The Age of Scarcity Industrialism

It’s been suggested several times, on this blog and elsewhere, that the process of coming to terms with the reality of peak oil has more than a little in common with the process of dealing with the imminence of death. The five stages of getting ready to die outlined by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in a series of bestselling books back in the 1970s – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – show up tolerably often in today’s peak oil controversies. There’s good reason for the parallel, because the end of the age of cheap abundant energy marks the terminus of many of today’s most cherished assumptions and ways of looking at the world, and it also means that a great many people alive today will die sooner than they otherwise would.

More than twenty years have gone by since I tended the dying in nursing homes, in one of a flurry of low-paying jobs I held after leaving college. Getting to know the guy with the scythe while the people around you are heading through life’s exit turnstile teaches lessons that don’t fade easily, though, and from that perspective I’m not at all sure the parallels have been taken far enough. In particular, it’s interesting to note that the same five stages – or at least the first three of them – also characterize our collective response so far to the predicament of industrial society.

When the diagnosis arrived at the beginning of the 1970s, for example, the immediate response was the one Kübler-Ross could have predicted: denial. By the end of that decade that response became an overwhelming political force. “It’s morning in America,” Ronald Reagan proclaimed, as his workmen tore down the solar hot water heaters Jimmy Carter installed on the White House roof: in some ways the definitive political act of the Eighties. Political gimmickry and reckless overpumping of North Slope and North Sea oil fields forced the price of oil down to the lowest levels in history, and made it possible for the industrial world to wallow in one last orgy of mass consumption, the final blowoff of the Age of Exuberance.

The next stage on Kübler-Ross’s list, anger, arrived on schedule as the Eighties gave way to the Nineties. By the decade’s end that stage, too, became a political force that put its poster boy in office, with a little help from hanging chads and the Supreme Court. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq filled the same role in the new phase that the junking of the White House’s solar panels filled in the old, a definitive sign that the new attitude held center stage in our national soap opera. It will be interesting to see whether the winning candidate in the 2008 election pursues a weak version of Bush II’s policies, as Nixon did Johnson’s and Bush I did Reagan’s, and crashes and burns on schedule around 2012; history doesn’t repeat itself, as the saying goes, but sometimes the rhymes are exquisitely precise.

One way or another, though, the stage of anger is fading out. Even oil company executives are starting to mention peak oil and global warming, and politicians are starting to tone down their rhetoric and climb aboard various bandwagons – ethanol, biodiesel, or what have you. This marks the arrival of bargaining. This stage has certain advantages; where denial refuses to deal with death, and anger looks for someone to blame for it, bargaining looks for things that can be done to make the Reaper change his mind. I’ve argued before that we’re well past the window of opportunity in which the decline and fall of industrial society might have been prevented. Still, that doesn’t foreclose the chance to cushion the decline and get things of value through the approaching mess, and these should be at the top of the industrial world’s agenda right now.

The first transition we face on the curve of the Long Descent, as I’ve suggested in the last several posts, will take us from a form of industrial society focused on abundance to another that centers on scarcity. It’s a form without precedents outside of a few wartime examples, and the transition to it is likely to see a great many false starts and futile attempts to impose the thinking of the past on the realities of the future. Still, it’s not an impossible transition, and will likely be easier than some of the others we’ll face along the way.

The nature of the challenge is straightforward enough. The economic framework of the modern industrial world is geared to expansion: of goods and services, technology, energy use, resource extraction, and population, among other things. That won’t continue as the limits to growth begin to bite in the next few years, and many things – starting with the economic framework of the industrial world – will have to change accordingly.

We’re now close to two years past the peak of world oil production, and serious declines are likely to arrive in the next few years. How serious is a matter for guesswork today, but balancing failing production from existing fields against new production from fields under development and unconventional sources such as tar sands and biodiesel, something on the order of a 4% to 5% decline per year seems likely for the first decade or so. That will be a body blow to existing economic and social arrangements. Still, production increases of 4% to 5% a year didn’t bring Utopia, and production declines on the same scale won’t bring Armageddon, either.

A very large percentage of the energy used in a modern industrial society, after all, is wasted. During an age of cheap abundant energy, it’s profitable to use energy in ways that have no real economic value at all, because the profit to be made selling the energy outweighs the short-term costs of wasting it. Tourism, the world’s largest industry just now, is a classic example. Shut down the tourist industry – as every country in the world did during the Second World War – and redirect the resources now wasted on tourism to other uses, and industrial societies could weather a steep drop in energy supplies without impacting necessary goods and services. The same is true of many other dimensions of today’s economy of waste.

In America, in particular, the sheer scale of energy waste makes phenomenal gains in efficiency fairly easy. The average American uses twice as much energy as the average Briton, and three times as much as the average European, to support a standard of living that by some measures is not even as high as theirs. Decades of shortsighted planning and inept economic policy will have to be undone in a hurry, as Americans discover that suburban living is no longer viable in a post-commuter age, but the problems involved aren’t insuperable; for that matter, the rehabilitation of inner city neighborhoods and the rebuilding of mass transit systems could provide much-needed jobs to replace those lost when industries that exist solely to waste energy evaporate in the face of the new economics of scarcity.

As this suggests, the fading out of the economy of waste promises to stand most of the economic slogans of the last two decades on their heads. When transportation accounts for most of the cost of many commercial products, that fact will write R.I.P. on the headstone of the global economy, because goods made overseas will be priced out of markets dominated by local production and regional trading networks. We’ve already begun to see the cutting edge of the new resource nationalism, as energy reserves and strategic raw materials become the mainsprings of political and military power, and governments start treating them accordingly. Expect this to expand dramatically in the decades to come, as dependence on foreign resources becomes a noose around a nation’s neck and economic independence – even at a sharply lowered standard of living – the key to survival.

More generally, the pendulum of power could well swing away from the multinational corporations that have exercised so much influence in recent years, toward those national governments willing to use military force to maintain territorial integrity and control over resources. When most resource transfers across borders are negotiated between governments according to a calculus of political advantage, rather than being purchased on the open market by the highest bidder, those whose power comes solely from money will find themselves with a great deal less clout than they have today. Those governments that master the new calculus of power soonest, in turn, will dominate the age of scarcity industrialism.

However it unfolds, the age of scarcity industrialism will no more be a permanent state of affairs than the age of abundance industrialism that precedes it. While it lasts, access to fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources will be the key to international power and national survival, but by that very token fossil fuels and other nonrenewable resources will continue to slide down the curves of depletion. As resource production in one nation after another drops below levels that will support any kind of industrial system, industrial economies will unravel and give way to other forms of economy – in the terms I’ve used in several recent posts, other seral stages in the process of succession that leads to the ecotechnic societies of the future.

What remains unknown is which of the current industrial societies will manage the transition to scarcity industrialism, and which will falter and crack under the strain. The United States could go either way. It’s rare for a society that claws its way to the top of the heap under one set of economic conditions to hold onto that status when conditions change, and our society’s fervent commitment to the economics of waste has opened up fissures of weakness throughout its economic, social, and political structure; the implosion of America’s current empire is thus a foregone conclusion. If the next generation of American politicians are unusually lucky and smart, we might be able to coast down the curve of declining empire as Britain has. If not, we could face any of the usual fates of empire, ranging from stagnation and contraction to nightmare scenarios of political-military collapse and partition by hostile powers.

This is one reason why it would be useful for Americans on all points of the political spectrum to get over their habit of demonizing their opponents and wallowing in self-righteous anger as soon as possible, and start looking for constructive options instead. The time of bargaining, when preparations for the difficult future ahead of us can be made most readily, will not last forever. American culture always tends to extremes; the denial that blinded the Seventies and Eighties, and the anger that burst into incandescence in the Nineties and the present decade, were both of lavish dimensions. The phase of bargaining may well equal them; so, most likely, will the depression – economic, social, and spiritual – that comes when the efforts to bargain with the Reaper turn out to be too little and too late. We can only hope that when acceptance comes, it will be on the same grand scale.

Climbing Down The Ladder

Last week’s Archdruid Report post raised the possibility that future societies might be able to maintain a relatively high level of technology without falling into the trap of relying on extravagant use of nonrenewable resources, the basis of our present industrial society. The dream of building a civilization of this sort – an ecotechnic society, to use the term I coined in that post – has been cherished by a good many people in alternative circles for years now, and not without reason.

Behind that dream lies a canny bit of philosophical strategy. Central to the rhetoric used to justify today’s social arrangements in the industrial world is a forced dichotomy between the alleged goodness of enlightened, technologically advanced industrial societies and the alleged squalor of primitive preindustrial life. Many of today’s critics of industrialism fall into the trap of accepting the dichotomy and simply reversing the value judgments, as though it’s possible to break out of a dualistic way of thinking by standing the dualism on its head.

The cleverness of the ecotechnic dream is that it breaks out of the dichotomy altogether. In the jargon of modern Druid philosophy, it turns an unresolved binary into a balanced ternary. In less technical terms, it proposes a third option that borrows many of the best qualities of the two sides of the dichotomy, and thus blows the dichotomy out of the water by widening the field of choices, not just to three but to infinity. The question stops being a matter of accepting one of two whole systems, in a choice that excludes all alternatives; it becomes a matter of picking and choosing among a dizzyingly large array of factors that go together to make up a future society.

The vision of an ecotechnic future is thus worth keeping in mind. As a plan for the near term, though, it faces extreme challenges of the sort suggested by my previous post on the succession process. In the language of ecological succession, a fully ecotechnic society is a climax community, and you can’t make the jump from pioneer weeds to climax forest in a single transition. The conditions that allow the climax forest to establish and maintain itself in the face of competition from other biotic communities haven’t been achieved yet.

This is as true in human affairs as in the development of any other biotic community. It’s as pleasant as it is popular to think that human social change is driven primarily by deliberate choice or by some other uniquely human factor, but the science of human ecology and the evidence of history – and history is simply human ecology mapped onto the dimension of time – both suggest otherwise. Industrial civilization triumphed over other forms of human society not because people agreed to make that happen, but because at the time of its emergence, in a world with untapped fossil fuel reserves, it was able to overcome the competitive pressure of other human social systems and the challenges of nature.

Industrial civilization faces collapse, in turn, because when fossil fuels are scarce and expensive, and the biosphere is undergoing drastic changes, its ability to maintain itself against the challenges of nature and competition from other, less energy- and technology-dependent human social systems is doubtful at best. The forms of human society that rise to prominence in the aftermath of industrialism, in turn, will be those that can establish and maintain themselves more effectively than their rivals in the changing world of the deindustrial age. We may have our preferences, but nature has the final say.

The conditions that would allow an ecotechnic society to establish and maintain itself are more or less those that existed before the industrial revolution broke open the treasure chest of the Earth’s stored carbon and started looting it for short-term advantage. In a world where energy resources are limited to sun, wind, water, muscle, and biomass, and all work must be accomplished by those means, those societies that evolve efficient and sustainable technologies using those resources have major survival advantages over rival societies that use them unsustainably – for a good example, compare imperial China’s 5000-year history with the death spiral that claimed the ancient Maya.

The problem ecotechnic societies of the near future face is that these conditions do not yet exist. So far, we’ve used up around half the world’s stock of petroleum, and somewhat less than half its stock of coal and natural gas. All these fuels are subject to peaks and declines in production, which means among other things that they will remain available in diminishing amounts for a long time to come. While modern industrial societies as they exist today probably can’t survive the end of constantly increasing energy supplies, the impact of peak fossil fuel production will likely drive the emergence of other forms of industrialism adapted to a world of diminishing fuel supplies – and while those supplies still exist, these neo-industrial societies will probably still be able to wield more economic and military force than ecotechnic rivals.

More broadly, many of the legacies of today’s industrial societies will continue to exist for decades or centuries into the future. These legacies represent stored energy – the energy needed to create them, and to build the material and knowledge base that made them possible – and the amount of additional energy needed to maintain and use them in many cases will be quite small compared to the stored energy contained in them; the energy needed to keep a hydroelectric plant or a computer in working order is fairly small compared to the energy they embody, or the advantages that owning and using them could confer.

It’s quite likely that for some decades or centuries, deindustrial societies that would not be able to build a hydroelectric plant or a computer could still maintain the rather less demanding knowledge and resource base needed to keep them functioning, in much the way that Dark Age communities all over Europe used and repaired Roman acqueducts they could never have built themselves. Still, much of the legacy technology inherited by the deindustrial age will not be a renewable resource; when it finally breaks down, it’s gone – for decades, or centuries, or forever.

The result is an interesting parallel to succession. In the near and middle future, as the deindustrial age unfolds, the societies that will be best able to flourish are precisely those that will be least able to survive over the long term. In the near term, societies that rely on the increasingly efficient use of the remaining fossil fuels, eked out with renewable resources and high technology, will likely do much better than either the wasteful dinosaur cultures of the present industrial period or the lower-energy cultures that will end up replacing them.

In the middle term, societies that combine sustainable subsistence strategies and economies with an effective use of the industrial age’s legacy technologies will likely do much better than the lingering fossil fuel-dependent societies they replace, or the ecotechnic societies that will replace them in turn. Only when fossil fuel production has dropped to the point that coal and oil are rare geological curiosities, and the remaining legacies of the industrial age no longer play a significant economic role, will ecotechnic societies come into their own.

It’s crucial to keep this process in mind when planning for the future. One of the great barriers in the way of the lifeboat communities imagined by so many thinkers in the peak oil community these days is that while they’re viable (at least in theory) in the future, they aren’t viable in the present. There just aren’t that many people who are in a position to chuck their industrial lifestyles, move to a rural ecovillage, and successfully support themselves there for decades while the machinery of industrial society slowly creaks and shudders to a halt around them.

In terms of the model I’ve presented here, the would-be builders of lifeboat communities are like seedlings of some climax forest species trying to grow in a piece of land still covered with pioneer weeds. The conditions that would allow them to flourish haven’t arrived yet. The last years of industrial society, and the decades of neo-industrial societies struggling to manage on declining energy reserves in an age of limits, thus form a hurdle that has to be leapt in order to build something relevant for the future.

That hurdle can be faced successfully, but it requires a different approach. Instead of trying to make the leap to an ecologically balanced, fully sustainable society all at once, it may turn out to be necessary to climb down the ladder a step at a time, adapting to changes as they happen, and trying to anticipate each step in succession in time to prepare for it, while working out the subsistence strategies and social networks of the future on a variety of smaller scales.

This approach is evolutionary rather than revolutionary – that is, it relies on incremental changes and a continuous process of experimentation rather than trying to break from the past and impose an ideal that may turn out to be no more viable that what it replaces. Among other things, this means that it can be carried out on local and even individual scales, a detail that makes it much more viable in practical terms than attempts to change society as a whole from the top down. How this process might unfold will be the subject of several future posts.