The Long Descent (25 page)

These awkward facts show that renewables won't allow us to continue living the lifestyles we take for granted today. The problem, of course, is that as things now stand, neither will anything else. As oil production worldwide plateaus and falters, other fossil fuels are coming under strain, and no alternative — renewable or otherwise — shows any sign of being able to take up the slack. A steady decline in the overall production and availability of energy thus defines all the likely futures ahead of us. Extrapolate the effects in economic and social terms, and we face what might as well be called the Deindustrial Revolution, a period of wrenching change in which the world's industrial societies give way to subsistence economies dominated by the agricultural sector and powered by sun, wind, water, and muscle.

The implied reference to the Industrial Revolution is deliberate, of course. The birth of industrial society in the late 18th and 19th centuries, and its global expansion in the 20th, catalyzed sweeping changes in almost every dimension of human life, and it left the certainties of previous ages in tatters. It seems likely that the twilight of industrial society will drive equally sweeping effects, overthrowing today's fundamental assumptions just as thoroughly as the coming of fossil fuels overthrew those of early modern Europe's agrarian societies. The economics of renewable energy technology, though, take on a very different and much more positive shape in the context of deindustrialization.

This suggestion cuts across much of the conventional wisdom in the peak oil community these days, but at least three factors back it. First and most obvious, of course, is the fact that even the most drastically deindustrialized society will still need energy. (Even hunter-gatherers systematically exploit energy resources, if only in the form of food and firewood.) Windmills with a net energy of 5- or 6-to-1 are hopelessly inadequate to power an industrial society, but deindustrial societies with grain to grind, water to pump, and many other uses for mechanical energy will find them just as economically viable as did the agrarian societies of the past. In the same way, the economics of passive solar heating are one thing when it's a question of whether to heat one's home with solar energy or fossil fuels, and quite another when fossil fuels are priced out of the heating market, firewood is scarce, and the choice is between solar heat and nothing at all.

Renewable energy technologies that can be built from readily available materials with hand tools are uneconomical today, because they have been priced out of the market by fossil fuels. Many of them, however, will be economically viable in a deindustrialized society. Windpower and waterpower head the list of crucial energy sources for the deindustrial age; as Lewis Mumford pointed out in his
Technics and Civilization,
the first phase of the Industrial Revolution (his “eotechnic” phase) used windmills, waterwheels, and sails as its prime movers.
⁶
Passive solar space heating and solar hot water heating also belong on the list, as do bicycles and other efficient ways of converting human muscle power into mechanical energy.

Many other renewable energy technologies don't make this particular cut. The poster child for the losers is the photovoltaic (PV) cell. PV cells can't be made without high-tech manufacturing facilities and energy-intensive materials, and, according to some calculations, their net energy is right around 1-to-1 — that is, it takes about as much energy to manufacture a cell as the cell produces in its relatively short working life.
⁷
In the aftermath of the Deindustrial Revolution, barring drastic changes in the technology, PV cells will be museum pieces or expensive novelties, if they can be made at all.

Yet a simple before-and-after analysis misses a crucial variable. The net energy of PV cells, like most other renewable energy technologies, is radically asymmetric over time. Essentially all the energy inputs go into PV cells at the beginning, when they are manufactured and installed; the energy output comes later on, and requires almost no further input. In effect, then, a PV cell can be seen as a way of storing energy; the energy put in at its manufacture, one might say, is extracted out of it, bit by bit, over its working life.

When energy availability is increasing or remains steady over time, this asymmetry is a drawback; it means that the user has to pay for all the energy produced by the PV cell up front, in the form of manufacturing costs, and only gets the energy back over time. Deindustrialization, though, stands this logic on its head. As energy resources decline in availability and rise in price, PV cells allow the user to arbitrage energy costs across time — to buy energy, in effect, when it's relatively cheap and available, and to use it when energy is relatively costly and scarce. The same is true of other renewable energy technologies; for example, a high-tech windpower generator can be built and stocked with spare parts now, when plentiful fossil fuel puts its manufacture within reach. For the next ten to twenty years, as fossil fuels deplete and the price of energy soars, that windmill can continue turning out electricity with only the most minimal further investment.

Such strategies won't provide energy for the long term, but it's crucial to remember that the long term is not the only thing that matters. To return to a metaphor used earlier, if you knew that tomorrow you would be taken up in an airplane to 10,000 feet or so and tossed out the cabin door, the long-term value of a parachute as an investment would probably not be the first thing on your mind, and the fact that the parachute would be of no further use to you once you reached the ground might not weigh heavily on your decision making process, either. These points would presumably take second place to the overriding need to get to the ground alive.

We face a similar situation today. Industrial society's vulnerability to fossil fuel depletion leaves us perched unsteadily in the cabin door with plenty of empty air below us, waiting for declining oil production to give us the shove that will send us on our way down. Renewable energy technologies, like the parachute of the metaphor, won't keep us from falling, but they can potentially slow the descent enough to make a difference. One of the lessons taught by (but rarely learned from) the wars and disasters of the 20th century is that the difference between a lot of energy and a little is less important than the difference between a little and none at all. Investing a portion of today's relatively abundant energy resources into tomorrow's energy technologies will make it a good deal easier to provide that “little” when it's most needed, as well as cushioning some of the impacts of the Deindustrial Revolution.

Climbing Down the Ladder

Yet the airplane of industrial society is very short on parachutes just now, and it's instructive to explore the reasons for that. One of the children's books I read when I was growing up used the metaphor of a ladder to represent progress; this rung is a chariot, the next a stagecoach, the one after that a locomotive, the next a car, and so on. The problem with this metaphor is that it makes it look as though the earlier rungs are still there, so if the top one starts to crack, you can step down to the next one, or to the one below that. In most fields of technological progress, that isn't even remotely true. How many people nowadays, faced with a series of complicated math problems and denied a computer, could whip out a slide rule or sit down with a table of logarithms and solve them? These days even grade school students in math class do arithmetic on pocket calculators.

The same thing is true in nearly any other branch of technology you could name. Each new generation of technology is more complex, more resource-intensive, and more interdependent with other technologies than the one before it. As each new generation of technology is adopted, the one before it becomes “obsolete” and is scrapped — even if the older technology does the job just as well as the newer one. Twenty years later only a handful of retired engineers still remember how the old technology worked, and in many cases not even they would be able to build it again from scratch.

In effect, as we've climbed from step to step on the ladder of progress, we've kicked out each rung under us as we've moved to the next. This is fine so long as the ladder keeps on going up forever. If you reach the top of the ladder unexpectedly, though, you're likely to end up teetering on a single rung with no other means of support — and if, for one reason or another, you can't stay on that one rung, it's a long way down. That's the situation we're in right now, with the rung of high-tech, high-cost, and high-maintenance technology cracking beneath us.

In the last few years, fortunately, people have begun to replace a few of the lower rungs. Once again there are working farmers who use draft animals or their own muscles instead of tractors and who fertilize the soil with compost and manure instead of petroleum-based chemicals. Once again there are blacksmiths who make extraordinary things using only hand tools, and there are home brewers who turn out excellent beer with the ordinary kitchen gear and raw materials their great-great-great-grandparents knew well. Even the lowest rung of all, making stone tools by flint knapping, has had a modest renaissance of its own in recent years.

One of the most hopeful features of this side of our predicament is that the revitalization of old technologies can be done successfully by individuals working on their own. It's precisely those technologies that can be built, maintained, and used by individuals that formed the mainstay of the economy in the days before cheap, abundant energy made a global economy seem to make sense.

These same technologies — if they're recovered while time and resources still permit — can make use of the abundant salvage of industrial civilization, help cushion the descent into the deindustrial future, and lay foundations for the sustainable cultures that will rise out of the ruins of our age.

Another practical example shows how this can work. Some time ago, after mulling over the points just mentioned, I started looking into the options for climbing down the ladder a rung or two in the field of practical mathematics. The slide rule was an obvious starting place. A few inquiries revealed that most of my older friends still had a slipstick or two gathering dust in a desk drawer, and not long afterward I found myself being handed a solid aluminum Pickett N903-ES slide rule in mint condition. The friend who gave it to me is getting on in years and has a short white beard, and though he looks more like Saint Nicholas than Alec Guinness, I instantly found myself inside one of the fantasies burned into the neurons of my entire generation:

“This,” Obi-wan Kenobi tells me, “is your father's slide rule.” I take the gleaming object in one hand, my gaze never leaving
his face. “Not so wasteful or energy-intensive as a calculator,” he says then. “An elegant instrument of a more sustainable age.” I press my thumb against the cursor, and…

Well, no, a blazing blue-white trigonometric equation didn't come buzzing out of the business end, and of course that's half the point. The slide rule is an extraordinarily simple, low-tech device that lets you crunch numbers at what, at least in pre-computer terms, was a very respectable pace. Even by current standards it's not slow. I've only begun to learn the ways of the Force, so to speak, but I can easily multiply and divide on my Pickett as fast or faster than I can punch buttons on a calculator.

Beyond its practical uses, however, the slide rule has more than a little to teach about what sustainable technology looks like. It's quite literally pre-industrial technology — the basic principle was worked out in 1622 by Rev. William Oughtred, though it took many more years of experimentation to produce the handy ten-inch device with multiple scales that played so important a role in 19th and 20th century science and engineering. This simple device crunched most of the numbers that put human footprints on the moon. Set a slide rule side by side with an electronic calculator and certain points stand out.

First,
a slide rule is durable.
By this I don't simply mean that you have to use more force to break a slide rule than a pocket calculator, though this is generally true. More important is the fact that a pocket calculator has a limited shelf life. Over fairly modest time spans, batteries go dead, memory and processing chips break down, and plastics depolymerize into useless goo. Even the cheap plastic slide rules once mass-produced for schoolchildren will outlast most pocket calculators, and a good professional model can stay in working order for something close to geological time.

Second,
a slide rule is independent.
You don't need to rely on any other technology to make it work or to do something useful with the output. Pocket calculators depend on a certain level of battery technology to work, though admittedly this puts them toward the independent end of the spectrum. By contrast, think of the number and extent of the technological systems needed to keep a car or an Internet terminal functioning and useful.

Third,
a slide rule is replicable.
If you have one, it doesn't take advanced industrial technology to make another, or a thousand more; a competent cabinetmaker with hand tools and a good eye can produce them as needed. Making a pocket calculator, by contrast, demands a mastery of dozens of extraordinarily complex and energy-intensive technologies: clean rooms with –nanoparticle-free air, solvent chemistry, and manufacture of monomolecular metallic films are but a few. Once these technologies can no longer be sustained — a dead certainty in the deindustrial age — pocket calculators become a nonrenewable resource. Slide rules remain viable as long as something like the technology of Oughtred's time remains available.

Fourth,
a slide rule is transparent.
By this I mean that it's easy to work out the principles that make it function from the device itself. This is crucial, because a transparent technology can communicate much more than its own output.