Quotes / Terminally Dependent Society

We lived in an electric world. We relied on it for everything. And then the power went out. Everything stopped working. We weren't prepared. Fear and confusion led to panic. The lucky ones made it out of the cities. The government collapsed. Militias took over, controlling the food supply and stockpiling weapons. We still don't know why the power went out. But we're hopeful someone will come and light the way.

It was no trivial thing. Thousands of years of Eastern despotisms had been of that nature. Water was life. Dig a canal system, guard the canals. If a town opposes the government, block the canals, dam or pollute the river, confiscate the wheat or rice.
Two towns in a drought? Strip one of food, send it all to the second. Gain the second town's support; make deadly enemies of the first, but it won't matter, they will die.
Hydraulic empires never died. No matter how far they slid into decadence, they lived on until destroyed by barbarians beyond the border.
Hydraulic empires grew with the rising level of communications and transport. On Earth a moment came at which one government could rule the world, forever. Afterward the United Nations controlled not just water, but communications via comsats, electric power from sunpower satellites, and every resource that could be labeled "limited."
...one civilization stretched from Sol to the far comets, one empire with a stranglehold on... what?
Reading between the lines- Everything. The Web controlled everything that flowed. Water, hydrogen, information, diet supplements, placement of orbitting habitats, and kinetic energy. Especially kinetic energy. What moved through interplanetary space averaged twenty klicks per second. Fusion explosions were nothing compared to that. Every habitat in motion within Sol system was assigned its orbit. Keep to it or be treated as a meteor.

The government built and controlled every power generator. Once these had been very diverse: damns, geothermal plants, temperature differential plants in the ocean depths; now they were big fusion generators supplemented by rooftop and desert solar-energy collectors. But the State owned them all.
Corbell: Peerssa, do you know what a water-monopoly empire is? Pity. A lot of early civilizations were water-monopoly empires. Ancient Egypt, ancient China, the Aztecs. Any government that controls irrigation completely is a water empire. If the State controls power of all kinds, they also control the fresh water supply, don't they? With a population of twelve billion-
Peerssa: Yes, of course. We built the dams and rerouted the rivers and distilled fresh water for deuterium for the fusion plants and sent the excess water onward. If the State had ever paused to rest, half the world would have died of thirst.
Corbell: I once asked you if you thought the State would last fifty thousand years.
Peerssa: I don't.
Corbell: I think the State could last seventy or a hundred thousand. See, these water-monopoly empires, they don't collapse. They can rot from within, to the point where a single push from the barbarians outside can topple them. The levels of society lose touch with each other, and when it comes to the crunch, they can't fight. But it takes that push from outside. There's no revolution in a water empire.
Peerssa: That's a very strong statement.
Corbell: Yeah. Do you know how the two-province system works? They used it in China. Say there are two provinces, A and B, and they're both having a famine. What you do is, you look at their records. If Province A has a record of cheating on its taxes or rioting, then you confiscate all the grain in Province A and ship it to B. If the records are about equal you pick at random. The result is that Province B is loyal forever, and Province A is wiped out so you don't worry about it.
Peerssa: We rarely have famines. When we do...
Corbell: There's nothing more powerful than controlling everybody's water. A water-control empire can grow so feeble that a single barbarian horde can topple it.

The greatest industry on Earth centred about Multivac – Multivac, the giant computer that had grown in fifty years until its various ramifications had filled Washington, D.C. to the suburbs and had reached out tendrils into every city and town on Earth. An army of civil servants fed it data constantly and another army correlated and interpreted the answers it gave. A corps of engineers patrolled its interior while mines and factories consumed themselves in keeping its reserve stocks of replacement parts ever complete, ever accurate, ever satisfactory in every way. Multivac directed Earth’s economy and helped Earth’s science. Most important of all, it was the central clearing house of all known facts about each individual Earthman.

Fossil fuels opened the door to widespread mechanization and electrification, completely transforming our way of life. As central as their role has been, it is difficult to claim that many of the benefits we enjoy today—whether health care, technology, scientific knowledge, or comfortable living standards—would have been possible without them. Much that we celebrate in this world rode on the back of fossil fuels.

History may very well view this time period as the Fossil Fuel Age rather than the Industrial Age. Fossil fuels are a ubiquitous and defining characteristic of this unusual time. The current level of technology, global population, or impressive state of knowledge would not have been possible without fossil fuels. We, therefore, owe a great debt of gratitude to these three amazing resources. Perhaps the first species on any planet to discover and use fossil fuels will follow a similar madcap trajectory and even temporarily poke into space, as we have.

Technology and innovation are slowing, not accelerating. The pace of innovation exploded alongside the introduction of fossil fuels and the energy it unleashed. I like to play a mental game of transporting someone from 1900 to 1960 while doing the same for an inhabitant of 1960 popped into 2020. Which is more mystified by “magic” all around? 1960 technology is bewildering to the 1900 resident[s] (surrounded by new things without names, even), while 2020 shows mostly snazzy refinements but few unrecognizable elements of everyday life. As important as energy is to the functioning of our civilization, and as clear as it has been since the 1970s that fossil fuels would not provide indefinite energy, no fundamentally new energy technologies are on the table that were not also around in the 1970s. Sure, they’ve become more efficient in many cases, but are now approaching theoretical maximum efficiency. No transformational revolutions are imminent.

…fossil fuels allowed us to drastically overshoot the natural carrying capacity of the planet, and that bill will come due when the underlying resource inevitably dwindles. Sometimes simple is simply right.

...we have not built a single hydroelectric dam of any consequence without the aid of fossil fuels. No nuclear plants, wind turbines, or solar panels have been made without the bulk of the work (energy) required coming from fossil fuels. From mining to earth-moving to materials processing to transporting ingredients and final products, the renewable/alternative energy enterprise has been a fossil endeavor through and through.
So when you look at plots of global energy trends, seeing fossil fuels towering over the diminutive-but-rising renewables, recognize that even those alternatives are just a ghostly reflection of fossil fuel use.
That in itself is not particularly problematic. Based on the favorable energy return on energy invested (EROEI) in renewable technologies—well above break-even—it is possible and beneficial to leverage fossil fuel use into non-fossil forms. This non-fossil augmentation could be treated as a form of efficiency. Rather than getting 100% of our energy from fossil fuels, we get only 80% in direct form and squeeze another 20% out of other fossil-enabled resources.
The bigger problem is that the processing of industrial materials (cement, steel, aluminum, etc.) requires a great deal of heat, which currently is obtained by burning fossil fuels. Almost all alternatives to fossil fuels (the exception being burning biomass) create electricity, which is not particularly suited to creating the kind of heat required in industry.
To understand this, think about the usual method of creating electrical heat. Toasters, space heaters, dryers, and stove tops use metal coils that get hot and even glow orange. But to get hot enough to melt steel, you’d also melt the coils. So that’s no way to go. Electric arcs can make small volumes very hot (think arc welding), but only tungsten electrodes resist melting under the arc’s heat. Put simply, creating enough heat—in large volumes—to “destroy” (melt, re-form) materials will tend to destroy the heating agent as well. In the case of fossil fuels, we don’t care if the heating agent (fuel) is “destroyed” (burned) in the process of creating heat: that’s what we do with them in any application. But we don’t want to destroy electrical heaters in the process of creating enough heat for an industrial application.
This view may be oversimplified, but I think it helps us understand the nature of the challenge, and why heating by burning is an entirely different animal—and much easier—than heating by electricity.
What, then, is left when fossil fuels are more scarce? One possibility is a well-ordered world in which sophisticated new technology maintains our modern capabilities in an utterly transformed way. This is probably the default assumption of most, but not a carefully examined one that can be easily supported based on current knowledge/evidence: owing in part to the grossly distorted perspective fostered by the fossil fuel age. The other world is one in which life gets tougher, high technology is harder to maintain, resource wars are the most obvious and common strategies to secure basic needs, and the resulting disruptions make it difficult to achieve the utopian vision of a high-tech future dependent on global supplies. Today’s energy-rich lifestyle may well turn out to be a privilege conferred by the fossil fuel suit as if satisfying a dress code for the high-tech club. Once the enabling elixir is spent, we may be kicked out of the club.
While we can’t know the future, one thing we can do is ask what might be learned from the past. We once lived in a world without fossil fuel use. The year 1712 marks a turning point when the first commercial steam engine—powered by coal—was used to pump water from coal mines in order to access more coal. Did you notice a theme there? What inventions existed before the start of the fossil fuel era? Those can be truly said to be independent of fossil fuels. After this date, the capabilities afforded by an abundant energy source slowly permeated the world and opened new possibilities. How many of the subsequent inventions can trace some dependency to fossil fuels somewhere in their lineage? Hint: the flurry of inventions [...] tended to come out of places that were early adopters of fossil energy (i.e., England, Scotland, France).
It is entertaining to muse about what we might not have today if fossil fuels had never been available or utilized. Would we have computers or lasers? Would we have skyscrapers or photovoltaics? Would we have understood nuclear energy or fundamental physics that relied on high-energy experiments? Would we even have bicycles? It is, of course, impossible to say with any certainty. But since all of these things first emerged after fossil fuels took hold, and built upon each other in ways that at least had access to the benefits of fossil fuels, it is plausible that most of what we see around us in the developed world owes its existence to fossil fuels. In fact, one might say that it is a much tougher case to argue the counterfactual that we would still have comparable technology today had fossil fuels not burst onto the scene.
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For most people… the critical role fossil fuels played is easily overlooked. In so doing, we form a grotesquely warped view of who we are. Anything seems possible: we would appear to have transcended nature to be the masters of the planet. Lots of self-assigned rights and privileges follow. It is an age of human exceptionalism. The resulting narrative is highly appealing and stubbornly held even when cracks in the foundation are evident. Many fewer life-changing inventions have entered the scene in the last 60 years than in the 60 years prior to that. Such an inconvenient and obvious truth threatens deeply held beliefs and is quickly brushed aside as anything but obvious.

Energy and life history traits are connected. Food energy, once processed by digestion, fuels biomass production, enabling growth and reproduction. The energy budgets of most species are constrained primarily by body size because body size sets fundamental limits on how much energy an organism can acquire and physiologically process. This in turn sets a fundamental limit on the amount of energy that can be allocated to different components of the life history. Understanding variation in life histories requires understanding how constraints on the use and consumption of energy affect demographic traits.

...it would be virtually impossible to power a cement plant with wind and solar. The same is true of plastics, ammonia, and steel, all necessary for modern civilization, and all require the burning of fossil fuels to produce.
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Even if you can produce enough energy from carbon-free sources... the processes themselves don’t work without fossil fuels. Metallurgical coal is needed to make steel.

Everything characteristic about the condition we call modern life has been a direct result of our access to abundant supplies of cheap fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have permitted us to fly, to go where we want to go rapidly and move things easily from place to place. Fossil fuels rescued us from the despotic darkness of the night. They have made the pharaonic scale of building commonplace everywhere. They have allowed a fractionally tiny percentage of our swollen populations to produce massive amounts of food. They have allowed us to develop industries of surpassing ingenuity and to push the limits of what it even means to be human to the strange frontier where man imagines himself into a kind of machine immortality.
All of the marvels and miracles of the twentieth century were enabled by our access to abundant supplies of cheap fossil fuels. Even the applied technology of atomic fission, which came along in the mid-[20th-]century, would have been impossible without fossil fuels and may be impossible to continue very long into the future without them.
The age of fossil fuels is about to end. There is no replacement for them at hand. These facts are poorly understood by the global population preoccupied with the thrum of daily life, but tragically, too, by the educated classes in the United States, who continue to be by far the greatest squanderers of fossil fuels. It is extremely important that we make an effort to understand what is about to happen to us because it will have earth-shaking repercussions for the way we live, the way the world is ordered, and whether the very precious cargo of human culture can move safely forward into the future.

Since [Edwin] Drake drilled the first oil well in Pennsylvania in 1859, the cheap oil generation created an artificial bubble of abundance characterized by great technological progress and amazing scientific discoveries. Here is a simple list reminding us how most benefits of modern life are underlined by cheap gas: automobiles, trains, airplanes, computers, television, suburban modular housing, apartment buildings, skyscrapers, central air conditioning, electrified dwellings, movies, shopping centers, department stores, supermarkets, cheap clothing, contact lenses, lipstick, hair gel, toothbrushes, recorded music, inexpensive wines from Chile, power tools, plastic surgery, rubber gloves, bicycle pumps, credit cards, identification cards, our national defense system… all have their origins in cheap fossil fuel and for their continued existence depend on it.

Fossil fuels represent such an overwhelming contribution to modernity that it is really hard to conceptualize its continuing without them... Modernity rose to its current magnificence on the back of fossil fuels, and could very well ride the pulse back to zero.

I became aware that some of the pillars on which modern life is based were necessarily temporary. Growth on a finite planet would have to stop—both in physical terms like energy, but also in economic terms.
Fossil fuels, upon which we are utterly dependent, would soon taper off, being a finite resource.
Fertilizers and agriculture critically depend on fossil fuels, so the human population could experience a large correction later this century.
The Limits to Growth work from 1972—which I found to be insightful and credible—reinforced the plausibility of a mid-century major “adjustment.”
The turbulence of a transition this momentous could be so disruptive (resource wars, economies in ruins) that all my work testing general relativity might be lost and rendered meaningless (as well as all the things my colleagues work on).
Renewable technologies are not as easy as they sound: fossil fuels do things that the electricity from renewables has a hard time replicating, and the materials' demands ramp up extraction and its associated ills.
Biodiversity loss (extinctions, tragic population declines) spell an ultimate dire fate if we do not heed the warnings: we are obviously now powerful enough to destroy large swaths of the ecosphere and community of life.
Technology facilitated the predicament, and constitutes an inappropriate response, as we will never master all knowledge and will inevitably create unintended consequences.
An energy substitute for fossil fuels is the last thing we need, as energy is what powers our expanding terminal encroachment on the living world.
Science is a narrow tool: powerful and tenacious like a pit bull, but having no intrinsic wisdom or context. It concerns itself with what we can do, not what we should do.

How will we rise to the challenge to keep modernity powered into the future? In all likelihood, we won’t. Besides the misdirection of “inexhaustible flows,” keeping modernity powered by any means looks like game-over for ecological health, and therefore humans, if pursued at all costs. So, enough with the fantasy schemes.

Modern societies would be impossible without mass-scale production of many man-made materials. We could have an affluent civilization that provides plenty of food, material comforts, and access to good education and health care without any microchips or personal computers: we had one until the 1970s, and we managed, until the 1990s, to expand economies, build requisite infrastructures and connect the world by jetliners without any smartphones and social media. But we could not enjoy our quality of life without the provision of many materials required to embody the myriad of our inventions.
Four materials rank highest on the scale of necessity, forming what I have called the four pillars of modern civilization: cement, steel, plastics, and ammonia are needed in larger quantities than are other essential inputs. The world now produces annually about 4.5 billion tons of cement, 1.8 billion tons of steel, nearly 400 million tons of plastics, and 180 million tons of ammonia. But it is ammonia that deserves the top position as our most important material: its synthesis is the basis of all nitrogen fertilizers, and without their applications it would be impossible to feed, at current levels, nearly half of today’s nearly 8 billion people.
The dependence is even higher in the world’s most populous country: feeding three out of five Chinese depends on the synthesis of this compound. This dependence easily justifies calling ammonia synthesis the most momentous technical advance in history: other inventions provide our comforts, convenience or wealth or prolong our lives—but without the synthesis of ammonia, we could not ensure the very survival of billions of people alive today and yet to be born.

Because so many elements of modern lifestyles are completely in the context of fossil fuels—how we feed people, how we manufacture cities and roads and consumer goods, how we extract materials from far-flung places and move them around the world, how we impose hegemony and “peace” through military might—we can’t surgically remove fossil fuels and pretend that the system would look anything like what actually developed.

…everyone in the world owes much of their present standard of living to advances made by chemists. Without the Haber-Bosch process for creating fertiliser from nitrogen in the air, half the world’s population would not have enough to eat. All modern medicines, from aspirin to RNA vaccines, owe their discovery to chemistry.
The lithium batteries that enable so many portable electronic devices – yep, chemistry. We could go on.
And indeed we will.

How easy it is for the superclass to posture against industry and modernity, to turn their attention to accumulating luxury beliefs alongside their luxury things, given they’ve already made it in life. For others, though, such as Indian coalminers, Chinese truckers, American frackers and British refinery workers, the elitist disdain for fossil fuels is disastrous. A phaseout of fossil fuels might flatter the saviour complex of the virtuous rich, but it would devastate the living standards of the rest. Less food, less travel, less warmth, less light – these will be the dire wages of the anti-fossil-fuel hysteria.
It just isn’t true that the fossil-fuel age has failed. On the contrary, the Industrial Revolution is mankind’s greatest achievement so far. Our exploitation of the fossilised sunlight in coal and oil propelled us from a world of want into a world of plenty. Health and life expectancy, not to mention knowledge and liberty, expanded exponentially in the era of fossil-burning.

...modernity was made possible by a one-time rapid expenditure of fossil fuels, and... these would disappear about as quickly as they appeared, leaving us in a precarious position: uncharted waters for modernity.

Fossil fuels opened new doors for humanity. They formed from the transformation of ancient plants through pressure, temperature, and tens to hundreds of millions of years, essentially storing the sun’s energy over time. The resulting fuels freed humanity from its reliance on photosynthesis and current biomass production as its primary energy source. Instead, fossil fuels allowed the use of more energy than today’s photosynthesis could provide, since they represent a stored form of solar energy.
First coal, then oil and natural gas allowed rapid growth in industrial processes, agriculture, and transportation. The world today is unrecognizable from that of the early 19th century before fossil fuels came into wide use. Human health and welfare have improved markedly, and the global population has increased from 1 billion in 1800 to almost 8 billion today. The fossil fuel energy system is the lifeblood of the modern economy. Fossil fuels powered the industrial revolution, pulled millions out of poverty, and shaped the modern world.

Our civilization is still powered by oil. Without it, there would be no agriculture, mining, or long-distance transport, as all of these activities require a dense, low-entropy fuel. Heavy batteries or hydrogen simply do not cut it. As most of my readers already know, we have a huge problem though. We are about to pass a civilizational tipping point in 2025, due to an exponential rise in the energy demand of producing oil liquids (representing 15.5% of the energy production of oil liquids today, and projected to reach a proportion equivalent to half of the gross energy output by 2050). In our model, this translates into a marked uptick in the trajectory for the blue dot toward depletion and an overall increase in entropy for energy resources. Combined with the same effect from mining minerals, we are clearly headed towards “The Empty Quarter” (mostly due to the same principles as with oil: an ever-growing energy demand driven by falling ore grades). Should we get there, it would lead to a gradual collapse of modern technologies, and with it our entire way of life. “Renewables” are facing the same problem: both fossil fuels and mined minerals are essential to their making — both of which are soon to be on the decline. Not to mention the fact, that we hope to be mining ever scarcer resources with a much dispersed, high entropy energy source (sunlight). How do those two add up?

Well, electricity is an extremely useful energy carrier. So some of our most important societal processes are totally dependent on electricity now: communication, information storage. And so what happens if the grid goes down? Everything stops working, right? Even the gasoline pumps stop working because they work on electricity. So even though we only use 20% of our energy in the form of electricity — the other 80% we use in the form of solid, liquid and gaseous fuels — that 20% is really, really key. And it’s absolutely essential for hospitals and in offices and your home office, and keeping the stores running and all the rest. It’s absolutely essential that we keep the grid operating. So that’s why even with the limitations of solar and wind power, I think it’s really important that we build as much of this stuff as we can, while we can, because right now, it takes a lot of fossil fuels to build solar panels and wind turbines and, you know, source the materials for them, do the manufacturing processes and deploy them all around the world and so on. You know, we aren’t going to have fossil fuels forever. And, you know, forever is a very long time, but it may be a very short time, that we still have fossil fuels available in the quantity and the cheapness that we currently enjoy. So we’ve got to use this time to build out alternative energy sources as much as possible, while reducing our need for energy as much as we can. We can’t just assume that renewable electricity is going to enable the Industrial Revolution and economic growth to continue into the 22nd century. It ain’t going to happen. We’ve got to not just look for alternative energy sources, but alternative ways of organizing our economy, organizing our lives, so that we get by with less power.