Doomsday: today, or maybe next week, or...
I became aware of this life after the oil crash site through Ryvr's blog: much obliged.
Oddly, one of the numerous omissions in a very lengthy presentation is much specific about life after the oil crash. The authors apparently so exhausted themselves that they didn't quite get around to that part. This site illustrates a couple of other things I’ve learnt in a long life:
First problem is the utter failure of doom and gloom scenarios to achieve anything useful. Anyone who starts a paper with “Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon” loses me and indeed most people.
The second group of problems are the innumerable flaws in the after the crash argument. To accept this argument, you must accept the premise that no gain in knowledge can be sustained independent of the use of petroleum. You must also accept an a priori pessimism that the species cannot adapt to drastic change.
Third, the political context the authors have so thoughtfully provided suggests a bias in favour of the hypothesis: the sort of bias that hands ammunition to the Right. Capitalism is evil, collectivism is good.
This bias is no improvement on conservative bias.
(Example: some years back I ran across Farley Mowat’s Sibir, a view of Siberia coloured, I suggest, by the collectivism is good mentality. Published in 1970, it describes development practises we now know to have been environmental nightmares, in glowing and positive terms.) I’m rather amazed that this embarrassing bit of propaganda is still in print.
The oil era began in 1859, and became a significant economic factor during the 1870s. The Industrial Revolution began a century earlier. The knowledge revolution began more than 400 years before that. Let’s consider a very few of the underpinnings of the modern world that existed before oil.
In communications: invention of moveable type, the spread of literacy, the existence and principle of electricity, applied to the telegraph, photography, universities, libraries and the resultant storage and transmission of extra-somatic information.
Hydropower, external combustion engines, advanced architecture, a wide range of metallurgy
In transport: canals, bridge building, railroads, measurement of longitude and successive breakthroughs in global navigation.
In medicine: anaesthesia, germ theory, and the start of the diagnostic and treatment revolution that continues to the present.
Another argument is that the combined discovery of cheap oil and internal combustion stopped development of other energy sources and technologies in their tracks. We cannot say where the following might now be if these two factors hadn’t blunted their development:
Oil will cease to be the centrepiece of our economy over the next one to two centuries. If we are as incapable of adapting as these authors suggest, if the loss of an energy source obliges us to forget everything we learned in all the centuries before its discovery, then we do not deserve to survive.
The one worry this site gives me is that someone might take this drivel seriously.
Oddly, one of the numerous omissions in a very lengthy presentation is much specific about life after the oil crash. The authors apparently so exhausted themselves that they didn't quite get around to that part. This site illustrates a couple of other things I’ve learnt in a long life:
- Just as politicians should not do science, so scientists should not do politics.
- Any science presented in the context of a socio-political agenda is not science.
First problem is the utter failure of doom and gloom scenarios to achieve anything useful. Anyone who starts a paper with “Civilization as we know it is coming to an end soon” loses me and indeed most people.
The second group of problems are the innumerable flaws in the after the crash argument. To accept this argument, you must accept the premise that no gain in knowledge can be sustained independent of the use of petroleum. You must also accept an a priori pessimism that the species cannot adapt to drastic change.
Third, the political context the authors have so thoughtfully provided suggests a bias in favour of the hypothesis: the sort of bias that hands ammunition to the Right. Capitalism is evil, collectivism is good.
This bias is no improvement on conservative bias.
(Example: some years back I ran across Farley Mowat’s Sibir, a view of Siberia coloured, I suggest, by the collectivism is good mentality. Published in 1970, it describes development practises we now know to have been environmental nightmares, in glowing and positive terms.) I’m rather amazed that this embarrassing bit of propaganda is still in print.
The oil era began in 1859, and became a significant economic factor during the 1870s. The Industrial Revolution began a century earlier. The knowledge revolution began more than 400 years before that. Let’s consider a very few of the underpinnings of the modern world that existed before oil.
In communications: invention of moveable type, the spread of literacy, the existence and principle of electricity, applied to the telegraph, photography, universities, libraries and the resultant storage and transmission of extra-somatic information.
Hydropower, external combustion engines, advanced architecture, a wide range of metallurgy
In transport: canals, bridge building, railroads, measurement of longitude and successive breakthroughs in global navigation.
In medicine: anaesthesia, germ theory, and the start of the diagnostic and treatment revolution that continues to the present.
Another argument is that the combined discovery of cheap oil and internal combustion stopped development of other energy sources and technologies in their tracks. We cannot say where the following might now be if these two factors hadn’t blunted their development:
- Wind powered mechanics. Even today’s windmills are held back by their reliance on a generator technology created with oil in mind. Large sailing vessels vastly more efficient than the square-riggers of old already exist, with no technological barrier to their general use.
- Muscle powered mechanics. For example, when I was in grade school, we were taught that human-powered heavier-than-air flight was an impossible joke. It happened when I was 30. Had we not dropped human-powered development in favour of internal combustion, where might this technology be today?
- External combustion has not improved substantially in more than a century, having been displaced by internal combustion.
- Use of coal. The reputation of coal as a hazardous energy source is based less on its inherent qualities than on its inefficient use. This possibility seems lost on the West, but not on the Chinese. Not only has oil displaced coal technology development, it has closed most progressive minds to alternative possibilities.
Oil will cease to be the centrepiece of our economy over the next one to two centuries. If we are as incapable of adapting as these authors suggest, if the loss of an energy source obliges us to forget everything we learned in all the centuries before its discovery, then we do not deserve to survive.
The one worry this site gives me is that someone might take this drivel seriously.
posted by Uncle | 17:53
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