The Long Descent (21 page)

Even in the realm of energy, this option offers more possibilities than a casual glance might suggest. One of the many ironies of our present situation is that today's energy-squandering lifestyles actually bid fair to give us more room for maneuver as energy supplies decline. In North America, in particular, we waste so much energy on nonessentials that a large fraction of our energy use can be conserved without severely impacting our lives. Consider the suburbanite who mows his lawn with a gasoline-powered mower and then hops in a car to drive down to the gym to get the exercise he didn't get mowing his lawn! From Christmas lights and video games to three-hour commutes and Caribbean vacations, most of the absurd extravagance that characterizes energy use in the world's industrial countries only happens because fossil fuel energy has been so cheap for so long.

It's been pointed out many times that the average North American uses about three times as much energy each year as the average European.
¹⁵
It's much more rarely noted that the standard of living that Americans buy with this extravagance isn't significantly better than the one Europeans enjoy at a third of the energy cost. This means that North Americans could cut their energy use by two-thirds without seriously affecting their standard of living. Most European countries have infrastructure and urban design that support relatively low-energy lifestyles, while most of North America lacks these, so what is theoretically possible may be difficult for most people to achieve. Major cuts, though, are well within reach.

Mature technologies and proven lifestyle changes already exist that can save half or more of the energy the average North American family uses in the course of a year. Nearly all of them were already on the shelf by the late 1970s, and books from that period on appropriate technology and energy conservation — most of which can be bought on the used book market for a few dollars each — provide detailed instructions.
¹⁶
At this point it's simply a matter of putting them to work. Because most of them require modest investment, and prices for many of the materials involved are likely to soar once energy prices shoot up and conservation becomes a matter of economic survival for all but the very rich, getting them in place as soon as possible is essential.

Let's start with transportation, the largest single energy use for most people in North America. Commuting by private car swallows a majority of most people's gasoline budget and a very large fraction of their total energy use. Few aspects of today's lifestyle are as dysfunctional in a deindustrial world as our habit of driving long distances between home, work, stores, and shops. After fifty years of car-centered land-use planning, getting out of the commuting lifestyle will take careful planning and a willingness to do without certain amenities, but it can certainly be done.

If your present job uses local materials and labor to produce goods or services people need — and thus will still be viable in a deindustrializing world — you need to live within walking or, at most, bicycling distance of your workplace. Otherwise you won't have a job once shortages hit and commuting becomes impossible. (You won't be able to rely on public transit, because millions of other people will be trying to use it at the same time you are.) If your present job is like most employment in a modern industrial society, producing nothing people actually need, you need to switch to a career producing necessary goods and services, so you need to live within walking distance of your future workplace and the people who will patronize you. In either case, you need to be within walking distance of other people who can provide you with goods and services you need.

The best way to manage this is to live in an old-fashioned mixed-use neighborhood that includes homes, small businesses, and public facilities such as schools and libraries, all of which are within easy reach of one another. The neighborhood can be in a rural area, a town, or a small or middle-sized city. It can even be in the sort of old-fashioned suburb that surrounds a small business district or retail core. Moving to such a neighborhood can involve giving up amenities that many people want, but to be frank, you'll just have to live with that. A lifeboat is more cramped and less comfortable than an ocean liner, but if the liner's sinking, the lifeboat is still a better option.

Don't let the first wave of crises find you living in a bedroom suburb miles from the nearest shopping or employment. Nor will you want to be in the sort of lone house or cabin in the backwoods that most of today's survivalists fancy, not unless you plan on meeting your own needs for food, fuel, clothing, health care, police protection, and everything else. All these things will still be available during the crisis years. Although supplies will be sporadic and shortages common, the experience of European nations during the wars and depressions of the 20th century shows that local economies will readily emerge as the global economy comes apart. Barter and foreign currencies will come into use if the national currency becomes worthless. In the decaying suburbs and the rural periphery, though, goods and services will be out of reach, and, unless you've thoroughly practiced self-sufficiency and are willing to embrace a primitive lifestyle, trying to get by in isolation is a one-way ticket to starvation, exposure, and death.

Once you can get to essential goods and services on your own feet, other aspects of transportation are easily handled; local economies will generate their own transport networks as supply and demand come back into balance. The great challenge will be getting through the first wave of crises, as the commuter economy grinds to a halt and the transitional economy that will replace it struggles to get going. Preparation is essential. For example, the sooner you start commuting on foot, as well as walking to the grocery store and bringing home your purchases in cloth bags or a backpack, the less difficulty you'll have when these are the only options left.

So much for transportation. Household uses account for most of the remaining energy that people in today's industrial societies actually need, and here the conservation techniques developed in the early 20th century and perfected in the 1970s can be put to use. Few of today's houses have adequate insulation, and little tricks like putting gaskets behind light switch plates and electrical outlets have been all but forgotten since the beginning of the Reagan years. Fixing these things — adding insulation, weatherstripping, storm windows, and the like — can save a great deal of energy with very modest investment. More ambitious steps such as solar hot water heating, passive solar retrofits, earth berms, and the like can also be put to good use. Sweaters, quilts, and other ways of conserving body heat also have their place. While you're at it, learn to be comfortable with changes in temperature; your great-grandparents–got along just fine without air conditioning and central heating, and so will you.

Having a backup source of heat for your home is essential in a future where blackouts and fuel shortages will be a common occurrence. In many cases, a wood stove or fireplace insert will be your best option, because the fuel can be produced locally. Cop-picing
¹⁷
and other methods of producing firewood that don't impact surviving forests will be essential, and — if the pun may be forgiven — will likely become one of the 21st century's growth industries. Using wood as a heating fuel will increase the death rate from asthma, but not doing so will increase the death rate from hypothermia and infectious disease; in the future ahead of us, such bleak tradeoffs will be commonplace.

Other household issues can be dealt with similarly. You'll need to have at least one backup method for cooking food, and you should be prepared to wash your clothes in the bathtub and take care of other necessities when the power goes out or the price of electricity soars out of reach. Assess every appliance and amenity you have, and make sure that you can either do the equivalent by hand, using tools you own and know how to use and maintain, or do without it altogether. The time to do that assessment, of course, is now, while the tools you'll need are readily available.

It's important to recognize that the benefits of doing these things aren't limited to the people who do them. The logic here is the same that makes airlines tell you to put on your own oxygen mask before trying to help anyone else get theirs on; you're not going to be able to help anyone else survive the crises of the approaching deindustrial age unless you've taken care of your own basic needs first. If you've already learned the skills and made the adjustments that the end of abundant energy requires, you can show other people how to make the same changes. The experience of the 1970s shows that, in the presence of the sort of hard economic incentives rising energy prices bring, many more people will embrace necessary lifestyle changes than not.

The same principle works on a wider scale as well. Critics of conservation programs often point to the Jevons Paradox as an argument against trying to save energy. First described by the 19th century economist William Stanley Jevons, this rule of thumb holds that when new technology allows a resource to be used more efficiently, the amount of the resource being used goes up, not down, because the increased efficiency makes it cheaper compared to alternatives.
¹⁸
This is only true, however, when the only limit on using the resource is how much it costs. When the resource itself runs short due to physical limits, increases in efficiency blunt the impact of the shortage by making up some of the shortfall; increased levels of efficiency will thus prevent prices from rising as far and as fast as they would otherwise.

In the opening years of the deindustrial age, putting the Jevons Paradox to work will be crucial. The longer the world's remaining fossil fuel reserves can be stretched out and used to cushion the decline of industrial civilization, the less traumatic and chaotic the transition will be. Every gallon of gas and kilowatt of electricity that doesn't have to be spent on household uses will be available for trains that bring grain from farms to cities, factories that build wind turbines and solar panels, and a hundred other desperate necessities. The same factors that made gasoline rationing and victory gardens essential during the Second World War will play at least as vital a role in the forced transition to sustainability ahead of us.

The Sound of Aunt Edna's Knitting

The economic landscape on the far side of Hubbert's peak can be traversed with the same sort of practical steps just outlined. Changes on the larger scale — the scale of whole economies or societies — will be much harder to accomplish, because the noise of volatility can too easily hide the signal of decline. Just as occasional plunges in the price of oil and natural gas encourage people to embrace the comforting delusion that they no longer have to worry about long-term energy availability, the upside of the post-peak economy — the fortunes that will made, the speculative gambles that will pay off, the boomtimes that will come when demand destruction crashes energy prices and all seems right with the world — will make it easy for people to convince themselves that industrial society is still on track.

It's easy to understand this sort of thinking since the alternative is to accept the unacceptable: to admit that the industrial age is ending, and the luxuries, conveniences, and standard of living that define ordinary lifestyles in the modern world are going away — not just for a little while, but forever. That the unacceptable is also inevitable makes it no easier to cope with. Still, accepting the unacceptable is the crucial step in dealing with the economic impact of peak oil. Every assumption about the future has to be reassessed in the light of a contracting economy in which money and other forms of abstract wealth no longer guarantee access to goods and services.

Not that long ago, after all, money played only a minor role in the overall economic picture. Until the 18th century, more than half of all goods and services in the Western world were produced within household and community economies and exchanged in customary networks governed by obligation and reciprocity, not supply and demand. Most households produced the great majority of their own food, clothing, and other necessities, using surpluses to barter for specialty goods with local producers. Cash served as a means of exchange for things produced so far away that transport costs and spoilage made barter unworkable. It took cheap, abundant fossil fuel energy to make transportation so cheap that centralized production and distribution of commodities could take the place of local production for local use.

In the aftermath of peak oil, such local economies will be the wave of the future, and the money economy of the present and recent past will be a self-defeating anachronism. Since fossil fuel depletion is a gradual process, though, the changeover won't happen overnight. This is a good thing, since the vast majority of people in the industrial world today are completely without the skills and tools they will need to function in a local economy. Most jobs — from executives and consultants through salespeople, office staff, and all the other cubicle-shaped pigeonholes in the corporate caste system — serve functions internal to the industrial economy instead of producing goods and services people want or need.

The jobs that matter in a deindustrial economy, by contrast, are the ones that meet human needs directly. Farming is the classic example. If you grow food crops with your own labor, you don't actually need the money economy, except to deal with property taxes and the like. Your labor provides you with value directly because some of your crops end up on your own kitchen table; the rest can be exchanged with other local sources of goods and services you need — the seamstress next door, the blacksmith down the road, the general store in town. Money is a convenient way of facilitating these exchanges, but it's not necessary — you can as well use barter, or local scrip, or any other means of exchanging value that comes to hand. Because what you produce has value to other people, you can trade for the things other people produce, whether or not the money economy is there to mediate the trade.