[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Retrofit Economy

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (September 10 2008)

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


I've suggested several times in these essays that the broad shape of the
most likely future facing industrial society, at the end of the age of
cheap abundant energy, can be sorted out very roughly into three phases:
the age of scarcity industrialism, the age of salvage societies, and -
if we are lucky - the ecotechnic age, when new societies based on
sustainable high technology will rise on the ruins of our own
unsustainable time. For a variety of reasons, any typology of this sort
is easy to misunderstand, and it seems worthwhile just now to clarify
what I intend to say, and what I don't, in proposing this model of the
future.

The most important point that needs making, it seems to me, is that
these three phases are to some extent ideal types, and the forms they
take on the ground of actual history will be far more complex, messy,
and idiosyncratic than the simple outline suggests. This isn't simply a
result of the fact that none of these phases have arrived yet. The same
thing can be said, after all, of the use of economic phases to talk
about history that's already happened.

When a historian suggests that England embraced a mercantilist economic
system in the sixteenth century, for instance, she does not mean that
the English economy shifted gears all at once on January 1 1501. Nor
does she mean that the English economy in that century lacked important
features of the older feudal-agrarian economy or foreshadowings of the
capitalist economy that replaced mercantilism later on, nor that the
English mercantilist economy was identical to all others. Rather, she
means that the traits implied by the term "mercantilism" - an
export-based economy geared toward generating a favorable balance of
trade with competing nations, foreign policy initiatives pursuing
overseas colonies and the expansion of naval power and a merchant
marine, and the like - provide a workable sketch of the shape toward
which the English economy moved over the course of the century in question.

The same rule applies to the phases I've outlined here. The transition
from today's industrialism of abundance to the scarcity industrialism of
the near future, for example, will likely be just as slow and ragged a
process as the rise of mercantilism. Some nations - Russia, for example
- have already implemented the political control of resource markets
that I've suggested as a core feature of the phase; other nations have
barely begun to move in that direction, and other features of the phase
are just as unevenly distributed. For that matter, the 1950s-era
American autos cruising down the streets of Havana today, repeatedly
rebuilt with scavenged and jerry-built parts, show certain core features
of the salvage economy already in existence in some parts of the world
right now.

Thus the world of a hundred years from now, say, will include nations at
many different points along the scale. It will very likely be dominated
by nations that have embraced scarcity industrialism, while the powers
of today's age of abundance will be the fallen empires and failed states
of that day. Meanwhile, those nations that draw the short straws in the
geopolitical lottery may already be well into the salvage society phase,
mining the refuse of the industrial age to meet local needs and to pay
for whatever foreign trade can still be had. Nations that lack both
fossil fuels and valuable salvage, in turn, will either have fallen back
to agrarian or nomadic economies or, given plenty of luck and the
necessary knowledge base, may be pioneering the first rough sketch of an
ecotechnic society. All of this will take place amid the turmoil of
ordinary history: that unending and uneven rhythm of crises, struggles,
and the rise and fall of governments and peoples whose embarrassingly
premature obituary Francis Fukuyama wrote a few years back, and which
tends to hide the slower and broader shifts in economy and subsistence
from contemporary eyes.

Fast forward another century, when Hubbert's curve will have finished
its trajectory and fossil fuels will be rare geological specimens, and
the powers of the age of scarcity industrialism will most likely have
collapsed in their turn. Those areas with a wealth of salvageable scrap
and the political and military savvy to hold onto them will be the
regional powers of a world in which global reach no longer exists, while
other areas - the modern conception of the nation-state will probably
have fallen into history's recycling bin by then, to be replaced by some
other form of geopolitical arrangement - will have only sustainable
resources to rely on; some of those will likely have settled into some
nonindustrial mode for the long term, while others may be building on
the first tentative foundations of an ecotechnic system. All these
changes, once again, will take their shape amid the rough and tumble of
historical events, and may be difficult to track against that wildly
variable background.

One implication of this vision is that appropriate steps for the present
and the near future are not limited to those that have some obvious
relationship to the scarcity industrialism of the near future. If,
unlikely as it seems, any of my readers belong to the political,
economic, or military leadership of one of the world's leading or rising
powers, their attention will be, and indeed should be, riveted to the
coming of scarcity industrialism; the nations they lead, not to mention
their own positions of influence and privilege, depend utterly on how
well they are able to manage that difficult transition. For the rest of
us, though, a broader focus and a less limited toolkit has many
advantages. The end of the age of abundance industrialism means the end
of the trickle-down economy that provided so many economic benefits to
the middle classes and raised the industrial world's working classes out
of abject poverty. To some extent, while the political classes will be
entering a new industrial order, those outside that circle may just find
themselves passing directly into the world of Dark Age salvage
societies. What this implies, in turn, is that the skills and habits of
the age of salvage may be well worth cultivating right now.

One obvious example unfolds from the implications of the sprawling
speculative subdivisions that surround so many American cities just now,
in the aftermath of the late housing bubble. For decades now, people
interested in sustainable housing have focused their attention on
innovative methods of new house construction: cobb and adobe, straw
bale, and many more. These are useful and in some cases brilliantly
successful technologies, but their application to our present
predicament is limited by one overarching factor: here in America, at
least, we already have many more houses than we need or can afford, and
the economic system we use to pay for new houses is so badly broken just
now that it may take a generation or more to get a new one up and running.

That being the case, the dream of sustainable Levittowns of cob-built,
earth-sheltered, solar-heated houses will remain out of reach for a good
long time. The possibilities before us are more limited. We can either
struggle on with the hopelessly inefficient housing stock we have now in
its current state, or we can learn how to rework our existing homes to
improve their energy efficiency: that is, we can learn to retrofit.

The word "retrofit" was coined in the 1950s, but its common use is one
of the legacies of the energy crises of the 1970s. During those years, a
great many homeowners discovered that houses built to take advantage of
cheap energy lost most of their advantages when energy stopped being
cheap. At the same time, the soaring interest rates and stagflation of
that decade made buying a new home a good deal less economically viable
than it had been during the preceding years. Many people responded by
figuring out cheap, effective ways to improve the energy efficiency of
their existing homes. Insulating blankets found their way around hot
water heaters, caulk guns traced lines around leaky foundation plates,
insulated Roman blinds replaced fashionable curtains, and a surprising
number of people discovered that it really is just as comfortable to put
on a cardigan as it is to turn up the thermostat on a cold evening.

One of the less noticed phenomena of these same years, in turn, was the
emergence of home energy retrofitting as a viable economic sector. In
every American city and a great many smaller towns, contractors no
longer able to find work building houses found a new niche installing
insulation, storm windows, and solar water heaters, while hardware
stores found room for a new section of home energy efficiency supplies.
It was never a large sector, and its growth came to a sudden stop in the
early 1980s in the flurry of political machinations that crashed the
price of oil and threw away our best chance for a transition to
sustainability, but it was one of the few success stories at a time when
most American industries were contracting and most families' standard of
living was slipping year after year.

Many of those same conditions are repeating themselves on a much larger
scale as the world stumbles across the uneven plateau on top of
Hubbert's peak. Despite the recent volatility in the futures markets,
oil remains far more expensive than it was a year ago; one step down for
every two steps upward still amounts to steady upward movement. The
approaching Great Recession promises to make the stagflation of the
Seventies look mild, but to American families it still poses the same
challenge of having to get by with less. Thus it's tolerably likely that
the same sort of retrofit economy will emerge in the next few years, as
those homeowners who stayed clear of the blandishments of fast-talking
mortgage salesmen, and keep their homes, find that they have no choice
but to make the best of the homes they have.

The same considerations apply to other sectors of the economy. The auto
industry is facing a similar transition, for example, as mechanics and
hobbyists across the country turn used cooking oil into biodiesel,
convert hybrid cars into plug-in vehicles, and equip bicycles and
scooters with electric motors and batteries. Detroit's much-ballyhooed
electric cars, when they finally get around to appearing on the market,
are likely to find themselves eating the dust of thousands of ingenious
retrofitters who, unburdened with the institutional inertia of Fortune
500 corporations, are getting products to local markets right now. These
retrofits won't allow what James Howard Kunstler has usefully labeled
"the paradise of happy motoring" to continue; on the other hand, they
may well enable a great many Americans to deal with the downside of a
social geography designed for cars rather than people, during the
inevitable lag time while that social geography becomes a bad memory.

A great many more dimensions of American life are likely to need
retrofitting in the years to come; nearly every aspect of our economy,
culture, and politics depends on cheap abundant energy and will have to
be rebuilt to deal with the new reality of energy scarcity. That will
apply to little things - for example, plenty of home appliances now
controlled by computer chips can be made to work with thermostats,
spring-driven timers, and the like, given a little ingenuity and a
willingness to tinker - and to much bigger ones as well. In a very real
sense, given the sharp limits we face in the near future, our entire
lives will need to be retrofitted to deal with the realities so many of
us have been trying to avoid for so long. The first job of this
foreshadowing of the salvage economy, in other words, will be to haul a
viable future out of the scrap heap of the present, and get it back into
some semblance of working order while there's still time to do so.

_____

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 (2006) and The Long Descent (2008). He
lives in Ashland, Oregon.

http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/09/retrofit-economy.html


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