BrainGlutton’s very much unsurprising mention of James Howard Kunstler and peak oil in this thread reminded me of Kunstler’s vision of a post-peak oil world: a world without modern technology or transportation (and many other things that are sort of irrelevant here).
That’s always struck me as a very interesting vision. I can’t think of many times a civilization (especially a global one like the Western “lifestyle” seems to be) slid quite that far back, especially in the short time Kunstler envisions. What especially interests me is the feeling of inevitability that Kunstler, fellow apocalyptic peak oil believers, and others of differing political, religious, and economic beliefs have.
What exactly do you think it would take for mankind (the whole of it, not just the richest or poorest nations) to go back to (as I believe someone here put it in regards to Kunstler’s views) “the early 19th century, except with electricity” or worse? Are you one of those who think that it will happen in the next decade? Later?
I probably didn’t cover some expected questions/beliefs, but I think you get the idea…
Whatever it is will need to be quick. That’s the major factor. Peak oil, population aging, global warming etc are just too slow acting to produce any serious retrogression. Humans are infinitely adaptable, and unless you take modern society by surprise we’ll simply adapt to the change with minor alteration.
Peak oil: we can completely switch to nuclear energy within a decade if we really need to. Aging population: we can tackle this by offering massive incentives for producing more children, and in the meantime cultural and technological solutions will fill any shortfall. Global warming: we build dykes in high value areas, use air conditioners and adjust agricultural practices. All those solutions will probably produce a recession and a stalling of advancement, but it won’t lead to regression.
What we need for a collapse is something totally out of the blue. It also needs to hit the whole world simultaneously. If places like New Zealand are largely unaffected they’ll continue to function quite fine even if the rest of the planet is completely uninhabitable.
It’s hard to imagine what could conceivably do that. A massive plague that kills off >70% of the world’s population over night could do it. Not so much because 2 billion people isn’t more than enough to keep the world running, but because the fear and social breakdown that results would likely leave the survivors fragmented and unable to co-ordinate. A lot of modern technology needs a large coherent population base to persist, and a dispersed population won’t work.
Asteroid impacts, super volcanoes and massive nuclear war might have similar impacts and might add to it by making much of the wodl unable to support high density agricultural communities.
Outside of those sorts f things its hard to thin of realistic threats that could lead to a collapse.
Ask a Rhodesian. He will be able to tell you all too clearly what it’s like to have a modern civilization collapse around you. I know such a man - his father was a soldier in the elite Selous Scouts; the family fled to Venezuela. Farms were destroyed, houses looted, women raped and civilians killed en-masse; the country went from a prosperous and modern place into what is now called Zimbabwe, where there are denominations of money in the trillions and absolute chaos and brutality around every corner.
I don’t think it’s inevitable, but I certainly think it’s possible. Remember, a *lot *of the world *currently *lives at not even the 19th C. - more like the 16th C., and parts of that not even with electricity. Even the bits that do have electricity and some products of modern society like the Green Revolution and medicine are not that much better off - think Indian or Chinese peasants.
So the idea of those parts of the world which are more advanced sliding somewhat backwards is not that hard to believe, but it would take some sort of great disaster to do it, and I don’t think Peak Oil (which I do believe in) will do it. Peak Oil is an economic disaster, but Kunstler is just a little crazy when he extrapolates it do the complete breakdown of society. I envision it more like post WWII Britain, with the rationing, shitty food and the like.
Many have commented on the similarities between environmentalism and religion, and IMO they really are too similar to be entirely coincidental. I’m convinced the same sections of the brain are involved in both, which is why we see identical overarching themes in pretty much all religions and environmentalism: an initial “natural” golden age from which we fell by rejecting the laws of the life givers, constant urging for a “return” to closer relationship with the life givers, sacrifices that must be made to re-establish the relationship, prophecies of inevitable but vaguely dated doom if the relationship isn’t re-established and so forth.
This isn’t a jab at environmentalism per se, but I think the reason why it’s such a popular cause to devote a life to and the reasons why the alarmist warnings of fire-and-brimstone retribution are accepted with so much certainty with so little evidence is because it all resonates so strongly with our religious nature. It fills a religious needs, especially in many atheists.
It would take something pretty calamitous, like nuclear war or an asteroid strike. There would need to be a complete breakdown in education worldwide to go back to the 19th century.
However, the “peak oil” prophets of doom aren’t talking complete bunk, generally they just over-extrapolate. The green revolution, which has supported unsustainable population growth, is a result of mechanised farming. As oil becomes more scarce, we’ll be forced to become more efficient and develop more energy sources. It’s very unlikely that we’ll have the same energy budget to work with in the future, expect energy and food costs to rise sharply. This will effect economies as a whole (and recently, we’ve had some harsh lessons on how fragile they can be). Improved technology will bail us out to some degree, but it’s impossible to predict how much. I see a future where private transportation becomes a luxury as possible. However, modern communications and the internet aren’t going to go away. Ultimately, a lot more people may telecommute.
There are genuine reasons for pessimism, regression in our standards of living over the next century is a real possibility. Bear in mind, while our quality of life in the developed world has greatly improved in the last 60 years, that isn’t true globally. The biggest risks as I see them are scarcity of energy sources, climate change (affecting crop yields and forcing migration) and unsustainable population growth.
What I believe could destroy western civilization would be a handful of nukes detonated about a hundred miles in the atmosphere over various parts of the U.S., Europe, Japan, and South Korea. The United States is completely unprepared for an attack that would destroy most modern electronics, cars etc. Imagine what would happen to Las Vegas if they couldn’t truck food in?
It would seem to me that just like in the case of evolution, it is becoming a matter of faith that we should **not ** accept what the scientists are telling us, as we can trust that the gods will keep the environment the way it is for humans.
However, I do agree that even in this case modern civilization will be able to survive with some preparation, the problem for civilization will be if we don’t even prepare for the changes. (IMHO there is less evidence that efforts like the Kyoto protocol will make a big difference, the evidence that I see shows me that we should invest mostly in technology that will help us adapt to the changes.)
IMHO the fears over peak oil are a load of cobblers. There are massive hydrocarbon reserves; it’s just that some of them are currently uneconomic to recover. Peak oil isn’t so much a problem as an opportunity. There are other sources of electricity, like nuclear. You can use batteries to provide motive power instead of petrol. And should someone patent a process to economically synthesise petrol, they will become a trillionnaire.
Society may change, just as it changed when the horse was domesticated, just as it changed when the train was invented, and just as it changed when the car was invented, but it will advance, not regress.
A key factor. Once there is a general belief that major resources (like oil) are limited then nations will want to secure their own supply of what’s available. A decline in oil production could reduce civilization to a 19th century level in fifty years. But a major war for declining oil production could do the same in ten years.
That’s hand waving away genuine concerns. I agree - we’re not going to run out of oil. But oil production will decline. So the issue is that we’re going to run out of cheap oil.
You can’t assume that we’re on the verge of developing some cheap substitute for oil. Rising oil prices have been a concern for over thirty years now and people have been unsuccessfully looking for a substitute for a generation. Nobody’s made that trillion dollar discovery yet.
It could be that the Earth’s oil supply is the equivalent of winning a lottery. You get a two million dollar prize and start spending a hundred thousand dollars a year. Just because twenty years is a long time and you become used to the effortless lifestyle you shouldn’t assume nothing will ever change and that when the time comes you’ll figure out some other way to get an easy hundred thousand dollars to spend.
Hydrogen is a better bet for future non-fossil fuel vehicles. Electric is good for short distance commuting.
Hopefully a chemist will comment on this, but as I understand it synthesis isn’t the problem (we muck around with carbon polymers all the time, and petrol is a simple blend of chemicals). The problem is energy. Synthesising a fuel requires more energy than burning the fuel provides. This also applies to hydrogen production.
Progress is not guaranteed and is not inevitable. It won’t happen if we ignore the problems we face.
Well I find the linear notion of ‘progress’ to be facile and fallacious. History has never run ‘backwards’. The idea that Feudal Europe was more ‘barbaric’ than Roman civilization has some truth to it, but barely. The Romans were vicious and nasty and knowledge advanced in feudal Europe. A great example of how far beyond Roman technology they were in feudal Europe is the gothic cathedral. If people can build a gothic cathedral without oil, then there is a whole lot we can do without oil.
It would definitely be a chaotic transition if just suddenly oil was too scarce for the average consumer, but society would adjust. There would probably be famine, war and plague as people run around like chickens with their heads cut off, but we aren’t going to suddenly forget Newtonian, Einsteinian and Quantum Physics just because we run out of oil. The average redneck that can build Rube Goldberg contraptions out of scrap parts isn’t going to forget how to do basic mechanical and electrical jobs. Big factories will switch over to electricity and will have to find a new method for distributing their goods, but they will.
The end of oil is not the collapse of modern civilization, or at least if it is, it’s the collapse into something even more advanced. Solar power will be viable before we reach the threshold of civilizational collapse due to peak oil. Solar Power is just now on the cusp of primetime, they have been growing in efficiency at more than 100% per year in the past year or two, that industry is growing by leaps and bounds.
If we run out of oil we’ll drive electric cars, it’s as simple as that.
When reading the doomsday predictions, I often wonder what people think is holding society together now and why they think that mechanism will be ineffective in the future. The prophecies all pertain to the naked use of force to obtain some advantage in a near-future, seriously undersupplied world. Of course, if force will be effective then, it would be effective now and, obviously, it is. Criminal behavior could be seen as tiny fissures in the edifice of civilized society (although with the proviso that “crime” as a concept and as an activity seems to presuppose civilization itself). We do not think of crime or war or economic malaise or all the other misfortunes visited upon segments of our society as auguring the end of human civilization, so I’d have to say the institution of human societies seems very resilient.
I’d venture further that in times of disaster, the group impulse is probably a great deal stronger, rather than more attenuated.
Rhodesia never had the kind of modern society that exists in Europe, America and Japan though. There was a white elite that was educated and kicked out, and this contributed to a decline due to the nature of simply kicking out a significant portion of your educated elite.
In developed 1st world nations there is not the same concentration of technical skills in the hands of a small minority. That in and of itself makes all the difference.
In Rhodesia we aren’t even talking about advanced technical skill here, we are talking about pretty good farming techniques and such. There is simply no basis for comparison to say the United States, Germany or Japan.
Agreed, and your insight into criminality brings it home. We will see an uptick in criminality, but not the demise of civilization. The idea of a demise of civilization assumes that people in Berkeley are going to stop being physicists suddenly, and stop doing science simply because they can’t get oil cheaply.
We are today aware of a wider world, people have travelled the globe, and we have libraries full of information regarding how people did it before the advent of oil. The bottom line is even if they have to ride their bike to the university, the citizens of Berkeley California are still going to know advanced calculus while riding that bike.
An EMI burst or a failure of the nations electrical grid would bring civilization to its knees. After the immediate effect of everybody eating all their ice cream, the failure of services would be catastrophic.