Powerdown: options and actions for a post-carbon world

Citation

Heinberg, R. (2005), "Powerdown: options and actions for a post-carbon world", European Business Review, Vol. 17 No. 5. https://doi.org/10.1108/ebr.2005.05417eab.002

Powerdown: options and actions for a post-carbon world

Keywords: Industrial societies, Energy, Energy management

Purpose - Oil has been the cheapest and most convenient energy resource ever discovered by humans. Aims to consider the options and actions for industrial societies in an era of oil and natural gas depletion.Design/methodology/approach - Outlines the main points from the author's book.Findings - Describes a fundamental change of direction for industrial societies from the larger, faster, and more centralized, to the smaller, slower, and more locally-based; from competition to cooperation; and from boundless growth to self-limitation.Originality/value - The paper raises awareness and highlights issues surrounding the options as available energy declines.

My most recent book, Powerdown, is an exploration of the realistic options that will be available to industrial societies, and individuals in those societies, in the dawning era of oil and natural gas depletion. It is a starkly frank look at our prospects as the industrial period winds toward its inevitable conclusion, and a discussion of what we can do to build a truly sustainable culture for our children and grandchildren.

Oil has been the cheapest and most convenient energy resource ever discovered by humans. During the past two centuries, people in industrial nations accustomed themselves to a regime in which more fossil-fuel energy was available each year, and the global population grew quickly to take advantage of this energy windfall. Industrial nations also came to rely on an economic system built on the assumption that growth is normal and necessary, and that it can go on forever.

When global oil production peaks, as it will in the next few years, that assumption will come crashing down.

How can we be sure that oil will become less abundant? Consider these simple facts. The oil industry started in America, and the US is the most-explored region on the planet. Thus, America's experience with oil will eventually be repeated elsewhere. Oil discovery in the US peaked in the 1930s; oil production peaked roughly 40 years later. Since 1970, the US has had to import more oil nearly every year in order to make up for its shortfall from domestic production.

The same is happening elsewhere. Global discovery of oil peaked in the early 1960s. One after another, oil-exporting nations are reaching their all-time production peaks and falling into decline, becoming oil-importing nations. Britain is a classic example: it is slated to become a net importer once again this year. Between 18 and 24 of the world's 45 most important oil-producing nations are, like the US and Britain, past-peak.

According to a growing chorus of oil experts, the global peak will arrive between now and 2010.

Clearly, we need immediately to find substitutes for oil. But an analysis of the current energy alternatives is not reassuring. Solar and wind are renewable, but most nations now get only a tiny portion of their energy budgets from them; rapid and costly growth will be necessary if these alternatives are to replace a significant fraction of the energy shortfall from post-peak oil. Nuclear power is dogged by the problem of radioactive waste disposal. Hydrogen is not an energy source, but an energy carrier: it takes more energy to produce a given quantity of hydrogen than the hydrogen itself will yield. Moreover, nearly all commercially produced hydrogen now comes from natural gas - whose production will peak only a few years after oil begins its decline. Unconventional petroleum resources - heavy oil, tar sands, and shale oil - are plentiful but costly to extract, and the rate of extraction cannot be increased arbitrarily.

The hard math of energy resource analysis yields an uncomfortable but unavoidable prospect even if efforts are intensified now to switch to alternative energy sources, after the oil peak industrial nations will have less energy available to do useful work - including the manufacturing and transporting of goods, the growing of food, and the heating of homes.

If there is any solution to industrial societies' approaching energy crises, renewables plus conservation will provide it. Yet in order to achieve a smooth transition decades will be needed, and we do not have decades before the peak comes. Moreover, even in the best case, the transition will require the massive shifting of investment from other sectors of national economies toward energy research and conservation. And the available alternatives will likely be unable to support the kinds of transportation, food, and dwelling infrastructure we now have; thus the transition will entail a complete redesign of industrial societies.

The likely economic consequences of the energy downturn are enormous. All human activities require energy - which physicists define as "the capacity to do work." With less energy available, less work can be done - unless the efficiency of the process of converting energy to work is raised at the same rate as energy availability declines. It will therefore be essential for all economic processes to be made more energy-efficient. However, efforts to improve efficiency are subject to diminishing returns, and so a point will be reached where reduced energy availability will translate to reduced economic activity. This is problematic given the fact that most economies are currently based on the need for perpetual growth.

The consequences for global food production will be no less profound. Throughout the twentieth century, food production expanded in country after country, mostly due to increased energy inputs. Without fuel-fed tractors and petroleum-based fertilizers, pesticides, and herbicides, it is questionable whether crop yields can be maintained at current levels.

The oil peak will also impact international relations. Many wars of the twentieth century were fought over resources - often, oil. But those wars took place during a period of expanding resource availability; the coming decades of heightened competition for fading energy resources will likely see more frequent and deadly conflicts - many of them likely centered in the Middle East and Central Asia.

If humankind is to avoid ruthless competition, cooperative efforts toward conservation will be needed. The ways cooperation and conservation could be achieved are limitless in detail, but the broad-scale options are few and easily surveyed. Industrialized societies will have to forego further conventional economic growth in favor of a costly transition to alternative energy sources. All nations will have to limit per-capita resource usage. To avoid wasteful competitive struggle, powerful countries will have to reduce disparities of wealth both among their own people, and also between themselves and poorer nations. Not only will oil, coal, and natural gas need to be conserved, but also fresh water, topsoil, and other basic and limited resources. Moreover, as energy available for industrial transportation declines, economies will have to be unlinked from the global market and re-localized. Everyone - especially those in rich, industrial nations - will have to undertake a change in lifestyle in the direction of more modest material goals more slowly achieved. And inevitably, with the conservation of resources will come the necessity to stabilize and reduce human populations.

These are far from being entirely new ideas. In the early 1970s the Club of Rome commissioned, from a MIT-based international team of researchers led by Donella Meadows, a study on the future of industrial society. Published as The Limits to Growth in 1972 (LTG), the book provoked a debate that is still ongoing. The study concluded that if (then) present growth trends continued, fundamental resource limits would be reached in the middle of the twenty-first century, leading to a dramatic, uncontrollable collapse of population, food production, and other significant measures of social viability.

Several economists resorted to misrepresentation and misquoting in order to attempt to debunk LTG's conclusions. However, in fact, rather than having been refuted or debunked, the LTG study has well withstood the test of time and is widely regarded as an early landmark in the literature on sustainability.

While the main message of the book was worrisome, LTG's second important conclusion was that it might be possible establish a state of global equilibrium in which society would be "sustainable without sudden and uncontrollable collapse" and "capable of satisfying the basic material requirements of all of its people."

I mention the LTG study because both its analysis and its recommendations clearly framed the terms of the effort we must now take up in earnest - which I have termed Powerdown. This would imply a fundamental change of direction for industrial societies - from the larger, faster, and more centralized, to the smaller, slower, and more locally-based; from competition to cooperation; and from boundless growth to self-limitation.

If this recommendation were taken seriously, it could lead to a world a century from now with fewer people using less energy per capita, all of it from renewable sources, while enjoying a quality of life enviable by the industrial urbanite of today. Human inventiveness could be put to the task of expanding artistic satisfaction, finding just and convivial social arrangements, and deepening the spiritual experience of being human. Living in smaller communities, people would enjoy having more control over their lives. Traveling less, they would have more of a sense of rootedness, and more of a feeling of being at home in the natural world. Renewable energy sources would provide some conveniences, but not nearly on the scale of fossil-fueled industrialism.

This will not, however, be an automatic outcome of the energy decline. Such a happy result can only come about through considerable effort, beginning immediately.

The book begins with an updating of information on petroleum depletion in my previous volume, The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies. It then explores the four pathways that will be available to humanity as available energy declines.

The first consists of ruthless competition for the world's remaining resources, a path I call "Last One Standing."

The main alternative is "Powerdown," a strategy that will require tremendous effort and economic sacrifice in order to reduce per-capita resource usage in wealthy countries, develop alternative energy sources, distribute resources more equitably, and humanely but systematically reduce the size of the human population over time. The world's environmental, anti-war, anti-globalization, and human rights organizations are pushing for a mild version of this alternative, but for political reasons they de-emphasize the level of effort required and play down the population issue.

Meanwhile the vast majority of the world's people are in the dark. They do not understand the challenge facing us, nor the options realistically available. Politicians and the media actively help to maintain this condition of ignorance by encouraging denial and offering false hopes (for an easy transition to a hydrogen economy, or for simple market-based solutions), a path I call "Waiting for the Magic Elixir."

Finally I suggest that, if Powerdown efforts fail, we should prepare for the ensuing collapse of industrial civilization by building cultural lifeboats - communities of preservation and service that would seek to protect natural ecosystems and teach the skills of sustainability and self reliance.

In the final chapter, "Our Choice," I explore how three important groups within global society - the power elites, the opposition to the elites (the antiwar movement, anti-globalization movement, etc. - the "Other Superpower"), and ordinary people - are likely to respond to these four options. I suggest that the most fruitful response is likely to be a combination of Powerdown (in its most severe form) and Lifeboat Building. This chapter ends with a plea for the preservation of our highest human values and ideals during a time when human life may begin to appear cheap and superfluous, and when fear and hate may seem increasingly justified.

Powerdown offers no facile answers to the dilemmas ahead. Its purpose is not to persuade but to inform. It dares to speak frankly about the human condition, but avoids cynicism and despair. It acknowledges that we are probably living in the early collapse phase of industrial society. By taking reality (rather than hopeful fantasy) as a starting point, it offers readers plain talk about what is happening now, what is likely to unfold in the next few decades, and what we can do.

Richard HeinbergNew College of California, Santa Rosa, California, USA