Canadian mennonite article series: #4: limits and society
“The rain came down, the streams rose, and the winds blew and beat against that house, and it fell with a great crash.” Matthew 7:27
Let me be bold – Like a vast chain-letter pyramid scheme, like a house built upon the sand, Western society is built upon a poor foundation: cheap energy. Yes, the cheap energy whose shaky foundation we explored in the previous article.
To be sure, cheap energy is not inherently bad. For two centuries the ever increasing availability of energy has allowed the development of tremendously complex societies, with services (health care, education) and opportunities (communications, travel) once not even imaginable, now available to huge numbers of people.
However, like all good things, we get used to them, and the availability of cheap energy is now something that we take for granted. It wouldn't be so bad if cheap energy were merely a convenience, an opportunity to enjoy for a while, and then to live without again. However the assumption of cheap energy has become far more deeply entrenched in our society in ways that are extremely difficult to undo. In this article I will outline three ways:
First, the assumptions of cheap energy have become physically entrenched in the structure of our society. At one point, only a few generations ago, life centered around small walkable towns, with most food produced and goods manufactured locally. Such a societal structure was consistent with low energy inputs, however that structure has largely been dismantled: it is no longer available to be returned to. Our societal infrastructure, having work and home far apart, having many-lane highways, having big-box stores with vast parking lots, are all premised on cheap energy. The roads, expressways, suburbs, sprawling cities, strip malls, pipelines and refineries have been built and will require energy to rebuild.
Next, the assumptions of cheap energy have become economically entrenched in the structure of our society. The skills which people learn and the jobs which people do are, in most cases, highly specialized and service oriented, contributing to and relying on the continued existence of a highly-complex society. Although it is true that the total money spent on energy is a relatively small fraction of Canada's gross national product (GNP_, many significant contributors to our economy (tourism, automobile production, leisure activities) rely on the presence of cheap energy to function.
Finally, the assumptions of cheap energy have become psychologically entrenched in Western society. For one hundred years, every year there was more energy available per person than the year before (see figure). It was always possible to do more; it was always possible to keep what we had and to plan for more things, a bigger vision, a brighter future. It is these same hundred years – four generations – which has been so long as to give us the illusion of indefinite, perpetual growth. The need for growth is deeply embedded; indeed, cities, industries, economies which are not growing are called “stagnant”, as if a sustainable society should be equivalent to pond scum. However energy-per-capita has leveled off, and is likely to begin decreasing, meaning that next year we will not, in fact, be able to do more than now.
For example, the university at which I work is constantly planning for and constructing new buildings. At what point is the university “big enough”? At what point will we be forced to concede that energy costs have risen to the point that we can no longer even maintain the buildings we have?
Even worse, the buildings which we built were not built to last. If everything is going to get rebuilt in ten years, then long-term quality is a needless expense. If, however, at some point we can no longer re-invent our society we will be stuck with our creation, and there will be regrets.
The notion of Western society's sustainability has almost become a bad joke: most people, even people not environmentally or socially motivated, will concede that the Western way of life is not sustainable long-term.
But it's not a joke. There were parts of the Roman empire in France which exported a lot of agricultural produce to Rome, and yet were productive and well-off. However after the collapse of the Roman empire, although there was no plague, no environmental catastrophe, and even no more food exports, yet the people in this part of France were left desperately poor, literally eating mud and grass. The supporting structure of an advanced, organized, specialized society had fallen apart.
The only possible conclusion is that we need to use remaining fossil fuels towards rebuilding our society, our infrastructure, and towards the development of new energy sources. This has been done before: Western society moved from wood energy and horse power, to coal energy and steam engines, to oil energy and internal combustion engines, and finally to nuclear energy (see figure). Seen in this light, using fossil fuels to preserve status quo is crazy: we have a limited endowment of fossil fuels remaining that is needed to rebuild our infrastructure.
Many people will argue that “the market” (capitalism) will automatically take care of this transition, as it did the transition from horsepower to coal to oil. However these previous transitions were always to denser forms of energy, always towards a future with more available energy. Furthermore, economic markets tend to be very short-term and do a terrible job of anticipating the future or accounting for non-economic costs (like an ecosystem). There is a very real possibility of getting stuck: as long as energy is cheap we squander a precious resource and compromise the future, as energy gets expensive we may find too little energy remaining to rebuild society.
Rebuilding society's infrastructure seems like such a vast, hopeless task that there is no way for an individual to respond. However we need to start, one person at a time, changing our attitudes towards energy use and indefinite growth. Many questions of growth and infrastructure are decided at the local and regional levels. We need changed expectations of individuals and their lifestyles, of the companies in which we work, of the local and regional governments which are charged with making long-term decisions on planning, transit, and infrastructure. There are many opportunities for the motivated individual to contribute to change.