Peak Everything

by Richard Heinberg

  The other signal event of 1970 — the first Earth Day — was well noted at the time. The brainchild of Senator Gaylord Nelson, Earth Day was reported prominently in the New York Times, Time, and most other significant media outlets. Legislation followed: the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Water Quality Improvement Act, the Water Pollution and Control Act Amendments, the Resource Recovery Act, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, the Toxic Substances Control Act, the Occupational Safety and Health Act, the Federal Environmental Pesticide Control Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Safe Drinking Water Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, and the Surface Mining Control and Reclamation Act.

  The crowd at Woodstock filled a natural amphitheater, with the stage at the bottom.

  Perhaps even more important than this legislation was the symbolic value of the occasion in giving voice and identity to a growing minority who viewed the fossil-fueled industrial project as having dire consequences for humanity and nature, and who advocated a dramatic change of direction for society as a whole, away from consumerism and toward conservation, away from militarism and toward nurturance of life. The Earth Day message — which would be given renewed force two years later with the publication of the Club of Rome report, The Limits to Growth, and then again with the Arab oil embargo of 1973 — appealed to many young people’s intuitive longing for a return to a simpler, more localized and agrarian version of America, an America that didn’t meddle in other nations’ affairs.

  The Earth Day message might have been still more compelling had its framers been aware of the fact and significance of their nation’s oil peak. However, though the message evoked legislative and cultural responses, it sank in only so deep. It was, after all, difficult for many Americans to accept the notion that they should voluntarily give up their material privileges, their control of global resource streams, their entitlement to a glittering technotopian future of effortless abundance, and accept instead a self-disciplined and self-limiting future of hard work and parsimonious material aspirations. The difficulty was compounded by the existence of an international rival, the USSR, that would presumably fill the void if America were to shrink from its imperial duties. The Soviet Union was also a competitor in the oil business and had actually out-produced the US in recent years. Wouldn’t stepping off the consumerist treadmill mean giving in to the Commies?

  It was a contest of visions and values, and that contest was to be decided in the election of 1980.

  The Path Taken

  Jimmy Carter was a less than perfect president; nevertheless, he somewhat understood the Earth Day message. I was living in Canada during the mid-1970s and almost never watched television, but I somehow found myself viewing the live broadcast of a Carter speech in which he told Americans that they would have to change their material way of life in order to keep their freedoms. I was so amazed to hear an American president saying such things that I moved back to the US. But the Carter years were destined to be few.

  For over three decades the American Right had been searching for ways to overturn the New Deal. Corporate leaders backing the Republicans had managed to make common cause with the burgeoning Christian fundamentalist movement and the anti-Communist fringe; Nixon had perfected the strategy of bringing social conservatives from the old Confederacy into the Republican Party; and the party had found its perfect pitchman — a former movie actor and ex-spokesman for General Electric. Ronald Reagan and the Republican PR machine pushed all of the right buttons, even resorting to an “October surprise” to manipulate the Iranian hostage crisis to their benefit.

  Reagan and George H. W. Bush (who, during the mid-1980s, may have been the de facto president) were the last US leaders of the World War II generation, their cohort’s final gift to the nation. It was morning in America, but let the Earth be damned: the Republicans had found an electoral strategy so successful that Democrats began trying to copy it, so that since 1980 the entire US political system has lurched toward ever-increasing economic inequality, globalization, imperialism, and militarism.

  So what did the Boomers do after 1980?

  Having already taken a detour into the bleary world of recreational drugs, many of the more spirited Boomers now turned to gurus, meditation, and cults: politics was a bummer; if we really wanted to change the world we should change our heads first.

  Other Boomers steered toward the stock market and scrambled up the corporate ladder. They got jobs, made money, and discovered that “greed is good.” By the end of the decade it was apparent that the Boomers were divided, with some upholding the Earth Day vision, others honing their skills as right-wing radio talk show hosts, and the rest just trying to get by.

  Another Fork in the Road

  Bill Clinton, the first Boomer president (born in 1946), elicited high hopes among his generational peers feeling battered by a dozen years of Reagan/Bush. But as governor of Arkansas, Clinton had already learned the necessity of obeying entrenched power-holders in order to get along in politics. Moreover, by now the American governmental-corporate system was far too large and complex, and had far too much momentum behind it, to permit a fundamental change in direction.

  In the late 1960s and early ’70s, many of us had believed that when our generation eventually took over the reins of power we would change the world. Well, here we were with one of our cohort as president and the country was more deeply mired than ever in the banality of consumerism. The WWII generation was increasingly filling obituary pages and populating nursing homes; now we had no one to blame but ourselves. The generation of peace and love had become the generation of SUVs and fast food.

  It was clear that we had deluded ourselves by thinking of our cohort as united in its values, or by imagining that those values were somehow immutable. Just as Brokaw’s “greatest generation” had started out in the 1930s battling the evils of unrestrained capitalism and went on in the 1940s to fight the menace of fascism only to end by electing Nixon, Reagan, and Bush and supporting the Vietnam war, we were now doing something similar.

  This is not to say that all of our number had sold out: we could count as generational heroes and heroines thousands of scientists, activists, artists, musicians, and writers who kept alive the Earth Day ideal of a society that lives in harmony with nature rather than parasitically destroying it. However, with each passing year that ideal seemed ever more elusive — especially so following the 2000 election.

  We watched as that election was stolen, and our outrage only grew as we saw prominent Democrats quietly acquiescing to the evisceration of much of what was left of American democracy. The events of 9/11 jolted even the drowsiest awake, and some of us began paying attention as never before when we realized that mainstream news organizations were failing to ask the most obvious questions about the events — about the mysterious collapse of the towers, the failure of officials to dispatch jet fighters, the immediate confiscation and destruction of evidence, the suspicious airline stock trades, the thwarted warnings, and much more. With the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, the detentions in Guantanamo, and the passage of the USA Patriot Act, it became clear that the US had entered an entirely new historical period. The current president-by-decree was another Boomer, but his shortcomings didn’t end with rampant corruption among his appointees and the simplemindedness he so obviously exhibited: he was, in the words of George Washington University psychiatrist Dr. Justin Frank, “an untreated alcoholic with paranoid and megalomaniac tendencies,” and his cronies were evidently dedicated neo-fascists with every intention of turning America into a Disneyland Reich. That they were in some ways ridiculously inept made them all the more dangerous.

  In response, some Boomers honed their political consciousness. Political documentaries and blogs proliferated like wildflowers in springtime.

  Elections came and went, and widespread disgust with the disastrous ongoing occupation of Iraq eventually handed Congress to the Democrats. But there was never broad public discussion of t
he real issue that will impact our lives in the next few years — the generation that grew up expecting always more will soon be faced with less. The nation, now hallucinating uncontrollably from toxic exposure to Fox News, is in debt to the point that no conceivable decision made today will prevent a devastating implosion of the US economy, especially in view of the impending oil and gas peaks.

  It may seem cynical to some if I say that it is too late to salvage America’s political system, its economy, its suburban way of life; that it is even too late to contemplate an easy and peaceful transition to a different socio-ecological reality. But as far as I can tell, these are the facts. That possibility probably died in 1980. As they say these days, get over it.

  This doesn’t mean that life will end tomorrow. The American dream is going down, yet we still have some control over how it goes down. And it is in this remaining arena of choice that the post-World War II cohort might partially redeem itself.

  During the next two decades we Boomers will be our society’s elders. We will have amassed considerable financial capital, as well as human capital in the forms of competence, credibility, and connections. How will we use this capital?

  If we use it for any purpose other than to help awaken all and sundry to our collective plight, and to lead a change of course toward a peaceful, local, slow, and self-limiting post-fossil-fuel way of life, even if that goal may not be immediately attainable, it will all have been wasted.

  In the decades ahead we will be going through hell. That is an awful thing to contemplate, but the only alternative to accepting the fact is to live in denial until the reality is inescapable and our room for maneuvering is even more restricted than it has already become. What we must do now is lay the groundwork for collective survival. We must build lifeboats, or support the younger lifeboat-builders among us. If we do this, there will be local centers of self-reliance around which a new culture of true sustainability can begin to coalesce. Maybe people who are around decades from now will then be able to contemplate the creation of ecotopia — let us hope so.

  This is not the grandiose project we imagined for ourselves back in the 1960s and ’70s. We thought that we ourselves would usher in the New Age, but that possibility is extinguished. We Boomers have stolen much from the future generations; the main question remaining is, can we now give them back at least the possibility that they might build the world we once dreamed of?

  10

  A Letter From the Future

  GREETINGS TO YOU, people of the year 2007! You are living in the year of my birth; I am one hundred years old now, writing to you from the year 2107. I am using the last remnants of the advanced physics that scientists developed during your era, in order to send this electronic message back in time to one of your computer networks. I hope that you receive it, and that it will give you reason to pause and reflect on your world and what actions to take with regard to it.

  Of myself I shall say only what it is necessary to say: I am a survivor. I have been extremely fortunate on many occasions and in many ways, and I regard it as something of a miracle that I am here to compose this message. I have spent much of my life attempting to pursue the career of historian, but circumstances have compelled me also to learn and practice the skills of farmer, forager, guerrilla fighter, engineer — and now physicist. My life has been long and eventful...but that is not what I have gone to so much trouble to convey to you. It is what I have witnessed during this past century that I feel compelled to tell you by these extraordinary means.

  You are living at the end of an era. Perhaps you cannot understand that. I hope that by the time you have finished reading this letter, you will.

  I want to tell you what is important for you to know, but you may find some of this information hard to absorb. Please have patience with me. I am an old man and I don’t have time for niceties. The communication device I am using is quite unstable and there’s no telling how much of my story will actually get through to you. Please pass it along to others. It will probably be the only such message you will ever receive.

  Since I don’t know how much information I will actually be able to convey, I’ll start with the most important items, ones that will be of greatest help in your understanding of where your world is headed.

  Energy has been the central organizing — or should I say, disorganizing? — principle of this century. Actually, in historical retrospect, I would have to say that energy was the central organizing principle of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as well. People discovered new energy sources — coal, then petroleum — in the nineteenth century, and then invented all sorts of new technologies to make use of this freshly released energy. Transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, lighting, heating, communication — all were revolutionized, and the results reached deep into the lives of everyone in the industrialized world. Everybody became utterly dependent on the new gadgets: on imported, chemically fertilized food; on chemically synthesized and fossil-fuel-delivered therapeutic drugs; on the very idea of perpetual growth (after all, it would always be possible to produce more energy to fuel more transportation and manufacturing — wouldn’t it?).

  Well, if the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were the upside of the growth curve, this past century has been the downside — the cliff. It should have been perfectly obvious to everyone that the energy sources on which they were coming to rely were exhaustible. Somehow the thought never sank in very deep. I suppose that’s because people generally tend to get used to a certain way of life, and from then on they don’t think about it very much. That’s true today, too. The young people now have never known anything different; they take for granted our way of life — scavenging among the remains of industrial civilization for whatever can be put to immediate use — as though this is how people have always lived, as if this is how we were meant to live. That’s why I’ve always been attracted to history, so that I could get some perspective on human societies as they change through time. But I’m digressing. Where was I?

  Yes — the energy crisis. Well, it all started around the time I was born. Folks then thought it would be brief, that it was just a political or technical problem, that soon everything would get back to normal. They didn’t stop to think that “normal,” in the longer-term historical sense, meant living on the energy budget of incoming sunlight and the vegetative growth of the biosphere. Perversely, they thought “normal” meant using fossil energy like there was no tomorrow. And, I guess, there almost wasn’t.

  At first, most people thought the shortages could be solved with “technology.” However, in retrospect that’s quite ludicrous. After all, their modern gadgetry had been invented to use a temporary abundance of energy. It didn’t produce energy. Yes, there were the nuclear reactors (heavens, those things turned out to be night-mares!), but of course nuclear power came from uranium, another non-renewable resource. Then there were photovoltaic panels, which were a much better idea — except for the fact that some of the crucial materials, like gallium and indium, were also rare, quickly depleting substances. Moreover, making the panels ate up a substantial amount of the power the panels themselves generated during their lifetime. Nevertheless, quite a few of them were built — I wish that more had been! — and many are still operating (that’s what’s powering the device that allows me to transmit this signal to you from the future).

  Solar power was a good idea; its main drawback was simply that it was incapable of satisfying people’s energy-guzzling habits. With the exhaustion of fossil fuels, no technology could have maintained the way of life that people had gotten used to. But it took quite a while for many to realize that. Their pathetic faith in technology turned out to be almost religious in character, as though their gadgets were votive objects connecting them with an invisible but omnipotent god capable of overturning the laws of thermodynamics.

  Naturally, some of the first effects of the energy shortages showed up as economic recessions, followed by an endless depression. The economists had been operatin
g on the basis of their own religion — an absolute, unshakable faith in the Market-as-God and in supply-and-demand. They figured that if oil started to run out, the price would rise, offering incentives for research into alternatives. But the economists never bothered to think this through. If they had, they would have realized that the revamping of society’s entire energy infrastructure would take decades, while the price signal from resource shortages would come at the exact moment some hypothetical replacement would be needed. Moreover, they should have realized that there was no substitute capable of fully replacing the energy resources they had come to rely on.

  The economists could think only in terms of money; basic necessities like water and energy only showed up in their calculations in terms of dollar cost, which made them functionally interchangeable with everything else that could be priced — oranges, airliners, diamonds, baseball cards, whatever. But, in the last analysis, basic resources weren’t interchangeable with other economic goods at all: you couldn’t drink baseball cards, no matter how big or valuable your collection, once the water ran out. Nor could you eat dollars, if nobody had food to sell. And so, after a certain point, people started to lose faith in their money. And as they did so, they realized that faith had been the only thing that made money worth anything in the first place. Currencies just collapsed, first in one country, then in another. There was inflation, deflation, barter, and thievery of every imaginable kind as matters sorted themselves out.

  In the era when I was born, commentators used to liken the global economy to a casino. A few folks were making trillions of dollars, euros, and yen trading in currencies, companies, and commodity futures. None of these people were actually doing anything useful; they were just laying down their bets and, in many cases, raking in colossal winnings. If you followed the economic chain, you’d see that all of that money was coming out of ordinary people’s pockets ...but that’s another story. Anyway: all of that economic activity depended on energy, on global transportation and communication, and on faith in the currencies. Early in the 21st century, the global casino went bust. Gradually, a new metaphor became operational. We went from global casino to village flea market.