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| Half of next winter's firewood, still to be hauled to the back yard and stacked neatly. |
In my last post I discussed a number of issues (needs and wants, human nature and politics) that I felt we needed a grasp of before I could go on with the rest of this series. If you haven't read that post yet, it might be a good idea to read it before going on.
Earlier in this series, I identified ecological overshoot leading to the dieoff of much of the human race as a serious problem looming ahead of us. A problem that we are failing to address. Both overpopulation and overconsumption are major contributors to this situation, but overconsumption is the issue which we have the most chance of addressing in time to make a difference—to get us through the bottleneck we are facing. It will, however, require a fairly major change in attitude for many, if not most, people. I think we need to understand why we are overconsuming before we tackle this problem, and that is going to be the subject of my next few posts.
Our economy has grown significantly over the last few hundred years, since 1700 or so, during what might be called the "industrial age". With it affluence and consumption have increased as well, at least in the developed world, to the point where this is no longer a blessing, but a serious problem. The confluence of a number of factors have made this possible, and I'll be spending today's post discussing those factors. In subsequent posts we'll look at the consequences of industrialization, how this has led to overconsumption, and what we might do about the problem.
Surplus Energy
I must give a nod to my Peak Oil friends and acknowledge that fossil fuels have played a key role in enabling economic growth during the last few hundred years of our history.
For any particular energy source, it takes a certain amount of energy to access that energy. Surplus energy is what's left over to be used, and it's what makes an economy work. The more surplus energy, the greater the potential for economic growth.
In pre-industrial economies, mechanical energy comes primarily from muscles (human or animal) and to a lesser degree from wind and falling water. Heat energy comes mainly from burning biomass (firewood, peat, dung, straw, etc.) and to a lesser degree from the heat of the sun. None of these energy sources provided enough surplus energy to drive strong economic growth.
At the start of the industrial age the demand for firewood was getting ahead of the forests of Europe, and those in need of heat were forced to turn to coal. This was fairly easy to do since there were deposits of coal on or near the surface of the land, and it got the industrial revolution off to a good start.
Coal was followed in the latter half of the late 19th century by oil and in the twentieth century by natural gas. All are still being used in large quantities. The high level of surplus energy from these fossil fuels enabled the building of our industrial civilization.
Technology
Soon enough after the start of the coal age colliers were forced to dig deeper to satisfy demand, and when they went below the level of the local water table, it was necessary to pump the water out of the mines before they could be worked. This unprecedented demand for mechanical energy soon resulted in the development of heat engines that could convert the energy of burning fuel into mechanical energy. Once that energy was available, we found a great many other things to do with it beyond just pumping water out of coal mines. This included railways and various sorts of factories where steam engines and eventually electric motors replaced muscle power.
Before industrialization, most goods had been made in small shops employing only a few people, or in peoples' homes, using almost entirely muscle power. The availability of manufactured goods was limited by this and there was significant pent up demand. So the new factories found strong demand for their products.
The "New" World
In the late Renaissance and early industrial periods Europeans "discovered" several new continents that they had not previously know about. They ruthlessly moved in to exploit the wealth of these "new" areas. This gave industrialism a boost in terms of lands that it could treat as empty and natural resources waiting to be developed.
Social Structure
It seems to me that any egalitarian society, faced with the prospect of industrialization, would probably have decided it wasn't worth the trouble—the great possibilities for amassing wealth just wouldn't have held that large an attraction, given the amount of work involved for the majority of the people to benefit just a few. And indeed such societies were colonized and still haven't been successfully industrialized.
At the other end of the political spectrum, totalitarian societies may well have been too inflexible and at least initially rejected industrialization because of the amount of change it entailed, the unwelcome challenge to the existing order of things. And indeed, during the process of industrialization, inflexible aristocracies were eventually overthrown or reduced to mere figureheads and replaced with ruling classes friendlier to industrialization.
Europe seems to have had just the right combination of an upper class at least some of whom (particularly rich merchants) saw change as an opportunity to amass great wealth and hungry lower classes with no choice but to work for the upper classes. Especially after the enclosure of the commons left them with no way to be self sufficient.
Preindustrial wealth mainly took the form of productive land, and there was only so much land available. Industrialization offered many new sources of wealth—things like mines, factories, railroads, banks, etc.
Capitalism
The new upper classes soon became what we now know as "capitalists". Capitalism is an economic and political system which exploits the labour of the working class and facilitates the accumulation of wealth by rich capitalists. It had existed in a nascent form before but really blossomed during industrialization. Indeed capitalism and industrialization went hand in hand and reinforced each other.
The Financial System
The financial sector of the economy provides services to do with managing money. It had already existed for some time, but what it really needed was a rapidly growing economy to enable it to use money to make more money in a really effective way. The high surplus energy of fossil fuels made such growth possible. As with capitalism, finance and industrialization went hand in hand.
Government
The state, with legal systems and police to enforce the concepts of possession and property and to enforce claims, in the form of debt, on others' productivity, was, as always, primarily the servant of the upper classes. Practically every government in the world was eager to support the capitalists and financiers in their effort to industrialize.
Unintended Consequences
During the industrial age all these factors (and many others) interacted in complex and unpredictable ways, producing not just the intended results (more wealth for the rich and powerful), but also a variety of unintended, and in many cases unwelcome, consequences. So much so that at this point the switchover to fossil fuels as an energy source, and the industrialization that it enabled, is starting to seem like a mistake to all but the small number who have profited most from it. Some of these unintended consequences are contributing to collapse in general, others are specifically related to the issue of overconsumption.
I'll be going into detail on that in my next post.
I expect many will find this a short and unsatisfying post (I certainly do), but the alternative was making this the first section of a very long post, so I decided to stop here and continue next time with what I hope will be the more interesting part and not discouragingly long.
Links to the rest of this series of posts: Collapse, you say?
- Collapse You Say? Part 1, Introduction, Tuesday, 30 June 2020
- Collapse, you say? Part 2: Inputs and Outputs, Wednesday, 30 September 2020
- Collapse, you say? Part 3: Inputs and Outputs continued, October 7, 2020
- Collapse, you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff, January 2, 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 5: Over Population, January 8, 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 6: Over Population and Overconsumption, Februrary 21, 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 7: Needs and Wants, Human Nature, Politics, March 8, 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 8: Factors which made industrialization possible, May 13 , 2021
- Collapse, you say? Part 9: Unintended Consequences of Industrialization, May 20 , 2021
- Collapse You Say? Part 10 / Time for Change, Part 1: Money, January 5, 2022
- Time for Change, Part 2: Hierarchies, Februray 16, 2022
- Time for Change, Part 3: Without Hierarchies? April 23, 2022
- Time for Change, Part 4: Conclusions June 22, 2022
6 comments:
So much so that at this point the switchover to fossil fuels as an energy source, and the industrialization that it enabled, is starting to seem like a mistake to all but the small number who have profited most from it.
Nice summary of the background to the development of industrial civilization, but I wonder about your sentence I've quoted above.
I think there are a significant number of people who believe that industrialization was a mistake, and I'm one of them, but I doubt that the belief is as widespread as you imply. If it were only a "small number" of people who thought that industrialization was good, I doubt that there would be such political difficulty in organizing societies differently.
In the US, there are very few people who wish to be significantly less affluent than they already are and many who would jump at the chance for an increase in affluence. For example, only about half of the people who make less than $40,000 per year donate any money to charity, and while the percentage is higher among the more affluent, the average donation to charity is from 3-5% of gross income. To me, this indicates that although there is willingness to help other people in difficult circumstances, that willingness is tempered by a desire to retain almost all of one's income. And I rarely hear of people who are the beneficiaries of charitable donations refusing to accept charitable services.
I fear that there will be great resistance in industrialized countries to rapid deindustrialization. Even those with the best intentions would find the requirements of deindustrializing to be onerous, perhaps too much for people to survive.
I think it is true that many people now realize that there are extreme drawbacks to industrialization, like climate change, but I think that proposals like the Green New Deal indicate that even those who recognize those drawbacks (not including climate change deniers) are assuming that we can remediate them with straightforward changes to the kinds of industries we use rather than abandoning industrialization entirely.
@ Joe Clarkson
Maybe so, Joe. Maybe so. But note I said it is "starting to seem". While the full blown realization is confined to a few like you and I, many can sense that something isn't right. And I think that number has grown in the last year or so.
I agree with Joe. Further, when people really begin to feel the negative effects of overripe industrialization, there's a powerful incentive to blame something other than the true root cause (for example, "immigrants that want free stuff," or mismanagement by one's political opponents). By and large, people do not want to stop believing in the narrative of progress or take that unilateral step "backward" that deindustrialization would entail. It's much more appealing to blame the problems on others so one's level of affluence can be maintained by taking someone else's stuff.
@ Dawn G
You're right that progress is a powerful religion that people are very reluctant to give up. And consuming is also what amounts to a religion, also one which people are very loyal to.
But why? I see many people in the "collapse sphere" blaming this on basic human nature, but I don't agree. In my experience, when you find people holding to ideas that don't serve them well, you'll also find that a great deal of money is being spent to keep people convinced of those ideas. The ones doing that spending are people who stand to gain even more by keeping people convinced.
And I would say that is certainly the case in our world today. This is not a conspiracy but rather a matter of the rich and powerful people (capitalists) who run things taking the path of least resistance toward what they see as their best interests. And that calculation is always made in the short run, with idea that the long run need not be considered, because things never really change very much.
It very difficult to isolation oneself from the continual barrage of propaganda, most of it in the form of marketing. Only a few of us manage to hold on to some grasp of what the future holds (continued collapse), but even we have a twisted view of reality.
Every time things start to fall apart somewhat, more people start to question the conventional wisdom. It happened after the dot com bust in 2000, after the Global Financial Crisis in 2008 and it is happening now during the pandemic. Of course people come up with all sort of different ideas, many of them wrong, but what I am pointing to the the fact that people are questioning.
We'll probably find out how adaptable people are to collapse when the first really big crisis happens. I thought in the beginning of the pandemic that it might be the first, but the death rate was too low to really shut down industrial civilization. Massive payments to the millions of unemployed allowed the worst effects to be tolerated without causing too much of a decline in affluence and any possible associated social unrest.
Even so, there was a substantial backlash against common sense programs to protect people. If we can't persuade people to wear masks during a pandemic, how are we to persuade people to rapidly reduce their consumption of energy and most of the products they now purchase routinely?
Big cities are totally dependent on the continued functioning of industrial civilization. How willing will people be to uproot themselves and move out into the country where a low energy, non-industrial life is possible? It sounds to me like a pretty hard sell, especially pre-crisis. If life in urban areas starts to deteriorate rapidly, I can see people developing a strong desire to leave and go "back to the land", but how will it be physically possible?
@ Joe Clarkson
I think the refusal to make common sense responses to the problems we are confronted with will be one of the biggest issues that faces us in the years to come. But I don't think this happens just because people are stupid.
Part of it is denial and unwillingness to accept that the situation has changed or to understand how it has changed. This certainly been true during the pandemic--at every turn we have under estimated its seriousness, and based our actions on bizarrely optimistic predictions, when reality has turned out to support a much more pessimistic outlook. It's not over yet and there is a lot more grief to come.
But an even bigger part of the lack of common sense is that there are people out there doing their best to lead other people astray, using natural human tendencies. A lot of this happens because those people have ideologies that they want to see coming to the fore. They want to be proven right, and are willing to do the stupidest things toward that end. Whether it's storming the capitol, plotting to kidnap the governor, or refusing to wear masks and social distance. And when they are proven wrong, there is always someone else to blame it on.
As collapse continues, there will be many opportunities to have this sort of thing beat out of us. But I think it will also become clear that there are many sorts of commons sense and many different ways of adapting to the challenges we'll face.
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