The dead industrial machine versus ecotechnic!

Hey chicklets!

I have just completed several weeks of reading Jay Hensen's blog course, Archdruid essays and replies from Ran Prieur. They were and are discussing the most important concern of all of our lives, "what happens to us now?" as we begin the post peak oil decline.


Our current industrial society developed in response to the finding of vast energy resources. Our population growth and industrial machine expansion exploded to consume the petrochemical energy resource that had been discovered under the ground. Black gold, Texas tea, oil. Like yeast in sweet grape juice or maggots on dead meat – biological expansion occurs when the resource becomes available. There was no stopping us. Nature always seeks to use the resources available by exploding the population of life that can utilize it. So industrial society culturally and machanically evolved to utilize the oil resource and grow more people and their houses and machines. We were very successful. One billion of us at the start of the Civil War burgeoned to almost seven billion today.
Oil, its good food.

Now we are on the plateau of oil production. We are producing flat out and we're emptying underground field after underground field and the few new ones we are finding aren't replacing the ones that are finishing. Oil production is past peak, past the flat top of the production curve – and every year we will have less and less oil and natural gas. This is not a debate among "market forces." There is no spin doctor who can make oil out of bullshit (though you can make methane - natural gas). Our cultural industrial machine (our civilization) runs on oil and will not easily change. It will mutate and it is even now. That mutation is to prioritize, protect the rich, protect the resources of the rich and to make the resultant contraction (die off) hurt those who are out of sight of those who will control that contraction and resource exhaustion.

In wine making yeast simply die when the alcohol they excrete reaches about 14 percent. They are poisoned by their own waste. Humans are hardier, more like cockroaches. Some of us survive and force a cultural mutation, though it is tempting to draw a parallel about drowning in our own wastes.

This obvious reality that we happened to overlook while watching TV and believing our own TV news finally, irrevocably, lays enormous questions at our feet. How will the industrial machine, our culture, running on petroleum react to declining energy supply. What will happen to us, to me, to you, to your children?

If we can envision a ecotechnic future of food grown within the constraint of permanent soil fertility, transportation wholly driven by renewable energy supplies (including the construction of the transportation), and manufacturing that runs and is built only with renewable energy – if we can figure this out – how will society accept the change – how do we get from here where we stand on our dying earth to there, where everything is sustainable? How many of us must die to end up with a population that will fit this world?

De-industrialization – the winding down of the world sized, petroleum fueled machines of transportation, agriculture and manufacturing due to running out of gas (literally) will still leave, for a very long time, pockets of industrialization that will out compete any sustainable ecotechnic solution to anything.

Lets look at de-industrialization in more depth. How can an industrial machine that runs on oil compete when the oil is not available? Here is why: once built, it takes less energy to keep an industrial process working than to build a new more sustainable process that can do the same thing. Archdruid suggests the example of the computer. Long after we cannot support the world wide manufacturing and design and shipping of a computer we will be able to cobble together parts from existing computers that will allow the laptop to keep functioning for many years. This gives a small society with computers an competitive edge over a group who has lost that ability. Guns are simpler example. Whereas one group might be hunting with bows and arrows that they have made, if they come into conflict with a group over scarce resources that still has AK 47 machine guns and ammunition they will not survive.

Thus the evolving eco friendly - ecotechnic society would be crushed by the guns of a dying culture - but die nevertheless they would. This feels like going backwards to where we want to be – that ecotechnic, earth friendly, future. But this is inevitable until all the machines of war have truly come to rest. There will be many false starts and the remnants of functioning military and consumption will not go easily into the night.

I put the question above - what will the industrial machine will do when scarcity of petroleum begins to impact it's own survival. Up to a point, we will pay more for the fuel and maintain this lifestyle. Then we will go to war to get what we need. Some people, like Jay Hensen feel that this leads inevitably to nuclear war, and he suggests this culminates in 2030 or thereabouts.

I don't think so. If you read through all three of the Archdruid's essays on the ecotechnic future and then read Ran Prieur thoughts you might come to the conclusion as I have, that the evolution of this cultural change will be interrupted from other forces present in the world.
What do I mean? The loss of easy energy impacts the industrial machine but also impacts every other function of our lives too. Our waste stream from our industrial society is destroying our world's survive us and any of these aspects such as global warming, financial collapse, loss of agricultural output, bird flu like plague, and social collapse at the regional level may interrupt the face off position of old and new, of sustainability versus remnant industrialization.

Any of these problems can interrupt the flow of petrochemicals to the modern industrial machine, and any one of them would cause the modern industrial machine to be unable to compete with sustainable ecotechnic renewable splinter groups almost immediately.

What does that mean – concrete example - the organic farmers will produce food even when the agribusiness fails (because Agribiz can't get financing and has it's land foreclosed and it's tractors sit idle and the processing plants fail and the buildings sit empty). So the small sustainable farmer would be able to barter, trade and sell and survive because there is no competition from the steroid (oil) enhanced world killing machine (agribiz). It also means that even though small organic farmers might be able to compete with a stalled national agribusiness machine to ensure their survival, they will only be able to feed a very small fraction of the world's population. Perhaps as little as 500 million. Sustainable means solar radiation without the help of 120 million years of stored energy (oil).

So what happens to the unfed people? They starve of course, but the real question is what they do while they are starving?