Almost everybody is aware of the first phenomenon. Very few are aware of the second -- or, at least, they are frightened to talk about it. Occasionally, liberal politicians will mention the second and use it as the reason why western nations should allow in more young energetic people from Africa, Asia and South America so that their future earnings can pay for the health care and state pensions of the swelling numbers of the indigenous old people in the western countries during the next two or three decades.
This, of course, is a very silly argument. Whether the numbers of immigrants, both legal and illegal, into western countries will rise moderately or excessively (that is, at greater rates than the numbers of jobs we can provide) is beside the point. When they have largely replaced or merged into the existing stock -- which is inevitable -- the evidence strongly suggests that they, too, will produce smaller-than-replacement family sizes. They will also be committing suicide as we are today.
There are two reasons for what appears to be the inevitable death of the human species. The first is man's incessant desire for status goods (which quickly become ordinary consumer goods which everybody owns) which signal the status of individuals in society and which has driven the economic system hitherto. We can do nothing about this. The propensity for status and rank order is deeply buried in our genes and has been for millions of years, long before homo sapiens itself arose, roughly 100,000 years ago. The second is due to one of the latest status goods, and the most powerful so far, the motor car. This has enabled -- indeed encouraged -- the separation of society from work. More accurately, it has separated the close conjunction of family plus local community from the place of work.
Most of the working population of western countries have lost their local community completely. However, because we are still a strongly social species we now hang onto our jobs and the flimsy, temporary nature of the community we find there like grim death. Millions of working people now spend hours a day, travelling stressfully to work, mainly because that's the only place they will now find some companionship with others. The result of this is that they have little leisure time left when they arrive back at home and have little time, energy or emotionality left over to cope with their children. And this is the main reason these days why parents in western countries are reducing the number of children they are prepared to produce.
This phenomenon is really an extension of the main hypothesis I will be discussing in my book. What I have been saying so far is that modern adults don't have any more time or energy to spend on any new status goods which are of anywhere near the economic significance as the motor car and the TV and one or two more things during the last century. There'll be nothing more to energise the economic system, which always requires novel goods of high enough attractiveness -- and thus profit margins -- to keep the investment cycle going.
But in this posting -- and I will need to touch on this in my book -- I am saying that there is an even more serious prospect. Not only will our economic systems collapse, but our populations will, too.
That's the bad news. The good news is that the motor car depends on cheap oil and, more latterly, natural gas. When this starts to decline then the whole de-communitising shift of the last century will start to unwind, and there is the possibility that work and family plus local community can start to recombine. Goodness knows, this is going to be possible in principle. We have abundant solar energy falling on all the tropical and temperate countries of the world (that is, where people live now). This can be tapped into one way or the other -- solar cells or bacterial production of hydrogen, etc. And we also have the technology of the Internet and its future development. Most jobs -- and I repeat -- most jobs will be as easily able to be done at home or at an office or workshop very close by as are now done by fairly long-distance commuting every day.
I believe that when re-communitising starts taking place, then the problem of status and rank order can be fulfilled locally, leisure time will increase again, and that the joys and satisfactions of a decent family size will be restored. Mankind might then begin to have the future that it doesn't have now. But there'll be harrowing times between now and then. And we won't do it voluntarily. We'll only be forced into it because oil and gas supplies will become scarcer and increasingly expensive.
The following article from this week's New Scientist describes the underlying reason why western society is now about to change:
<<<< BRACE YOURSELF FOR THE END OF CHEAP OIL
Bob Holmes and Nicola Jones
A moment of truth is fast approaching -- perhaps sooner than we can prepare for it. "The world faces at best a global recession. At worst, war, famine and mass migration," says Richard Hardman, trustee of the London-based Oil Depletion Analysis Centre and a former president of the UK Geological Society. He is talking about the day we no longer have enough oil to meet energy needs. The result is likely to be skyrocketing fuel prices and economic chaos -- far worse than the worldwide recession caused by the oil shocks of the 1970s.
But this crisis isn't centuries away. The crunch point comes not when we have run all the oil wells dry, but when demand outstrips production. And a growing number of experts are warning that this is likely to happen within the next few years. "There is a growing consensus that we are heading for an imminent peak [in oil production], if not already past it," Hardman says.
In previous crises, new reserves always seem to have been found to make up the shortfall. But the declining rate at which new fields are being discovered suggests it won't happen this time, at least not for conventional oil. We now find just one barrel of oil for every four we consume. And with production already declining in the US and the North Sea, the world must rely increasingly on the politically volatile Middle East and other parts of the developing world.
So how long have we got? To estimate when the world will run short of oil, you need to know how much oil there is overall. In principle, this should be easy to calculate: geologists know which kinds of rock are likely to hold oil and they know where these reservoirs are and how big they are. "They know all the regions where it's possible to find oil by now," says Kjell Aleklett, physicist at Uppsala University, Sweden, and president of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas. "There are no new regions to be found."
Oil companies keep detailed information about individual basins secret, but most of the educated guesses made over the past few decades fall close to the same estimate: the world's oil reserves began with a total of about 2 trillion barrels of which some 900 billion have now been used.
The 1.1 trillion barrels that remain represent about a 40-year supply at current consumption levels of about 25 billion barrels per year. At first glance this seems a comfortable cushion, but don't be fooled -- we won't get the chance to use it all at anything like our present rate. The flow rate from any single oil well begins to decline as soon as production starts, because the pressure in the reservoir drops. Companies can maintain the flow for a while by injecting water to boost the pressure, but the flow inevitably dwindles and the last of the oil must be wrung out.
Good half of the pie
This means that the rate of production follows roughly a bell-shaped curve. The peak, whether from a single basin, a region, or the entire world, comes when about half the oil has been extracted -- once most of the wells are in and before they taper off too much. After that, the rate falls inexorably. "It's not that you've eaten half the pie; you've eaten the good half of the pie," says Alt Samsam Bakhtiari, an expert with the National Iranian Oil Company. If production rates fall while demand continues to rise, oil prices are likely to spike or fluctuate wildly, raising the prospect of economic chaos, problems with transporting food and other supplies, and even war as countries fight over what little oil is available. "That's when all hell breaks loose," says James MacKenzie, an energy analyst at the World Resources Institute in Washington DC.
If the general consensus of a 2-trillion barrel reserve is correct, the world has almost finished the good half of the pie and this day of reckoning is not far off. Indeed, many prominent analysts, Aleklett included, foresee oil production peaking in the next 5 to 15 years, far too short a time to find alternative fuels, especially for transportation, and barely long enough to bring effective conservation measures into play.
Some believe the peak is already here. "I am 99 per cent confident that 2004 will be the top of the mathematically smoothed curve of oil production," says Kenneth Deffeyes, a geophysicist at Princeton University. And he believes the highest single year may already have passed. "2000 may stand as a blip above the curve and be in the Guinness Book of World Records." Other leading analysts, including Colin Campbell, founder of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil & Gas, have reached the same conclusion. These analysts use variations of a method pioneered by geophysicist Marion King Hubbert, now something of a folk hero for correctly predicting in 1956 the US production peak in the 1970s, despite widespread dismissal of the idea at the time.
Not even the optimists believe we have much more than 20 years to prepare for the peak, if demand grows at its historical norm of 2 per cent per year. In a recent analysis, the United States Geological Survey (USGS) controversially estimated the world's extractable oil at more than 3 trillion barrels. Based on that figure, the US Department of Energy calculates that oil production may not peak until 2037.
As well as predicting the discovery of new fields, USGS analysts tracked changes in estimated reserves for 33,000 known fields and found that they crept upwards over time, either because earlier estimates were too conservative or because technological improvements allowed the companies to extract more oil. Applying this reasoning worldwide, they forecast that known fields should yield 612 billion barrels beyond current expectations.
But will new technology wring enough oil out of existing fields to maintain production rates? "I don't buy it," says David Pursell, an energy analyst with Simmons & Company International, an investment banking firm in Houston, Texas, that specialises in the energy sector. "You've got to spend a ton of capital to get an extra l or 2 per cent out."
Others who favour later dates, such as Shell and Exxon, include less accessible, dirtier sources such as heavy oil. But using these sources would release even more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere than conventional oil, a price that many feel is too high. "The most important problem we face with oil is not its availability but its carbon," says MacKenzie. "We have to move away from fossil fuels if we are to deal with the climate issue."
Whatever the exact timing of the peak, we still need to find a new source of energy. "In the end there's no way to know who's right, but it doesn't matter," says Jeremy Rifkin of the Foundation on Economic Trends in Washington DC. "We're only arguing about 20 years. If we think oil is a problem now, just wait 20 years. It'll be a nightmare."
New Scientist 2 August 2003 >>>>
Keith Hudson, 6 Upper Camden Place, Bath, England
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