The Party's Over Part 8

Therefore extreme dislocations in both the financial system and the human matter-energy economy are likely during the energy transition. The exact form these dislocations will take is difficult to foresee. Efforts could be made to artificially pump up the financial system through government borrowing - perhaps to finance military adventures. Such ma.s.sive, inflationary borrowing might flood markets with money that would be losing its value so quickly as to become nearly worthless. On the other hand, if inflationary efforts are not undertaken quickly or strenuously enough when needed, then the flagging rate of loans might cause money to disappear from the economy; in that case, catastrophic deflation would result. As was true in the Great Depression, what little money was available would have high purchasing power, but there would simply be too little of it to go around. Unemployment, resource and product shortages, bankruptcies, bank failures, and mortgage foreclosures would proliferate.

It is entirely possible that, over a period of decades, both inflationary and deflationary episodes may occur; however, due to the lack of a stable linkage between money and energy, periods of financial stability will likely be rare and brief.

Continued population growth, even at reduced rates, will put added strain on support systems and exacerbate the existing inherent requirement for economic growth.

Who will feel the pain? Most likely, the poor will feel it first and hardest. This will probably be true both nationally and internationally, as rich nations will likely seek to obtain energy resources from the poorer nations that have them by financial chicanery or outright military seizure. Eventually, however, everyone will be affected.

Some comforts, even luxuries, will probably continue to be available in most countries; but regardless of whether the financial environment is inflationary or deflationary, nearly everything that is genuinely useful will become relatively more expensive because the energy employed in its extraction or production will have grown more rare and valuable.

Transportation.

The automobile is one of the most energy-intensive modes of transportation ever invented. This is true not just because of its direct use of fuel (a lightly loaded bus, airliner, or train actually uses more fuel per pa.s.senger-mile) but for the energy embodied in the construction of so many individual units that require replacement every few years. The rate of car owners.h.i.+p in the US is now 775 per thousand people - nearly the highest in the world - and many less-consuming nations, such as China, are foolishly seeking to emulate the American love affair with the automobile. Because increased car owners.h.i.+p results in changed patterns of urban development and resource distribution, it creates social dependency. Wherever this dependency has taken hold, it will have ruinous consequences in the coming century.

Over the short term, more energy-efficient cars will be built, including gasoline-electric hybrids, and perhaps some hydrogen-powered models. But the relentless economics of the energy decline will mean that - eventually but inevitably - fewer cars will be built. Only the wealthy will be able to afford them. The global fleet of autos will gradually age and diminish in number through attrition. For a peek at the year 2050, look to Cuba - where 50-year-old Fords and Plymouths are still in service because virtually no newer ones have been imported from the US due to the trade embargo.

During the 20th century, millions of miles of roads and highways were built for automobile and truck traffic, at extraordinary expense. The Los Angeles Freeway, for example, cost taxpayers $127 million per mile to construct. In fiscal 1995 alone, local, state, and federal governments in the US spent $80 billion on roads and highways. Last century's prodigious road-building feat - dwarfing any of the wonders of the ancient world - was only possible because oil was cheap. Asphalt incorporates large quant.i.ties of oil, and road-building machines run on refined petroleum. In the decades ahead, road building will grind to a halt and existing roads will gradually disintegrate as even repair efforts become unaffordable.

Countries with good public transportation - street cars, buses, subways, and trains - will be much better poised than the US to weather the energy transition. Ma.s.s-transit users typically spend $200 to $2,000 per year for travel, considerably less than car owners spend. Also, when well utilized, ma.s.s-transit systems consume much less energy per pa.s.senger mile than do automobiles. In her book Divorce Your Car! Ending the Love Affair with the Automobile, Katie Alvord points out that "[w]hile a single automobile uses over 5,000 BTUs per pa.s.senger mile, a train car carrying 19 people uses about 2,300 and a bus carrying the same number only about 1,000."1 However, the construction of ma.s.s-transit systems itself requires a sizable energy investment, and the US - where the development or maintenance of ma.s.s transit was actively discouraged in favor of the private automobile - will find it increasingly difficult to make such investments.

Modern pa.s.senger jets run on high-grade kerosene refined from oil. The only likely replacement fuels are ethanol and hydrogen, which would offer some advantages but also pose serious problems.

Ethanol produced from bioma.s.s would be expensive to produce in quant.i.ty and would require the redesign of jet engines; existing propeller-driven aircraft could burn ethanol more readily. However, as discussed in the previous chapter, the net energy gain from ethanol production is at best minimal, and the amount that could be produced is limited by the amount of available cropland.

Hydrogen contains three times as much energy per unit of weight as does kerosene, which means that only one-third as much fuel would have to be carried by hydrogen-burning planes to cover a similar range. However, hydrogen's lower density requires the complete redesign of aeronautic fuel tanks. In order to reduce the s.p.a.ce needed for hydrogen storage, the fuel would need to be kept in liquid form at minus 285 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 253 degrees Celsius). But even then the specific volume of hydrogen is twelve times greater than that of kerosene, so hydrogen storage tanks would necessarily be much larger than those for kerosene. Moreover, with such low temperatures being maintained on board the aircraft, considerable insulation would be required, which would add to aircraft weight. Other technical problems include the requirement for a redesign of aircraft engines to properly burn the alternative fuel.

NASA experimented with hydrogen-powered aircraft in the 1950s and 1960s, when a B-57 jet bomber flew partially on liquid hydrogen. The former Soviet Union also tried hydrogen experimentally, converting one of the three engines of a Tupolev 154 pa.s.senger jet to liquid hydrogen. Currently, NASA is supporting new research on hydrogen-powered aircraft. But as of today there are no commercial airliners that run on hydrogen, nor are any likely to be built for at least two decades.

As we saw in the previous chapter, the production of hydrogen in large quant.i.ties presents problems - both from the standpoint of the need for natural gas as a feedstock and because of the low net-energy yield for most of the electricity sources that could produce hydrogen from water through electrolysis.

There is thus no doubt that, whether it depends on kerosene, ethanol, or hydrogen, air travel will become extremely expensive as the 21st century wears on. Given that oil will still be available throughout most of the coming century, though at much higher prices, it is possible that rich individuals will continue to avail themselves of air travel in some form and that the military will increasingly commandeer dwindling flight fuels for fighters, bombers, helicopters, and missiles. But it is highly unlikely that the commercial airline industry as we know it today will survive any attempted transition to ethanol or hydrogen. As a result, the tourism industry will languish in the decades ahead. This could have devastating effects on places like Hawaii, whose economies are almost entirely dependent on tourism.

But even more serious consequences of reduced transportation will be felt in disruptions in the distribution of goods. In the 1980s and '90s, increased global trade resulted in the moving of products and raw materials ever further distances from source to end user. As transportation fuels dwindle - for air, sea, and land travel - we will see an inevitable return to local production for local consumption. But this process of "globalization in reverse" will not be without difficulty, since local production infrastructures were often cannibalized in the building of the global economy. For example, no large shoe companies continue to manufacture their products in the US. Unfortunately, the rebuilding of local production infrastructures will be problematic with less energy available.

Food and Agriculture.

Throughout the 20th century, food production expanded dramatically in country after country, and virtually all of this increase was directly or indirectly attributable to energy inputs. Since 1940, the productivity of US farmland has grown at an average rate of two percent per year - roughly the same pace as that by which oil consumption has increased. Overall, global food production approximately tripled during the 20th century, just keeping pace with population growth.

Modern industrial agriculture has become energy-intensive in every respect. Tractors and other farm machinery burn diesel fuel or gasoline; nitrogen fertilizers are produced from natural gas; pesticides and herbicides are synthesized from oil; seeds, chemicals, and crops are transported long distances by truck; and foods are often cooked with natural gas and packaged in oil-derived plastics before reaching the consumer. If food-production efficiency is measured by the ratio between the amount of energy input required to produce a given amount of food and the energy contained in that food, then industrial agriculture is by far the least efficient form of food production ever practiced. Traditional forms of agriculture produced a small solar-energy surplus: each pound of food contained somewhat more stored energy from sunlight than humans, often with the help of animals, had to expend in growing it. That meager margin was what sustained life. Today, from farm to plate, depending on the degree to which it has been processed, a typical food item may embody input energy between four and several hundred times its food energy. This energy deficit can only be maintained because of the availability of cheap fossil fuels, a temporary gift from the Earth's geologic past.

While the application of fossil energy to farming has raised productivity, income to farmers has not kept pace. For consumers, food is cheap; but farmers often find themselves spending more to produce a crop than they can sell it for. As a result, many farmers have given up their way of life and sought urban employment. In industrialized countries, the proportion of the population that farms full-time fell precipitously during the 20th century. In 1880, 70.5 percent of the population of the United States were rural; by 1910, the rural population had already declined to 53.7 percent. In the US today, there are so few full-time farmers that census forms for the year 2000 included no such category in their list of occupations.

Mechanization favors large-scale farming operations. In 1900, the average size of a farm in Iowa was 150 acres; in 2000, it was well over twice that figure. However, the proportion of food produced by family farmers on a few hundred acres is itself dwindling; the trend is toward production by agribusiness corporations that farm thousands, even tens or hundreds of thousands of acres. In addition, a few giant multinational corporations control the production and distribution of seed, agricultural chemicals, and farm equipment, while other huge corporations control national and international crop wholesaling.

The transportation of food ever further distances has led to the globalization of food systems. Rich industrialized nations have used loans, bribes, and military force to persuade nations with indigenous populations surviving on small-scale, traditional subsistence cultivation to remove peasants from the land and grow monocrops for export. In the early part of the 20th century this practice gave rise to the phrase "banana republic," but the latter half of the century only saw the trend increase. In nation after nation, tiny subsistence plots were joined together into huge corporate-owned plantations producing coffee, tea, sugar, nuts, or tropical fruits for consumers in the US, Europe, and the increasingly prosperous countries of the Far East. Meanwhile, the ranks of the urban poor grew as peasants from the countryside flocked to shantytowns on the outskirts of places like Mexico City, Lagos, Sao Paulo, and Djakarta.

Today in North America, food travels an average of 1,300 miles from farm to plate. Consumers in Minneapolis and Toronto enjoy mangoes, papayas, and avocados year-round. In London, b.u.t.ter from New Zealand is cheaper than b.u.t.ter from Devon.

The production of meat and the harvesting of fish have likewise resulted in more energy consumption over the course of recent decades. A carnivorous diet is inherently more energy-intensive than a vegetarian diet; as growing populations in the Americas and Asia have adopted a more meat-centered fast-food diet, energy inputs per average food calorie have increased. Motorized fis.h.i.+ng boats are much more effective at harvesting fish from the sea than their 19th-century sailing equivalents, though they are far less energy-efficient. But their very effectiveness poses a problem in that nearly all marine fisheries are now in decline as a result of overfis.h.i.+ng.

The ecological effects of fossil fuel-based food production have been catastrophic, particularly with respect to agriculture. Farmers now tend to treat soil as an inert medium with which to prop up plants while force-feeding them chemical nutrients. As a result, the complex ecology of the living soil is being destroyed, leading to increased wind and water erosion. For every bushel of corn produced in Iowa, three bushels of topsoil are lost forever. Meanwhile, agricultural chemicals pollute lakes, rivers, and streams, contributing to soaring extinction rates among mammals, birds, fish, and amphibians.

There are signs that limits to productivity increases from industrial agriculture are already well within sight. Global per-capita food production has been falling for the past several years. Grain surpluses in the exporting countries (Canada, the US, Argentina, and the European Union) relative to global demand have disappeared, and farmers are finding it increasingly difficult to maintain production rates of a range of crops due to the salinization of irrigated croplands, erosion, the loss of pollinator species, evolved chemical resistance among pests, and global warming. For each of the past several years, world grain production has failed to meet demand, and grain in storage is being drawn down at a rate such that stocks will be completely depleted within two to five years.

Prospects for increasing food production above the global level of demand are dim, largely due to continued population growth. In his 1995 book Who Will Feed China?: Wake-up Call for a Small Planet, Lester Brown doc.u.ments how and why China will need to import more and more grain in the decades ahead in order to feed its expanding population. Brown notes that "[a]lthough the projections ... show China importing vast amounts, movements of grain on this scale are never likely to materialize simply because they, along with climbing import needs from other countries, will overwhelm the export capacity of the small handful of countries with an exportable surplus."2 Add to this already grim picture the specter of oil depletion. It is not difficult to imagine the likely agricultural consequences of dramatic price hikes for the gasoline or diesel fuel used to run farm machinery or to transport food long distances, or for nitrogen fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides made from oil and natural gas. The agricultural miracle of the 20th century may become the agricultural apocalypse of the 21st.

Expanding agricultural production, based on cheap energy resources, enabled the feeding of a global population that grew from 1.7 billion to over 6 billion in a single century. Cheap energy will soon be a thing of the past. How many people will post-industrial agriculture be able to support? This is an extremely important question, but one that is difficult to answer. A safe estimate would be this: as many people as were supported before agriculture was industrialized - that is, the population at the beginning of the 20th century, or somewhat fewer than 2 billion people.

There are those who argue that this figure is too low because new seed varieties and cultivation techniques developed during the past century should enable far more productivity per acre than farmers of the year 1900 were able to achieve.

This optimistic vision of the future of agriculture is currently being put forward by two camps with diametrically opposed sets of recommendations. One camp, consisting of the organic and ecological agriculture movements, recommends eliminating chemical inputs, shortening the distance between producer and consumer, and reducing or eliminating monocropping in order to support biodiversity. A recent report by Greenpeace International ent.i.tled The Real Green Revolution: Organic and Agroecological Farming in the South notes that in "this research we have found many examples where the adoption of [organic and ecological agriculture] has led to significantly increased yields."3 The other camp, led by the agricultural biotechnology industry, has proposed an entirely different solution: the genetic engineering of new crop varieties that can outproduce old ones, grow in salty soil, or yield more nourishment than traditional varieties while requiring fewer chemical inputs. According to Hendrik Verfaille, President and CEO of Monsanto, the foremost corporate producer of gene-spliced agricultural seeds, this "technology increases ... crop yields, in some cases dramatically so. It is a technology that has been adopted by farmers faster than any other agricultural technology."4 Optimists in both camps a.s.sume that energy conservation and alternative energy sources will cus.h.i.+on the impact of fossil-fuel depletion on agriculture.

But one could argue just as cogently that the figure of two billion as a long-term supportable human population is too high. Throughout the 20th century, croplands were degraded, traditional locally adapted seed varieties were lost, and farming skills were forgotten as the number of farmers as a percentage of the population - especially in industrialized countries - waned dramatically. These trends imply that, without fossil fuels, a smooth reversion to levels of productivity seen in the year 1900 may actually be unrealistically optimistic.

Organic or ecological agriculture can be even more productive in some situations than industrial agriculture, but local success stories cannot make up for the fact that the total amount of nitrogen available to crops globally has been vastly increased by the Haber-Bosch ammonia synthesis process, which is currently dependent on fossil fuels. Ammonia synthesis could be accomplished with hydrogen, which could in turn be produced with hydroelectic hydrolysis; but the infrastructure for such production is currently almost nonexistent. It will be extremely difficult to replace all or even a substantial fraction of the added available nitrogen from ammonia via organic sources (manures and legumes). John Jeavons, of the organization Ecology Action in Willits, California, has spent the past quarter century researching methods for growing a human diet on the minimum amount of land using no fossil-fuel inputs; he has concluded that survival is possible on as little as 2,800 square feet, enabling a theoretical maximum sustainable global carrying capacity of 7.5 billion humans. However, Jeavons' "biointensive" mini-farming method a.s.sumes the composting of all plant wastes and human wastes - including human bodies post mortem - and provides a strictly vegan diet with no oils and no plant materials devoted to the making of fuels for cooking or heating. A more realistic post-fossil fuel carrying capacity would be substantially below the current population level.5 As for the genetic engineering of food crops: the technology is risky and likely to have serious unintended environmental or health consequences that could more than wipe out whatever short-term benefits it may offer. Moreover, it will not substantially reduce dependence on fossil fuels.6 If we simply permit the optimistic and the pessimistic arguments to cancel one another out, at the end of the day we are still left with something like two billion as an educated guess for planet Earth's sustainable, long-term, post-petroleum carrying capacity for humans. This poses a serious problem, since there are currently nearly six-and-a-half billion of us, and our numbers are still growing. If this carrying-capacity estimate is close to being accurate, then the difference between it and the current population size represents the number by which human numbers will likely be reduced between now and the time when oil and natural gas run out. If that reduction does not take place through voluntary programs of birth control, then it will probably come about as a result of famines, plagues, and wars - the traditional means by which human populations have been culled when they temporarily surpa.s.sed the carrying capacity of their environments.

Heating and Cooling.

Compared to food production, heating and cooling may seem far less consequential - matters merely of comfort. However, in many places - particularly the northern regions of North America, Europe, and Asia - a source of heat can mean the difference between life and death.

Currently in the US, according to the EIA, residential energy use accounts for 21 percent of the total national energy consumption. Of this, 51 percent is consumed for s.p.a.ce heating, 19 percent for water heating, and 4 percent for air conditioning. The rest powers lights and appliances, including refrigerators.

Modern urban life offers a context in which it is easy to take heating and cooling for granted. Fuels and electrical power are piped or wired into houses and offices sight unseen and do their work silently and predictably at the turn of a k.n.o.b or the flick of a switch. Many office buildings have windows that cannot be opened, and few homes are designed for maximum energy efficiency. Temporary winter interruptions in fuel supplies often lead to deaths; and during the summer, elderly people who lack access to air conditioning are vulnerable to extreme heat. In an average year in the US, 770 people die from extreme cold and 380 from extreme heat; combined, these figures exceed the average combined death tolls from hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, and lightning.7 Serious and continuing fuel shortages would probably lead to a substantial increase in mortality from both temperature extremes.

Natural gas is widely used in industrialized countries for cooking and for heating hot water; diminis.h.i.+ng supplies will obviously result in higher costs for these services. Only a relatively small proportion of the total amount of natural gas used goes toward cooking; however, since this is an essential function, a protracted interruption in supplies could have a major impact on people's daily lives.

Energy in the form of electricity is the primary power source for the refrigeration of food. As electricity becomes more expensive due to shortages of natural gas and the decline in net energy from coal, refrigeration will become more costly. Without refrigeration, supermarkets will be unable to keep frozen foods, and produce will remain fresh for much shorter time periods. The food systems of cities will need to adjust to these changes.

In areas of the world where wood, other plant materials, and dried animal wastes are used as fuel for s.p.a.ce heating and cooking, air pollution and deforestation are already serious problems. Thus, given present population densities, the subst.i.tution elsewhere of such traditional fuels for oil and natural gas will pose serious environmental and health hazards.

The Environment.

The energy transition of the coming century will affect human society directly, but it will also likely have important indirect effects on the natural environment.

Some impacts - such as deforestation from increased firewood harvesting - are relatively easy to predict. As fossil fuels become scarce, it will become increasingly difficult to protect trees in old-growth forest preserves, and perhaps even those along the sides of city streets.

Other environmental effects of oil and natural gas depletion are less predictable. It is tempting to speculate about the impact on global warming, but no firm conclusions are possible. At first thought, it might seem that fossil-fuel depletion would actually improve the situation. With ever fewer gallons of gasoline and diesel fuel being burned in the engines of cars and trucks, less carbon dioxide will be released into the atmosphere to contribute to the greenhouse effect. Perhaps petroleum depletion could accomplish what the Kyoto protocols on greenhouse gas emissions have only begun to do.

However, it is important to remember that when global oil production peaks, half of nature's original endowment of crude will still be in the ground waiting to be pumped and burned. Extraction rates will gradually taper off but will not suddenly plummet. If efforts are made to increase coal usage in order to offset energy shortages from oil and natural gas, greenhouse gas emissions might remain close to current levels or even rise. Thus, unless a coordinated, intelligent program is put in place for a transition to non-fossil energy sources as well as for a rapid and drastic curtailment of total energy usage, the net effect of oil and natural gas depletion on the problem of global warming is not likely to be significantly positive over the next few decades.

The situation is similar with regard to the problem of chemical pollution: a decline in the extraction of fossil fuels might seem to hold the promise of reducing environmental harms from synthetic chemicals. With less plastic being produced and fewer agricultural and industrial chemicals being used, the load of toxins on the environment should decrease. However, many pollution-monitoring, -control, and -reduction systems currently in place - including trash pick-up and recycling services - also require energy. Thus, even if the production of new chemicals declines, over the short run there may be heightened problems a.s.sociated with the containment of existing pollution sources.

The reduced availability of oil and natural gas will likely provoke both electrical energy producers and politicians to call for a reduction of pollution controls on coal plants and for the building of new nuclear plants. But these strategies will entail serious environmental costs. Increased reliance on coal, and any relaxation on emissions controls, will result in more air pollution and more acid rain. And increased reliance on nuclear power will only exacerbate the unsolved problem of radioactive waste disposal.

As the global food system struggles to come to terms with the decline in available net energy for agriculture, transportation, and food storage, people who have the capacity to fish or to hunt wild animals will be motivated to do so at increasing rates. But given mounting energy and financial constraints, conservation agencies will find it difficult to control overfis.h.i.+ng and the over-hunting of edible land animals. Endangered species will have fewer protections available and extinction rates will likely climb.

The environmental impacts of changing patterns in agriculture are difficult to predict, given that the direction of those changes is uncertain. If efforts are made to localize food production and to voluntarily reduce chemical and energy inputs via organic/ecoagricultural methods, then the current detrimental environmental impacts of agriculture could be reduced markedly. However, if the managers of global food systems opt for agricultural biotechnology and attempt to sustain inputs, negative environmental effects from food production are likely to continue and, in the worst case - a biotech "frankenfood" disaster - could be catastrophic.

In sum: it is possible to imagine scenarios in which the decline in fossil-fuel extraction and consumption could, on balance, be relatively good for the environment, or very bad indeed. It will all depend on how governments and other inst.i.tutions choose to respond.

Public Health.

International, national, and local systems of public health, which protect the human population against communicable diseases and parasites, are also vulnerable to declines in the availability of cheap energy. Water and sewage treatment, medical research, and the production and distribution of antibiotics and vaccines all require power. In the next few decades, unless the percentage of total available money and energy devoted to public health increases, more- as well as less-industrialized societies will face at worst severe epidemics and at best increased disease-related death rates.

Today, infectious diseases already cause approximately 37 percent of all deaths worldwide. Waterborne infections account for 80 percent of all infectious diseases globally, and 90 percent of all infectious diseases occur in the less-consuming countries. Each year, a lack of sanitary conditions contributes to approximately 2 billion human infections causing diarrhea, from which 4 million infants and children die. Even in industrialized nations, waterborne diseases pose a significant health hazard: in the US they account for 940,000 infections and approximately 900 deaths each year.8 Approximately 1.2 billion people in less-consuming nations lack clean, safe water. Of India's 3,119 towns and cities, just 209 have partial treatment facilities and only 8 have full wastewater treatment plants; 114 cities dump untreated sewage and partially cremated bodies directly into the sacred Ganges River.

Many diseases that can easily and cheaply be treated or prevented still pose problems in many areas of the world. New strains of E. coli are spreading in parts of Africa and Asia where humans are crowded and where water and food contamination is rampant. At least 300 million acute cases of malaria occur globally each year, resulting in more than a million deaths, most of them in Sub-Saharan Africa. Moreover, tuberculosis is on the rise in many nations due to crowding and drug resistance. Currently, an estimated 1.7 billion people worldwide are infected with TB, with approximately 95 percent of deaths occurring in less-consuming countries. In 1990, the annual number of new TB infections was 7.5 million; by 2000, the number had reached 10 million.9 Human plague - which is a.s.sumed to have been the disease that decimated European societies throughout the medieval period - continues to break out periodically. The plague parasite, Yersinia pestis, is transmitted by human contact with rodents. In the 1980s, the average of the annually reported cases in the world was 1,350; in the 1990s, the average annual number rose to 2,500. Nearly 60 percent of the reported cases occurred in Africa.

Diphtheria had been under control for many years; but, following the breakup of the former Soviet Union, the disease made a startling comeback. In 1975, about 100 cases were recorded in Russia; but in 1995 alone, 51,000 new cases were reported. The World Health Organization attributes this recent explosion in diphtheria in Russia to a decline in the effectiveness of that nation's public health program.

In the decades ahead, global warming will likely contribute to the spread of infectious tropical diseases such as malaria, putting a further strain on already over-taxed public health systems.

Meanwhile, as many long-familiar diseases that were formerly in decline are making a comeback, entirely new diseases continue to arise, including hantavirus, Lyme disease, Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, Legionnaire's disease, West Nile virus, ebola haemorrhagic fever, Venezuelan haemorrhagic fever, Brazilian haemorrhagic fever, and AIDS. The last of these poses perhaps the greatest public-health challenge in the world today.

In eastern and southern Africa, HIV infection is cutting down an alarming percentage of Africa's most energetic and productive adults aged 15 to 49. In 2001, more people on the continent succ.u.mbed to HIV than to any other cause of death, including malaria. While only 10 percent of the world's population lives in sub-Saharan Africa, the region is home to two-thirds of the world's HIV-positive people and has suffered more than 80 percent of all AIDS deaths. In Zaire and Zimbabwe, more than a quarter of the adults carry the virus. In a few districts, rates of infection approach 60 percent. If infection rates continue to grow unchecked and if mortality figures follow infection rates, AIDS will soon dwarf every catastrophe in Africa's recorded past.10 AIDS cases are now being reported in rapidly increasing numbers in Russia and China as well.

In short, global public health systems are already taxed beyond their limits.11 But what will be the impact of a reduced energy availability on those under-funded and over-extended systems?

It could be argued that the impact of oil depletion on the medical and health infrastructure need not be severe since many public-health problems (such as those stemming from lack of clean water) can theoretically be solved relatively cheaply. Moreover, even if the end of oil and natural gas were to mean turning back the clock of technological development to pre-industrial levels, that would not necessarily imply the loss of all intervening advances in medical science. Anesthesia, antiseptics, surgery, and transfusions save tens of thousands of lives annually and need not disappear with reduced energy availability.

Nevertheless, modern medicine taken as a whole is a highly energy-intensive enterprise. A hospital in a typical industrial city uses more energy per square foot of s.p.a.ce than nearly any other kind of building. As the interval of cheap energy wanes, the wealthy few will likely continue to have access to modern forms of care for their various health problems, but even the richest countries will find it increasingly difficult to support the development or distribution of new vaccines or of new antibiotics to combat the rapidly emerging strains of resistant diseases.

While the severity of the public-health problems the next generation will face is impossible to estimate, worst-case scenarios are truly horrific.

In any event, the medical profession will need to adapt to an entirely new energy environment, with all that this implies in terms of changes in transportation and other forms of support infrastructure; urban authorities will need to find less energy-expensive ways to maintain water treatment and waste disposal facilities and otherwise ensure public hygiene; and national governments will need to make deliberate efforts to channel a much greater percentage of available energy and money away from other sectors (such as the military) and toward public health, if a steep increase in preventable deaths is to be averted.

Information Storage, Processing, and Transmission.

Electronic information technologies - including computers, telephones, fax machines, computer printers, and internet servers - are critical to the functioning of modern industrial societies. They have come to play essential roles in the coordination and management of financial, commercial, manufacturing, medical, and military systems, so that a general failure of data and communications systems would soon imperil much of the support infrastructure of society as a whole.

The daily operation of information technologies is not, to any appreciable degree, directly dependent on oil. Thus the peak in petroleum extraction will not have an immediate impact on information storage, processing, and transmission. However, the construction, maintenance, and distribution of the components of information systems do depend, to a much larger extent, on oil-fed transportation and on the fabrication of plastics. Thus, over the long term, oil scarcity will make it more difficult to maintain or expand current information systems.

However, the daily operation of the information infrastructure of industrial societies is directly dependent on regional electrical grids. These grids are complex, costly to maintain, and highly vulnerable to interruptions in the supply of basic energy resources (coal, uranium, and natural gas) used to generate electricity. Moreover, demand for electricity continues to increase, fed partly by continued population growth. As the net energy available to industrial societies wanes, resources devoted to the electrical grids will become relatively more expensive. At a certain point, demand for electricity will begin consistently to exceed supply. From then on, the electrical power grids may become threatened. Periodic brownouts and blackouts may become common. These may in turn interrupt the critical functions of information systems. In that case, the only way to maintain the grids would be to increase the price of electricity sufficiently to discourage nonessential uses, and this would have a significant impact on the economy. Within years of the first widespread blackouts it may become impossible to maintain the grids at their present scope, and efforts may be made to reduce the size of grids and to cannibalize components that can no longer routinely be replaced. Eventually it might no longer be possible to maintain the electrical grids in any form.

If and when that point is reached, unless an alternative renewables-based electrical infrastructure is already substantially in place, the information infrastructure of industrial societies will collapse and virtually all electronically coded data will become permanently irretrievable.

National Politics and Social Movements.

The implementation of the most intelligent strategies for dealing with the petroleum extraction peak - such as diverting remaining energy resources toward conservation and transition efforts - will require political will. But politicians are seldom inclined to deal with problems proactively, and will be unlikely to act decisively until crisis has arrived full-blown. Moreover, due to their perennial need for large campaign contributions, politicians (particularly in the US) are much more likely to respond to the advice of wealthy corporate leaders than to that of scientists or citizens; and corporate leaders in turn customarily take their cues primarily from economists - who tend to discount even the possibility of resource shortages in their confidence that the all-knowing market will magically provide subst.i.tutes for whatever commodities become scarce.

Thus the current shape of the political landscape will affect how we deal with - or fail to deal with - the energy transition. And at the same time, the energy transition will change the political landscape in profound, structural ways.

Politics is, at least in part, the social contest for control over resources. The current political scene has resulted from long-term resource rivalries between relatively empowered and disempowered social groups. As energy supplies dwindle, those rivalries will be greatly exacerbated.

According to the political theory of the Right, each individual is morally ent.i.tled to gain control over as large a share of the total resource base as he or she can possibly obtain, using legal means. Traditional ways of expanding one's resource share include capturing energy from other humans by hiring them for wage labor (from which surplus value is extracted in the form of profits) and by investing in energy-leveraging productive enterprises that depend directly or indirectly on energy resources extracted from the Earth. The government, according to this theory, has little or no responsibility to maintain equity in resource distribution or to provide a safety net for the disadvantaged. The Right thus gains part of its legitimacy from its appeal to the individual's desire for freedom - the freedom, that is, to control a disproportionate share of resources. Most great cultural achievements, according to rightists, have been initiated not by the ma.s.ses but by extraordinary individuals. Thus it is by giving rein to the individual quest for accomplishment and gain that society as a whole is bettered.

Another cornerstone of rightist politics is the pursuit of security through state investments in ever-expanding police and military powers. Such powers are needed, after all, to protect the concentrations of wealth that result from the project of seeking to control resources. The Right aims its appeal primarily at those with disproportionate wealth, and secondarily to members of the lower cla.s.ses who envy the wealthy or who can be persuaded that the highest aims of the state are law, order, and security.

According to the political theory of the Left, people are morally obliged to share resources and society as a whole is better off when inequalities of wealth are minimized. Here, government has a responsibility to help equalize access to resources and to provide at least a minimum of needed resources for all citizens. Theorists at the far-left end of the political spectrum hold that all exploitation of humans by other humans - including the system of wage labor - is morally repugnant. The Left typically seeks to appeal to members of the lower cla.s.ses and to idealistic intellectuals. While the Communist-bloc nations of the 20th century offered a counter example, the Left has historically been somewhat less preoccupied than the Right with police and military security; and where it calls for criminal sanctions or military actions, these are often against individuals, corporations, or nations whose efforts to control resources appear egregiously unfair.

Democracy - the social means whereby citizens collectively and consciously control the conditions of their lives - is often regarded as an artifact of Greek civilization or the Enlightenment; but from a larger historical and anthropological perspective it can be seen as an attempt on the part of people living in modern complex societies to regain some of the autonomy and egalitarianism that characterized life in the hunter-gatherer bands of our distant ancestors. Democracy is a reaction against the concentrations of power that arose in early agricultural states and that burdened our more recent ancestors with kings.h.i.+p and serfdom. Because it implies that everyone should be able to partic.i.p.ate in decisions regarding the allocation of resources, democracy is an inherently leftist ideal. This remains true despite the profoundly undemocratic nature of the Communist-bloc societies of the 20th century. Unquestionably, the most innovative thinking regarding democratic processes has come from the far-left of the political spectrum, which is occupied by anarchists of various stripes.

Both leftist and rightist ideologies contain an element of unreality or even denial concerning population and resource issues. Most rightists preach that all who wish for success and who work hard can potentially be wealthy if each individual is freed to compete in the market, unimpeded by government regulation. Most leftists promise that, if wealth is shared and decisions are made cooperatively, there will be plenty for everyone - with no exceptions in the face of population pressure or resource depletion. A few rightists acknowledge resource limits but argue that, since existence is a Darwinian struggle anyway, it is the fit (the wealthy) who should survive through economic compet.i.tion while the unfit (the poor) are culled by starvation. A few leftists acknowledge limits but believe that, if humanity is made aware of them and empowered to deal with distribution issues democratically, people will decide to undertake a process of voluntary collective self-restriction that will enable everyone to thrive within those limits. Typically, when either leftist or rightist regimes actually encounter resource limits, some aspect of ideology (democracy on the one hand, the free market on the other) is sacrificed, at least to some extent.

The contest between the Left and the Right is probably an inevitable dynamic within every civilization, but it has developed into its current form only since the late 18th century - that is, since the start of the industrial interval. Throughout the energy upswing, the political contest ebbed and flowed through periods of colonialism, anti-colonialism, populism, socialism, communism, fascism, the Cold War, and corporate globalization, with all sides competing for rights to an expanding base of available resources. As petroleum extraction peaks and energy resources become more scarce, the entire political landscape will s.h.i.+ft as both the Right and the Left try to come to terms with the new reality.

Particularly in wealthy nations, the Right will no doubt seek to exploit people's heightened compet.i.tiveness and their felt need for security and authority during a time of flux. The general populace, seeing the world coming apart at the hinges, fearing a breakdown of law and order, and wanting to know whom to blame for mounting economic ills, will likely rally to strong leaders who offer scapegoats and who promise to maintain order by whatever means necessary.

Meanwhile the Left will appeal to people's moral indignation at the wealthy and powerful, who maintain extremely unequal shares of resources even as vast numbers of humans lose access to basic necessities. Many citizens will also be outraged at corporate and political leaders for their failure to antic.i.p.ate the obviously inevitable energy transition and for their failure to inform and warn the public.

The net-energy decline will bring challenges to all social groups, both the empowered and the disempowered. The wealthy will find it difficult to maintain social control and to justify extreme inequality. Leftists will be seeking an equal share of a shrinking pie - which will lead to the feeling of having metaphorical goal posts continually moved backward as one approaches them. With victory always receding toward the horizon, the rank and file may find it hard to maintain their morale. Moreover, as rising expectations confront dwindling realities, leftists in wealthier countries (such as the US) may be branded as traitors to the cause of maintaining their nation's unequal control of global resources.

Since it is easier to contemplate sharing when there is plenty to go around than when what little one has is disappearing, population pressure and resource scarcity will likely place ever-greater stress on the already battered democratic ideals of industrial societies.

If the Right gains the upper hand, the result will probably be the undermining of civil liberties; the scapegoating of leftists, minorities, and foreigners; and the expansion of military and police powers. Democracy will become a ritualized sham at best. If the Left gains the upper hand, the result might be a kind of modern peasant revolt, in which the wealthy will be demonized and punished. However, neither political response will necessarily do much to solve the underlying problem of energy-resource depletion.

Because they have no solution, politicians on both sides will probably go to absurd lengths to obscure or mystify the real causes of the changes engulfing society. The public will likely not hear or read much about peaks in the extraction rates of oil or natural gas. They will see prices for basic commodities increase sharply (in inflation- or deflation-adjusted terms), but the ensuing economic turmoil will be held to be the fault of this or that social, political, ethnic, national, or religious group, rather than being identified as the unavoidable result of industrialism itself. The Left will blame selfish rich people and corporations; the Right will blame foreigners, "terrorists," and leftists.

Many people already sense that the traditional political categories of Left and Right no longer hold the solutions for today's unique social and environmental problems. Sociologist Paul Ray has argued, on the basis of extensive polling data, that a sizable portion of European and American populations consist of "cultural creatives" who defy both leftist and rightist stereotypes.12 These are people who typically espouse ecology and feminism while questioning globalization and the power of big business. It is conceivable that this const.i.tuency, if united and mobilized, could press for sensible energy policies.

The signal political development of the past decade has been the emergence of the global-justice movement advocating "globalization from below." That movement, to which many cultural creatives are drawn, demands the democratization of all social inst.i.tutions and the limitation of the power of corporations to exploit workers in less-consuming countries; it also envisions a borderless world in which people can move without restriction. As the project of corporate globalization collapses for lack of energy resources, the anti-globalizationists will see their warnings about the consequences of undermining local economies fully vindicated. However, corporate leaders may blame the global-justice movement for having helped cause the collapse of the global economy. And with dwindling resources motivating growing hordes to migrate en ma.s.se seeking necessities for survival, the ideal of a borderless world may seem less attractive to the settled segments of the populace.

In order for the movement to meet the challenges of the post-petroleum era, it must discard all socioeconomic a.n.a.lysis rooted in the 19th century (e.g., cla.s.sical Marxism and some strains of anarchism), which a.s.sumes industrial growth based on increasing energy-resource availability. The a.n.a.lysis needed today must take into account ecological principles, energy-resource constraints, population pressure, and the historical dynamics of complex societies - including the infrastructural reasons for their growth and collapse. This a.n.a.lysis has already begun within some quarters of the environmental movement, but even there it is neither complete nor widely disseminated.13 The movement's intellectual leaders will be tempted to seize on the new energy constraints as evidence of mismanagement on the part of the government-corporate authorities (which, of course, is the case), but then to withhold the crucial information that the new energy regime (entailing shortages, economic chaos, and general suffering) is by now a historical inevitability. They will find it difficult to resist the incentive to offer the public promises of plenty, if only the reins of political power are s.h.i.+fted. The alternative - telling the public the awful truth that the era of cheap energy and industrial growth is over - may be politically unpalatable, but in the long run it is the only morally defensible course of action: the sooner the general public understands the situation industrial societies are in, the less suffering will occur as we make the inevitable but painful transition to a new energy regime.

Over the past few decades and in the US particularly, rightist forces have so successfully inoculated the public with corporate-funded propaganda that an open debate between Left and Right over how to respond to the emerging crisis may never take place.14 Instead, the Right may simply reign triumphant.

But if growing public dissatisfaction arising from the shrinking of the resource base is denied coherent expression through a leftist alternative, it will seek some other outlet. It could, for example, be expressed through increased intergenerational conflict. Even if not explicitly told that this is the case, young people will likely intuitively understand that, within the lifetime of the baby-boomer generation, nearly half of the total petroleum reserves of the planet were used up. Everywhere they will see evidence of the extravagant party their elders have thrown, while for themselves there will be only dregs left over. With ever fewer economic opportunities available, they may feel an unspeakable resentment toward older people who have frittered away the world's endowment of natural resources, leaving almost nothing for their children and grandchildren. If rightist forces are powerful enough to prevent this rage from being channeled into an organized leftist movement, young people may vent their anger through random acts of sabotage, which will only provoke and justify increased repression.

Over the long term, however, the prospects for maintaining the coherence of large nation states like the US, regardless of the philosophy governing their political apparatus, appear dim. Lacking an industrial infrastructure of production, transportation, communication, and control, large nations may eventually devolve into regional enclaves - which, depending on the local circ.u.mstances, could have political structures that are either democratic or authoritarian, depending on local circ.u.mstances.

The Geopolitics of Energy-Resource Compet.i.tion.

Just as political rivalries within nations will be exacerbated by the energy transition, so those between nations will be heated to the boiling point.

Resource conflicts are nothing new. Pre-state societies often fought over agricultural land, fis.h.i.+ng or hunting grounds, horses, cattle, waterways, and other resources.15 As we saw in Chapter 2, most of the wars of the 20th century were also fought over resources - in some cases, oil. But those wars took place during a period of expanding resource extraction; the coming decades of heightened compet.i.tion over fading energy resource supplies will likely see even more frequent and deadly conflicts.

Though it is an empire in steep decline, the US - as the world's largest energy consumer, the center of the global industrial empire, and the holder of the most powerful store of weaponry in world history - will nevertheless play a pivotal role in shaping the geopolitics of at least the first decades of the new century. It is therefore probably best to begin an exploration of international relations during the net-energy decline with a survey of current US geopolitical strategy, especially as it relates to energy resources.

For the past few decades, the US has pursued a dual policy in the Middle East, the most oil-rich region of the planet. On the one hand, it has supported repressive Arab regimes in order to maintain access to petroleum reserves. America persuaded its Arab oil-state clients to denominate their production in US dollars. By thus being required to pay for most of their oil imports in dollars, importing countries around the world have contributed a subtle t.i.the to American banks and the US economy with every barrel of crude purchased. Arab rulers take a share of the "petrodollar" profits from the oil extracted from their countries and channel much of what they receive toward investments in the West and toward the purchase of US weapons. In exchange, they have been promised US protection against their own people, who would naturally prefer to benefit more directly from the immense energy wealth with which nature has endowed their lands.

On the other hand, the US has supported Israel unquestioningly and with vast amounts of money and weaponry. Especially after its impressive military victory over the Arab states in 1967, Israel came to be seen as a foil to Arab nationalism. The Nixon Doctrine defined Israel's role as that of the "local cop on the beat," serving US military and intelligence interests in the region. This role became still more important following the Iranian Revolution in 1979, which denied the US its other main base in the Middle East. Israel also serves to deflect Arab resentment away from the United States: even though the US extracts considerable wealth from Arab countries, until recently Arab anger tended to be borne primarily by Israel, with the US depicting itself as a friend to the Arabs. American-backed Arab leaders likewise used Israel as a foil to divert the anger of the so-called "Arab street" away from their regimes' corruptness and toward the neighboring Jewish state.

Figure 22a.

Oil consumption by region, in millions of barrels per day. (Source: C. J. Campbell).