Industrial civilization is slowly failing and it kind a sucks being stuck with it. Over the past couple of weeks and months I’ve been increasingly posting about the failure of western civilization, but let’s not forget that the West is but a part of global civilization suffering from the same ailments bringing the entire system down. The coming end of global western dominance happens to coincide with the rapidly approaching limits to material growth and the mounting environmental challenges caused by our reckless abandon. Climate change, energy crises, resource scarcity and overshooting all natural limits and boundaries will all complicate things beyond our ruling class’ ability to manage. Expect some wild times ahead.
The whole idea of industrial civilization and unending technological progress has started with a belief that we can keep extracting minerals from underground forever (if not, then we will find substitutes). Take a look around in your room: all of your objects, together with the power feeding them, has come from somewhere underground. Plastics, made from oil pumped up from below the surface. Metal, made from mineral ores. Cement, gypsum, ceramics: all made from earth itself — not to mention the immense heat (well above 1000°C) needed to transform them into their current form. All coming from fossil fuels and minerals from beneath our feet.
Do you have solar panels on your roof? Well, those are made from minerals too. Some of them are so rare, like Indium or Gallium, that world production would need to increase several hundredfold to build out solar panels in the necessary quantity in order to “halt” climate change. Even wood has turned out to be an unsustainable building material. Humanity is cutting down old growth forests at an ever increasing rate for centuries now — a clear sign that new growth is not nearly enough to satisfy demand. And as wood is being turned into furniture and housing stock, the minerals sucked up by trees from the ground remain trapped within them and get poison coated in paint and pesticides. In other words: they are never allowed to return to the soil where they came from — leaving depleted lands behind, unsuitable for agriculture after a few harvest cycles. (By the way the same is true for food production.)
Minerals are all around us in our man-made environment, yet our bodies contain (and need) only tiny little amounts of them — for a good reason. The metals (and fossil energy we use to extract and transform them) are located in finite reserves, where they’ve been building up for hundreds of millions of years. Today we burn and mine through them at an exponential rate — many million times faster than they accumulate. Once we run out of the rich, easy to access deposits though only the dregs remain: taking ever more energy every year to get the next ton. This is by definition unsustainable.
Sustainable beings are made out of abundant materials. The human body is 99% comprised of just six elements: oxygen, hydrogen, nitrogen, carbon, calcium, and phosphorus.
Our bodies, the plants we eat, the animals around us contain no copper wiring and lithium-ion batteries or get powered by mineral oil. Nor they need special cathodes to generate, and then platinum fuel cells to use up, hydrogen for a very good reason.
If life itself were predicated on such relatively rare elements, it would have gone out of fashion a long time ago. Those who believe that all we need to do then is to recycle, need to be reminded that no recycling process can be 100% perfect. None. Not even in Nature. This is why carbon has kept accumulating underground in the form of coal, oil and natural gas in the first place. Out of the trillions of organisms who lived and died on this planet some has fallen into places where full recycling was not possible and their bodies and cells have ended up trapped under miles of rock. This is why CO2 levels has kept dropping with every passing million years or so, until a big volcanic eruption came or a bunch of apes started to burn ancient carbon again.
The carbon recycling process is leaky and traps carbon underground. (While this might sound like a saving grace for the climate, it is not nearly fast enough to keep up with the pace of our pollution load.) This is absolutely no different to any human process. In fact, we leak energy and materials on a level orders of magnitudes higher.
Many of the materials we depend on — like concrete for example — are not even recyclable at all, and even if we were able to rigorously recycle metals and every material we use today, there would still always be a tiny little fraction we would lose due to wear and tear, oxidation, abrasion and so on. In other words, even by reaching a 99% level of recycling (i.e.: losing only 1% of our accumulated material stock every year, which is simply technically unattainable and unrealistic) we would still run down our existing inventory in a mere century.
High tech civilization thus remains predicated on turning finite amount of mineral reserves from underground into energy and building materials — only to scrap them later and pollute the environment during their whole lifecycle. It simply could not happen any other way: there is no technology use without mining the earth, pollution and throwing stuff on the waste dump. Technological civilization is a one way street with a beginning, and you guessed right, a definitive END (1).
This is not to say that we will run out of everything all at once tomorrow, or anytime soon. Instead, we will experience peak supply, beyond which the annual production will start to decrease year after year. Due to the innumerable variables involved in natural resource extraction (legislation, actual demand, pricing), there can be of course better or worse years. It is even possible to reach a production plateau, where annual quantities does not change. At least for a while. Since we are talking about finite reserves, however, it is mathematically impossible to uphold even flat production levels for long.
Steady state economy is not possible based on finite material stocks and a leaky recycling process. What comes up, must also come down.
It is exactly this approaching downward slope in resource production where humanity will face the hardest of challenges. Lacking the minerals (metals, sand, sulfur, potassium etc.) in adequate quantities (i.e. what used to be available last year) and a stable climate to match, humanity will be increasingly hard pressed to maintain high tech civilization and industrial scale agriculture.
As supply diminishes under the relentless pressure of increasing energy demand of mining, so will demand. Not because people would not want to use high tech materials, but simply because they will not be able to afford them. As scarcity hits, prices go up, then demand gets destructed within a couple of months or years. Prices go down as a result, stymieing investment in ever more complex mining and drilling operations (deep water, anyone?). Lacking adequate replacement projects to substitute for depleting old mines and wells, a new supply bottleneck arises, and prices go up again, killing another bunch of businesses and households together with high prices and any hope to replace newly depleted mines. Rinse and repeat, till we hit the bottom in a couple of decades, a century at most.
By then there will be only small pockets (closer to the poles) where technology and mechanized agriculture would still be available. The eventual breakdown of global supply chains however will all but guarantee that at some point there will be no more replacement parts for broken machinery and electronics, and even these safe havens of technology will be abandoned.
Today’s technology is so complex that it takes only a few vital components to render it useless, and in a world grappling with scarce resources, a permanent energy crisis, coastal inundation, heat waves and droughts people will be forced to return to technologies not seen since centuries. If I had to summarize how the technology of the coming decades will look like in a few words, I would not use magical terms like AI, or Industry 4.0. No, the future will be increasingly low-tech. Appropriate. De-automated. Manual. Radically useful. Why not start today…?
Losing the fundamentals — cheap resources and a stable climate — of our high tech civilization is a slow moving train crash, not a sudden world changing event. It has been on since at least half a century, but so far the process has been masked by financial means (credit and loans) and aggressive globalization (the takeover of other nations resources). The tempo of drawdown is accelerating though and it will cut into the flesh of rich nations sooner than many dare to expect.
This is not to say, that we were not warned. Logic informed many of our great thinkers that this is what we can expect (the work of Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen or Herman Daly comes to mind here). The famous Limits to Growth study came to the same conclusion as well. Fifty years ago. Their findings were attempted to be denied, but were proven to be quite accurate instead. The study made no predictions, but laid out several different scenarios. Back then — at least in theory — we could still became sustainable, if we had managed to half our consumption rate. I repeat: halve it, compared to 1970’s(!) levels. No, we kept growing it, effectively quadrupling our resource use instead of reducing it.
The results speak for themselves. Business as usual has won, hands down.
How does this inform us on recent geopolitical events? Although not spoken about publicly, one can easily trace how the depletion of cheap resources fuels many wars and uprisings in our world. Let’s take the case of copper in Peru and Chile for example. As we have seen, due to resource depletion, mining requires ever greater amounts of energy in form of electricity and diesel fuel. This relentless rise in energy expenditure has eroded profits, unprecedented energy cost increases in recent years have just made this all the worse. Remember: this is not a one time increase in energy costs (in kW and not only in $ terms) but akin to walking up against a landslide: as the quality of copper coming up from the mine decreases so does the energy requirement to process it grows. Relentlessly.
So, as the income from mining declines (both for the state and the working class), we see more and more popular uprisings — and more and more powerful counteraction from the ruling elite of the world. No wonder, you need a lot of cheap copper and lithium to run a green revolution and build all those Tesla-s… And what’s the oligarchs’ response?
“We will coup whoever we want! Deal with it.” — Elon Musk
This can be seen currently as “resource nationalism” and imperialism by other means, but there is more to that. Knowing how close we are to hitting hard resource limits then decline (years? a decade or two?) the big power competition between the US and China gains a new meaning. Both of them need a ton of cheap resources to run their economies and keep their populations consuming happily like there is no tomorrow. With both of them still exponentially growing though, soon there will be no place for two such large economies on this finite planet of ours. Expecting an infinite growth in resource consumption is insane and will lead to a crash in one way or the other. The same goes for trying to coerce other nations.
Scaling back on imperialism, and ultimately resource use through focusing on local communities, building resilience at home and adopting more sustainable agriculture practices, could help us avoid this situation. This is not where we are headed though. The drums of war are being beaten harder and harder, and avoiding a hot war in the Pacific seems increasingly unlikely. It looks like we have been stuck in a failing civilization headed for a crash.
On the long term, however, it absolutely does not matter who wins WW3. Western civilization may be further down the road of decline and might lose the coming clash of titans (more on this in a later post), but what is coming for western powers is what is in store for the others as well. Increasing pressure from environmental challenges and resource depletion (leading to a slow decline in the amount of minerals and food produced) will hasten this process, and will make it very unlikely that any of the nation states we have today will last into the next century.
Until next time,
B
Notes:
(1) If you believe that we are far from the bitter end hallmarked by the drawdown of the last reserves of finite material, I have to remind you that we are discovering less material reserves than we use up every year for decades now. If you think of the total amount of oil what we have ever discovered as our bank account for example, we are now drawing down more money from this account every year than what we deposit. We burn roughly 30 billion barrels of it a year and ‘discover’ a mere 20 at best annually. Sometimes only 10. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that this cannot end very well. Oh, and by the way the same goes to copper — essential and irreplaceable to everything electric.
