General Premises:
The collapse of industrial civilization is inevitable.
Currently we are in a situation where industrial civilization requires
more and more energy each year to persist. The industrialized population
is growing. Capitalism is doing its best to ensure that every person
in the population consumes more each year. The infrastructure of civilization
is becoming larger and more complex, and requires ever-increasing
amounts of energy just to maintain it. Also, human-caused ecological
catastrophies require increasingly large amounts of energy to cope
with. The water table, for example, in China's breadbasket is dropping
by 3 to 10 feet a year, which means that massive energy expenditures
(and the depletion of water elsewhere) will be required just to keep
their yields the same. (Which is not currently happening. For the
past four years, civilization has consumed more grain than it produced,
last year by a margin of almost twice the annual grain ouput of Canada.)
Global warming and climate change will also require energy compensation
to keep industrial civilization from flying apart. An Intergovernmental
Panel has found that by 2065, monetary costs of weather damage
caused by climate change will exceed the entire planet's gross
domestic product.
But at the same time, evidence shows it as likely that we have already
used more than half of our planet's available fossil fuel reserves.
Which means that, according to Hubbert's curve, we will have less
and less energy available to us each year until we run out completely.
Often when I talk about this to people for the first time, they
say, "Well, have you heard about this new hybrid car?" or "Yes, I
think the government had better start putting more energy into renewable
technologies." I think that in the case of renewables, the solution
would be worse than the problem. For instance, to run all the cars
in England on corn-ethanol would require that the entire land
area of England be cultivated with corn. Which of course, is
impossible, since you would have to get rid of the cities and highways
to have enough space, and then where would the cars drive? And even
then, you still don't have energy to light and heat houses that the
car drivers live in, or the offices that they work at. You don't have
energy to run the factories that manufacture their cars, or the replacement
parts to repair them. You don't have energy for the police stations,
or least of all the military, which are the "hidden fist of the hidden
hand" which help to keep this whole system going.
Clearly this situation will not last. Eventually the upward energy
consumption trend and the downward availability trend will collide
catastrophically. The result will be the collapse of industrial civilization,
and there is nothing that anyone can do to stop it.
But there are things that people can do about it, during
and after it. Which is what this book is for.
Liberty, democracy and ecological sanity are not compatible with
industrial civilization.
Industrial civilization will destroy more human and living
communities the longer it lasts. Hence, the longer it exists, the
worse are our chances for survival.
Therefore, it is desirable that industrial civilization
should end as soon as possible.
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