[permaculture] Toby- Re. "Apocalypse Not" - How do you see it presently?

Toby Hemenway toby at patternliteracy.com
Thu Nov 15 15:10:45 EST 2007


Dear Shivani,

Thanks for writing. At some point I'll have to do a follow up to 
"Apocalypse, Not" since my thinking has evolved some, and there were 
some points that were misunderstood in the article. I'm no optimist--I 
have always thought that the next 30 years are going to be pretty rough, 
but I can't get on the doom bandwagon, still. I have studied complex 
adaptive systems (our civilization is one of those) since the 1970s, and 
it is naive to think that there is a linear relationship between energy 
inputs and complex system outputs. I am  actually more excited than I 
was about the opportunities of the next couple decades, although I'm 
very aware of the inevitable large-scale suffering we'll see, too. But 
not everyone gets to see their culture make an enormous shift.

I'll just revisit those 5 points briefly.

> *1. Our demand for oil is unchangeable and is not significantly 
> affected by price. * /[It hasn't been so far, even though the price 
> has climbed steeply.  The poorest countries, however, are already 
> suffering plenty, as they can no longer afford the energy needed to 
> support their infrastructures.]
> /
Oil prices are still, adjusted for inflation, below their 1980 record 
price. So we've had 27 years to get complacent and to adjust to a 
moderate increase in price, as well as learning to live with the unheard 
of volatility of the last couple decades. The rise from $60 to $90/bbl 
is nearly entirely due to speculation and is viewed by most oil pros as 
simple volatility; real shortages are not here yet. Oil is still cheap, 
so I don't expect a lot of change in behavior until we have averaged 
$110/barrel or maybe much more, for some months or more--we've been in 
the 90s for just a few days. And demand in the last few weeks has 
dropped by about 4%, says the Wall Street Journal.

We're still very, very early in the Peak cycle. We are still on the 
upward curve. The dynamics of rounding the top are going to be very 
different. Check out HT Odum's "A Prosperous Way Down" for some very 
sophisticated thinking by a brilliant systems ecologist. He describes 
how our culture is optimized for growth, and how it needs to, and 
can--if other complex systems are any guide--shift to optimize for the 
"rounding the top" phase. That's something a lot of doomers miss: They 
think we'll go right from an upward curve to a downward one. I think 
we're just now getting to the top-rounding phase, and we'll be in it for 
30 years or so. That seems to explain why some say the Peak has already 
happened and why others give dates from now through 2030. It's a broader 
peak than most people are aware of. The shift in the curve's shape from 
near-straight to round will trigger dynamics that many Peak-Oilers 
aren't considering.
> /
> /*2. We are so badly addicted to oil that we will watch our 
> civilization collapse rather than change our behavior.*  /[Certainly 
> no good news yet.   If the U.S. Dept. of Enrgy report that said we'd 
> need a decade of flat-out nationwide effort before peak, "or the 
> problem will be pervasive and will not be temporary" is accurate, we 
> are in for it.]
> /
Again, we're not at a point where we're getting much direct feedback 
from shortages. But the energy situation is one of the biggest topics in 
every major publication. I see an enormous shift in consciousness around 
energy awareness. Read the business press and count how many articles 
are on energy compared to, say, 3 years ago. Even conservative 
publications are reporting energy news, along with global warming. 
Awareness is the first step toward action. No promises, there, but I see 
it as a very good sign.
> /
> /*3. Significant oil conservation is not possible in the time frame 
> needed**/. /*/ [We haven't even begun to conserve.]
> /

See point 1. We began conserving in 1974 with the doubling of gas 
mileage that occurred over the next 8 years. Energy star products. 
High-efficiency furnaces. I could list thousands of ways we conserve 
energy compared to 1970. Per capita energy usage is way down; WSJ says 
corporations worldwide are using 71% less energy to manufacture the same 
amount of goods as in 1980. SUV sales have plummeted in the last 18 
months. High mileage car sales are up hugely. Do some homework around 
that point--to say we haven't begun to conserve is simply wrong. That's 
why demand has, in effect, so outpaced the change in supply: 
conservation has freed up much more oil available for new markets to 
demand. And again, there's been little real push from prices to conserve 
for 25 years.
> /
> /*4. Even with conservation, demand will be more than oil plus 
> alternatives can possibly meet*/.  ["Dampening" of demand occuring in 
> poor nations  is the only factor lowering demand so far.   
> Alternatives have not added anything significant yet, but have 
> threatened world food supplies.  Production has been flat since about 
> the time you wrote the article.  Conservation is still just a gleam in 
> the eye of idealists.  Only demand has increased significantly.
> /

Really, your time frame is too short (we're all so impatient for this 
collapse to get on with itself, aren't we? Myself included!). Oil prices 
need to get to unseen levels and stay there for demand to change. The 
Chinese, for example, are subsidizing oil to build their economy, so of 
course demand there is going to go up. At some point the subsidies will 
end and reality will set in. For the Chinese, that may not be pretty, 
unless they can quickly restore their agrarian base. This is probably 
the point I'm least confident about. The rush of the BRIC nations to 
build oil-dependent infrastructure in the last 2 years has been a truly 
moronic course of action. But I still have a good deal of faith in the 
relationship between supply, demand, and price--or else most of 
economics is wrong. Demand destruction will of course occur first in 
poor nations; they have the least flexibility. I think we're next. Be 
patient.
> /
> /*5. Society is so fragile that it cannot withstand large shocks.*
> /[Previous complex societies have collapsed under multiple stresses, 
> as outlined in  Tainter's book, //The Collapse of Complex 
> Societies.    With peak oil, global climate change, an economy running 
> on fumes.... our society is facing more large stresses than others 
> that succumbed to fewer. No complex society has lasted long, due to 
> the fragility caused by complexity.  And no society has been as 
> complex as ours.]
> /

Are our stresses larger than others? Rome faced multiple invasions, 
total collapse of agricultural soils, enormous costs of colonies, 
generations of incompetent rulers, a tax system that bankrupted the 
countryside, and more, and it still took 300 years to collapse. I think 
those are larger stresses than the ones we face.  Civilizations can take 
huge shocks in stride: remember than the Black Death was followed in 40 
years by the Renaissance; that Rome went to the brink of collapse at 
least twice and recovered--and that the Eastern Roman Empire really 
never collapsed; much of that culture still exists.

The idea that complex systems are fragile is dead wrong. They are 
remarkably robust and far more resilient than simple ones. Tainter does 
not say that complexity is fragile, and neither does anyone who studies 
complexity. What Tainter says is that increases in complexity eventually 
bring diminishing returns, and that leads to collapse unless a new 
source of energy to support the complexity is found (e.g., the discovery 
of the New World, oil, conquest). Tainter, however, ignores the free 
ride given by self-organization, and our culture is hugely 
self-organizing. That will shift the diminishing returns curve and offer 
quite a bit more resilience. That's something I plan to write about at 
some point. Tainter also points out that collapse usually takes the same 
amount of time as the upward trajectory. Sure, this civilization will 
end, and I hope it does  (that's probably been the biggest shift in my 
thinking since the article: a better grasp of why civilization is both 
unsustainable and ruinous to the human spirit). But collapse will 
probably take another couple centuries if the past is any guide.

Don't take this as optimism. There's a lot to worry about. Oil is a 
high-quality energy source that is roughly 50,000 times more easily 
converted to work than solar (see Odum's work on transformity), so we've 
got a big downshift to do. But I still only give the "death of billions" 
scenarios about a 15% chance in my lifetime.

Toby
http://patternliteracy.com



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