The Long Descent (14 page)

Thus in the near future, at least, we're most likely facing a period of crisis, followed by a period of renewed stability, with another round of crises waiting in the wings. That's how the process of catabolic collapse unfolds, in a stair-step process alternating periods of crisis with breathing spaces at progressively lower levels of economic and political integration. If past examples are anything to go by, the approaching period of crisis will likely last around 25 years, with the breathing space following it around the same scale or a little longer. The great challenge of the present, then, is to deal with the immediate crisis in each of its manifestations.

The Energy Predicament

Of all the many aspects of the predicament of industrial society, the peak of world petroleum production will likely have the most drastic impact in the short and middle term. Now it's true, as
The Limits to Growth
pointed out, that unlimited growth on a limited planet bids fair to run into many shortages, not just one. On cue, plenty of other resources are also running short worldwide, from fertile topsoil and fresh water to dozens of minor but economically important minerals.
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In the latter days of industrial civilization, shortages are inevitable, but no other globally traded commodity is as central to the world's industrial economies as oil — and no other commodity faces so imminent and irreversible a decline.

Thus the end of the age of cheap oil promises a sea change in the world's economies and societies as significant as the beginning of the fossil fuel age some three hundred years ago. Its impact can easily be overstated, though, and indeed it has been overstated by quite a few writers on the survivalist end of the peak oil community. Many of these writers insist that the inevitable result of declining petroleum production will be the rapid collapse of civilization in an uncontrollable spiral of violence, anarchy, and mass death.

This is as mistaken as it is counterproductive. It's certainly possible to dream up worst case scenarios that result in sudden collapse, but these scenarios run headlong into an awkward historical fact: declines in petroleum use equal to the ones we face on the downslope of Hubbert's peak have occurred many times in recent history, without producing anything like the consequences the survivalist theory predicts. In America, World War II saw gasoline rationing and sharp reductions in the use of oil throughout the civilian economy; the energy crises of the 1970s set in motion a 15% decline in petroleum use worldwide that lasted for most of a decade. Unlike the future we face today, those periods of declining petroleum use proved to be temporary, but they show that American society can use less oil without collapsing.

Overseas, far more drastic reductions in petroleum supplies and energy use have often been made. The results included hard times and human suffering, but the collapse of civilization? Hardly. Two world wars, the greatest depression in modern history, and plenty of less global but no less severe crises have forced individuals and economies to make do with much less for extended periods. Except in a few exceptional and very short-term situations, social order has remained intact and economies have adapted to extreme conditions, shedding energy- and resource-intensive sectors and establishing new networks to get food and other necessities to those who need them. This, rather than the total social collapse of the survivalist fantasy, is what we face in the next few decades.

Here in North America, the end of cheap oil will be made more complex by another factor: a large fraction of electricity and home heating nowadays comes from natural gas, and North American natural gas reserves are depleting fast.
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Over the next decade or so, as the inevitable shortages hit, the rising prices and dwindling availability of natural gas will make both these uses unaffordable for most people. Some writers have claimed that this will lead to the total collapse of electric power grids nationwide, but this hardly follows. As the supply of electricity decreases, prices rise, and demand goes down as people cut their usage or are disconnected for failure to pay their bills. As shortages become more severe, grid operators and governments have plenty of options varying from mandatory conservation programs to rationing schemes to cutting entire sectors out of the grid so that power can be saved for other uses. None of these will allow current rates of energy use to be maintained, but all of them will cushion the descent into a dein-dustrial world.

Where electrical power is concerned, in fact, the 21st century may well look like a film of the 20th century run in reverse. As the 1930s were the decade of rural electrification in America, when electricity finally made its way to farm families nationwide, the 2030s may turn out to be the decade of rural de-electrification, when rural America goes off the grid for good. Well before 2100, electricity will be what it was in 1900, an urban amenity generated by hydroelectric, wind, and coal-fired plants — and used mostly by the wealthy. Not long after that most of the coal will be gone and other fossil fuels will be a fading memory, but wind and running water will remain, and cities will likely have their own sustainably powered electrical grids providing modest amounts of light and power to the homes and businesses of the well-to-do.

Transportation is a more complex matter. A transportation network of the sort we have today requires not only fuel and vehicles, but a sprawling and energy-intensive infrastructure of highways, bridges, gas stations, tanker truck fleets, storage depots, highway police, and more, all demanding constant investment — and all vulnerable to the impact of catabolic collapse. As costs soar and resources run short, expect to see that network come gradually unraveled. Rural areas far from major routes are already seeing infrastructure disintegrate as roads are no longer repaired and gas stations far from the freeways go out of business. As this process speeds up, resources will most likely be concentrated on a network of critical freeway corridors and urban regions. This network will then contract over a period of several decades until resource availability drops below a critical value and truck transport stops being economically viable.

The private car never did make much sense, except as a way to maximize employment in the manufacturing and construction sectors of the economy,
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and the complex of industries centered on the automobile can be counted on to go the way of the dodo in short order. Soaring gas prices will render most of American human geography worse than useless, as people no longer can afford to shuttle among retail cores, employment centers, and suburban bedroom communities that are many miles from one another.

The “doughnut geography” common to so many North American urban centers, with decaying urban cores surrounded by prosperous suburbs, has already begun to reverse in many areas as –middle-class families move to gentrifying urban neighborhoods, while their former suburban homes are relegated to the lower classes. Expect this trend to accelerate over the next few decades, as today's suburbs become slum districts like those surrounding Third World cities today, and the suburban tract housing spawned by the now-deflating–housing bubble turns into raw materials for the shantytowns of the permanently poor.

Trains, which require a much simpler infrastructure and use much less energy than trucks to move cargo, will potentially be viable much longer. Those countries that have maintained their rail networks will have a massive advantage as the automobile age comes to an end. In North America, by contrast, the railroad network has undergone many decades of malign neglect, and unless significant resources go into maintaining and upgrading it soon, it will likely disintegrate as resources run short. Even if the railroads get the emergency investment they need, it's an open question whether rail travel can keep going over the long term without fossil fuels. If the railroad network unravels in the same way as the highways, the social and political consequences will be immense. Lacking cheap transcontinental transport, for example, it's unlikely that the United States or Canada will maintain political unity for long.

The transportation network of last resort depends on water. North America's navigable waterways have suffered at least as much neglect as the railroads, but they can be maintained and rebuilt at a much lower level of technology; several crucial links — above all the Erie Canal and St. Lawrence Seaway, connecting the Great Lakes with the eastern seaboard — remain intact. If the railways fail, the economically viable region of North America will contract by more than half because the inland West will lose any effective way to import goods or export its own produce. Still, waterways weave together the Atlantic seaboard, the Great Lakes states and provinces, and the Mississippi valley. The harsher topography of the west coast offers far fewer options for water travel; the Columbia and Sacramento watersheds connect agricultural regions in the far west to coastal ports, but a regional waterway network is out of reach even with today's machinery, so regional and local devolution will be hard to prevent.

The end of cheap energy thus promises to remake the human geography of North America and reshape the lifestyles of almost everyone living on the continent. The transition to the new dein-dustrial society, though, will take place over decades, not overnight, as governments, businesses, and individuals scramble to deal with shrinking supplies of fossil fuel energy. So much time has been wasted, and so little has been done to prepare for the inevitable, that a great deal of human suffering and deprivation is inevitable at this point.

Avoiding the Y2K Fallacy

In all probability, the most sweeping dimension of the change we face is economic. For the last three hundred years, the key to prosperity has been the replacement of human skill with mechanical energy. The steam-powered factories of 18th century England heralded the arrival of a new economic order in which technological progress and fossil fuel extraction went hand in hand, and success went to those who pushed mechanical energy into new economic sectors — replacing sails with steam, farm horses with tractors, local theaters with movies and TV, folk culture with mass-produced pop culture, and so on.

Hubbert's peak marks the limit of this process. If the last three hundred years funneled wealth to those who exploited fossil fuels to the fullest, and allowed them to build centralized, technologically driven economic structures, then the next three hundred years will see exactly the opposite. Success will go to those who get ahead of depletion curves by reducing their reliance on fossil fuels further than others, and by relying instead on human skills and sustainable, low-intensity energy inputs.

These changes won't take place overnight, though, and the most likely future ahead of us is a long and uneven period of economic contraction and technological decline. There will be plenty of bumps and potholes in the course of the Long Descent, to be sure. Systems failures will likely play a significant role. The aftermath of Hurricane Katrina in 2005, which reduced large portions of coastal Louisiana and Mississippi to a deindustrial condition from which they show few signs of recovering as of this writing, offers an example of the sort of thing that can be expected in the future. Still, systems failures don't automatically spiral out into total collapse.

This point has been notably lacking in many discussions about the economic impact of peak oil. It's been argued, for example, that the financial shock imposed by rising energy costs will cause the entire global economy to come apart at the seams, leaving people unable to get food and other necessities, and turning them into the marauding hordes of survivalist fantasies. This is a classic example of what might as well be called the Y2K fallacy; revisiting the Y2K fiasco will cast some light on where current speculations about peak oil have run off the rails.
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In the late 1990s, as my readers will doubtless remember, computer experts began to warn that many older computer systems had no way to process year-numbers beginning with a 2 rather than a 1, so they could crash when the calendar rolled over from 1999 to 2000. Early surveys of the problem showed that a very large number of systems could be affected, especially in banking, telecommunications, and government. By the beginning of 1998 or so, it was clear that a major mess was in the making unless something was done.

This real and serious problem, though, quickly got blown out of proportion by believers in the myth of apocalypse. By early 1999, survivalist visions of social collapse and mass death via Y2K spilled out of this subculture and percolated through American society. I knew many people who confidently expected the end of civilization as we knew it on New Year's Eve of 1999; they waited all night in their basements for the blackouts, systems failures, and rampaging mobs that never came.

Some pundits have used these failed predictions to argue that the whole Y2K crisis wasn't real in the first place, but this misstates the whole lesson of the experience. The threat was real; believers in apocalypse simply missed the four most important words in the prediction — “unless something was done.” Faced with a credible threat, a hard deadline, and a clear course of action, people responded predictably by doing something about the situation. Sales of Y2K-compliant computers and software soared off the charts (powering a boomtime in high-tech industries that deflated dramatically once the crisis was over). Software jockeys made money hand over fist reprogramming old machines. Some of us used simpler fixes; I simply reset the calendar on my old and non-compliant computer to December 31, 1949, and went through the rollover to January 1, 1950 with no trouble at all.

The fallacy that bedeviled the Y2K survivalists was the belief that government, business, and citizens, faced with an imminent threat and presented with a clear, constructive response to it, would sit on their hands and do nothing until catastrophe overwhelmed them. This same odd belief can be found throughout current discussions about peak oil. As oil plateaus and then declines, energy prices will rise sharply; that's the threat. The obvious response, which succeeded brilliantly in the 1970s, is to reduce energy use through conservation and increased efficiency.