On her blog, "Our Finite World", Gail Tverberg outlines the likely prognosis for humanity, and our best possible choices, as we run up against the Limits of Growth http://ourfiniteworld.com/2014/02/17/reaching-limits-to-growth-what-should-our-response-be/ The case she unveils is, to say the least of it, sobering, but I am reminded of an article that I wrote some while ago, published on this blog and on scitizen.com http://scitizen.com/future-energies/the-10-commandments-guidelines-to-surviving-in-a-post-peak-oil-world_a-14-3709.html, which, with a few amendments and reconsiderations, I now re-post here. The
original set of 10 commandments provided a simple set of rules for members of a small
community to live in reasonable harmony with one another, and that is
essentially the requirement for an oil-dependent society that has
necessarily fragmented into smaller communities, once its supply of oil
has been severely curtailed. At first sight this does seem like a
prognosis of "doom and gloom", as indeed it will be if there is no
sensible scale-down of oil-fuelled activities. Indeed, a "wall" of fuel
dearth will suddenly appear, and we will drive straight into it; or
really be abandoned by the wayside of the petrol-fuelled journey of
globalisation. So, here are some suggestions (not rules or commandments,
but logical consequences and prospects for the era that will follow
down the oil-poor side of Hubbert's peak). Overall, it will be necessary
to curb our use of oil in the same amount as its rate of declining
supply. The world's major 800 oil fields are showing an average production decline rate of -5%/year http://aspousa.org/peak-oil-reference/peak-oil-data/oil-depletion/
which determines the size of the "hole" that must be filled by a
matching production rate of unconventional oil, just to preserve the
status quo, let alone to permit a growth in supply. Clearly the
depletion-rate will not be precisely linear, but certain courses of
action are indicated.
(1) The real problem is that our
society is based around the car. This is particularly so in the U.S.,
where it is (or has become) necessary to travel over significantly
greater distances than in the U.K., and in Europe generally. Fuel is
cheap in the U.S., and if it were not, the economy would grind to a
halt. I have toured extensively in the U.S., giving lectures on
environmental subjects, and indeed when I was scheduled to cover 10
venues in 14 days (on one trip) I needed to fly between almost all of
them (except in Houston where I had two engagements in the same city),
and was amazed at how much competition exists between airlines with the
consequence that I could cover about 1,000 miles for around £30.00
($46.80). The standard price would be probably four times that in the
U.K., say from London to Edinburgh, which is less than 1,000 miles, but
you gather my drift. As I have stressed before, in no way are cars
part of the solution to the problem of sustainable living in the
oil-poor era, which I predict we will see begin to emerge within about a
decade from now. I have "done the math", and it seems clear enough
that the massive amounts of fuel that we currently use cannot be
replaced gallon-for-gallon by biodiesel, biobutanol, bioethanol or
indeed biohydrogen - there just isn't enough arable land to grow the
crop to make any of this stuff on a sufficient scale, certainly not if
we want to keep growing food. A rise in car-share schemes would be a
useful first step.
(2) That brings me onto the next
vital issue - food production. All farming will necessarily become
organic. At the outset, let me say that I realise that growing food
organically (fertilized by plant mulch and animal manure, and without
using chemical pesticides) requires more land than modern forced
agriculture does. However, since the means to force it - pesticides, herbicides and
chemical fertilizers - are produced using oil and natural gas, once these are no longer available, there will be no alternative. Some say that if
Cuba could do it, as they did when the former U.S.S.R. curtailed their
supplies of oil, fertilizer and pesticides, then so can we. This is
good thinking, however, Cuban society is of the necessarily localised
kind based around community farms supplying local small populations. So
that's where we are heading. Rock-phosphate fertilizer is another
issue, since its production appears to have also peaked and thus there
is a real incentive to recycle N and P from agricultural run-off and
from human and animal waste, which would also address the problem of
eutrophication and algal blooms. Methods of Regenerative Agriculture and
Permaculture need also to be introduced as a means for reducing the
inputs of artificial fertilizers, pesticides and freshwater into
farming.
(3) Many urban conurbations can only support a
small number of their very large populations. A city the size of
London is a good example, with around 10 million people depending on
where you draw the borders, which would pose a considerable exercise in
relocating most of that number since London itself has insufficient
arable land for the purpose of sustaining so many.
(4)
Transportation is, of course, a major issue, beyond the availability
of the "car". Virtually all goods on shop-shelves are imported - many
from other countries, sometimes across the world, and certainly over
considerable distances within these shores. Most of that will have to
go, and local production will become the norm. Hence there will be an
inevitable rise in local economies.
(5) This is a
thorny matter, because it means that the accepted mechanisms of retail
trade will need overhauling. Massive chain-retail industries, say
McDonalds and many others, will have to to work on the local scale if
they are to survive. Hence if we had a McDonalds in the village of
Caversham, the burgers it sold would be made from locally farmed beef,
not imported from Argentina, say. Everything will hence become more
expensive, as the monopoly advantage of bulk-buying on an unimaginable
scale will be lost. All such mechanisms rely on cheap oil and it is
precisely the loss of that which we are planning for.
(6)
Certainly in the U.K., once the world leader in engineering, we now
manufacture relatively little because we can buy it more cheaply e.g.
from China. However, the cost of imports will necessarily soar, and so
if we want particular items (even cars), they will have to be made
certainly within the U.K. The same argument applies for the U.S., and
maybe even more so. Indeed, there is a certain joy to be had in the
death of faceless corporate industries who we believe don't really care
too much about individuals. Smaller local businesses do, because their
livelihood depends on it. The developing world may be hard-hit,
however, if the West no longer wants to buy their goods, and that
development may atrophy - but it must in any case, since all of it is
underpinned by the declining source of world oil supplies.
(7) The age of "consumerism" per se,
is drawing to a close. This will impact on everything, and hard. We
will never re-experience the oil-extravaganza of the 20th Century.
Hence that kind of manufacture and supply will make its swansong. How
indeed we will make anything in the future is a good question since oil
and gas have served as both a basic manufacturing material and a fuel
for industry. It is certain, however, that an emphasis on more
essential items (warm clothes and pots and pans, say) will matter much
more than devising novel gadgets for mobile-phones beyond their
inaugural purpose of just talking to somebody. The entertainment
industry, tourism and the service sector generally will begin to
wrap-up.
(8) Having seen a huge reorganisation of
education in the U.K., we will see far more, and maybe a return to some
of the original technical colleges that have now become universities,
and this might end much of the current pretence that the nation is
better educated than ever before. With the fall of the intrinsic
manufacturing industry (which was based on first coal and then oil),
and high levels of unemployment in the 1980's, a whole generation of
new universities was established and a general re-jigging of the system
to fit the bums-on-seats funding policy. Hence some universities will
offer whatever courses can swell their entry numbers, and so we see a
rise in pharmacy while the real science of chemistry has declined
sharply. The title "professor" needs to be looked at too, when in some
universities a professor (that's "Full Professor" in the U.S., not
lecturer) may have no scholarship in the subject he is allegedly a
professor of!
How indeed can such an individual
profess? Real knowledge and real levels of literacy and numeracy should
be instilled from school levels and this does not seem to be the case
even though we have never had more "university graduates". Indeed some
companies e.g. Zeneca, in exasperation, are now training their own
staff, taking them at age 16, rather than training poorly educated
graduates. This is indeed how industry used to gain its ultimately
senior staff (they worked their way up), and it would avoid the
mandatory "student debt" that has been enforced on the young by vastly
expanding the numbers of university places but then removing the
maintenance grant system, which now would be absurdly expensive for the
government to fund. My novel "University Shambles" satirises some of
the absurdities that have come about in the hastily expanded British
university system http://universityshambles.com
(9) The
high-tech medical system will also be unable to survive. Most of
modern medicine depends on oil and gas, at the simplest level to get
hospital staff to work in the mornings. Even bandages and dressings,
drugs and high-tech equipment such as heart monitors and devices to
jolt an arrested heart back into life depend on oil as a manufacturing
feedstock and electricity to run them. There will likely be less
cosmetic surgery, and organ transplants too. The NHS in the U.K. was
set-up primarily to fight infectious diseases, and this might be more
effectively done working on a smaller community scale, than in
confronting a highly mobile world population with the means to transport
diseases too. That knowledge gained in the successful control of much
infection should be prized and taught as part of the new
physicianship.We may see the return of the "cottage hospital" which like
a local farm, attends to the needs of a fairly small community, rather
than massive city hospitals and health centres. Preventative medicine
will come to the fore, since prevention is indeed much more effective
(and less demanding of resources) than cure.
(10) This,
the final item is a round-up of what has already been alluded to. Life
will necessarily become more locally focussed. If people are unable to
move around so freely, they will tend to stay where they are. A likely
successful outcome for we humans in the imminent oil-poor era will be
met through thinking and planning on the scale of small communities.
Some regions will naturally have certain advantages over others and
disadvantages too, e.g. whether there is access to transport/energy from
a river or plenty of crop-land or woodland. That said, the internet
should not be lost, otherwise we will become hidden from one another in
small isolated community pockets, and that would be a seriously
retrograde step. Optimistically, this may be a good time to think about
setting up your own local business in wherever it is you choose to
settle. Now that is an important choice to make, as you may find
yourself stuck there if you don't like it!
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