When The Lights Go Out

Bee has been reading The Upside of Down: Catastrophe, Creativity and the Renewal of Civilization By Thomas Homer-Dixon. The theme, I guess, is civilization's dependence on limited resources and its consequent fragility as we approach the our planet's limits. I haven't read the book, but the subject is a frequent theme of mine. In particular, energy is finite and critical. Bee notes:

Yet we are living in a society that disregards its limits. There is no doubt growth can't proceed forever, energy resources are not infinite, and more is not always better. Sure, one can debate exactly when and how a change will set in, but there is no way disregarding the fact that we have to address these problems, and we should do so rather sooner than later.

In his latest book "The Upside of Down" Thomas Homer-Dixon addresses the question of how crucial energy resources are for our societies to maintain their complexity. In a nutshell the argument is that it takes energy to keep our systems running at high performance. We are not prepared to cope with less energy, and our societies' networks lack resilience. Should energy supply dwindle, and one or two unfortunate events hit at the wrong time, the effect can be disastrous. The book is a warning, a call for caution and for action.

So what does happen when the lights go out, and the grid goes down? We haven't done this experiment on a global scale before, but smaller scale experiments are not comforting. I often flack here for Jared Diamond's book Collapse. He looks at several societies that pushed beyond the envelope of their ecologies limits. In the worst cases, like Norse Greenland and Chaco Canyon, the collapse was complete, leaving nothing behind but ruins. On Easter Island, society disintegrated, population collapsed, and society's key resources were lost, but some people survived - perhaps because they no longer had the means to leave.

The population carrying capacity of the planet without abundant and cheap energy is no doubt a lot smaller than at present, but the real threat is that we will devastate the Earth's remaining resources in our attempt to maintain our standard of living - that happened both in Chaco Canyon and Norse Greenland. That's the positive feedback that leads to catastrophe.

Diamond also points out some cultures that made the adjustments to adapt to their ecological limits. They made the choices - sometimes hard choices - that allowed survival. Bee's author apparently talks about a more democratic (and presumably, more egalitarian) society making better choices, but that's not enough. True, our resources would last a bit longer if Larry Ellison didn't need four yachts over 100 meters, but the real problem is that there are just too many of us. We really need to make the choice to reduce the human population. The easiest and most humane way to do that is to penalize excessive reproduction - for example with taxes. It is possible - parts of Europe have reduced their fertility rates to the replacement rate or lower.