Peak Everything (29 page)

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?

G
REETINGS 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,
dis
organizing? — 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 operating 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 21
^st
century, the global casino went bust. Gradually, a new metaphor became operational. We went from global casino to village flea market.

With less energy available each year, and with unstable currencies plaguing transactions, manufacturing and transportation shrank in scale. It didn't matter how little Nike paid its workers in Indonesia: once shipping became prohibitively expensive, profits from the globalization of its operations vanished. But Nike couldn't just start up factories back in the States again; all of those factories had been closed decades earlier. The same with all the other clothing manufacturers, electronics manufacturers, and so on. All of that local manufacturing infrastructure had been destroyed to make way for globalization, for cheaper goods, for bigger corporate profits. And now, to recreate that infrastructure would require a huge financial and energy investment — just when money and energy were in ever-shorter supply.

Stores were empty. People were out of work. How were they to survive? The only way was by endlessly recycling all the used stuff that had been manufactured before the energy crisis. At first, after the initial economic shock waves, people were selling their stuff on Internet auctions — while there was still electricity. When it became clear that lack of reliable transportation made delivery of the goods problematic, people started selling stuff on street corners so they could pay their rents and mortgages and buy food. But after the currency collapse, that didn't make sense either, so people began just trading stuff, refurbishing it, using it however they could in order to get by. The cruel irony was that most of their stuff consisted of cars and electronic gadgets that nobody could afford to operate anymore. Worthless! Anybody who had human-powered hand tools and knew how to use them was wealthy indeed — and still is.

Industrial civilization sure produced a hell of a lot of junk during its brief existence. Over the past 50 or 60 years, folks have dug up just about every landfill there ever was, looking for anything that could be useful. What a god-awful mess! With all due respect, I have always had a hard time understanding why — and even
how
— you people could take billions of tons of invaluable, ancient, basic resources and turn them into mountains of stinking garbage, with almost no measurable period of practical use in between! Couldn't you at least have made
durable, well-designed
stuff? I must say that
the quality of the tools, furniture, houses, and so on that we have inherited from you — and are forced to use, given that few of us are capable of replacing them — is pretty dismal.

Well, I apologize for those last remarks. I don't mean to be nasty or rude. Actually some of the hand tools left behind are quite good. But you have to understand: the industrial way of life to which you have become accustomed will have horrific consequences for your children and grandchildren.

I can vaguely remember seeing — when I was very young, maybe five or six — some old television shows from the 1950s:
Ozzie and Harriet...Father Knows Best...Lassie.
They portrayed an innocent world, one in which children grew up in small communities surrounded by friends and family. All problems were easily dealt with by adults who were mostly kind and wise. It all seemed so stable and benign.

When I was born, that world, if it had ever really existed, was long gone. By the time I was old enough to know much about what was happening on the bigger scene, society was beginning to come apart at the seams. It started with electricity blackouts — just a few hours at a time at first. At the same time the natural gas shortages clicked in. Not only were we cold most of the winter, but the blackouts got dramatically worse because so much electricity was being produced using natural gas. Meanwhile the oil and gasoline shortages were worsening. At this point — I guess I was a young teenager then — the economy was in tatters and there was political chaos.