To define a continuum or path of transition from today to life in the post-carbon world it is necessary to start with a reasonably clear vision of that post carbon world. Largely this vision has to be local, or at least regional, centered on the area in which you live or will live at that time.
It is always awkward forecasting the future. There are so many variables. But it is easier, in my mind, to predict what life will be like in that post-carbon world than at any point during the transition. If you can start with a clear vision of the destination you are in a better position to define your own transition path.
What will the post-carbon world look like? Here are just fifteen examples of the changes you will see in society as we slide down the energy-decline slope.
* The focus of life will be very much local, not the global focus of today. Sustainability will mean local self-sufficiency and self-reliance, either individually or as a community.
* Consumerism will be dead, dead, dead. The keyword will have become need, not want. Gone with consumerism will be the vast advertising industry that fuels consumerism today.
* Society will clearly not be dominated by the automobile. Electric cars may hang on for a while, as might cars running on locally-produced bio-diesel. The ultimate demise of the automobile will be, however, not a lack of fuel to run them but the inability to maintain the automobile manufacturing industry, an industry today based on planned obsolescence. Yes, it would be possible to make durable, rugged cars that would last decades, perhaps a century or more. But that would entail a complete overhaul of the industry mindset.
* Globalization will have died well before we enter the post-carbon world. In fact it is very much in the process of unwinding now. The massive fuel demands of large-scale trans-oceanic transport and the tremendous raw material demands of the ship-building industry simply are not going to be feasible in a world of net declining resources.
* Communities will produce all, or almost all, of their own food. If they trade it will likely be with other nearby communities but this will likely be limited to crisis times such as after crop failures.
* Travel will not be what it is today. Airlines will be a thing of the past, unless they convert to blimps and hot air balloons. Before that the industry will likely survive for a while as a luxury for the monied elite. Trans-oceanic shipping will be extremely limited, unless it reverts to sail but even then would be limited. Possibly, and hopefully, the once expansive railway system and services will be rebuilt in time but that is going to require a government commitment which, at the moment, seems very unlikely. The concept of travelling for vacation will probably disappear over time. The current highway systems will initially fall into disrepair and ultimately be abandoned to be reclaimed by nature. Some of the routes they followed may still be used, on horseback and on foot, since many of the early highways followed routes that were already well in use before that. People in cold climates will not travel south to escape winter but will, in fact, be very travel restricted by that winter weather.
* The manufacturing industry, if it survives, will be seriously downsized and refocused on society's needs, not the competitive and advertising-stimulated wants of today.
* Manufacturing processes will likely be reverse engineered so that production can be dispersed to regional areas where they will serve a discrete regional market.
* Housing will change dramatically, downsizing from the ubiquitous McMansions of today to the small, energy-efficient, cozy cottages and bungalows that were prevalent in our parents' time.
* Classical, perpetual-growth economics will have died a painful death. It is, indeed, in the process of dying now, real growth having already died years ago with the appearance of growth being propped up by a myriad of smoke-and-mirrors financial instruments. The wheels fell off in 2008 with the $147 dollar price for oil. Economists, if money is to continue as the lifeblood of human society, will have to find ways for that society to survive within a no-growth economy.
* The face of retail will change dramatically. Malls will be dead. A tremendous shake-out of the retail sector will have major casualties. What retail survives will mostly move into residential areas, close to the customer, and be run out of the home, not separate rental or owned space.
* The village or neighbourhood open-air market will become the primary source of commerce. Much of the commercial business will be for repair, maintenance, refit, mend, fix as the throw-away society dies.
* Many people assume the very useful internet will survive the decline in oil. It won't. The internet is cheap-energy- and technology-intensive. Cheap energy is even now disappearing as costs go up and available resources decline. And to think the computer manufacturing industry will survive the end of cheap energy is wishful thinking in the extreme. So the internet will not survive the end of cheap energy. Your ability to have and use a computer in any form in a post-carbon world will depend on your personal ability to fix, maintain and program it yourself, and your ability to personally or communally produce the energy to run it.
* Large cities with their multi-million populations and their rings of suburbs will not survive the end of cheap energy in their present form. They cannot be made food self-sufficient and do not have the internal resources to become self-reliant. They are critically dependent on massive infrastructure that is now expensive to maintain and, in the future, impossible to maintain. Cities in pre-industrial times generally did not exceed a million population (and those were rare), were surrounded by rich farmland (now covered by suburbs), depended on a large slave population (currently replaced by energy slaves), and generally had good water access for moving trade and commodities by sail and barge (now replaced by energy-intensive rail, trucking, ship and air).
* Medicine will become far less ubiquitous and far less technology intensive. That technology requires a thriving manufacturing industry that exists only because of cheap energy. And both the manufacture and use of that equipment consumes a great deal of energy. Every advance in technology has, in my opinion, reduced the ability and willingness of doctors to make a patient diagnosis with medical skills alone. This has been largely necessitated by our litigation-prone society.
How will you chart your course to sustainability through that minefield? It won't be easy because it depends so much on timing. The first thing that you must do, if you are to be successful, is keep a close eye on the news. The signs will be there but you have to develop a very active and effective bullshit filter. You will have to be able to read between the lines. You have to use something other than the corporate dominated and controlled mainstream media to get at the truth behind what that mainstream media is telling you. Use sources like the internet, alternative newspapers, independent TV and radio.
If you wait for the mainstream media to present a clear and honest picture, like those who were surprised at the financial downturn, it will be too late. And, most importantly, you have to follow the news regularly, even keep notes, in order to spot the trends that are developing. The mainstream media are not going to suddenly one day run a headline that says we've run out of cheap oil - all that's left is shale and tar sands. What they will do instead is probably barrage you with stories about the marvellous new technologies that allow us to extract oil from shale and how that technology will extend the oil age by hundreds of years.
Fair warning will be available but you will have to search for it, dig for it, find sources that you trust and rely on them. Seeing, recognizing and accepting those warnings should, in most cases, give you enough chance to avoid the worst. It is, in my opinion, a terrible waste of your energy trying to convince others what is coming. Those who rely exclusively on the mainstream media will laugh at you and call you a doomer until the shit hits the fan. Then they will simply avoid you.
Good luck and enjoy the trip!
Showing posts with label transition towns. Show all posts
Showing posts with label transition towns. Show all posts
Thursday, August 20, 2009
Tuesday, August 18, 2009
Finding the Continuum From Here to Sustainability
Social evolution is, in itself, a continuum. But just as species evolution is. according to many prominent biologists, marked by punctuated equilibrium (sudden mutational blips in the midst of long periods of evolutionary stasis), so too has been the development or evolution of human society. The smooth, steady continuum is a myth, just as the smooth bell-curve that depicts peak oil is a myth. The path of any evolutionary process is as uneven as an untended cobblestone road.
In the case of both species evolution and human social evolution, the punctuated equilibrium has been generally a function of available energy. When a species overshoots the energy carrying capacity of its environment (which for most means exceeding the food supply) sudden bursts in evolutionary change happen as certain existing mutations in the gene pool are suddenly favoured by the changes in environment. Mutations are common but it takes certain conditions for them to become favoured.
In the case of other species that energy is derived from food alone. Only in the case of man does external energy, in the form primarily of fossil fuels, enter the picture. Our use of external energy has for millenia interrupted the cyclical nature of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium, smoothing out the large peaks and valleys of natural evolution because we have in that time had access to and used more energy than what we are limited to in the natural food supply.
There has been little change in our man-made environment, little opportunity for mutations to achieve dominance in human species. But as our hospitals and medical journals will reveal, mutations happen all the time. That creates the potential for an uncomfortable relationship; the longer the period of stasis the more abrupt and dramatic the period of punctuated equilibrium will be when it comes.
Human society (as opposed to the human species) has, however, gone through a process of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium each time there has been a major change in our energy supply, as with the discovery of a new energy source (See my articles in this blog; Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth and Alternative Energy, Add-ons and Replacements ). This was the case with the taming of wind power, the discovery of peat, coal, oil, electricity, natural gas, the taming of water to produce hydro-electricity, uranium to produce nuclear power and even the advent of agriculture.
As with any other species taking a new food item into its diet, each of those energy sources has been exploited as an add-on to our ever-increasing energy mix. With each new energy source discovered, the proportion of total energy use satisfied by the old sources decreases (though the absolute usage may stay as high as it was) in favour of the new, usually more efficient energy source. An energy source is rarely abandoned by choice once it has been incorporated into the energy mix.
Only depletion that forces the abandonment of an energy source seems to be able to accomplish that. This could be seen, for example, in Cuba with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the virtual, and sudden, elimination of oil as an energy source for that country. They were suddenly forced into finding a way to live without what had been their dominant energy source. (It is interesting to note now that oil has been discovered in Cuba's territorial waters the U.S. and the oil majors want to challenge Cuba's claim to those waters so they can have access to the oil.) Similarly, wood as a source of heat energy was virtually abandoned in Britain, due to massive deforestation, as coal became the dominant heating fuel in its place.
Life on the way up the energy slope, as each new source of energy is exploited, is as herky-jerky and traumatic as the punctuated equilibrium of species evolution. A look at the the past three centuries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is the history of dramatic and sudden changes affecting the whole of society. The Industrial Revolution itself dramatically changed the landscape of Europe and North America in just a couple of decades as coal became a primary industrial fuel as well as the preferred home-heating fuel.
As would be expected, the way down the energy slope will also he very uneven. Never in human history, however, have we had a period when the net total energy available was in decline. But that will be the case with peak oil because natural gas, coal, uranium, hydro-electric production all appear as though they will be peaking at roughly the same time. Is there another magic energy source waiting in the wings? It is possible - through various alternatives like wind, solar, methane, tidal and other alternatives - to replace the energy derived from one of those sources (except oil). But there is no other energy source that is seen as even fractionally possible to replace our total energy mix, or replacing oil alone.
If, however, you can accept that species evolution has been a continuum, and that human social evolution to this point has been a continuum, then it should be possible for you to see the changes that will happen as a result of peak oil as a continuum. That can help take the fear out of the peak oil issue. The most frightening aspect about peak oil for most people is the dramatic and abrupt changes it will make in the way we live our lives.
But change is change, whether it is perceived as good or bad. Change is what you make of it. If you approach it with fear and negativism it will be difficult and traumatic, even debilitating. If you approach it with excitement and a sense of adventure, however, it can be a life-confirming experience. Peak oil, after all, will happen whether you like it or not. The changes that it will bring will happen whether you like them or not. You may as well make the best of it.
A continuum through peak oil to a post-carbon future will be a process of transition, adapting to and adopting changes into your lifestyle that move you inexorably toward the lifestyle you will have to be living in that post-carbon world. There is a growing grass-roots transition-town movement that started in Britain but has expanded to other parts of the world, including North America. These are communities that are planning how their community will transition into a post-carbon world. Some of these are medium-sized cities, many small towns. Admittedly, many of those efforts are faltering because they fail to get the wider community involved. But the fact that the movement keeps expanding means, hopefully, that a critical mass is building.
The continuum that so many are looking for in order to find comfort in accepting the peak oil theory and/or joining the peak oil movement has to be found in understanding what the post-carbon world will look like. Knowing that it is possible to reasonably understand the evolutionary changes society will go through between now and then. One absolute, however, is that the continuum, the transition, can not be found in or based on business as usual, by clinging to the present. That is a dead-end path.
In the case of both species evolution and human social evolution, the punctuated equilibrium has been generally a function of available energy. When a species overshoots the energy carrying capacity of its environment (which for most means exceeding the food supply) sudden bursts in evolutionary change happen as certain existing mutations in the gene pool are suddenly favoured by the changes in environment. Mutations are common but it takes certain conditions for them to become favoured.
In the case of other species that energy is derived from food alone. Only in the case of man does external energy, in the form primarily of fossil fuels, enter the picture. Our use of external energy has for millenia interrupted the cyclical nature of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium, smoothing out the large peaks and valleys of natural evolution because we have in that time had access to and used more energy than what we are limited to in the natural food supply.
There has been little change in our man-made environment, little opportunity for mutations to achieve dominance in human species. But as our hospitals and medical journals will reveal, mutations happen all the time. That creates the potential for an uncomfortable relationship; the longer the period of stasis the more abrupt and dramatic the period of punctuated equilibrium will be when it comes.
Human society (as opposed to the human species) has, however, gone through a process of evolutionary punctuated equilibrium each time there has been a major change in our energy supply, as with the discovery of a new energy source (See my articles in this blog; Energy as the Catalyst in the Punctuated Equilibrium of Human Population Growth and Alternative Energy, Add-ons and Replacements ). This was the case with the taming of wind power, the discovery of peat, coal, oil, electricity, natural gas, the taming of water to produce hydro-electricity, uranium to produce nuclear power and even the advent of agriculture.
As with any other species taking a new food item into its diet, each of those energy sources has been exploited as an add-on to our ever-increasing energy mix. With each new energy source discovered, the proportion of total energy use satisfied by the old sources decreases (though the absolute usage may stay as high as it was) in favour of the new, usually more efficient energy source. An energy source is rarely abandoned by choice once it has been incorporated into the energy mix.
Only depletion that forces the abandonment of an energy source seems to be able to accomplish that. This could be seen, for example, in Cuba with the withdrawal of the Soviet Union and the virtual, and sudden, elimination of oil as an energy source for that country. They were suddenly forced into finding a way to live without what had been their dominant energy source. (It is interesting to note now that oil has been discovered in Cuba's territorial waters the U.S. and the oil majors want to challenge Cuba's claim to those waters so they can have access to the oil.) Similarly, wood as a source of heat energy was virtually abandoned in Britain, due to massive deforestation, as coal became the dominant heating fuel in its place.
Life on the way up the energy slope, as each new source of energy is exploited, is as herky-jerky and traumatic as the punctuated equilibrium of species evolution. A look at the the past three centuries since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is the history of dramatic and sudden changes affecting the whole of society. The Industrial Revolution itself dramatically changed the landscape of Europe and North America in just a couple of decades as coal became a primary industrial fuel as well as the preferred home-heating fuel.
As would be expected, the way down the energy slope will also he very uneven. Never in human history, however, have we had a period when the net total energy available was in decline. But that will be the case with peak oil because natural gas, coal, uranium, hydro-electric production all appear as though they will be peaking at roughly the same time. Is there another magic energy source waiting in the wings? It is possible - through various alternatives like wind, solar, methane, tidal and other alternatives - to replace the energy derived from one of those sources (except oil). But there is no other energy source that is seen as even fractionally possible to replace our total energy mix, or replacing oil alone.
If, however, you can accept that species evolution has been a continuum, and that human social evolution to this point has been a continuum, then it should be possible for you to see the changes that will happen as a result of peak oil as a continuum. That can help take the fear out of the peak oil issue. The most frightening aspect about peak oil for most people is the dramatic and abrupt changes it will make in the way we live our lives.
But change is change, whether it is perceived as good or bad. Change is what you make of it. If you approach it with fear and negativism it will be difficult and traumatic, even debilitating. If you approach it with excitement and a sense of adventure, however, it can be a life-confirming experience. Peak oil, after all, will happen whether you like it or not. The changes that it will bring will happen whether you like them or not. You may as well make the best of it.
A continuum through peak oil to a post-carbon future will be a process of transition, adapting to and adopting changes into your lifestyle that move you inexorably toward the lifestyle you will have to be living in that post-carbon world. There is a growing grass-roots transition-town movement that started in Britain but has expanded to other parts of the world, including North America. These are communities that are planning how their community will transition into a post-carbon world. Some of these are medium-sized cities, many small towns. Admittedly, many of those efforts are faltering because they fail to get the wider community involved. But the fact that the movement keeps expanding means, hopefully, that a critical mass is building.
The continuum that so many are looking for in order to find comfort in accepting the peak oil theory and/or joining the peak oil movement has to be found in understanding what the post-carbon world will look like. Knowing that it is possible to reasonably understand the evolutionary changes society will go through between now and then. One absolute, however, is that the continuum, the transition, can not be found in or based on business as usual, by clinging to the present. That is a dead-end path.
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