economies of scale (almost the entire national spinach crop, for example, comes from a single valley in California), the damage from that freak storm is today potentially continental or even global in scope. We have embarked on a century in which, increasingly, freakish weather is normal.