Showing posts with label dieoff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dieoff. Show all posts

Thursday, 13 May 2021

Collapse you say? Part 8, Factors which made industrialization possible

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?

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Sunday, 21 February 2021

Collapse you say? Part 6, overpopulation and overconsumption

We've had a lot of snow
recently in Kincardine

In this series of posts I've been talking about why I think our industrial civilization has been slowly collapsing since the 1970s, and is likely to continue to do so until circumstances have forced us to adopt a sustainable lifestyle. In the light of the issues I'll be talking about in this post, I should make it clear that I don't think of collapse as a problem to be solved, but rather as a predicament to which we must adapt. And there is a lot of room for different opinions as to what exactly those adaptations should be.

My last few posts have sparked some discussion on a couple of issues that I think are worth devoting the entirety of this post to, before I go on with scheduled programming, so to speak.

Footprints

The first is what "footprint" actually means. The best source I can recommend for this is the Global Footprint Network and their Ecological Footprint measure. I found their FAQ page answered most of my questions. Interestingly, the most surprising things I found out are about what the Ecological Footprint isn't. Which lead me to the Water Footprint Network and the concept of Carbon Footprints. For the issues of dwindling non-renewables like fossil fuels and minerals it was harder to find anything like "footprints", but Wikipedia does have an article on resource depletion which may serve as a good jumping off point if you want to do further reading.

What footprint definitely does not mean is "square miles per person". This is clearly a confused approach to the subject, since hunter-gatherers who have a very low impact on the ecosystem use a lot of square miles per person, but step very lightly wherever they go. While modern humans occupy a relatively small area of land each, but have a very heavy impact on the planet.

The Ecological Footprint uses a measure of "global hectares per person" where "one global hectare is the world's annual amount of biological production for human use and human waste assimilation, per hectare of biologically productive land and fisheries."

"In 2012 there were approximately 12.2 billion global hectares of production and waste assimilation, averaging 1.7 global hectares per person. Consumption totaled 20.1 billion global hectares or 2.8 global hectares per person, meaning about 65% more was consumed than produced. This is possible because there are natural reserves all around the globe that function as backup food, material and energy supplies, although only for a relatively short period of time."

Those quotes are from Wikipedia's short article on "global hectares", which may serve to clarify what I am talking about here.

Overpopulation or Overconsumption?

The second issue was a disagreement about whether overpopulation or overconsumption is the main problem contributing to the overshoot situation we are facing. Opinions on this seem to lie on a spectrum, interestingly coinciding somewhat with the left to right political spectrum. In my discussion of this below, I'll be disregarding the people who don't think there is a problem to worry about at all, who don't believe that we are or ever will be in overshoot. They are either in denial or have immense and unjustified faith in progress and technology. But that is a whole different story.

First I should note that the problem is not just that there are too many people or that they are consuming too much, but also that both our population and our consumption are growing. Even if we didn't have a problem yet, growth means that we soon would have. Of course, we clearly do have a problem and have had since the 1980s when our impact went above the carrying capacity of the planet. Growth just means it's getting continual worse.

My friends on the left aren't terribly concerned about overpopulation. What they are concerned about is excessive consumption by the upper class. If that can be eliminated, and the lot of the poor improved accordingly, they believe that the demographic transition will continue and population will peak out at a level that the planet can support. They also speak about reducing waste in the food production system, which would be a good idea. And they have quite a bit of faith that technology will assist with all of this. If you suggest that we should be actively trying to reduce our population, they may well label you as an "eco-fascist".

Which brings us to the other end of the spectrum, where there actually are some eco-fascists. But most of the people I know who are saying that overpopulation is the source of our problems also acknowledge that over-consumption is a big concern. They mention overpopulation first because they are concerned that it doesn't get enough attention.

There are some people, though, who focus entirely on overpopulation and believe the overconsumption is solely the result of overpopulation. Worse yet, they take the fact that an abundance of food facilitates population growth and then jump to the conclusion that having less food available is the only effective way to get our population to decrease. The problem with that idea is that it doesn't fit the facts.

First, these folks will tell you that we are continually increasing the food supply and because of this the population is growing at a steady 1.4% per year. In fact, while the level of food production has been increasing, the population growth rate peaked in the 1960s at around 2% and has been decreasing since then, to around 1.05% in 2020.

In the developed nations the population growth rate has decreased to below the replacement level in many cases. And that is with an excess of food.

In the developing world, fertility and the population growth rate are still high. This despite the fact that many people are suffering from malnutrition—around eight hundred million globally, most of them in the developing world.

The eco-fascists say that if the food supply was gradually decreased, gradually increasing malnutrition would cause a reduction in fertility and with it falling population growth rates, and without causing undue hardship. But while severe malnutrition does reduce fertility, the response of fertility to minor levels of malnutrition is much more complex.

As for avoiding hardship, in the real world of markets where we ration by price, if there is a shortage of food then the price of food goes up, and the poorest people in the affected area experience what amounts to famine driven by economics. In many cultures this is more likely to spark a revolution than to decrease fertility, as it did in several countries when food prices spiked at the start of what has been called the "Arab Spring". This was less a matter of a sudden desire for democracy than a reaction to an increase in the price of food.

The negative effects of a plan to control population growth rate by reducing the food supply would fall disproportionally on poor, brown people, and this is where the term "eco-fascist" arises. Labels aside, oppressing the poor and weak seems to me like a pretty despicable thing to do. Especially since it would not, as we'll see in a moment, achieve the desired result of reducing our degree of overshoot.

Even though my politics are pretty far left, my ideas on overpopulation versus overconsumption lay somewhere in the middle of the spectrum. I've been looking at humanity's impact on the planet using the I=PAT approach, which considers the effects of population, affluence (consumption) and technology. It's pretty clear that our impact is already greater than the carrying capacity of the planet (about 165%), with both population and consumption contributing to this, and both continuing to grow. It is clear that the per capita level of consumption is increasing, so that something beyond just population growth is driving growth of consumption. You mighty characterize this as "increasing affluence", which gives the problem a name, but doesn't do much to solve it.

It is also important to keep in mind that where ever our impact is greater than the carrying capacity, the ecosystem is being damaged, and carrying capacity decreases. This makes our situation even worse.

Much of our current consumption relies on non-renewable resources. As these resources become depleted, it costs more and requires more energy to access them. This takes us further into overshoot in a way that I don't think is adequately represented by footprint or impact measures. The depletion of resources we rely on, and don't have adequate substitutes for, is a major driver of collapse.

For a long lived species such as ours, there is a lengthy delay between reducing the rate at which our population grows, and actually reducing the population. At best, if the demographic transition keeps spreading in the developing world, and the population growth rate continues to decrease, it will be many decades before our population stops growing. During that time our impact will almost certainly exceed the carrying capacity of the planet by a much greater extent than it does at present. I would expect this will result in a significant dieoff of the human population.

So, I believe we should still do everything we can to reduce population growth, including educating women, striving to give them more control over their lives, and making birth control more readily available. We should not do anything that would be morally abhorrent, lest the solution be worse than the problem.

We also need to look elsewhere for something that can be done to reduce our impact in the short run, before overshoot catches up with us.

In the decades since Paul Erlich proposed the I=PAT approach, many have turned to technology as the most promising way to reduce our impact. It is the only approach that doesn't call for significant changes in lifestyle, especially for rich people. Sadly, no real technological solutions have been forth coming. The oft promised "decoupling" hasn't happened, and there is good reason to think that it won't ever. Many new technologies actually consume more, especially more energy—take bit coin, for example. I'll go into that in more detail in an upcoming post.

The only remaining alternative to reduce our impact would be to reduce consumption. This is something most people are unwilling to do, but I believe we that must, and that we can. While overpopulation will take a long time to address, overconsumption can be reduced almost immediately, as we have seen during the current pandemic.

Consider the graph below, which charts world income deciles against consumption.

Figure 1

I guess it's no surprise that richer people consume more, but how much more is pretty shocking.

Based on this graph, 59% of consumption is done by the top 10% of the richest people in the world. The bottom 50% of the people, the poorest people in the world, do only 7.2% of the consumption. If we were to get rid of the bottom 50% of our population, it would have very little effect, leaving our impact at 153% of carrying capacity( .928 times 1.65 = 1.53). On the other hand, if we were to get rid of the richest 10%, it would reduce our impact to 68% of carrying capacity(.41 times 1.65 = .68). Of course, I am not proposing that we set out to "get rid" of anybody, but this does show why I think that we should be looking at reducing consumption as well as population. And why I think people who want to stop poor folks from breeding are barking up the wrong tree.

Before we can take a close look at what drives consumption, and the growth of consumption, I think we need to look at several touchy subjects—human nature, our needs and wants, and politics. I'll do that in my next post.

Here is some additional reading on the subject of population growth and malnutrition: https://www.karger.com/Article/Pdf/4523


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Saturday, 2 January 2021

Collapse you say? Part 4: growth, overshoot and dieoff

Nature's Ice Sculptures Along Lake Huron

On the rare occasions when the subject of collapse comes up in polite conversation, a kollapsnik like me is liable to get responses like: "Collapse you say? Surely not!" Thus the title of this series of posts. But I've found that responding with "Surely yes!" isn't very effective (as well as sounding rather childish). The pandemic this year (2020) has got some people thinking a bit more, but most still expect things to get back to normal any day now.

So in this series of posts I've been talking about what collapse is and why I think the our civilization has been slowly collapsing for several decades and will continue doing so. This in the hope of laying out the facts clearly enough that just about anyone should be able to recognize the seriousness of the situation.

In the last two posts(Part 2, Part 3), I looked at problems with the inputs to and outputs from our civilization, and pointed out a number of issues, any one of which alone should be cause for great concern. And taken together, well....

Now I think it is time to have a look inside the box labeled "Industrial Civilization". When you look around you from within this civilization, you are confronted with a complex and confusing sight, of which I don't have any sort of complete understanding. But there are some aspects which bear more directly on collapse than others, and I'll have quite a bit to say about them in the next few posts.

The problems we've looked at so far—resource depletion, declining surplus energy, climate change, overshoot and decreasing carrying capacity—all seem to be a result of the ongoing growth of our civilization, both population growth and growth in affluence. So you would think we'd be making a serious effort to get growth under control, maybe even initiate "degrowth", in order to cope with these problems. And yet, over the last few decades economic growth has come to be seen as a necessity. If you paid attention to election speeches, you'd conclude that the most pressing problem we face is maintaining and further stimulating such growth, not preventing it. It seems to me that this obsession with growth is a built in feature (dare we say a fault) of our civilization.

To more clearly understand our impact on the planet—our footprint—we need to review the subjects I touched on at the end of my last post: eco-system services, carrying capacity, and overshoot. Eco-system services are things like breathable air, potable water, a reliable climate and moderate weather, arable soil, grasslands, forests and the animals living on/in them, waters and the fisheries they provide, and so on. And also important, though I neglected to mention it in my last post, is the ability of the eco-system to (within limits) absorb and process our waste products. All these things are available to us free of charge and we simply could not do without them.

It is reasonable to call the rate at which the eco-system can supply those services to us its "carrying capacity". The portion of those services that the human race uses can be called our "footprint"—the impact we have as we walk upon this planet.

According to the Wikipedia article on carrying capacity, credible estimates of carrying capacity range from 4 to 16 billion humans, with a median around 10 billion. The literature I've read on carrying capacity and dieoff typically talks about us currently being at around 165% of the planet's carrying capacity. If such estimates were made when our population was around 7 billion, then the carrying capacity was a little over 4 billion. That's at the low end of the range of estimates, which seems prudent. Using the high or even median estimates would lead us to do nothing in the belief that everything is OK and may well continue to be OK. Instead, we should be setting ourselves up to run well below carrying capacity, allowing us to live on this planet without damaging it and with a comfortable margin to allow for unforeseen circumstances.

Being over carrying capacity is called being in overshoot, and it leads to collapse. Some of the extra over 100% comes from consuming non-renewable resources, and some of it comes from using renewable resources at greater than their replacement rate, so that they too are irreversibly consumed. This means that we are actually reducing the carrying capacity of the planet and digging ourselves into an ever deeper hole. Certainly judging from the resource depletion and pollution (mainly climate change) problems we're currently experiencing, it seems that we are indeed in overshoot, and the condition of the ecosphere is definitely worsening.

If we are to solve the problems caused by our overshoot we need not just to reduce our impact below the current carrying capacity of the planet, but rather to go below the smaller carrying capacity that will be left by the time we get to where we are aiming. Further, since it is a big planet with different conditions in different places, we can't just look at global averages, but must consider impact versus carrying capacity on a region by region basis. This to avoid being fooled if we are lucky enough to live in an area that is not as yet hard hit. In much of Europe and North America, it seems we are currently being fooled.

Our footprint (impact) is expressed in the following equation: I=PAT.

"I" stands for impact, or footprint, which is the product of three factors:

  • "P", which stands for population.
  • "A", which stands for affluence, or consumption of resources.
  • "T", which stands for technology, and is included in the hope that improving technology can reduce our impact

We seem determined to do whatever it takes to increase "I", no matter how negative the results. Is this because of something inherent about human beings, or the way we organize ourselves, or the circumstances we find ourselves in? Or perhaps all three combined together?

In the rest of this post and the following one we'll look at this from the viewpoint of our growing population. In future posts we'll look at the role affluence and technology play in our problems.

But first I think we need to understand something about the mathematics of growth. In cases where the rate of growth is related to the size of what's growing, growth is "exponential". If you chart such growth on a graph, it looks something like this:

Figure 1, The Exponential Function

This is the kind of growth you get with a compound interest savings account, where even if the interest rate stays the same, the balance in the account increases dramatically over time. It is convenient to look at exponent growth in terms of the doubling rate, the amount of time it takes for that bank account to double. A rule of thumb is to divide 70 by the percent growth rate per year, and that gives you the approximate doubling period in years. If you are lucky enough to get 10% interest, your savings will double in 7 years. At 5% interest it takes 14 years to double and at 1% interest, it takes 70 years to double.

What may not be clear from Figure 1 is the degree to which the curve takes off as it moves to the right. Growth is very slow at first until we reach the "knee" of the curve, then it goes right through the roof, so to speak. A great deal has been said about how exponential growth is counter-intuitive for most people. Here is a short (not quite two minutes) YouTube video about the subject. If you have a little more time (11 minutes), this video goes deeper into it.

But in the physical world, growth consumes resources, which are only available at a certain maximum rate and can a only support so large a population. At some point the rate of growth starts to decrease and the curve levels off rather than continuing upwards. So the exponential curve doesn't really give us a very good picture of how growth actually works. For that we need to look at the logistic function.

Figure 2, The Logistic Function

Of course the logistic function assumes a constant supply of whatever it takes to support a population, so that the right side of the curve levels off and stays flat. Again, the real world doesn't exactly work like that. In the real world it is possible to go into overshoot, and over consume resources so that the rate at which the system can supply them is reduced. This results in something like the curve shown below.

Figure 3, Overshoot and Dieoff

The population in this case is of some sort of simple organism with a more or less fixed consumption rate per individual, and a growth rate determined by the availability of food. I have chosen to show the worst case scenario where the population we are considering declines to zero because of decreased carrying capacity and the rest of the ecosystem is so badly damaged by the overshoot that it dies out as well.

Fortunately, this is not necessarily the case—as the population goes into dieoff it eventually goes below even the reduced the carrying capacity of the environment and quits damaging the environment. The environment, if the damage is small enough, may be able to recover, even if the species that was in overshoot doesn't. If it recovers enough before the population under consideration goes extinct, that population may be able to recover as well, something like this:

Figure 4, Overshoot, Dieoff and Recovery

What happens as time progresses off the right end of the graph varies. The population may go into overshoot again, then die off and recover, and this may be repeat on an ongoing basis. Or, at any point along the way, a dieoff could lead to extinction. In any case the idea that there is a "balance of nature" that would cause the population to level out just below the carrying capacity is largely bogus. Things are always changing and don't stay balanced forever, or even for very long.

So now that we've looked at growth in general, we need to look in detail at the growth of the human population of this planet. Because human populations can change their growth rates, their levels of consumption and even the carrying capacity of their environment, this is complex, and I'm going to devote the whole of my next post to the subject. In short, though, based on the ideas of carrying capacity, overshoot and our capacity for growth, I am not in the least dissuaded from my predictions of collapse,"dieoff" in the language we've been using in this post.

This has turned out to be quite a short post, mainly because I have split it in two and saved the slightly longer second half for next time. So, there is room here for a couple of graphics about carrying capacity and ecological footprint.

Figure 5, Biocapacity and Ecological Footprint

This an interesting and possibly misleading graph, which compares the carrying capacity (biocapacity) of various countries with their consumption, on a per capita basis. The units on the vertical axis are "global hectares per capita, Gha".The Wikipedia article on GHA is a short and informative read. Here is one central paragraph:

"Global hectares per person" refers to the amount of production and waste assimilation per person on the planet. In 2012 there were approximately 12.2 billion global hectares of production and waste assimilation, averaging 1.7 global hectares per person. Consumption totaled 20.1 billion global hectares or 2.8 global hectares per person, meaning about 65% more was consumed than produced. This is possible because there are natural reserves all around the globe that function as backup food, material and energy supplies, although only for a relatively short period of time. Due to rapid population growth, these reserves are being depleted at an ever increasing tempo. See Earth Overshoot Day

To understand what I mean by misleading, take a look at Canada, the country where I live. The graph might make it seem that we are doing fine, since we have a large biocapacity compared to our population. but our per capita consumption (ecological footprint) at 7 Gha is among the highest in the world.

Figure 6, Footprint in terms of "Planets"

Another way of looking at footprint is to calculate how many planets like Earth it would take if everyone on Earth today lived like they do in a certain country. As is so often the case, Canada is left out of Figure 6, but a little calculation using the numbers in Figure 5, leads me to believe that if everyone lived like we do in Canada, we'd need around 4.4Earths. I find that quite a sobering idea.


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Friday, 26 October 2018

Responding to collapse, Part 3: Declining Surplus Energy

Canada Geese enjoying a calm day on Lake Huron

In my last post I talked about responding to changes in our "natural" environment caused by climate change. Today I'll be talking about responding to changes in the human part of our environment, the part that we have created, both the "built" physical environment and the social environment.

We are social animals and also technological (tool using) animals. For the last few million years our ancestors evolved to live in groups and use technology. In one way of looking at it, our techniques for working together in groups are an organizational technology that greatly amplifies what we could do alone.

At any rate, for a long time now we have been dependent on technology—we certainly aren't much good alone, naked and empty handed. Technology needs energy to make it work and for most of our history that energy has come from food via muscles (human or animal), biomass (mainly firewood), and to a lesser extent wind, moving water and the sun. But over the last couple of centuries we've added cheap and abundant fossil fuels to that mix of energy sources. We've gradually become dependent on a global network of complex technology powered by those fuels for the very necessities of life.

This is a cause for concern—what if energy were to become more expensive and/or less abundant? As it certainly seems likely to do in the near future. Well, in short, the way we live would have to change, becoming less energy intensive, and it seems very likely that the planet would no longer be able to support so very many of us. It can barely support the number of us that are alive today, so this would mean a significant dieoff of the human population. And the climate change related problems we talked about last time will only make this worse.

Of course this is nothing new. I've discussed the ideas of carrying capacity, overshoot and dieoff many times over the years on this blog. But the devil, as they say, is in the details and if we are to discuss strategies for living through collapse, we need to look closely at those details.

The economy is a major and critically important part of the modern human environment and one that is fueled by energy, so I see depletion of fossil fuel energy resources (often referred to as Peak Oil) as the major challenge as far as the human built environment goes. To really understand that challenge, it is important to understand a bit about "biophysical" or "surplus energy" economics. Have a look at those links for more detail, but I'll try to explain in brief.

First, why is energy so critical to the functioning of the economy? Modern industrial processes are significantly more productive than the cottage industry of just a few hundred years ago, and it requires a lot of energy to make them work. The energy that drives these processes is worth far more in terms of the goods it produces than the price that industry pays for it. As such, energy is far more than just another commodity. And it must be abundant and cheap, if industry is to be profitable and the economy is to continue growing.

Second, why are fossil fuels such an important source of energy? Basically because they have been abundant, cheap and convenient to use. When I say cheap, I am not just talking about the cost in dollars, but in the amount of energy it takes to access fossil fuel energy. This is defined as the "Energy Returned on Energy Invested" (EROEI). Early in the twentieth century, when oil came into prominence as an energy source, it took just one barrel of oil to get 100 barrels of oil out of the ground—the EROEI was 100. The "surplus energy" was over 99% and this was a tremendous stimulus for economic growth.

Since we have developed fossil fuel resources on a "lowest hanging fruit" basis, the easiest to access, highest quality sources have gradually been used up. Modern oil discoveries rarely have an EROEI better than 10. Unconventional sources of oil, such as fracking and tar sands, have even lower EROEIs. And sadly, the renewable energy sources that are being considered to replace fossil fuels also have very low EROEIs. Even lower if you add in the energy storage required if intermittent sources like wind and solar are to be put into practical use.

The important thing to understand here is that there is a very clear link between the average EROEI of a country's energy sources and the strength of its economy. As that average EROEI goes down, industry starts to become less and less profitable. Below 15 this gets very serious—it becomes difficult to raise capital to start new endeavours and existing businesses find it hard to stay profitable. As the average EROEI decreases further, infrastructure replacement and even routine maintenance of infrastructure becomes difficult to fund. Industrial civilization starts to crumble and the kinds of heroic efforts it would take to save it are beyond its capabilities.

Conventional economists are blind to this and assume that as one energy source runs out, demand will successfully fuel efforts to find a substitute. Without a clear understanding of EROEI, evaluating the merits of such substitutes can be very difficult. Already we are seeing "energy sprawl" as wind turbines and solar panels are springing up everywhere, but with such low EROEIs that they are actually lowering the average EROEIs of the systems they are being added to.

Some people argue that there are huge reserves of unconventional fossil fuels, enough to last for centuries, "so where's the problem?" The problem is that these unconventional hydrocarbons have such low EROEIs that they are not a solution—pursuing them just makes things worse.

The same is true of nuclear fission—lots of fuel, but such a low EROEI (around 9) that it's no help. If at some point we manage to design practical fusion reactors, it is pretty clear that they will be so complex that their EROEI will be even lower than fission reactors, making the abundance of fusion fuel a moot point.

The essence of our situation here in the early twenty first century is that the problem of declining surplus energy doesn't have a solution. Of course, in addition to that underlying and insoluble problem, there are lots of things wrong with our social/governmental/economic systems that make the situation even worse. Definitely it would help to fix these problems, but it is important to keep in mind that, even if they were all fixed, everything wouldn't suddenly be OK—the main problem would still exist. And because of declining surplus energy, it's going to get harder and harder to fix anything.

So, what to do? Well, we just have to adapt to these new realities. Here I am going to borrow some ideas from Prof. Jem Bendell's essay "Deep Adaptation", particularly his three Rs.

Bendell is mainly concerned with climate change and after doing a review of the current findings of climate science, he concludes that "collapse is inevitable, catastrophe is likely and extinction is possible". Considering declining surplus energy and the resulting economic contraction as well as climate change leads me to the same conclusions, maybe more so. Even without any catastrophic events, the slow collapse of industrial civilization, brought on by the falling EROEI of its energy sources, is surely an inevitability. And we should be planning our response to such a slow and tedious collapse, which will require a great deal of adaptation to our new circumstances.

There are many forms of denial that people fall into when faced with the certainly of collapse. Not surprisingly, most people see their continued livelihood and their feelings of self-worth as being dependent on the possibility of ongoing material progress. This is the "religion of progress" which is so central to our modern society. Collapse, of course, means the end of material of progress, and immersion in a complex predicament beyond our control. Admitting this is even possible has, at least initially, a crushing effect on most people.

But, for those who have overcome their denial, Bendell's three Rs hold the key to successful adaptation.

First comes "Resilience". This means having the personal resources—emotional toughness to keep going in the face of collapse and the willingness to adapt to conditions that we have been taught are simply unacceptable (involving a significant reduction in our level of comfort and convenience). I am currently reading Resilience, by Rick Hanson, which gives an abundance of advice on achieving a greater degree of personal, internal resilience.

The alternative is to continue with denial, or having accepted the reality of the situation, give up and abandon any attempt to adapt. To do so is a great pity, since the situation is potentially survivable. Not to minimize the rigors of collapse, especially of the kind of dieoff we will eventually be facing, but there is good reason to think that some of us will survive, find a livelihood and maintain a sense of self worth even with drastically reduced consumption of energy and material goods.

In order to be among those who survive, resilience also involves having accumulated some physical and social resources which will tide us through when the system that currently supports us falls apart, allowing us to hang in there long enough so that we have a chance to adapt. These are the things we will decide we do really need to keep in order to meet our basic needs—safety, satisfaction and connection. Our ancestors did this for millions of years without the help of industrial civilization, so I think there is some chance we can do so as well.

Next comes "Relinquishment". This means deciding what we need to let go of in order to not make matters worse. Clearly, many aspects of modern industrial society cannot be sustained and will have to be abandoned.

Lastly comes "Restoration". This means deciding what can we bring back to help us with the coming difficulties and tragedies. In building our modern world there is much that we have set aside, old things that can brought back and put to good use in our low energy future.

I could spend one or more posts looking at the details of these three Rs, and it is likely that I will. I think there are many different approaches that should be tried, and of those, quite a few that will be successful to some degree. The main thing is that people actually give it a try.

So, we started out to have a closer look at the details of collapse in order to gain a better perspective on strategies for living through collapse and after it. I think an understanding of surplus energy's role in economics and the three Rs outlined above is a good start. But to delve deeper into this, I think we need to take a look at mankind's disturbing tendency to group together in ever large settlements. We tend to focus on the advantages of living in cities and to ignore what it takes to make a city work, how it can stop and what might happen when it does.

Cities rely on long supply lines and extensive infrastructure to supply their inhabitants. Our failure to maintain that infrastructure and its resulting decay is already leading to intermittent outages of services for which there is no local alternative. At some point the line between outage and catastrophe blurs and not long after that it becomes unavoidably clear that collapse is really happening.

Now I am a country boy, so perhaps I am biased, but it is my contention that cities are going to be very hard hit by collapse, even the sort of slow collapse that I am talking about. I think that escaping to a more rural area before collapse progresses much further would be a good idea.

The key question, though, is why do I think things will be any better in rural areas?

There is no doubt in my mind that the crises related to supplies of energy, water and food (the basic necessities), which will no doubt occur as industrial civilization crumbles, will effect rural areas just as much as urban ones. People in rural areas are just as much a part of "Business As Usual" as people in the city, just as dependent on long supply chains and complex systems. And when there are disasters, relief efforts are likely to be focused on large population centres, ignoring the rural areas just on the basis of what will help the most people with the least effort.

But we are already seeing the US federal government tapering back on relief efforts in response to hurricanes and passing the responsibility off to the private sector. There is little reason to believe they will do any better. And not far down the road local communities, be they urban or rural, will find themselves essentially on their own when the going gets tough.

The good news is that there are many rural areas where:

  • adequate energy can be had locally in the form of firewood which can be cut by hand
  • potable water can be accessed from already existing wells that can be converted to hand or wind driven pumps and surface water that can be used with fairly simple filtration or treatment
  • sufficient food for the local population can be grown on existing farmland within walking distance of town, without fossil fuel powered machinery

Sure, it will require some degree of advance preparation and a willingness to adapt our lifestyles, but it is all quite doable. This is not the case in the city, where local resources for self-sufficient living are simply not available.

When I speak of rural areas, let me make it clear that I am talking about small towns of a few hundred to a few thousand people, surrounded by farmland, not isolated farmsteads. It will take more than a single family or two to make this work. Indeed isolation is one of the most debilitating conditions that you can find yourself in as a human being.

During the last few decades neoliberalism, in its endless search for profit, has done its best to monetize every human relationship and to isolate individuals from each other. The declining economy is leading to increased under employment and unemployment, poverty and homelessness all of which stresses our communities and isolates their individual members. And civil unrest is growing as inequality between the upper and lower classes increases and the degree to which the lower classes are being abandoned becomes more obvious.

But many small towns are a long way behind cities on that curve and their communities are still intact enough that co-operation is possible when it becomes clear what is required. And during a slow collapse it will gradually become more clear what the situation really is. To enough people, at least, that those advance preparations will get made. Collapse aware people have an important role to play there.

For a long time now, young people have been moving from areas like the one where I live to the cities in order to get an education and find work. The day will come (as I understand it already has as conditions have worsened in Greece) when the situation in the cities will be so bad, they will start to come home to take advantage of the somewhat better situation in the country. They will be able to pitch in and help their families adapt to collapse.

So far I have been talking about adapting during a slow and steady collapse. But of course catastrophic events can by no means be ruled out. In particular, our financial systems are largely virtual and as such are subject to extremely fast collapse when they fail. They will be the first to go, and that will have a negative effect on everything else.

It appears to me that most real economic growth ended in the 1990s and since then growth has largely taken the form of financial bubbles, fueled by debt instead of energy. Those who have money are desperate to find somewhere to invest it at a good return, but profitable, growing businesses are becoming rare, so instead they invest in ever more speculative endeavours. That's fine as long as the price is going up, but every such bubble is looking for a pin to burst it. A few months ago I said that we can expect a financial crash of greater magnitude than 1929 or 2008, sometime in the next few years and nothing has happened since then to change my opinion.

Already we have had a minor spike in the price of oil, trouble for the currencies of emerging market countries, and some indication that the long running bull market may be coming to an end. We are in the middle of this and it isn't yet clear if this is the start of a recession, or if the economy will rally and put off the big crash for some months or years yet.

When that crash does happen, I think that even in cities most of the population will survive the initial days of a financial collapse, mainly because of heroic efforts on the part of individuals in shop floor and low level management positions in supply chain and infrastructure organizations. The people at the tops of those organizations will be largely paralyzed, or at worst doing exactly the wrong thing. But even a worldwide financial collapse will hit some areas harder than others and will proceed, as I have said before, unevenly, unsteadily and unequally. And that's a good thing, because it means when things get really bad locally, there may well be someplace to go where things are better.

I expect there will be some reduction in our population due to supply chain failures following financial crashes. But the big dieoff that lies ahead of us will happen when industrial scale agriculture (both conventional and organic) comes hard up against resource limits—mainly fossil fuels and mineral fertilizers.

Still, it is possible that in the wake of a financial crash the stereotype of a city full of people starving in the dark with no help in sight will occur occasionally. For the vast majority of the unprepared people in that city this will not be a survivable scenario. For anyone who really has no other choice but to stay in the city for now, it might be best to have a few weeks of food, water, etc. on hand and plan to stay at home during such a situation, keeping a very low profile, until things settle down and only then head for the country.

But you and I, of course, will have long since moved to a small town at a safe distance from the city. The standard trope in discussions of collapse involves our little town being overrun with roving hordes of hungry people engaged in looting and other forms of violence. I think this is unlikely. The key is to be farther away from the city than most of its population can walk on empty stomachs, which is not that great a distance. Thirst and starvation are debilitating and most people will not think to head out until they are quite desperate.

A few people will no doubt make it through though. It is my opinion that it would be better for everyone involved to welcome them with food and medical assistance, rather than fight them off with guns. It will be a bit of a trick to be set up to do that and in my next post I will look at the practicalities of moving to a small town in the country and getting ready to cope as the pace of collapse increases.


Links to the rest of this series of posts, Preparing for (Responding to) Collapse:

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