Read Online Peak Everything by Richard Heinberg - Free Book Online
Authors: Richard Heinberg
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With computers and cybernetics, we managed to create tools with not just a life, but a mind of their own. Now our tools not only âbreathe,â âeat,â and do physical work; they also âthink.â Increasingly we find ourselves in synthetic, self-regulating (if not yet self-replicating) environments â shopping malls, airports, office buildings â in which non-human multicelled biota are present only as ornaments or pests; in which human work consists only of the few tasks for which we have not yet invented profitable automatic surrogates. The wonder of seeing drudgery eliminated is accompanied by the nuisance of being managed and bossed about
by machines, and of being rendered helpless by mechanical failures or â horror of horrors â power outages.
Itâs the Energy, Silly
What does it take to enable these techno-miracles? It takes 85 million barrels of oil per day globally, as well as millions of tons of coal and billions of cubic feet of natural gas. The supply network for these fuels is globe-spanning and awesome. Yet, from the standpoint of the end user, this network is practically invisible and easily taken for granted. We flip the switch, pump the gas, or turn up the thermostat with hardly a thought to the processes of extraction we draw upon, or the environmental horrors they entail.
The machines themselves have become so sophisticated, their services so seductive, that they are equivalent to magic. Few people fully understand the inner workings of any given tool, and different tools require their own unique teams of specialists for their design and repair. But what is more important, in the process of becoming dependent upon them, we have become almost a different species as compared to our recent ancestors.
Eniac (short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), unveiled in 1946, was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer able to be reprogrammed to solve a range of computing problems.
Infrastructure Matters
To understand how we have become so different, how different we have become, and also how the end of cheap extrasomatic energy is likely to impact us and the society in which we are embedded, it is helpful to draw another lesson from cultural anthropology.
Comparative studies have consistently shown that human societies are best classified on the basis of their membersâ means of obtaining food. Thus we commonly speak of hunting-and-gathering societies, horticultural societies, agricultural societies, fishing societies, herding societies, and industrial societies. The point is, if you know how people get their food, you will reliably be able to predict most of the rest of their social forms â their decision-making and child-rearing customs, spiritual practices, and so on.
Of course, from a biological point of view, food is energy. And so what we are saying (once again, but in a slightly different way) is that understanding energy sources is essential to understanding human societies.
Anthropologist Marvin Harris identified three basic elements that are present in every human society:
⢠infrastructure, which consists of the means of obtaining and processing necessary energy and materials from nature â i.e., the means of production;
⢠structure, which consists of human-to-human decision-making and resource-allocating activities; and
⢠superstructure, consisting of the ideas, rituals, ethics, and myths that serve to explain the universe and coordinate human behavior. 6
Change at any of these levels can affect the others: the emergence of a new religion or a political revolution, for example, can change peopleâs lives in real, significant ways. However, the fact that so many cultural forms seem consistently to cluster around ways of obtaining food suggests that fundamental cultural change occurs at the infrastructural level: if people switch, for example, from hunting to
With computers and cybernetics, we managed to create tools with not just a life, but a mind of their own. Now our tools not only âbreathe,â âeat,â and do physical work; they also âthink.â Increasingly we find ourselves in synthetic, self-regulating (if not yet self-replicating) environments â shopping malls, airports, office buildings â in which non-human multicelled biota are present only as ornaments or pests; in which human work consists only of the few tasks for which we have not yet invented profitable automatic surrogates. The wonder of seeing drudgery eliminated is accompanied by the nuisance of being managed and bossed about
by machines, and of being rendered helpless by mechanical failures or â horror of horrors â power outages.
Itâs the Energy, Silly
What does it take to enable these techno-miracles? It takes 85 million barrels of oil per day globally, as well as millions of tons of coal and billions of cubic feet of natural gas. The supply network for these fuels is globe-spanning and awesome. Yet, from the standpoint of the end user, this network is practically invisible and easily taken for granted. We flip the switch, pump the gas, or turn up the thermostat with hardly a thought to the processes of extraction we draw upon, or the environmental horrors they entail.
The machines themselves have become so sophisticated, their services so seductive, that they are equivalent to magic. Few people fully understand the inner workings of any given tool, and different tools require their own unique teams of specialists for their design and repair. But what is more important, in the process of becoming dependent upon them, we have become almost a different species as compared to our recent ancestors.
Eniac (short for Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer), unveiled in 1946, was the first large-scale, electronic, digital computer able to be reprogrammed to solve a range of computing problems.
Infrastructure Matters
To understand how we have become so different, how different we have become, and also how the end of cheap extrasomatic energy is likely to impact us and the society in which we are embedded, it is helpful to draw another lesson from cultural anthropology.
Comparative studies have consistently shown that human societies are best classified on the basis of their membersâ means of obtaining food. Thus we commonly speak of hunting-and-gathering societies, horticultural societies, agricultural societies, fishing societies, herding societies, and industrial societies. The point is, if you know how people get their food, you will reliably be able to predict most of the rest of their social forms â their decision-making and child-rearing customs, spiritual practices, and so on.
Of course, from a biological point of view, food is energy. And so what we are saying (once again, but in a slightly different way) is that understanding energy sources is essential to understanding human societies.
Anthropologist Marvin Harris identified three basic elements that are present in every human society:
⢠infrastructure, which consists of the means of obtaining and processing necessary energy and materials from nature â i.e., the means of production;
⢠structure, which consists of human-to-human decision-making and resource-allocating activities; and
⢠superstructure, consisting of the ideas, rituals, ethics, and myths that serve to explain the universe and coordinate human behavior. 6
Change at any of these levels can affect the others: the emergence of a new religion or a political revolution, for example, can change peopleâs lives in real, significant ways. However, the fact that so many cultural forms seem consistently to cluster around ways of obtaining food suggests that fundamental cultural change occurs at the infrastructural level: if people switch, for example, from hunting to
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