SENTIENT TIMES June/July 2005

The Path of Self-Limitation, Cooperation, and Sharing

By Richard Heinberg

Oil has been the cheapest and most convenient energy resource ever discovered by humans. During the past two centuries, people in industrial nations accustomed themselves to a regime in which more fossil-fuel energy was available each year, and the global population grew quickly to take advantage of this energy windfall. Industrial nations also came to rely on an economic system built on the assumption that growth is normal and necessary, and that it can go on forever.

When global oil production peaks, as it will in the next few years, that assumption will come crashing down.

How can we be sure that oil will become less abundant? Consider these simple facts. The oil industry started in America, and the US is the most-explored region on the planet. Thus, America’s experience with oil will eventually be repeated elsewhere. Oil discovery in the US peaked in the 1930s; oil production peaked roughly forty years later. Since 1970, the US has had to import more oil nearly every year in order to make up for its shortfall from domestic production,

The same is happening elsewhere. Global discovery of oil peaked in the 1960s. One after another, oil-exporting nations are reaching their all-time production peaks and falling into decline, becoming oil-importing nations. Britain is a classic example: it is slated to become a net importer once again this year. Between 18 and 24 of the world’s 45 most important oil-producing nations are, like the US and Britain, past-peak.

According to a growing chorus of oil experts, the global peak will arrive between now and 2010.

Clearly, we need immediately to find substitutes for oil. But an analysis of the current energy alternatives is not reassuring. Solar and wind are renewable, but most nations now get only a tiny portion of their energy budgets from them; rapid growth will be necessary if these alternatives are to replace a significant fraction of the energy shortfall from post-peak oil. Nuclear power is dogged by the problem of radioactive waste disposal. Hydrogen is not an energy source, but an energy carrier: it takes more energy to produce a given quantity of hydrogen than the hydrogen itself will yield. Moreover, nearly all commercially produced hydrogen now comes from natural gas—whose production will peak only a few years after oil begins its decline. Unconventional petroleum resources—heavy oil, tar sands, and shale oil—are plentiful but costly to extract, and the rate of extraction cannot be increased arbitrarily.

The hard math of energy resource analysis yields an uncomfortable but unavoidable prospect: even if efforts are intensified now to switch to alternative energy sources, after the oil peak industrial nations will have less energy available to do useful work—including the manufacturing and transporting of goods, the growing of food, and the heating of homes.

If there is any solution to industrial societies’ approaching energy crises, renewables plus conservation will provide it. Yet in order to achieve a smooth transition decades will be needed, and we do not have decades before the peak comes. Moreover, even in the best case, the transition will require the massive shifting of investment from other sectors of the economy toward energy research and conservation. And the available alternatives will likely be unable to support the kinds of transportation, food, and dwelling infrastructure we now have; thus the transition will entail a complete redesign of industrial societies.

The likely economic consequences of the energy downturn are enormous. All human activities require energy—which physicists define as “the capacity to do work.” With less energy available, less work can be done—unless the efficiency of the process of converting energy to work is raised at the same rate as energy availability declines. It will therefore be essential for all economic processes to be made more energy-efficient. However, efforts to improve efficiency are subject to diminishing returns, and so a point will be reached where reduced energy availability will translate to reduced economic activity. This is problematic given the fact that most economies are currently based on the need for perpetual growth.

The consequences for global food production will be no less profound. Throughout the twentieth century, food production expanded in country after country, mostly due to increased energy inputs. Without fuel-fed tractors and petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, it is questionable whether crop yields can be maintained at current levels.

The oil peak will also impact international relations. Many wars of the twentieth century were fought over resources—often, oil. But those wars took place during a period of expanding resource availability; the coming decades of heightened competition for fading energy resources will likely see more frequent and deadly conflicts.

If humankind is to avoid ruthless competition, cooperative efforts toward conservation will be needed. The ways cooperation and conservation could be achieved are limitless in detail, but the broad-scale options are few and easily surveyed. Industrialized societies will have to forego further conventional economic growth in favor of a costly transition to alternative energy sources. All nations will have to limit per-capita resource usage. To avoid wasteful competitive struggle, powerful countries will have to reduce disparities of wealth both among their own people, and also between themselves and poorer nations. Not only will oil, coal, and natural gas need to be conserved, but also fresh water, topsoil, and other basic and limited resources. Moreover, as energy available for industrial transportation declines, economies will have to be unlinked from the global market and re-localized. Everyone—especially those in rich, industrial nations—will have to undertake a change in lifestyle in the direction of more modest material goals more slowly achieved. And inevitably, with the conservation of resources will come the necessity to stabilize and reduce human populations.

It’s not as though these were entirely new ideas. In the early 1970s the Club of Rome commissioned, from a MIT-based international team of researchers led by Donella Meadows, a study on the future of industrial society. Published as The Limits to Growth in 1972 (hereafter referred to as LTG), the book provoked a debate that is still ongoing. The study concluded that if (then) present growth trends continued, fundamental resource limits would be reached in the middle of the twenty-first century, leading to a dramatic, uncontrollable collapse of population, food production, and other significant measures of social viability.

Several economists resorted to misrepresentation and misquoting in order to debunk LTG’s conclusions. However, in fact, rather than having been refuted or debunked, the LTG study has well withstood the test of time and is widely regarded as an early landmark in the literature on sustainability.

While the main message of the book was worrisome, LTG’s second important conclusion was that it might be possible to establish a state of global equilibrium in which society would be “sustainable without sudden and uncontrollable collapse” and “capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people.” What would be required to achieve this?

1. Stabilize the human population (which, in 1970, stood at about 3.6 billion).

2. Increase efficiency, so that “resource consumption per unit of industrial output is reduced to one-fourth of its 1970 value.”

3. Shift economies from production of goods to provision of services.

4. Reduce pollution “per unit of industrial and agricultural output” to one-fourth its 1970 value.

5. Divert capital to food production so that the entire population is fed.

6. Shift agriculture to a sustainable model (e.g., using compost as opposed to chemical fertilizers) to avoid soil depletion.

7. Improve the design of industrial goods to maximize durability and repairability.

I mention the LTG study because both its analysis and its recommendations clearly framed the terms of the discussion that we must now take up in earnest. Two follow-up volumes have appeared in the interim, using updated statistics (Beyond the Limits, in 1992, and The Limits to Growth: The 30 Year Update in 2004). In their latest contribution the authors note that they “are much more pessimistic about the global future than we were in 1972. It is a sad fact that humanity has largely squandered the last 30 years in futile debates and well-intentioned, but half-hearted, responses to the global ecological challenge.”

One brief trend in the sustainability literature was the suggestion that individual, small-scale initiatives would be sufficient to turn the tide. Perhaps the most familiar example of this trend was the best-selling 50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth by the Earthworks Group (GK Hall, 1989), which offered suggestions for recycling, reusing, bicycling, and insulating homes. However, the book soon provoked a response, in the forms of 50 Difficult Things You Can Do to Save the Earth (by Gar Smith, Earth Island Journal Press, 1995), and Simple Things Won’t Save the Earth, by J. Robert Hunter (University of Texas Press, 1997). The point made by these critics was that the unsustainability of industrial society is due not just to individuals’ decisions about product choice and personal behavior, but to fundamental socioeconomic structures, institutions, and processes.

The challenging reality is that making human society sustainable will require a large-scale reform of governments and economic systems, and the use of mechanisms of authority to apply penalties and offer incentives.

The mania for growth is not merely a personal pathology, or even a problem of economic ideology; it is structurally embedded in most national monetary systems. Currently most money is loaned into existence by banks and is thus based on debt, and implies a commitment to pay interest on that debt. If the economy does not grow, new money will not be created to pay interest on existing loans; those loans will thus be defaulted upon, and a crash will occur. It is essentially impossible to achieve a static or controllably contracting economy with a debt-based currency.

Therefore, if we are to achieve a reduced-scale, steady-state society, we will need to change our monetary system to one that is not based on debt and interest.

Meanwhile, it will be necessary for national governments and large economic institutions to implement systemic strategies for transforming their agricultural and transportation infrastructure. Cities will need to sprout thousands of urban vegetable gardens, and a significant percentage of the population will have to relocate to the countryside to help with agricultural production.

In order to alter the consumptive patterns of millions of citizens, public education will be required. An effective public education system already exists in the form of the advertising and entertainment industries, but that system is currently spreading a message exactly the opposite of what is required. We are being told daily to buy, consume, and waste. The needed message is that we must reduce consumption, reuse, and repair. The advertising industry will not willingly change its message; nor will the corporations that purchase advertising gladly reduce the scale of manufacture and distribution of their products, or happily redesign products to increase their durability and reparability. These sorts of changes to the economic system can be realized only through forcible government intervention.

True, there is much that individuals and communities can do to prepare for the energy crunch. Anything that promotes individual self-reliance (gardening, energy conservation, and voluntary simplicity) will help. But the strategy of individualist survivalism will offer only temporary refuge during the energy down-slope. True security will come only with community solidarity and interdependence. Living in a com-munity that is weathering the downslope well will enhance personal chances of surviving and prospering far more than will efforts at stockpiling tools or growing food.

The suggestions above describe a fundamental change of direction for industrial societies—from the larger, faster, and more centralized, to the smaller, slower, and more locally-based; from competition to cooperation; and from boundless growth to self-limitation.

If such recommendations were taken seriously, they could lead to a world a century from now with fewer people using less energy per capita, all of it from renewable sources, while enjoying a quality of life enviable by the industrial urbanite of today. Human inventiveness could be put to the task of expanding artistic satisfaction, finding just and convivial social arrange-ments, and deepening the spiritual exper-ience of being human. Living in smaller communities, people would enjoy having more control over their lives. Traveling less, they would have more of a sense of rootedness, and more of a feeling of being at home in the natural world. Renewable energy sources would provide some conveniences, but not nearly on the scale of fossil-fueled industrialism.

This will not, however, be an automatic outcome of the energy decline. Such a happy result can only come about through considerable effort, beginning immediately.

Richard Heinberg is a journalist, educator, editor, lecturer, and musician. His essays have appeared in many publications and his monthly, MuseLetter, was nominated in 1994 by Utne Reader for an Alternative Press Award. He is also an award-winning author of six books, including The Party’s Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, and his most recent Power Down. A member of the Core Faculty of New College of California, Richard has been writing about energy resource issues and the dynamics of cultural change for many years.

For more of his writing visit museletter.com.

Powerdown: Options and Actions
for a Post-carbon World
By Richard Heinberg
New Society Publishers, 2004

In addition to an overview of oil and natural gas depletion and their likely impacts, Powerdown explores four principal options available to industrial societies during the next few decades:

• Last One Standing—The path of competition for remaining resources. If the leadership of the US continues with current policies, the next decades will be filled with war, economic crises, and environmental catastrophe. Resource depletion and population pressure are about to catch up with us, and no one is prepared. The political elites, especially in the US, are incapable of dealing with the situation. Their preferred “solution” is simply to commandeer other nations’ resources, using military force.

• Powerdown—The path of cooperation, conservation, and sharing. The only realistic alternative to resource competition is a strategy that will require tremendous effort and economic sacrifice in order to reduce per-capita resource usage in wealthy countries, develop alternative energy sources, distribute resources more equitably, and humanely but systematically reduce the size of the human population over time. The world’s environmental, anti-war, anti-globalization, and human rights organizations are pushing for a mild version of this alternative, but for political reasons they tend to de-emphasize the level of effort requires, and to play down the population issue.

• Waiting for a Magic Elixir—Wishful thinking, false hopes and denial. Most of us would like to see still another possibility—a painless transition in which market forces come to the rescue, making government intervention in the economy unnecessary. Powerdown discusses why this rosy hope is extremely unrealistic, and serves primarily as a distraction from the hard work that will be required in order to avert violent competition and catastrophic collapse.

• Building Lifeboats—The path of community solidarity and preservation. This fourth option begins with the assumption that industrial civilization cannot be salvaged in anything like its present form, and that we are even now living through the early stages of disintegration. If this is so, it makes sense for at least some of us to devote our energies toward preserving the most worthwhile cultural achievements of the past few centuries.

Richard Heinberg explores how three important groups—the decision-making elites of government, finance and industry; the opposition to the elites, including the anti-war and anti-globalization movements; and ordinary people—are likely to choose among these options. He suggests that the most fruitful response will be a combination of Powerdown and Building Lifeboats, and asks that there be a conservation for our highest human values and ideals during what is likely to be the most challenging century of our history.

Heinberg concludes: “I believe that attempting to maintain business as usual during the coming decades will merely ensure catastrophic collapse. However, we can preserve the best of what we have achieved, while at the same time easing our way as peacefully and equitably as possible back down the steep ramp of increasing scale and complexity our society has been climbing for the past couple of centuries. These are the options we face, and the sooner we acknowledge that this is the case and choose wisely, the better off we and our descendents will be.”

Cuba’s Response to Energy Famine

In 1989, as the Soviet bloc disin-tegrated, oil and grain shipments to Cuba plummeted. Cuban trade dropped by over three quarters in a matter of months. Fertilizer and pesticide imports fell by 80 percent, making agricultural production difficult even as food imports vanished. Known officially by the Castro regime as the “Special Period in Time of Peace,” this episode in Cuba’s history saw the nation slide to the verge of collapse.

Because the Cuban economy was directly controlled by the state, and because there was little economic disparity in the country, the shortages were shared more or less equally. Nearly everyone lost weight, tens of thousands of children were seriously malnour-ished, and the population adopted a mostly vegetarian diet out of necessity.

Meanwhile, the government respon-ded to the agricultural crisis by distributing collectivized land for private cultivation. Within a few years, Cuban agriculture was transformed from consisting of 80 percent state-run farms to 80 percent employee-owned share-holder enterprises. With petrochemicals no longer available, Cuba went organic. Soon Cuba boasted a quarter of a million trained organic gardeners using techniques such as integrated pest management, intercropping, and com-posting. Agricultural production was moved closer to the cities to reduce transportation, refrigeration, and storage costs. By 1998, there were over 8,000 officially recognized organic urban gardens in Havana, cultivated by over 30,000 people and covering nearly a third of the available land.

Transportation was also devastated by the cut-off of Soviet oil. Today there are few cars on Cuban roads, but nearly every vehicle is filled with passengers due to an official policy that encourages hitchhiking. Bicycles are common, and animals (especially oxen) are often used both for human transport and for traction in agriculture.

Since human labor is plentiful and energy resources are scarce, the govern-ment adjusts salaries to encourage full employment. In many instances, laborers are paid more than managers. Building materials are in short supply, so people live in small houses and apartments, most of which are in need of repair. There is little new con-struction.

Nevertheless, Cuba offers us a vision of what our own energy-constrained future might look like—given a fairly optimistic scenario. Cuba managed to power down dramatically and quickly, relocalizing its economy with little increase in internal violence, and with relatively little sacrifice in terms of many basic measures of social welfare. -Red Pepper Magazine

SENTIENT TIMES
PO Box 1330 Ashland, OR 97520
PHONE (541) 512-1084 • FAX (541) 512-1085
dmokma@jeffnet.org