The Soviet Example
ADECADE AND A HALF AGO the world went from bipolar to unipolar, because one of the poles fell apart: The SU is no more. The other pole — symmetrically named the US — has not fallen apart, yet; but there are ominous rumblings on the horizon. The collapse of the United States seems about as unlikely now as the collapse of the Soviet Union seemed in 1985. The experience of the first collapse may be instructive to those who wish to survive the second.
I anticipate that some Americans will react rather badly to having their country compared to the USSR. I would like to assure you that the Soviet people would have reacted similarly, had the United States collapsed first. “Of course the United States collapsed,” they would have said, “and why wouldn’t it have? It was a hopelessly backward system, destined for the scrapheap of history: self-enriching political elites, industry predicated on generating profits for the elites rather than on serving public needs, boom and bust cycles, homelessness, unemployment, a legacy of slavery and Indian genocide, yadda-yadda. What could it possibly have in common with us, who solved all these problems decades ago, thanks to progressive social policy and centrally planned production? Stop prattling on about that failed former British colony! We have more important things to do than listen to you! We are busy building Communism — on Mars!”
Jingoism, you see, is usually a two-sided coin, neither side containing anything particularly informative. Feelings aside, here are two 20th century superpowers, who wanted more or less the same things — things like technological progress, economic growth, full employment and world domination — but disagreed about the methods. And they obtained similar results — each had a good run, intimidated the whole planet and kept the other scared. Each eventually went bankrupt.
Reasonable people would never argue that the two poles were exactly symmetrical; along with significant similarities, there are equally significant differences. Both are valuable in predicting how the second half of the clay-footed superpower giant that once bestrode the planet will fare once it too falls apart. Until recently, however, few people would have taken this premise seriously. After all, who could have doubted that the world economic powerhouse that is the United States, having recently won the Cold War and the Gulf War, would continue, triumphantly, into the bright future of superhighways, supersonic jets and interplanetary colonies? But more recently the number of doubters has started to climb steadily.
One key observation is that the US economy is dependent on the availability of cheap, plentiful oil and natural gas to a greater extent than any other country. Once oil and gas become expensive (as they already have) and in ever-shorter supply (a matter of one or two years at most), economic growth will stop and the economy will collapse. The term “collapse” as I try to use it here has been given a precise meaning by John Michael Greer’s theory of catabolic collapse in his 2005 book How Civilizations Fall: A Theory of Catabolic Collapse. According to this theory, collapse can be calculated to occur when “production fails to meet maintenance requirements for existing capital.” The theory adds some much needed rigor to the poorly understood recurring phenomenon of advanced societies suddenly going “poof.”
But even without delving too deeply into theory, it is possible to sketch out very simple collapse scenarios that anyone can understand. Oil powers just about everything in the US economy, from food production and distribution to shipping, construction and plastics manufacturing. When less oil becomes available, less can be produced, and economic growth comes to an end. In an economy that is designed to operate at a steady state this would not be such a problem, but the US economy operates on debt, and the value of debt is based on the promise of future growth. Without growth, debt pyramids begin to crumble, and once that happens, less money is available for such things as oil imports. Lather, rinse, repeat. A while later, look around: Where did that economy disappear to?
At this point, it appears that 2005 set the all-time record in global (conventional) oil production and although it is still theoretically possible that this record will be exceeded in coming years, pessimistic, and usually under-reported, news of rapidly depleting reserves, delayed projects and collapsing production at key supergiant fields far outweighs optimistic, and usually over-hyped, news of new discoveries or new projects coming on-stream. There is also a cottage industry of professional optimists, proudly serving the needs of clients whose long-term investment strategy is to continually invest for the short term. Optimism is contagious, and so they are the ones who get most of the press.
Not that the professional realists are in short supply. They are to be found at the CIA, the Defense Department, the General Accounting Office and the US Congress. They all insist that looming energy shortages are a severe threat and that something must be done to address them. (The most realistic of these realists point out that something should have been done about it already, starting one or two decades ago.) More and more municipalities across the country are passing Peak Oil resolutions, determined to cut energy consumption before circumstances force their hand. Efforts to label the observable, measurable phenomenon of peaking oil production as a “theory” neatly parallel the efforts of global warming deniers. Note, however, that what is known on the subject now is more or less what was known a decade or so ago. Thus, the lack of attention paid to it over the decades resulted not from ignorance but from denial: although the basic theory that is used to model and predict resource depletion has been well understood since the 1960s, most people prefer to remain in denial. And although the dynamics of denial are a bit off the subject of Soviet collapse and what it may teach us about our own, I can’t resist saying a few words about it, for it is such an interesting subject. I also hope that it will help some of you to go beyond denial, this being a helpful step towards understanding what I am going to say here.
Now that a lot of the Peak Oil predictions are coming true more or less on schedule, and it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore the steady climb of energy prices and the dire warnings from energy experts of every stripe, outright denial is being gradually replaced with subtler forms of denial, which center around avoiding any serious, down-to-earth discussion of the likely actual consequences of Peak Oil and the ways one might cope with them.
Instead, there is much discussion of policy: what “we” should do. The “we” in question is presumably some embodiment of the Great American Can-Do Spirit: a brilliantly organized consortium of government agencies, leading universities and research centers and major corporations, all working together toward the goal of providing plentiful, clean, environmentally safe energy to fuel another century of economic expansion. Welcome to the sideshow at the end of the universe!
One often hears that “We could get this done, if only we wanted to.” Most often one hears this from non-specialists, sometimes from economists, but hardly ever from scientists or engineers. A few back-of-the-envelope calculations are generally enough to suggest otherwise, but here logic runs up against faith in the Goddess of Technology: that she will provide. On her altar are assembled various ritualistic objects used to summon the Can-Do Spirit: a photovoltaic cell, a fuel cell, a vial of ethanol and a vial of bio-diesel. Off to the side of the altar is a Pandora’s box packed with coal, tar sand, oceanic hydrates and plutonium: if the Goddess gets angry, it’s curtains for life on Earth.
But let us look beyond mere faith, and focus on something slightly more rational instead. This “we,” this highly organized, high-powered problem-solving entity, is quickly running out of energy, and once it does, it will not be so high-powered any more. I would like to humbly suggest that any long-term plan it attempts to undertake is doomed, simply because crisis conditions will make long-term planning, along with large, ambitious projects, impossible. Thus, I would suggest against waiting around for some miracle device to put under the hood of every SUV and in the basement of every McMansion, so that all can live happily ever after in this suburban dream, which is looking more and more like a nightmare in any case.
The next circle of denial revolves around what must inevitably
