Nov 20, 2008

Peak Everything

Earlier this week we went to a lecture* by Richard Heinberg, the author of Peak Everything.

From what he says you might say that we (civilization) will either have to drastically change soon or we're in big trouble. We are running out of a lot more than oil and water and historically we have just used new sources of energy to increase the pace at which we extract other resources from the earth -- and use even more resources doing it.

So the sudden invention of abundant, cheap and clean energy (say, fusion) would likely increase the pace of other environmental catastrophes. Furthermore, the economics are such that in good times it is not cost effective to develop alternatives and in times like these alternatives may not be able to be developed timely enough for them to help. Another interesting point is that even if there were a sudden shift to an all out effort to develop solar energy, we would run out of essential raw materials (such as gallium) long before photovoltaic sources of energy met our needs.

His point is that the only solution is to replace the growth model of economics with a sustainable steady state model (if maybe even after some scaling back from where we are). That's not something that any population is likely to accept willingly**.

I haven't yet found anything which strongly disagrees with what he says either. Sounds like civilization's response this problem is like the classic case of boiling a frog. Throw him in hot water and he jumps out. But, put him in warm water and slowly increase the heat and he just relaxes...

*Update: The lecture was conducted interview-style and taped presumably for an upcoming episode of Chicago Public Radio's Eight Forty-Eight.

** Update: Professor, author and retired army colonel Andrew J. Bacevich (in spite of being a conservative) said something similar recently during an interview with Charley Rose. The caveat was that -- although true, any president to say this to the public would be voted out of office. He says this was the case with Carter.


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