Excerpted from John Michael Greer:
“The New Year’s Eve blog post from Chuck Burr at Southern Oregon Permaculture was timely. At a time when plenty of people are still insisting that the whole world can adopt a middle-class lifestyle powered by renewable energy resources, Burr cited hard numbers from a representative case study – his own solar-powered home – to show why high-tech renewables are at most a way station partway down the Long Descent. His argument will be familiar to readers of this blog: the photovoltaic system that powers his home won’t generate enough electricity in its lifetime to both account for the power that goes into making and maintaining it, and provide enough electricity to maintain a modern lifestyle for its end user. Burr went on to suggest, reasonably enough, that using high-tech renewables is still a good idea for now, since it will help cushion the future in which green plants may well turn out to be the most efficient source of primary energy around.
He’s likely right, but there are challenges in the way of even so modest a project. The obvious issue – the fact that the very large number of people closing in on their 99th and last week of unemployment benefits, and the even larger number caught in the stagflationary vise of dwindling wages and soaring bills, aren’t going to be in any position to buy and install expensive photovoltaic systems – is symptomatic of a far more profound and pervasive difficulty.
That difficulty, interestingly enough, was sketched out well in advance in the pages of The Limits to Growth, still the best – and thus, inevitably, the most reviled – map of the future toward which the industrial world is hurtling, eyes closed and pedal to the metal. It’s always fascinated me that in a society that claims to make most of its decisions on the basis of economics, so few people grasped the essentially economic argument at the core of the Limits to Growth analysis. That study did not claim, as so many people still insist it claimed, that the resources on which industrial society depends are going to up and run out one of these days. It proposed, rather, that the real costs of extracting resources and dealing with the consequences of environmental pollution, both of which are driven by economic growth, necessarily increase faster than the rate of economic growth itself, and sooner or later will force industrial civilization to its knees.
Perhaps the most visible signpost along the way to that destination is the point at which a society can no longer provide for its future and pay its current expenses out of existing resources. You know that point has arrived when a society begins neglecting its infrastructure, slashing basic services, discarding those economic sectors that cost too much to maintain, and abandoning those people who lack the political clout to make good a claim on slices of the dwindling pie. Readers here in America who don’t find this description oddly familiar are encouraged to take a good hard look out the nearest window.
The consequences of that logic pose an immense challenge to the more optimistic proposals for dodging the resource crunch at the end of the age of cheap petroleum – the nuclear power plants, high-speed rail networks, immense solar installations in assorted desert countries, and the rest of it. All these would require huge inputs of real wealth – not currency, which can be manufactured at will by central banks, but energy, materials, knowledge, and labor – real wealth – which are a good deal harder to conjure up out of twinkle dust. The Limits to Growth model suggests that underneath the smoke and mirrors of the financial economy lies the awkward fact of a shortfall in real wealth, caused by the need to divert a growing fraction of real wealth to meet the direct and indirect costs of extracting resources, on the one hand, and coping with the impacts of environmental pollution on the other. If that’s what’s going on – and I think a good case could be made for that thesis – then trying to scrape together enough real wealth to cover the cost of these projects simply piles another burden onto an already overloaded economic structure, and if pursued with enough misplaced enthusiasm, could conceivably become the trigger that brings the whole thing crashing down.
Now of course there’s another way to go about preparing for a future of scarce expensive energy, and it’s one of the key strategies of the “green wizardry” I’ve been discussing here iover the last six months or so. The central concept of that strategy might as well be called the Tarpaper Shack Principle: you don’t actually have a resilient energy technology unless you can build it from readily available materials, and put it to work for some useful purpose, while living in the kind of tarpaper shack the last Great Depression made famous. You may well end up living in something like that, you know; a great many people did the last time the industrial economy came unglued, and we are arguably in a much worse position today than in 1930, so looking up some renewable energy technologies that could have been made and used in a 1930s Hooverville may be more than a thought exercise just now.
Finding such technologies may seem like a tall order. It isn’t; there are scores of proven, mature technologies that can be tacked together from scrap, powered by renewable energy sources that cost little or nothing, and contribute mightily to getting the basic tasks of living done more easily, safely, and cheaply. The fireless cooker, the topic of last week’s post here, is one of them, and so is the technology I’d like to introduce this week, the solar box cooker.”