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

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  • From: Toby Hemenway <toby@patternliteracy.com>
  • To: SArjuna@aol.com, permaculture <permaculture@lists.ibiblio.org>
  • Subject: Re: [permaculture] Toby- Re. "Apocalypse Not" - How do you see it presently?
  • Date: Thu, 15 Nov 2007 12:10:45 -0800

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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