Gentle Decline 1/26: Reaction & Redux
Hello. This is an issue which is almost all in the mode of reply. Clearly, the concept of the end of oil from the last issue touched a nerve or two; something in the region of 5% of the subscribers to this newsletter hit reply, and a few more got in touch by other means. Reactions were divided into three groups; about 40% were "thank God I'm not the only one thinking about this", 40% "here is something important you didn't cover", 10% "surely this cannot be true", and 10% "I disagree!".
I'm going to respond to one of the "I disagree!" people in detail, so I'd like to introduce you to this issue's principal contributing author, Gav Cassells. Gav describes himself as a shareholder, an employee, a former business owner, a market watcher, an aviation industry watcher, and an incentives driven environmentalist. He lectures in Economics in UCD and DCU, and wishes you to know that despite taking a relatively free market position here, he does not subscribe to unfettered free markets in general (not that the oil market is even remotely a free market).
My point is that for energy consumption, there are an infinite number of substitutes (with a whole array of their own problems to be sure), but that the real problem we face is cheap oil. As soon as oil gets genuinely expensive, a lot of the alternatives become viable commercially, the oil industry shrinks and its power and the negative effects of a high tax on it will reduce, and so what remains at that point will become both more valuable and less desirable, and therefore will be diverted only to uses for which it has the highest benefit.
How long that significantly reduced oil period lasts is impossible to guess, but I suspect that we won’t actually ever use all of the oil because it just won’t be economical to do so.
This of course relies on there being substitutes. Substitutes can take two basic forms; we can substitute the energy or we can substitute the activity. I think we’re going to see a lot more of the former than the latter. Batteries will be key as the real strength of oil is how much energy is stored in it. So the big technological breakthroughs that are needed will be in generating that storage density at a similar weight. Basically anything attached to a grid won’t be affected; it’s the stuff that moves that will.
And I broadly agree with everything Gav is saying here. However, it's the stuff that moves that's important, at least insofar as my predictions go. That's what affects how far we can go, and how far we can send goods.
The real issue for that is batteries. They're just not very good yet. As far as I can make out by the careful scientific method of looking-stuff-up-online, the energy efficiency of crude oil is 41,868 kilojoules/kg (that might actually be a reliable figure; it's widely attested). Diesel is better, but it's had stuff done to it, so let's work with the crude oil figure. The energy efficiency of the best commercially available electric car batteries, in contrast, is 914 kilojoules/kg. No, I am not missing any zeros there.
Batteries definitely do not work on Moore's Law in terms of improvement. But let's postulate that they can be improved at a steady rate of 5% a year (this is very optimistic, given what I'm reading about the limits of current battery technology). It will take 80 years at that rate for batteries to equal oil, and the oil is going to start being hard to get (both in physical terms, and also in economic actually-getting-to-market terms) long before that.
There are two wild cards here - the more likely one is that batteries cannot be improved that much; that there is a hard limit beyond which human efforts to compress energy into matter can't equal tectonic plates over a few million years. The less likely one is "some breakthrough is made". But this is the "???" step in "Do thing, ???, profit!" - it's not reliable.
I'm going to take a brief break here from trying to whack an economist with numbers, and delve off into History and Narrative (I can hear some of you sighing from here; this drum is well-beaten). The way we learn history, the way we write about history, and to a fair degree the way in which history as a concept is deliberately formed relies on narrative. And while it is not written by the victors, it is written by the survivors. So when we look back, as it were, we see the clear straight path that leads to where we are now. This bears as much resemblance to reality as the London Tube Map - all the things are there, but they don't line up like that, and the distances between some of them are just wrong.
And because we are the survivors - and descendants of survivors - of history to date, we tend to think that the things in the past, while they were at various junctures clearly awful and terrible, weren't all that damaging, because here we are, and not much has changed, right? But all the stuff that has changed is lost, and we only have the continuities that survived, in both practices and people; we don't see them or have much real awareness of them, and we then discount what can happen in our future to similarly change things.
To take a fairly trivial example that happened within most of our lifetimes, let's look at smoking. Smoking - cigarettes, that is, rather than anything else - was everywhere in Ireland up to 2004. Lots of people smoked, and while it was generally accepted that you didn't smoke in a non-smoker's house, parties at the houses of non-smokers would have a rotating group of people out in the back yard to get their nicotine fix. In the spring of 2004, smoking was banned in public places, and suddenly it's gone. Now you see people in 1990s films (or stuff set in the 1990s) sparking up indoors and it looks downright alien. But if you'd told someone in, say, 1995, that there would be a time when nobody would smoke in pubs, they straight up would not have believed you. Because the smoking ban is now reality, we can look back and say "ah, sure, it was coming for ages, and everyone knew it". They didn't. It was an abrupt transition, and it made a vast difference right then - and still does - but because it's in the past, it's just one more thing that is now normal.
If we stop and look carefully, we can see the same thing with all plagues, many wars, most famines, almost all revolutions and rebellions, and a huge array of other things-that-changed. In reality, many of these were angled bends in the course of history, utterly inconceivable before they started, and completely inevitable when viewed in the past. The absolute best example of this is the start of World War I - any history textbook account of it looks like dominoes lined up and falling over one by one in neat succession, from the bullet that hit Franz Ferdinand straight through to the Treaty of Versailles. If you read contemporary accounts - and I mean the ones written the same day as things happened, not the week-later retrospective - you'll see the confusion and horror that was actually there, the complete this-can't-be-happening feeling of reality suddenly haring off at 110 degrees.
So back to batteries. The point of view Gav is holding to here basically says that not a lot will change; humans will find ways to make life without oil, and life in declining oil, much the same as it is now, just with different and/or improved technology. And I'm not saying that's impossible. I am, however, saying it's unlikely.
He continues:
However, we will also be aiming for more efficiency, i.e. using less oil to do the same job. Enormous steps forward have already occurred in this area using stronger, lighter metals for construction, or better insulation for heating, etc. Similarly we’ll move away from oil based plastics over time. We are already moving away from disposable for a whole host of reasons; that will accelerate over time, and because of underlying price factors.
That's all true, and it's good. It will help mitigate the effects. But it's not getting us out from the decline in available energy that's coming up. Basically, humanity stumbled onto a freebie in about 1850, and instead of going "we should invest this in such a way that when it's gone, we'll be permanently better off", we went "wheeeee!". This is not to blame the people of 1850, mind; they were missing vast amounts of information we have now, particularly about geology and the formation of oil. I am kind-of looking askance at the people of about the 1950s forward, though. And making that investment now isn't going to happen fast enough to prevent there being damage when and as oil runs out.
Do I think the ride won’t have any bumps in it? No. Do I think that it’ll be super noticeable? No. The world changes all of the time because technology and processes change constantly. These are mostly driven by a need to keep things cheap, and for a long time oil has been the way to do things cheaply. That will soon come to an end (I hope) and as soon as that happens demand for alternatives will rise. Hopefully those alternatives will benefit from scale effects like oil has now; those alternatives will become even cheaper, and oil will be done for as a mass market consumer product.
So we're actually in agreement on the topic of whether this change will be super noticeable - my constant position as a gradualist with regard to history says that the changes will come in one at a time, in small bits and pieces, and in hindsight, everything will look inevitable and normal, even if it falls out exactly as I say it will. It won't, mind. There will be all kinds of second- and third-order effects that I can't imagine right now, and some of those will do very unexpected things. Reality is a mathematically chaotic system, if you want to think of it that way; small differences have large effects.
I’m broadly a sceptic. There’s a general anachronistic theme to [your predictions] that I find discomforting and also unbelievable. The idea that we’ll ever ditch large scale specialisation is just crazy to me. Self sufficiency is both highly unlikely and would also be devastating to human productive capacity. Way more so than losing half of the land area of the planet.
Insert Heinlein quote here, kinda thing. This is the bit where Gav's thinking and mine really part ways, though. I'm pretty sure that the era of large-scale specialisation is gone. I would go so far as to say that it was actually over at about the time of the development of the production line. Before that time, you had people who were highly skilled, long-experienced practitioners of one particular sub-set of one particular craft; riveters, barrel-hoop makers, shirtwaist makers, Cox's Orange Pippin sellers, cigarette card painters, and on and on. After the production line - and the other automation that followed - you have in their places heavy machine operators, woodworkers, sewing machine operators, greengrocers, and graphic designers, all of whom can and do engage in half a hundred different projects. We also have project managers now, the ultimate in generalists.
I don't think that self-sufficiency is the future, mind. Full-on self-sufficiency is an absolutely brutal way to live, and even then it can only last until the first tool you can't replace yourself breaks. Even the most devoted self-sufficiency people, such as John Seymour, saint of this parish, didn't for a moment think they could isolate themselves and survive. There will still be a plenitude of people who never engage in anything to do with food production. But they will be fewer in number, and their food - and everything else they consume - will come from a smaller radius than "the planet", which is the current situation.
This isn't even speculation, really. We have a very fine - if hackneyed - example of what happens when your food can't come from far away in the form of the second World War. To be fair, our situation is not likely to ever be that extreme - my father, born in 1943, was six or seven years old when he saw an orange for the first time, because there just were none available in Wexford in his lifetime before that. We will still be able to import oranges; they'll just come from Spain and Greece, rather than California, and they will cost proportionally more than they do now. Spain and Greece will import beef from Ireland, rather than Brazil and Argentina, and in the absence of polyester for cheap clothes and insulation, wool from England (or cotton from Eygpt).
And I think some of the anachronism (aside from the fact that I'm talking about a time that is not now, like) arises from the fact that I'm positioning this as need, not ambition. You can spin the situation where more people work on local farms as post-apocalyptic self-sufficiency madness, or you can position it as entrepreneurs identifying gaps in the local market and providing employment. I do think that some of these local folks will be quite specialised, not least because in the absence of cheap global markets, local differences in material culture will become more pronounced again. If we're using more wood instead of plastics for, say, cooking implements, then we're going to end up in this country with people whose area of work is "producing spoons and spatulas made of ash", which is pretty damn specialised. And again, you can see that as peasant-level pre-industrial grind, or as high-level boutique/bespoke goods supplied to the market.
I fired some of this text over to Gav so he can make sure I'm not massively misrepresenting him. He responds:
I think there is some confusion here on how we are using the word specialisation. I see specialisation as being like a pyramid. I know one skill, for which I get paid a fungible asset. I am part of a company that produces one broad product category. That company is part of an industry that produces a slightly broader product category, but ultimately supports its participants with very specialised products for the production and delivery of those products. That industry might be part of a geographical agglomeration that is supported by specialised infrastructure. This means that me doing my one thing is most efficient in this one place or similar places and anything produced outside of these areas will not be able to compete. Infrastructure doesn't have to be steel and concrete (though it often is); it can be an agglomeration of available skills or capital (Silicon Valley) or an agglomeration of regulatory infrastructure or taxation regimes (The City). These agglomerations form because it is the most efficient way to produce a given product, or more often a final product. This may become even more important if shipping gets more expensive. Supply chains will have to be kept short and so you may see incredibly specialised areas forming, especially for the production of complex products.
I think we're in some sort of violent agreement here, which is probably useful, although my terms as food & agricultural historian and Gav's terms as someone who has read economics are at odds. Short supply chains are definitely the core of the issue, and the particular complex product I'm looking at here is a hot meal every day of the year (I've an upcoming issue of Commonplace on exactly how complex a ham and cheese sandwich is, as it happens). One of the aspects of complexity in terms of geography and shipping, though, is that the component parts of the end product - and the end product itself, sometimes even more so - can decay in transit. We can import vegetables from South America and pork from gods know where, and wheat from North America, but the bread generally gets made at the national level and closer, and the packaged sandwich you get at the corner shop or petrol station is definitely made within a few hundred miles at the outside. So I think what I'm trying to form up is that the degree to which food produced outside of a geographical area cannot compete will approach totality. Something like lightspeed cones in causality, wherein in this case the food made in China no longer has any impact on the food made in Ireland.
Another piece missing from your thinking might be that shipping across seas might become far more important. This is already the most efficient form of transport fuel-wise and may lend itself to conversion to battery technology much more easily than aircraft. I can envisage future aircraft being pure passenger carriers with the hold full of batteries to conserve pricey oil, with the cargo that would have been on those aircraft today forced on to ships (hopefully faster than they are today). Oil will be used for takeoff and landing but the engines will run on battery power mid-flight. Planes would probably carry fuel to be able to run the engines if they had to, but airlines would be doing everything they could to avoid that.
I like this bit. I have a distinctly old-fashioned liking for the whole concept of shipping, so the notion of there being more of it is pleasing. Some of the technology for this is already being invented, or possibly re-invented; the SeaWing Kite is one example.
And Gav's final word:
I'm not saying that things won't change; of course they will, and in wild and unpredictable ways. But what I am definitely saying is that humans respond to perceived necessities, and we're really inventive, and we will probably solve any problem that is merely a logistical or economic one.
And so that this issue is not all me and Gave going back and forth, Sorcha O'Brien, who's a design historian in NCAD, replied:
On the product design front, there is certainly a fair bit of research going on into developing different sorts of bio-plastics, to replace some of the different things that plastics are currently used for. As you say, a lot of plastic is used because it’s cheap, not because something needs to be durable. Of course, then you get all sorts of agricultural issues in the bio-plastic supply chain, about land use and fertilizer and competing with food production. From talking to a colleague who specializes in this area, the main area that I think that plastic would still be used is for medical devices, which need to be durable and sterilized, and not give patients anaphylactic shock. One of the NCAD students, Alison Doherty, did a really interesting experimental project last year making bio-plastic from the prawn shells discarded from her local fishery; I don’t know how people with shellfish allergies would react to something like that, which would certainly limit it for medical uses, and it would probably need to be very clearly labelled for more day to day uses, I suspect.’
Medical devices make sense. I was a little hard put to imagine anything that couldn't be done with metal, but then I thought of syringes, in which the transparency of plastic is useful, but you don't really want to use glass for something that's being moved around all the time. If allergy issues happen bio-plastics can't work, and I don't know enough about how that works to make even an educated guess as to what would happen. I do know that corn (maize) allergies can be triggered from fibres that have made it all the way into cardboard, though.
Other areas where I know I'd miss plastic: tupperware and cling film. There are other storage boxes, using combinations of metal and rubber (and possibly bamboo), but I can't think of any other material that behaves like cling film. I had best work out another way to close off my rising bread doughs from the outside world, I suppose.
The other thing that comes to mind was if you had ever read Emotional Design by Jonathan Chapman? He talks about ways to design things so that people want to keep them for longer and don’t throw them away. One of his big things was ‘patina’, which you get really well on wood and metal and leather, but not on plastic.
I haven't read Chapman, but his book is now on my acquisition list. The word 'patina' has entered my head, though, and I can't shake it out. It seems to be one of the salient differences between things are are renewable and reusable, and those which are not - plastic just wears, and looks unpleasant when it does, other materials start to look used and in some way more correct. And in the few days since Sorcha's email, I've been noticing it everywhere, from clothes to kitchen utensils to handrails. Wooden handrails, it turns out, are really improved by having a patina. This feeds into the wider question of what we replace plastics with, and what that means for potential employment and commerce in the future, but I think that's into another issue.
In fact, that all ran quite a bit longer than I was expecting, so the follow-up of "here's what to do to best cope with my expected outcomes of the decline in oil" issue will come later, assuming I don't get loads of interesting replies to this one.
This issue brought to you by a re-supply of Coke Zero, overheard remote armoured combat training sessions, a very pleasing eight-hour day in the kitchen, and the discovery of some very fine bits of the within-2km-neighbourhood I didn't know existed. And of course by Gav and Sorcha, and frequent research supplier Cee.
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