[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] Business As Usual

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (April 23 2008)

Druid perspectives on nature, culture, and the future of industrial society


Those of us who are watching the crisis of industrial society arrive on
schedule take our omens where we find them, and one appeared yesterday
morning in the unlikely form of an internet ad riding shotgun on a peak
oil blog. The header was striking enough - "Oil Will Hit $100!" - or it
would have been, except that one of the main benchmark grades of crude
oil closed not far below $120 a barrel that evening. When the ads on
your computer screen have already been left in the dust by the
headlines, it's fair to say, yesterday's assumptions are in serious need
of revision.

Meanwhile, rolling blackouts and food shortages are making life more
difficult for people in many of the world's poorer nations. Even in the
United States, where instant availability of consumer products is
generally considered an inalienable right, the first spot shortages of
grain products have made ripples in the media. I won't even get into the
plunging real estate prices and financial implosions along the route of
the slow-motion train wreck the global economy resembles so much these
days. One way or another, it's turning into a bad week for believers in
an imminent return to what most people nowadays consider business as usual.

Yet there's an irony, a rich one, in the chorus of reassurances still
rising from the mainstream media across the industrial world. Like the
frogs in Aesop's fable, they praised the replacement of the boring King
Log of New Deal economic regulations and Seventies energy-efficiency
standards by the far more exciting King Stork of the unfettered market,
only to find that too much excitement in the economic sphere has its
downside; their attempt to return to a free market succeeded mostly in
kickstarting a recurrence of the cycle of disastrous depressions that
reached its crescendo in 1929 and bringing about a recurrence of the
energy crises of the 1970s, but on a larger scale. Before you decide to
return to business as usual, in other words, it's useful to have some
sense of what business as usual actually is.

We are arguably facing a much more threatening example of the same
phenomenon right now, as the fuel gauge on the world's oil, coal, and
natural gas supplies moves visibly in the direction of that unwelcome
letter E. For the last three centuries or so, a steadily increasing flow
of cheap abundant fossil fuel energy has driven the growth of industrial
societies across much of the world. For the last century, since
petroleum replaced coal as industrial civilization's prime mover, and
widespread electrification made it possible to apply fossil fuels at
second hand to most business and domestic energy needs, most of the work
done in the industrial world has been done by machines powered directly
or indirectly by fossil fuels.

This seems perfectly normal to most of us who have grown up in the
industrial world. Up until very recently, essentially all the talk about
the disparity between the world's industrial societies and the rest of
the planet focused on how to bring the Third World "into the
twenty-first century". The phrase itself betrays the huge burden of
ideology that shaped that discussion - the belief, as potent and
devoutly held as any other religion, that history progresses straight to
us, that any different social arrangement is simply some version of our
own outmoded past, and that our peculiar and extravagant way of managing
human communities is thus as inevitable as it is inevitably beneficent.

Yet the whole debate was also an exercise in futility. We are seeing
right now what happens when an appreciable number of people in the
world's nonindustrial societies do exactly what so many decades of
rhetoric insisted they ought to, and claim a share of the world's fossil
fuels and industrial output. The limits to growth were always there; it
was merely the political arrangements that restricted the benefits of
industrialism to a small portion of the human species that made it look
as though unlimited growth was even an option.

What we most need to realize at this juncture is that the way things
have been in the world's industrial societies over the last century or
so is in no way normal. It's precisely equivalent to the new lifestyle
adopted by winners of a lottery whose very modest income has suddenly
leapt upward by $1 million a year or so. After a few years, the lottery
winners might well become accustomed to the privileges and possessions
that influx of wealth made possible, and children growing up in such a
family might never realize that life could be any other way. The hard
fact remains, though, that when the lottery money runs out, it runs out,
and if no provision has been made for the future, the transition from a
million dollars a year to the much more modest income available from an
ordinary job can be very, very rough.

The huge distortions imposed on the modern industrial nations by the
flood of cheap abundant energy that washed over them in the 20th century
can be measured readily enough by a simple statistic. In America today,
our current energy use works out to around 1000 megajoules per capita,
or the rough equivalent of 100 human laborers working 24-hour days for
each man, woman, and child in the country. The total direct cost for all
this energy came to around $500 billion a year in 2005, the last year
for which I was able to find statistics, or about $1667 per person per year.

Now consider how much it would cost to hire human laborers to perform
the same amount of work. At the current federal minimum wage of $5.75 an
hour, hiring 100 workers in three shifts to provide the equivalent
amount of energy would cost each American $512,811 a year, or about 308
times as much as the energy costs - and this doesn't count payroll
taxes, health insurance, paid vacations and the like. Mind you, it would
also require the US to find food, housing, and basic services for an
additional workforce of thirty billion people, but we can let the
metaphor go before tackling issues on that scale.

What makes this huge disparity relevant is that as recently as a hundred
years ago, the majority of work done even in the most advanced
industrial societies was done by human beings using hand tools. Kitchens
had servants instead of appliances; factories and shops had workbenches
instead of industrial robots; the functions now carried out by computers
were performed instead by legions of clerks wielding pen and ink. Go
back a little further in history, to the time when fossil fuels hadn't
yet become a significant energy source, and human muscles and minds did
the vast majority of work of all kinds, with modest supplements from
animal muscle, biomass, wind, and water power.

The familiarity of our current arrangements, and the rhetoric of
progress we use to justify those arrangements, make it easy to dismiss
such a human-powered economy as some sort of primitive oddity that
existed only because people didn't yet know any better. Look at the
disparity in economic terms and a different picture emerges. In a
society without access to cheap abundant energy resources, it makes much
more economic sense to train and employ a human worker than to develop a
machine to fill the same niche; except in special circumstances, the
additional cost of building, powering, maintaining, and operating the
machine more than outweighs the additional benefits of mechanical speed
and regularity.

This was why ancient Rome and imperial China, both of which had a solid
understanding of mechanical principles and sophisticated technical
traditions, never had industrial revolutions of their own. Lacking
massive energy supplies of the sort that made modern industrial society
possible, it simply made more economic sense to invest the available
resources into the labor force. The Romans did this the cheap, crude,
and ultimately ineffective way, by expanding a slave economy to the
breaking point; the Chinese did it far more sustainably and effectively
by evolving an extraordinarily robust system of small-scale capitalism,
on the one hand, and equally durable traditions of specialized
craftsmanship on the other.

All this has a pressing relevance to the present situation, because
we're running out of the energy resources that make it possible for
every man, woman and child in America to dispose of the equivalent of
$512,811 in labor every year. It's as though the thirty billion
invisible guest workers whose sweat powers the American economy are
quitting their jobs one by one, and moving back home to the Paleozoic.
When the process completes itself, and the long curve of depletion
finally sinks low enough that it's no longer economically worthwhile to
extract the remaining dregs of fossil fuel from the ground, the amount
of labor each of us will have at our disposal will be much, much less
than it is today.

With any luck, it'll be more than 1/308th as much - we know more about
collecting and using energy than the Romans or the Chinese did, and may
well be able to get enough renewable energy sources up and running in
time to matter. Still, it's mere wishful thinking to assume that the
universe is obliged to give us another vast windfall of cheap abundant
energy to replace the one we've wasted so enthusiastically over the last
few centuries, and none of the proposed replacements for fossil fuels
seem likely to live up to their billing. On a finite planet subject to
the laws of thermodynamics, claims that the trajectory of industrialism
must inevitably continue into the future are statements of faith, not of
fact.

Far more likely is the reemergence of an economy in which the work of
human hands and minds is once again the main source of economic value -
and with luck and hard work, it may be a good deal closer to the Chinese
than the Roman model. In a low-energy economy, after all, human beings
have huge economic advantages over machines. Machines do not develop
their own energy sources and find their own raw materials, much less
manufacture their own replacements, and the products of a given machine
do not improve over time all by themselves, as the products of a farmer
or a craftsperson so often do.

The farmers of the future may well use intensive organic methods rather
than the field agriculture of an earlier day, just as the craftspeople
of the future may well spend some of their time crafting solar hot water
heaters and shortwave radios. Still, this sort of handicraft economy is
a mature and effective social technology, and far and away the most
common way societies provide for the needs of their members. It is, one
might say, business as usual.

_____

John Michael Greer has been active in the alternative spirituality
movement for more than 25 years, and is the author of a dozen books,
including The Druidry Handbook (Weiser, 2006). He lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/04/business-as-usual.html#links


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