The Long Descent (16 page)

The impending collapse of public health, like most aspects of our current predicament, has an abundance of causes. One is the failure of government at all levels to maintain even the very modest financial support public health received through most of the 20th century. Lacking an influential constituency in the political class, public health departments came out the losers in the tax and budget struggles that dominated American state and local politics in the aftermath of the 1970s. Worse, food safety regulations were among the consumer protections gutted by business-friendly politicians, with results that often make headlines these days.

A second factor in collapsing public health is the end of the antibiotic age.
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Starting in the early years of the 20th century, when penicillin revolutionized the treatment of bacterial infections, antibiotics transformed medical practice. Dozens of once-lethal diseases — diphtheria, tuberculosis, bubonic plague, and many others — became treatable conditions. A few prescient researchers cautioned that microbes could evolve resistance to the new “wonder drugs” if the latter were used too indiscriminately, but their warnings went unheard amid the cheerleading of a pharmaceutical industry concerned only with increasing sales and profits and a medical system that had become little more than the pharmaceutical industry's marketing arm. The result has been an explosion of antibiotic-resistant microbes. As current news stories report the rapid spread of lethal antibiotic-resistant organisms such as methicillin-resistant
Staphylococcus aureus
(MRSA) and extreme drug-resistant (XDR) tuberculosis, epidemiologists worry what the microbial biosphere will throw at humanity next.

A third and even more worrisome factor is the impact of ecological disruption on patterns of disease.
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As the number of people on an already overcrowded globe spirals upward and more and more of the Earth's wild lands come under pressure, microbes that have filled stable ecological niches since long before our species arrived on the scene end up coming into contact with new hosts and vectors. HIV, the virus that apparently causes AIDS, seems to have reached the human population that way; Ebola and a dozen other lethal hemorrhagic fevers certainly did, along with many others. At the same time, global warming driven by our smokestacks and tailpipes has changed distribution patterns of mosquitoes and other disease vectors, with the result that malaria, dengue fever, and other tropical diseases are starting to show up on the edges of today's temperate zones.

Loss of adequate government support, the end of the antibiotic age, and the ecological shifts bringing dangerous organisms into contact with human populations pose serious challenges to public health all by themselves. Add the impact of fossil fuel depletion and the results are unwelcome in the extreme. In a future of soaring energy costs and crumbling economies, public health is guaranteed less support from local government budgets than it has now, meaning that even the most basic public health services are likely to go by the boards. The same factors make it unlikely at best that pharmaceutical companies will be able to afford the expensive and resource-intensive process of developing new antibiotics that has thus far kept physicians one step ahead of most of the antibiotic-resistant microbes. Finally, ecological disruption will only increase as a world population dependent on petroleum-based agriculture scrambles to survive the end of cheap oil; many countries will likely switch to coal, putting global warming into overdrive in the next few decades.

The inevitable result is the return of the health conditions of the 18th and 19th centuries, when deadly epidemics were routine events, childhood mortality was common, and most people could expect to die from infectious diseases rather than the chronic conditions that fill the “cause of death” slot on most death certificates these days. If you factor in soaring rates of alcohol and drug abuse, violence, and malnutrition — all inevitable consequences of hard economic contraction — you have a situation where the number of people on the planet will take a sharp downward turn. Statistics from Russia, where a similar scenario played out in the aftermath of the Soviet Union's collapse, suggest that population levels could be halved within this century.
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This doesn't require massive epidemics or the like; all it takes is a death rate in excess of the birth rate — and that's something we will certainly have as the deindus-trial age begins.

Imperial Sunset

The cascade of consequences that will follow the peaking and decline of world petroleum production can't be understood outside the context of politics. One dimension of that context is likely to become the preeminent political fact of the age of peak oil: the impending decline — and, at least potentially, the catastrophic collapse — of America's world empire.

Empires are unfashionable these days, which is why those who support the American empire generally start by claiming that it doesn't exist, while those who oppose it seem to think that the simple fact of its existence makes it automatically worse than any alternative. Both these views deserve serious questioning. When the United States maintains military garrisons in more than a hundred nations, supporting a state of affairs that allows the five percent of humanity who are American citizens to monopolize a third of the world's natural resources and industrial production, it's difficult to discuss the international situation honestly without words like “empire” creeping in. It requires a breathtaking suspension of disbelief to redefine American foreign policy as the disinterested pursuit of worldwide democracy for its own sake.

Still, portraying today's American empire as the worst of all possible worlds (a popular sport on the left for the last fifty years or so) requires just as much of a leap of faith. If Nazi Germany, say, or the Soviet Union had come out on top in the scramble for global power that followed the implosion of the British Empire, the results would certainly have been a good deal worse: those who currently exercise their freedom to criticize the present empire would face gulags or gas chambers. The lack of any empire at all may be a desirable state of affairs, of course, but until our species evolves efficient ways to checkmate the ambitions of one nation to exploit another, that state of affairs is unlikely to obtain this side of –Neverland.

Ever since transport technology evolved enough to permit one nation to have a significant impact on another, there have been empires; since the rise of effective maritime transport in the 15th century, those empires have had global reach; and since 1945, when it finished off two of its rivals and successfully contained the third, the United States has maintained a global empire. That empire was as much the result of opportunism, accident, and necessity as of any deliberate plan, but it exists, and if it did not exist, some other nation would fill a similar role. So, like it or not, America rules the dominant world empire today — and that will likely become a source of tremendous misfortune for Americans in decades to come.

In part, the downside of empire is built into the nature of imperial systems themselves, because the pursuit of empire is as self-destructive an addiction as anything you'll find on the mean streets of today's inner cities. The systematic economic imbalances imposed on client states by empires, while hugely profitable for the empire's political class, wreck the economy of the imperial state by flooding its markets with cheap imported goods and loading its financial system with tribute. Those outside the political class become what Arnold Toynbee has called an internal proletariat: the people who are alienated from an imperial system that yields them few benefits and many burdens. Meanwhile, members of the external proletariat — the people of the client states whose labor supports the imperial economy but who gain little or nothing in return — eventually respond to their exploitation with a rising spiral of violence that moves from crime through terrorism to open warfare.
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To counter the twin threats of internal dissidence and external insurgency, the imperial state must divert ever larger fractions of its resources to its military and security forces. Economic decline, popular disaffection, and growing pressures on the borders hollow out the imperial state into a brittle shell of soldiers, spies, and bureaucrats surrounding a society in free-fall. When the shell finally cracks — as it always does, sooner or later — nothing is left inside to resist change, and the result is implosion.

It's possible to halt this process, but only by deliberately stepping back from empire before the unraveling has gone too far. Britain's response to its own imperial sunset is instructive; instead of clinging to its empire and being dragged down by it, Britain allied with the rising power of the United States, allowed its colonial holdings to slip away, and managed to keep its economic and political system more or less intact. Compare that to Spain, which had the largest empire on Earth in the 16th and 17th centuries. By the 19th century it was one of the poorest countries in Europe, two centuries behind the times economically, racked by civil wars and foreign invasions, and utterly incapable of influencing the European politics of the age. The main factor in this precipitous decline was the long-term impact of empire. It's no accident that Spain's national recovery only really began after its last overseas colonies were seized by the United States in the Spanish-American–war.

In this light, the last quarter century of American policy has been suicidally counterproductive in its attempt to maintain the glory days of empire. That empire rested on three foundations: the immense resource base of the American land, especially its once-huge oil reserves; the vast industrial capacity of what was once America's manufacturing hinterland and now, tellingly, is known as the Rust Belt; and a canny foreign policy, codified in the early 19th century under the Monroe Doctrine, that distanced itself from Old World disputes and focused on maintaining exclusive economic and military influence over Latin America. With these foundations solidly in place, America could intervene decisively in European affairs in 1917 and 1942 and launch an imperial expansion after 1945 that gave it effective dominance over most of the world.

By 1980, though, the economic impacts of empire had already gutted the American industrial economy — a process that has only accelerated since then — and the new and decisive factor of oil depletion added substantially to the pressures toward decline. A sane national policy in this context would have withdrawn from imperial commitments, shifted the burdens of empire onto a resurgent western Europe, and pursued military and economic alliances with rising powers such as China and Brazil. The economic and social turmoil set in motion by the energy crises of the 1970s could have been used as an opportunity to downshift to less affluent and energy-intensive lifestyles, reinvigorate the nation's industrial and agricultural economy, and renew the frayed social covenants that united the political class with other sectors of the population in a recognition of common goals.

The realities of American politics, however, kept such a plan out of reach. In a society where competing factions of the political class buy power by handing out economic largesse to sectors of the electorate (which, as mentioned before, is what “liberal democracy” amounts to in practice), the possibility of a retreat from empire was held hostage by a classic “prisoner's dilemma.” Any elite group willing to put its own short-term advantage ahead of national survival could take and hold power (as Reagan's Republicans did in 1980) by reaffirming the imperial project and restoring access to the payoffs of the tribute economy. For that reason, especially since 2000, the American political class — very much including its “liberal” as well as its “conservative” factions — has backed the survival of America's global empire using all available means.

This would be disastrous even without the factor of peak oil. No empire, even in its prime, can afford to pursue policies that estrange its allies, increase its overseas commitments, make its enemies forget their mutual quarrels and form alliances with one another, and destabilize the world political order, all at the same time. American foreign policy in recent years has accomplished every one of these things, at a time when America's effective ability to deal with the consequences is steadily declining as its resource base dwindles and the last of its industrial economy fizzles out. To call this a recipe for disaster is to understate the case considerably.

Peak oil, though, is the wild card in the deck, and at this point in the game it's a card that can only be played to America's detriment. To an extent few people realize, every aspect of American empire — from the trade networks that extract wealth from America's client states to the military arsenal that projects its power worldwide — depends on cheap, abundant petroleum. As the first nation to systematically exploit its petroleum reserves on a large scale, the United States floated to victory in two world wars on a sea of oil, learning the lesson that the way to win wars was to use more energy than the other side. That was possible in the first half of the 20th century, when America was the world's largest oil producer and exporter. It became problematic in the 1970s, when domestic oil production peaked and began to decline while consumption failed to decline in step, making America dependent on imports. The arrival of worldwide peak oil completes the process by making America's energy-intensive model of empire utterly unsustainable.

How this process will play out is anyone's guess at this point. What worries me most, though, is the possibility that it could have a very substantial military dimension. The US military's total dependence on energy-intensive high technology could easily become a double-edged sword if the resources needed to sustain the technology run short or become suddenly unavailable. At the same time, its investment — economic as well as intellectual — in a previously successful model of warfare could turn into a fatal distraction if new conditions make that model an anachronism.