Unless one stands to profit from the plundering of Earth's resources, or is an ideologue who holds with such plunderers, it seems painfully clear that humanity is burning through its planet's fossil fuels at an alarming rate. After all, it doesn't take a mathematician to work out that today's four billion industrialized humans are going to burn through our finite amount of fuel infinitely faster than yesterday's few hundred million agricultural humans. More people plus higher fuel requirements equals more fuel used faster. And given the exponential rate at which the human population has expanded over the last 60 years, we've never used so much so fast. So being that we have a problem here, chiefly that our technological civilization is entirely dependent upon a fast-disappearing, finite resource, what do we do and what will the future look like without oil, coal, and natural gas?
Mr. Heinberg, a journalist and environmentalist, attempts to tackle these important questions in Peak Everything, a 200-page anthology of the author's essays on issues ranging from human psychology to future sustainability. After an attempt to explain the resource-profligacy of both the Greatest Generation and the Boomers they gave birth to, he moves on to what the world might look like if fossil fuels were no longer readily available. Being that transportation is the most fuel-hungry human industry, Mr. Heinberg logically assumes that, absent a wildcard like fusion power, by the end of the 21st century, our world will be made up of thousands of localized economies, that our food and our goods will be produced within a few hundred miles of where they are consumed, and that only the most valuable components will be fetched from elsewhere. In other words, he imagines a world of affiliated city states, community nations that are largely independent of one another and incapable of being united. The cost, to a centralized bureaucracy, in time and energy, to hold onto distant territories would simply be unaffordable.
This is the best case scenario, one in which society has sufficiently braced itself against the scarcity of fuel to plan for its future. The worst case scenario, meanwhile, finds humanity in its current state, making only a token effort towards sustainable energy while recklessly and needlessly hurtling towards the exhaustion of the fuel supply. Most writers on the subject, including Mr. Heinberg, agree that this will invite a widespread collapse of a society ill-prepared to transition to a post-fossil-fuel world. Mr. Heinberg cheesily concludes his work with an open letter from the future in which the author warns us about the consequences of inaction.
Despite the weakness of the final essay, Peak Everything packages an adequate summation of our current fuel problem with an intriguing conception of our future world to create a serviceable work that speaks to the problem of our rapid depletion of Earth's resources. Unfortunately, Mr. Heinberg's speculations on the causes of our profligacy fail to hit upon the most obvious explanation for our wastefulness.
While evolution is incredibly efficient, performing a cost benefit analysis on seemingly every decision -- is this new mutation (the brain) worth the energy it requires? --, human beings are not. They have never had to be. Since the agricultural revolution 10,000 years ago, we have existed in a vast abundance. Yes, there have been droughts and shortages, but these dearths are intervals between long stretches of time in which food, land, and labor have been readily available to us. We haven't had to make the same life-and-death choices evolution has had to make. The human brain requires some 20 watts of power per day to perform all its countless functions. The best super computer humanity can design performs at only a fraction of the speed of the human brain and requires a million times as much power. Why?
Because humans can afford to be inefficient. We can afford to have our disposable Iphones to pour water down the drain, to get a new car every three years, and to not think about recycling. There is no motivation to be efficient in an abundant society. This is why we are profligate. Tell someone it's bad to buy an Iphone because we have only so many petroleum products from which to make its plastics and he'll shrug and tell you that's someone else's problem and he'll use that phone for a couple of years and throw it off for the new version. But tell that same someone that the Iphone he's about to buy is the last one he'll ever have and see if he doesn't cherish it, protect it and keep it for many years to come.
Scarcity drives efficiency which, for humanity, is both a positive and a negative. We are eminently adaptable, so we should be able to make ourselves efficient, to conform to the new paradigm. However, this also ensures that we will never change until we have to change, until we have no other choice.
Peak Everything is a worthy read, but its weak conclusion and its occasional omissions reduce it from a must-read to passably interesting non-fiction for anyone interested in our dwindling resources and what that may mean for the future. (3/5 Stars)
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