systematic collapse: the basics

8/14/2019 Systematic Collapse: The Basics

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Systemic Collapse: The Basics

By Peter Goodchild

28 September, 2009

Countercurrents.org

Systemic collapse, societal collapse, the coming dark age, the great transformation, thecoming crash, the post-industrial age, the long emergency, socioeconomic collapse, thedie-off, the tribulation, the coming anarchy, perhaps even resource wars (to the extentthat this is not an oxymoron, since wars themselves require resources) there are manynames, and they do not all correspond to exactly the same thing, but there is a widespreadbelief that something immense and ominous is happening. Unlike those of the AquarianAge, the heralds of this new era often have impressive academic credentials: they includescientists, engineers, and historians. The serious beginnings of the concept can be foundin Paul and Anne Ehrlich, Population, Resources, Environment (1970); Donella H.

Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (1972); and William R. Catton, Jr., Overshoot(1980). What all the overlapping theories have in common can be seen in the titles ofthose three books.

Oil depletion is the most critical aspect in the systemic collapse of modern civilization,but altogether this collapse has about 10 principal parts, each with a vaguely causalrelationship to the next. Oil, metals, and electricity are a tightly-knit group, as we shallsee, and no industrial civilization can have one without the others. As those 3 disappear,food and fresh water become scarce (fish and grain supplies per capita have beendeclining for years, water tables are falling everywhere, rivers are not reaching the sea).These 5 can largely be considered as resource depletion, and the converse of resource

depletion is environmental destruction. Disruption of ecosystems in turn leads toepidemics. Matters of infrastructure then follow: transportation and communication.Social structure is next to fail: without roads and telephones, there can be no government,no education, no large-scale division of labor. After the above 10 aspects of systemiccollapse, there is another layer, in some respects more psychological or sociological, thatwe might call the 4 Cs. The first 3 are crime (war and crime will be indistinguishable,as Robert D. Kaplan explains), cults, and craziness the breakdown of traditional law,the tendency toward anti-intellectualism, the inability to distinguish mental health frommental illness. After that there is a more general one that is simple chaos, which results inthe pervasive sense that nothing works any more.

Systemic collapse, in turn, has one overwhelming cause: world overpopulation. All of theflash-in-the-pan ideas that are presented as solutions to the modern dilemma solarpower, ethanol, hybrid cars, desalination, permaculture have value only as desperateattempts to solve an underlying problem that has never been addressed in a more directmanner. American foreign aid, however, has always included only trivial amounts forfamily planning; the most powerful country in the world has done very little to solve thebiggest problem in the world.


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Oil Depletion

Oil is everything. That is to say, everything in the modern world is dependent on oil.From oil and other hydrocarbons we get fuel, fertilizer, pesticides, lubricants, plastic,paint, synthetic fabrics, asphalt, pharmaceuticals, and many other things. On a more

abstract level, we are dependent on oil and other hydrocarbons for manufacturing, fortransportation, for agriculture, for mining, and for electricity. As the oil disappears, ourentire industrial society will go with it. There will be no means of supporting the billionsof people who now live on this planet. Above all, there will be insufficient food, and theresult will be terrible famine.

A vast amount of debate has gone on about peak oil, the date at which the worldsannual oil production will reach (or did reach) its maximum and will begin (or did begin)to decline. The exact numbers are unobtainable, but the situation can perhaps besummarized by saying that about 20 or 30 major studies have been done, and theconsensus is that the most likely date for peak oil is 2008, when about 30 billion barrels

were produced. (Perhaps of greater importance is the fact that oil production per capitapeaked much earlier, in 1979.) On the other side of the peak, however, we are facing asteep drop: 20 billion barrels in 2020, 15 in 2030, 9 in 2040, 5 in 2050.

In the entire world, there are perhaps a trillion barrels of oil left to extract which maysound like a lot, but isnt. When newspapers announce the discovery of a deposit of abillion barrels, readers are no doubt amazed, but they are not told that such a find is only2 weeks supply.

As the years go by, new oil wells have to be drilled deeper than the old, because newlydiscovered deposits are deeper. Those new deposits are therefore less accessible. But oil

is used as a fuel for the oil drills themselves, and for the exploration. When it takes anentire barrel of oil to get one barrel of oil out of the ground, as is increasingly the case, itis a waste of time to continue drilling such a well.

Coal and natural gas are also disappearing. Coal will be available for a while after oil isgone, although previous reports of its abundance were highly exaggerated. Coal,however, is highly polluting and cannot be used as a fuel for most forms oftransportation; the last industrial society may be a bizarre, crowded, dirty, impoverishedworld. Natural gas is not easily transported, and it is not suitable for most equipment.

Alternative sources of energy will never be very useful, for several reasons, but mainlybecause of a problem of net energy: the amount of energy output is not sufficientlygreater than the amount of energy input. All alternative forms of energy are so dependenton the very petroleum that they are intended to replace that the use of them is largely self-defeating and irrational. Alternative sources ultimately dont have enough bang toreplace 30 billion annual barrels of oil or even to replace more than the tiniest fractionof that amount.


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Petroleum is required to extract, process, and transport almost any other form of energy; acoal mine is not operated by coal-powered equipment. It takes oil energy to makealternative energy.

The use of unconventional oil (shale deposits, tar sands, heavy oil) poses several

problems besides that of net energy. Large quantities of conventional oil are needed toprocess the oil from these unconventional sources, so net energy recovery is low. Thepollution problems are considerable, and it is not certain how much environmentaldamage the human race is willing to endure. With unconventional oil we are, quiteliterally, scraping the bottom of the barrel.

More-exotic forms of alternative energy are plagued with even greater problems. Fuelcells cannot be made practical, because such devices require hydrogen derived fromfossil fuels (coal or natural gas), if we exclude designs that will never escape the realm ofscience fiction; if fuel cells ever became popular, the fossil fuels they require would thenbe consumed even faster than they are now. Biomass energy (perhaps from wood, animal

dung, peat, corn, or switchgrass) would require impossibly large amounts of land andwould still result in insufficient quantities of net energy, perhaps even negative quantities.Hydroelectric dams are reaching their practical limits. Wind and geothermal power areonly effective in certain areas and for certain purposes. Nuclear power will soon besuffering from a lack of fuel and is already creating serious environmental dangers.

The current favorite for alternative energy is solar power, but proponents must close theireyes to all questions of scale. To meet the worlds present energy needs by using solarpower, we would need an array (or an equivalent number of smaller ones) of collectorscovering about 550,000 km2 a machine the size of France. The production andmaintenance of this array would require vast quantities of hydrocarbons, metals, and

other materials a self-defeating process.

Modern agriculture is highly dependent on fossil fuels for fertilizers, pesticides, and theoperation of machines for harvesting, processing, and transporting. The Green Revolutionwas the invention of a way to turn petroleum and natural gas into food. Without fossilfuels, modern methods of food production will disappear, and crop yields will be far lessthan at present. Because of the shortage of food, world population must shrink to onebillion by 2050, but we conveniently forget that war, plague, and famine are the onlymeans available. A close analogy to petroleum famine may be Irelands potato famineof the 1840s, since like petroleum it was a single commodity that caused suchdevastation. Cecil Woodham-Smith describes the Irish tragedy in The Great Hunger. Thefirst official response was disbelief: There is such a tendency to exaggeration andinaccuracy in Irish reports that delay in acting on them is always desirable, wrote SirRobert Peel in 1845. By 1847 the image had changed: Bodies half-eaten by rats were anordinary sight; two dogs were shot while tearing a body to pieces.

Petroleum is the lifeblood of our civilization. Even a bicycle, that ultimate symbol of analternate lifestyle, requires petroleum for lubrication, for paint, and for plastic


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components. The vehicle that delivers the bicycle runs on petroleum, over asphalt that ismade of petroleum. Rubber tires are often made of petroleum.

The problem of the worlds diminishing supply of oil is a problem of energy, not aproblem of money. The old bromide that higher prices will eventually make [e.g.] shale

oil economically feasible is meaningless. This planet has only a finite amount of fossilfuel. That fuel is starting to vanish, and higher prices are quite unable to stop the eventfrom taking place.

Much of modern warfare is about oil, in spite of all the pious and hypocritical rhetoricabout the forces of good and the forces of evil. The real forces are those trying tocontrol the oil wells and the fragile pipelines that carry that oil. A map of recentAmerican military ventures is a map of petroleum deposits. When the oil wars began islargely a matter of definition, though perhaps 1973 would be a usable date, when theYom Kippur War or, to speak more truthfully, the decline of American domestic oil led to the OPEC oil embargo.

The problem of the loss of petroleum will, of course, be received in the same manner asmost other large-scale disasters: widespread denial, followed by a rather catatonic apathy.The centuries will pass, and a day will come when, like the early Anglo-Saxons, peoplewill look around at the scattered stones and regard them as the work of giants.

When thinking about survival in a world without oil, we must remember that the nearfuture will differ from the distant future. To get an overview of the all the coming phases,we must consider that history in general (not only the history of oil) will form a sort ofbell curve: the events after about the year 2000 will form a downward curve thatsomewhat reflects the curve of events leading up to that same year. That bell curve will

not be perfectly symmetrical, of course: the decline in modern civilization is likely to befairly swift.

Although my own terms are largely arbitrary, I tend to think of a future transition fromwhat I call a Neo-Victorian Era to a Neo-Alfredian one. In other words, the future willdescend from an industrial age resembling that of Queen Victoria (the world of CharlesDickens) to a pre-industrial age resembling that of King Alfred the Great (the world ofViking raids), whose reign was a thousand years earlier. And finally we shall return to theStone Age, where we started from back to the Olduvai Gorge, as Richard C. Duncansays.

The Problem of Infrastructure

Most schemes for a post-oil technology are based on the misconception that there will bean infrastructure, similar to that of the present day, which could support such futuregadgetry. Modern equipment, however, is dependent on specific methods of manufacture,transportation, maintenance, and repair. In less abstract terms, this means machinery,motorized vehicles, and service depots or shops, all of which are generally run by fossilfuels. In addition, one unconsciously assumes the presence of electricity, which energizes


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the various communications devices, such as telephones and computers; electricity onsuch a large scale is only possible with fossil fuels.

To believe that a non-petroleum infrastructure is possible, one would have to imagine, forexample, solar-powered machines creating equipment for the production and storage of

electricity by means of solar energy. This equipment would then be loaded on to solar-powered trucks, driven to various locations, and installed with other solar-powereddevices, and so on, ad absurdum and ad infinitum. Such a scenario might providematerial for a work of science fiction, but not for genuine science. The sun simply doesnot work that way.

It is not only oil that will soon be gone. Iron ore of the sort that can be processed withprimitive equipment is becoming scarce, and only the less-tractable forms will beavailable when the oil-powered machinery is no longer available a chicken-and-eggproblem. Copper, aluminum, and other metals are also rapidly vanishing. Metals wereuseful to mankind only because they could once be found in concentrated pockets in the

earths crust; now they are irretrievably scattered among the worlds garbage dumps.

The infrastructure will no longer be in place: oil, electricity, and asphalt roads, forexample. Partly for that reason, the social structure will also no longer be in place.Without the infrastructure and the social structure, it will be impossible to produce thefamiliar goods of industrial society.

Without fossil fuels, the most that is possible is a pre-industrial infrastructure, althoughone must still ignore the fact that the pre-industrial world did not fall from the sky as aprefabricated structure but took uncountable generations of human ingenuity to develop.The next problem is that a pre-industrial blacksmith was adept at making horseshoes, but

not at making or repairing solar-energy systems.

Fossil fuels, metals, and electricity are all intricately connected. Each is inaccessible on the modern scale without the other 2. Any 2 will vanish without the third. If weimagine a world without fossil fuels, we must imagine a world without metals orelectricity. What we imagine, at that point, is a society far more primitive than the one towhich we are accustomed.

The End of Electricity

As Duncan points out, the first clearly marked sign of systemic collapse may be thefailure of electricity. Throughout the world, electricity comes mainly from coal, naturalgas, nuclear power plants, or hydroelectric dams, and all of them are bad choices. MostNorth American electricity is produced by fossil fuels, and in the United States thatgenerally means coal, although natural gas is often the first choice for future supplies offuel. Coal is terribly inefficient; only a third of its energy is transferred as it is convertedto electricity.


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The North American grid is a hopelessly elaborate machine the largest machine inhistory and it is perpetually operating at maximum load, chronically in need of bettermaintenance and expensive upgrading. But most North Americans still cannot think of afailure of electricity as anything more than a momentary aspect of a summer storm. Inother parts of the world, the future is already here: the lights fade out daily after 4 or 5

hours, if they come on at all. Actually North Americans are in far better shape than thecitizens of other countries. Thanks to political bungling, even civilized Britain willapparently be losing 40 percent of its electrical power between 2008 and 2014.

The Long-Term Reliability Assessment, a lengthy document by the North AmericanElectric Reliability Council, is disquieting. Each area of North America, according to thistext, will be in some danger of outage over the next few years, due to inadequate suppliesof electricity. Texas may be in the greatest danger, whereas Quebec (with the advantageof hydroelectric dams) may be the safest area.

North Americans should have been warned about the threat to electricity by the great

blackout of August 14, 2003. Jason Leopold describes the aftermath of that event:

Congress called for spending of up to $100 billion to reduce severe transmissionbottlenecks and increase capacity so the transmission lines could carry additionalelectricity from power plants to homes and businesses. But the money that would havefunded a reliable power grid was spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

I remember that day in 2003 very well. No gasoline, because the pumps requiredelectricity. Still, many Torontonians came up to Ontarios cottage country, where I wasliving, to wait out the troubles. Also no bank machines working, so it was cash only.There were big sales of batteries and candles. Also bottled water.

Its amazing how much pure water is needed, even by frugal people about 8 liters perperson per day is about the minimum comfortable amount, and thats only for drinking,cooking, and perhaps a little dishwashing. All other water, such as for flushing the toilet(if you dont use an outhouse), must come from a pond or a river, although you mightwant to install a hand pump for a well long before such an emergency occurs. You mightalso want to keep candles, matches, batteries, wind-up electric devices, and so on. And inwinter you would of course need several cords of firewood, and plenty of warm clothingand bedding.

Money and Labor

Almost everything in our modern economy is either made from oil or requires oil for itsfunctioning or its transportation. As the price of oil begins to skyrocket, therefore, so willthe price of everything else. The same happened on a smaller scale during the temporaryoil crises of the 1970s and 80s; it was referred to in those days as stagflation stagnation of income combined with inflation of prices, something that economists usedto say was impossible. The hardest hit will be those with debts: car payments, house


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mortgages, credit cards, student loans. But everyone will find that a dollar just doesntstretch. High prices will be combined with low wages.

At first, money will be an immensely important issue. It will take a handful of bills to buyanything. And largely because of the high prices, unemployment will rise dramatically.

For the first few years of the collapse, there will be a financial Reign of Terror, and infact this era has already begun to some extent, if we can judge from a number of relatedevents. In 1970 U.S. domestic oil production went into a permanent decline. Althoughglobal oil production must be dated to the first years of the twenty-first century,production per capita reached its peak much earlier, in 1979. In the U.S., gasoline prices,which had been steady for decades, started to increase annually by 18 percent in 2003.And around 2005 the energy required to drill for a barrel of oil began to exceed theenergy gained from it.

The economic problem of peak oil is occurring when North Americans have alreadybeen battered by other economic problems. One serious issue is globalization: for many

years, big companies have been getting their work done by sending it out to whatevercountries have the poorest people and the most repressive governments. The result is thatpeople in developed countries lose their jobs. Although the official unemploymentlevels are low, the figures are misleading; large numbers of the employed are notworking at well-paying, permanent, full-time jobs. Closely related to the problem ofglobalization is that of automation, which increases production but decreases payrolls.(The Historical Income Tables of the United States Census Bureau have shown, overmany years, the widening gap between the rich and the poor: in particular, while mostincomes have either fallen or not changed, the upper 5 percent of families have seen theirincomes climbing dramatically.) As a result of all these vagaries within the capitalistsystem, government services are perpetually being cut. The common expression is thatmoney is tight these days, although very few people ask why that is the case. Taxescontinue to rise, but the individual receives little in return.

(But, no, contrary to rumor the international credit collapse that began in 2007 was notdue to oil depletion; all that the two had in common is that the former can be ascribed togovernment corruption, which like oil depletion is an aspect of systemic collapse.)

At one point, the money problem will be everything. A few decades later, the moneyproblem will be nothing, because money will disappear. Money is only a symbol, and it isonly valuable as long as people are willing to accept that fiction: without government,without a stock market, and without a currency market, such a symbol cannot endure, asGeorge Soros has pointed out. Money itself will be useless and will finally be ignored.Tangible possessions and practical skills will become the real wealth. Having the rightfriends will also help.

The answer, in part, is to try to give up the use of money well ahead of time, instead ofletting the money economy claim more victims. Barter would allow people to provide fortheir daily needs on a local basis, without the dubious assistance of governments orcorporations. Such a way of doing business, unfortunately, is illegal if the participants are


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not paying sales tax on their transactions. Politicians disparage the age-old practice ofbarter as the underground economy or the gray economy, but of course their ownincome is dependent on taxes. In any case, the transition would not be simple: there areso many rules, from building codes to insurance regulations to sales- and income-taxlaws, that make it difficult to provide oneself with food, clothing and shelter without

spending money. Nevertheless, as the economy breaks down, so will the legal structure;where there is no law, there are no criminals.

Leadership and Social Structure

The decline in the worlds oil supply, the biggest news story of modern times, rarelyappears in the conventional news media, or it appears only in distorted forms. Ironically,the modern world is plagued by a lack of serious information. Todays news item isusually forgotten by tomorrow. The television viewer has the vague impression thatsomething happened somewhere, but one could change channels all day without findinganything below the surface. The communications media are owned by an ever-shrinking

number of interrelated giant corporations, and the product sold to the public is a uniformblandness, designed to keep the masses in their place. But the unreality of television isonly the start of the enigma. What is most apparent is the larger problem that there is noleadership, no sense of organization, for dealing with peak-oil issues.

One might consider as an analogy the Great Depression. During those 10 years, everyonelived on his own little island, lost, alone, and afraid. It was a shame to be poor, so onecould not even discuss it with ones neighbors. The press and the politicians largelydenied that the Depression existed, so there was little help from them. In general, it wasjust each nuclear family on its own for those who were lucky enough to have a family.Barry Broadfoot, in Ten Lost Years, records the memories of one Depression survivor:

Every newspaper across Canada and in the United States always played up the silverlining. . . . There were no such things as starvation, hunger marches, store front windowsbeing kicked in. Yes, they were reported, but always these were called incidents andincited by highly-paid professional agitators.

A related problem is the lack of ideological unity. While one person has a sort ofArmageddon-like vision, stocking up ammunition for the Last Battle, someone else isbusy on the Internet asking for ideas on how to make a still for the dozen corn plants heintends to grow. There is a complete lack of agreement on first principles.

Part of the reason for these problems is that many modern societies, including that of theUnited States, are individualist rather than collectivist. There is a sort of frontiermentality that pervades much of modern life. In many ways, this has been beneficial:freedom from tradition, freedom from onerous family duties, and freedom from manorialobligations have perhaps provided much of the motivation for those who came to whatwas seen as the New World. That spirit of self-sufficiency made it possible for pioneersto thrive in the isolation of the wilderness.


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Yet we must not forget the truism that there is strength and safety in numbers.Individualism might be more beneficial in good times than in bad; North Americans seemto adjust poorly to crises. The defects of individualism can seen right within what ismistakenly called the democratic process: political leaders can tell the most blatant liesabout economic trends, about warfare, or about transgressions of civil liberties, and the

response is a numbed, silent obedience which is puzzling only until one realizes that mostpeople have little means of behaving otherwise. They are generally lacking in family orfriends with whom they can share information or compare ideas, and they are thereforeentirely dependent on the news media for mental sustenance. The television set in theliving room is the altar on which common sense is sacrificed.

Faced with such challenges, one would at first be lucky to produce a post-oilcommunity much larger than ones own nuclear family, before sheer destitution forcespeople to take a more serious attitude to survival. Fair-sized groups, however, wouldeventually develop. The society of the future has never been described, but at least somenumbers are available. Chester G. Starrs statement, in A History of the Ancient World, is

probably as good as any: Whereas Paleolithic packs numbered perhaps 20 or 30,Neolithic farmers either lived in family homesteads, in villages of 150 persons (as atJarmo), or in even larger towns (as at Jericho).

In any case, the question of the ideal political system is essentially not a political matterbut a psychological one. Humans spent thousands of years living in small groups, huntingand gathering. The group was small enough so that each person knew every other person.Democracy could work because both the voters and the politicians were visible. Ithas only been in a tiny fraction of the life span of humanity that political units have beencreated that are far too large for people to know one another except as abstractions. Smallgroups have their problems, but in terms of providing happiness for the average person,the band or village is more efficient than the empire.

References:

Broadfoot, Barry. Ten Lost Years 1929-1939: Memories of Canadians Who Survived theDepression. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1997.

Duncan, Richard C. The Peak of World Oil Production and the Road to the OlduvaiGorge. Geological Society of America, Summit 2000. Reno, Nevada, November 13,2000. http://www.dieoff.org/page224.htm

Kaplan, Robert D. The Ends of the Earth: From Togo to Turkmenistan, from Iran toCambodia A Journey to the Frontiers of Anarchy. Gloucester, Massachusetts: PeterSmith Publisher, 2001.

Leopold, Jason. Dark Days Ahead. Truth Out. 17 October 2006.http://www.truthout.org/docs2006/101706J.shtml#


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North American Electric Reliability Council. Long-Term Reliability Assessment.Annual.http://www.nerc.com/pub/sys/all_wpdl/docs/pubs/LTRA2008.pdf

Soros, George. The Crisis of Global Capitalism: Open Society Endangered. New York:Public Affairs, 1998.

Starr, Chester G. A History of the Ancient World. 4th ed. New York: Oxford UniversityPress, 1991.

United States Census Bureau. Historical Income Tables Families. U.S. GovernmentPrinting Office. Annual. http://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/histinc/f03ar.html

Woodham-Smith, Cecil. The Great Hunger: Ireland 1845-1849. New York and Evanston:

Harper & Row, 1962.

Peter Goodchild is the author of Survival Skills of the North American Indians,published by Chicago Review Press. His email address is [email protected].

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