Peak Oil Benefits | Brussels Blog

Peak Oil Benefits

posted by on 13th Jan 2011
13th,Jan

In my youth, I remember regularly seeing a an elderly, rather grim, man parading the streets around Leicester Square decked-out with sandwich-board and placard urging the pleasure-seeking, cinema-bound crowds to eat less protein and thereby to avoid the perils of lust. Needless to say he was English and one suspects, a troubled man. His name as I have since discovered, was Stanley Green and his reputation lives on. He was the classic sandwich board man; long may his ilk flourish.

Doubtless, since the beginning of time, men have paraded in sandwich-boards advertising to anyone who might care to listen and many who might not, that protein incited lust or more frequently, that the end of the world was nigh. As for the message of the former and the predictions of the latter, that they have been deluded can be demonstrated by reference to two simple facts. We are still here, and so too is the world. We have not given up either on lust or survival. However, as far as the end-of-the-world-is-nigh merchants are concerned such a simple analysis misses an essential point; often they were right. The world is defined by the limits of our consciousness, not the boundaries of global geography. Fortunately, lust (graced by the name passion), and aided no doubt by proteins, has enabled the world that lies outside individual personal boundaries to flourish.

For the Neanderthal gloomily watching his new, sharp eyed, clever, aggressive neighbours Homo Sapiens Sapiens (us) taking over the neighbourhood, the end of his world was nigh. For the inhabitants of a mediaeval village consigned to ghastly extinction by the Black Death the whole world would have seemed, no doubt, about to end. For the Aztecs, as their great empire crumbled, sapped of its vitality by diseases brought by the conquistadores and felled by guns and cold steel, the end of the world was indeed nigh. So too, for the Aborigines of Tasmania, for the people of the Warsaw ghetto and for the countless other victims of conquest, the end of their particular worlds did come; but the world did not end.

Today, there is no shortage of gloom and metaphorical (and perhaps literal) toting of sandwich boards; the Internet is full of them. But all true sandwich board men (and women, but it is usually men) have to have some higher authority to whom they can refer in order to add weight to their message. Traditionally, it was one of those obscure, wilderness -inhabiting, Old Testament prophets the primary purpose of whom nowadays, is to provide wacky names for the male progeny of North London liberals. For us modern end-of-the-world-is-nigh types, two names stand out from the crowd. In the red corner I give you Joseph Tainter and in the blue corner, Guillaume Faye.
Joseph Tainter’s “The Collapse of Complex Societies” (Cambridge University Press) is rapidly becoming the must-have Bible for anyone who has forebodings about the direction in which European society is heading. Tainter doesn’t do sandwich-boards. He is an academic anthropologist and historian but his subject is the catastrophic collapse of the great empires of the past and by analogy, of the present.
Many explanations have been given for the swift decline of the Romans, the Maya, the Incas and the other empires whose pomp of yesterday is now one with Nineveh and Tyre, but few explanations are as compelling and as applicable to modern circumstances as that given by Tainter.
It would be impossible to do justice to his theory in a few sentences but the message for my sandwich-board comes from Tainter’s connection between energy and the structure of society. Put energy into a system and it becomes more complex and organised. Take energy away and it becomes less complex, less organised.
An aeroplane does not assemble itself out of piles of raw materials. The raw materials are made into components and the components assembled together. Energy is the tool for this process. As the aeroplane ages it requires energy to maintain it in working order. Take away that energy input and it will quickly decay. This is the working of the laws of thermodynamics- all states of being tend towards disorder, not towards order. For society the message is clear. Reduce the amount of energy going in and the structure will decay. The rate of that decay will be in proportion to the complexity of the structure. For reasons that are explained by Tainter, complex societies are vulnerable and will collapse rather than decay. As he also points out, the vestiges of that collapse may not be as disastrous as one might assume.
History has placed great importance on the study of empires. The history of the Eurocentric world passes like a torch from the Mesopotamians to the Egyptians to the Greeks to the Romans and so on. We have a tendency to regard the empires of the past as the bearers of the great achievements of humanity. The Romans generally get a better write-up than the Huns or the Anglo-Saxons. As Petrach said “What else then is all history but the praise of Rome”.
Now, with the benefit of post-modern revisionism, we are beginning to see that the interregnums between empires have not necessarily been dark ages. The Anglo-Saxons did not live in a society that approximated to what would commonly be described as a civilisation but they produced great works of literature and of craft and art. They also laid the foundations of that, the most expressive of media for the exchange of human thought; the English language.
My point is this.
The human world has, over the last century, enjoyed the benefit of enormous amounts of free energy. A gallon of petrol provides in energy terms the equivalent of about 600 man hours of work. We have used approximately a trillion barrels of oil since the date when it came into common use. It is as though over those years, everybody in the developed world has had thousands of slaves at his disposal. The use of this energy source has been fundamental not only to our living standards but to the way we live. It will be so for years to come, but we shall have to make do with less. No one disputes that the era of cheap oil is over. In the middle of a global economic slowdown it is now trading at around $90 a barrel. That is over four times the median price of around $20 a barrel that prevailed throughout most of the last century. As far as peak oil is concerned we are simply haggling over the precise date at which it occurred or will occur.
The diminution in our energy supply will undoubtedly change the shape of our society. With careful management we shall avoid a collapse, but what we will see is a decrease in complexity. We will all lead simpler lives and that, might not be such a bad thing.
Resource depletion will change our world in ways at which now we can only guess. If we cling to the hope that it will remain something like that to which we have been accustomed then it will come to an unhappy end, a Malthusian nightmare. There is however, the hope that it will be a benefit, a change that is thrust upon us for our good rather than our detriment. Our world will come to an end but the world will not. Instead, a new world might emerge which will be better than that which went before. It may in fact be the only hope in the face of a number of global problems which at present seem intractable.
Take climate change; it is a fact that around 99.99% of reputable specialist scientists accept that the world is warming and that this is attributable to the activities of man. Scientists might disagree over the scale of the problem but none has written a peer-reviewed scientific paper that casts credible doubt on that basic hypothesis. There is however, a vast body of opinion that doubts it. For the most part this corpus of doubt comprises people who are not scientists. Their argument at root is simple; why trust scientists? Why indeed? To paraphrase the question posed by the Peoples Front of Judea in Monty Python’s “The Life of Brian”, what have scientists ever done for us? (Apart that is, from modern medicine, mobile ‘phones, televisions, nuclear reactors, the internal combustion engine, plastics etc. etc.). As far as man-made global warming is concerned they are obviously wrong because unlike the television, the microwave and penicillin we don’t want what they are delivering to us; and we don’t like to be made to feel uncomfortable. As Erich Fromm observes in his prophetic work, “To Have or To Be” (Abacus 1979)
“Yet another explanation for the deadening in our survival instinct is that the changes in living that would be required are so drastic that people prefer the future catastrophe to the sacrifice they would have to make now”
The lame result of the recent Cancun summit underscores what is already apparent. The world will not abandon the mantra of growth as its driving economic philosophy. Neither the developing world nor the already developed world will accept that there are limits to growth. We measure progress by the extent to which motor cars, televisions, P.C.’s, ritzy marina-side studio pads etc., are acquired by at least a part of society (increasingly a middle class far removed from the desperately poor majority). Producing and maintaining the modern icons of material success uses energy and, either directly or indirectly, creates CO2 and thereby climate change. It is as simple as that.
Shackled with what Fromm describes as the “having mode” (as opposed to the “being mode”) we are seemingly doomed to end up in a dead world struggling for dominion over the remaining land that can support some vestige of life. The End of The World Is Nigh. Our only hope is that we won’t have the oil/gas/coal to burn to make the CO2 that will, without a reduction in its use, ultimately extinguish all of civilisation.
So let’s look on the bright side. As fuel becomes more expensive we shall reduce the extent to which we travel by car or aeroplane. Not only will we travel less, but so too will our food and other basic commodities. Our agriculture will perforce, have to rely less on fertilizers and fuel -guzzling factory-farming technologies. Energy from renewable sources will be produced at a local level albeit that we shall be interconnected by an efficient international grid. These are simple predictions- I guarantee they will come to pass.
Individually we will become more involved in the satisfaction of basic needs. Many of us will grow or produce our own food. As a result we shall become more attuned to the needs of our environment. We will become aware that in order to survive we must nurture that which feeds us; nature. We will eat less but will be better nourished. Heart disease and diabetes will be reduced, life-expectancy will increase. If you doubt that this will happen look at the history of Cuba in what is now known as the Special Period of the 1980’s. In response to a dramatic diminution of the oil supply exactly these results were achieved.
Our organs of government will respond to this dynamic. Local government will replace national and international government as the primary source of legislation. With a greater sense of connection in the community there will be less social alienation. Social problems and crime will abate. We will lead simpler, richer more healthy lives.
So, that is the red corner. My sandwich board reads “Use less Energy for Simpler Societies”. With it I shall wander the streets handing out hand printed leaflets pointing out that the end of oil will result in a healthy environment and healthy happy people.
Now for the blue corner and Guillaume Faye, that rarest of individuals, an intellectual on the far right. He is from France. His book Archeofuturism has recently been published in English. Nick Griffin, leader of the British National Party is a big fan.
Faye believes that Western European society is near to breaking point. There is a “convergence of catastrophes” social, economic and environmental that augurs the violent end of our current political and social order. (At this point it is worth recalling that the BNP is the only mainstream party that refers to the problems that will arise in the wake of peak-oil. It is an imminent catastrophe that will provide the party with the means to exploit the despair of the populace at the impotence of the current political order). After the ending of our current social order, Faye envisages the establishment of a pastoral society that will live in harmony with nature, ancestral values and the natural social order. At this point you might think that I am a fan. Here however, is the rub; by and large, it won’t include Moslems or indeed any social group that is not indigenous. They it seems are not part of the natural European order of things and will, one way or another, have to go.

Faye’s ideas about race are eerily reminiscent of Nazi ideals of “volk”. Faye is a national socialist. I dread to think what the sandwich-boards toted by his followers will read.

At present all of the above sounds rather like the end-of-the-world is nigh stuff which with some justification, we deride. But, in 2011 we will see the beginnings of the resurgence of radical politics. This will ultimately result in a choice between the radical right and what might loosely be described as the left. There is a convergence of catastrophes at hand. The current economic problems in Europe are not going to disappear. The Germany economy may be growing at the rate of 3.6% but that is on the back of sales of cars to East Asia and in particular to China. The irony is that it is the proliferation of those cars that will push the price of fuel higher and suppress any hope of “recovery”. The unemployed and dispossessed in Europe will look for radical solutions. Let’s hope that they read my sandwich-board first.

Robert Urquhart Collins

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