Читать книгу Prosper! - Chris Martenson - Страница 9
ОглавлениеBefore we get into the particulars of becoming more resilient, we’d like to share with you the data that explains why many people are increasingly motivated to action.
The short version is that virtually everything we take for granted is on an unsustainable trajectory. Our economic model demands perpetual growth – indefinitely. Exponentially increasing levels of debt, overuse of ecosystems, and ever-accelerating depletion of fossil fuels are just a few of the many examples of practices that cannot continue forever.
Stating the obvious: anything that can’t go on forever, won’t.
Now, before you quickly dismiss us as dyed-in-the-wool pessimists, allow us to step through the data that supports our views. Even if you’re already well-versed in this material, you may find this re-grounding in the data as motivation to get busy on your path towards resilience.
Your authors are data driven people, and we track a lot of it very closely through the work at our website, PeakProsperity.com. What sets us apart from most commentators, analysts and observers is that we dig deep into what we call the Three Es—the Economy, Energy and the Environment - and connect them all into a single, simple, and coherent framework.
When new data emerges, we adjust our views accordingly. But with the facts available to us today, this is the story we have to tell.
ENERGY
It all begins with energy. You are so completely enveloped within the comforting embrace of surplus energy that it probably escapes your notice and proper appreciation. As water is to a fish, so energy is to you.
Take a moment and glance at the things around you. Walls and ceilings, lights, appliances, furniture and clothing. There are metals, plastics and fabrics galore all around you.
Think about where you drove yesterday. How far will you travel over the next month? Where are you headed later today?
Each and every one of the things you can see, touch or do in life got there or is made possible because of energy. Fossil fuel energy mainly—but even more specifically, because of oil. Ninety-five percent of everything that moves from point A to point B in our globalized, just-in-time economy does so because of liquid fuels derived from petroleum. This means that when you scanned your surroundings, virtually everything your eyes saw required oil to get there.
Widening beyond what you can see, at this very moment there are massive traffic jams on hundreds of highways in hundreds of cities across the globe. Twenty-four hours a day. Three hundred sixty-five days a year, during every hour of every day, there are millions of cars just sitting there, stuck in massive traffic jams.
The price of oil is sensitively dependent on whether we are consuming slightly more than we are producing (which causes the price to rise), or if we’re consuming slightly less than we are producing (resulting in a price decline). But prices can distract you from the truth about oil, which is that we are constantly 24×7×365 burning it up in greater and greater amounts with every passing year.
Energy is also critically important because it’s tightly linked to economic growth, which is revered and sought by every nation on the planet. Everybody wants growth, especially more economic growth, which means continuously having more things produced and sold this year than last.
But this slavish fixation on economic growth has led us to overlook the reality that, for every additional 1% increase in Gross Domestic Product (GDP), electricity usage increases by roughly 0.5% and oil use increases by roughly 0.25%. So, it’s as simple as this: Growing an economy requires the consumption of energy to grow.
But this is clearly not a reasonable demand to make of a finite planet. While the demand for economic growth is unlimited, there’s a limited amount oil in the ground. The same is true for other fossil fuels such as coal and natural gas.
Centering just on oil, because the world remains so tremendously dependent on it, there are only two things you need to know.
First, the easy stuff is all gone. If there were easy stuff left we would not be drilling in ultra-deep waters, fracking at enormous expense, and boiling tar residue off of Canadian sand. Getting oil out of the ground is undeniably and obviously getting harder and more expensive as time goes on.
Second, there are no viable replacements for cheap oil anywhere on the horizon, at least not at the scales required *. We have no plan B in place for how we are going to transition off of oil. [*Note: the projected contributions from biofuels and electric vehicles are so tiny compared to oil’s stronghold on the transportation sector that they can be all but ignored at the moment.]
So as oil depletes, it becomes more expensive to extract every year, and we have no substitutes for it. Every year those two concepts become just a little bit more obvious.
The insidious part of this story is buried in the ‘more expensive to extract’ statement. Putting aside the additional money involved for a moment, what that really means is that we have to expend more energy to just get the same amount of energy out of the ground.
It takes energy to get energy, and we run both our economy and society on the surplus energy left over after all the energy used to find, extract, refine and distribute that energy has been subtracted.
Imagine for a moment that we were living in 1930 when those famous oil ‘gushers’ were being drilled. Back then we might have expended a single barrel of oil’s worth of energy in order to get 100 barrels out of the ground. That surplus balance of 99 barrels of oil went to market, and the nation used it however it wished.
This oil could have been used frivolously, or to build up the nation’s infrastructure. It could power the plowing of new farmland, or the import of feather boas from Brazil.
The point we’re making here is this: our culture, our economy, our jobs—progress and society itself—all exist due to surplus energy. Whether the world can produce 100 million barrels of oil per day or just 50 million is far less relevant than how much surplus energy there is to support the rest of our complex economy and the way of life we consider to be normal.
Now suppose for a moment that you live 30 years in the future and all new oil discoveries return just 1.5 barrels of oil for every barrel expended to find, produce and deliver that oil to market. What kind of a world do you suppose that would be like? Instead of expending a barrel of oil and getting 99 barrels back like we did in 1930, we’d only get 0.5 barrels back.
What’s the difference between 99 and 0.5? Night and day. Not everything that can be supported on 99 surplus barrels can be supported on a measly 0.5 barrels. In fact, we’d argue that practically everything we hold dear about our modern, comfortable lifestyles would vanish if we were suddenly forced to exist on a paltry 0.5 barrel surplus.
In rough terms, where the energy industry was once using 1% of our total annual energy and leaving 99% for society, it will someday be consuming 67%, leaving the rest of us to fight over the remaining 33%.
For those of us who have studied what life will look and feel like under these conditions, the answer is obvious. We will inherit a future defined by less of everything. The world will be a far less dynamic, less easy place to live with a much-simplified economy, reduced travel, and vastly fewer—or at least very different—opportunities compared to today. Unless you happen to work in the energy extraction business, in which case you may be very busy indeed trying to meet the demands of your increasingly-frustrated customers!
The sober truth is that we are well on that path of diminishing energy returns. The much-vaunted shale plays in the US you’ve seen touted in the media as the savior to the world’s oil needs? Those deliver perhaps 8:1 to 5:1 net energy returns.
Put another way, in the past 85 years of oil production, we now find ourselves getting just one-twentieth the return as when we started. It’s difficult to overstate the importance of this fact. It’s an astonishing development touching on everything we hold dear and you should rightly be wondering why you are reading about it here and not on the front page of every major newspaper.
The trends clearly show that the diminishing energy returns of oil are a permanent feature. Plentiful, cheap oil was a once-in-a-species bonanza. We’ve been blowing through it as if it were a massive and self-replenishing party fund, and we’ve fashioned our entire way of life and all our plans for the future on the comforting but false belief that oil’s age will never end.
The golden age of oil discoveries, you may be surprised to learn, peaked way back in the 1960’s. In 2014, world discoveries of new oil reserves dropped to a 20-year low, marking the fourth consecutive year of discovery declines, and only replaced roughly one-sixth of what we burned during that same year.
At the time of this writing in spring of 2015, there are no serious efforts underway for a smooth transition to a new energy source after the oil is gone.
Should a credible transition plan ever be devised, it will ask much of society. Such an effort will require the sort of dedication brought to the moon project, multiplied by the constructive intensity that gave us the interstate highway system, multiplied by some large whole number like 10. Or maybe 100. The budget and manpower needed will be staggering. But as of now, those in the halls of power are not debating this. It’s not even on their radar.
As for other forms of energy that might ride to the rescue, well, let’s just say that the current levels of investment in alternative energy (solar, wind, hydro, etc) are not yet equal to the task. Although energy production from alternative sources has been advancing nicely, it’s swamped each year by the gross increase in additional fossil fuel use. It’s an unfair race where fossil fuels have a gigantic head start.
More importantly, wind and solar are not replacements for oil. Oil gives us transportation fuels and chemical feed stocks while wind and solar give us electrons. They are not interchangeable inputs given the transportation industrial infrastructure we currently have.
As the surplus energy we receive from oil and other fossil fuels dwindles (the same dynamic is happening in coal and natural gas, too, albeit on a different timeline), we’re going to have to get used to getting by with less, because we will be able to do less. This will impact our lifestyles over the next several decades, affecting some harder and more quickly than others. (As we often say: your local mileage will vary).
But one thing we all care about is extremely vulnerable to a decline in surplus energy: the economy. Remember when we talked earlier about all that economic growth our corporate and political leaders are so fixated on? Perhaps it’s time to be asking what will happen to it when there’s not enough surplus energy left over to dedicate to growth.
This completes a (very) brief tour of energy, which will allow us to better appreciate the economy, the next “E” in our story. Trust us, this is important information that is leading somewhere.
ECONOMY
The economy is an easy thing to explain. While some describe it as the complicated sum of all the products and services a region produces, that’s a definition of what it is. In terms of what it does, the best explanation is that it grows.
We like our economy to grow by some percentage over time (be that a quarter, a year or a decade), which means that it is growing exponentially. This is a hugely important idea so let’s spend a bit of time developing the concept.
WATCH:
Chapters 9 - 22 of The Crash Course
TOPIC: Our Energy Predicament
URL and LINK: See Web Links
Anything that is growing by some percentage over some unit of time is growing exponentially. It could be a single percent (1%) each year or it could be 5% per month. It doesn’t matter by how much or for how long, all that matters is that this thing we’re measuring is growing by some percentage over time.
You’ve heard about this phenomenon endlessly, perhaps without realizing it. The newspapers and televisions constantly repeat the data points: Car sales are up 12% this month. House sales are up 5% year over year. The economy has grown by 3.2% this quarter.
If you look carefully, you’ll see that each of these is actually referring to a percentage increase over a unit of time – which means that the things we most carefully measure, track and report to ourselves are all growing exponentially.
So why is it so important to understand the concept of exponential growth? Because it is literally going to kill us if we don’t. We need to understand exponential growth because we are completely surrounded by it, and appreciating that will help us to both understand what’s happening today as well as predict what’s coming tomorrow.
“The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function”
—Albert Bartlett
Unfortunately, exponential growth is not an intuitive concept. We’re hard-wired to understand direct, linear relationships. We can hit a fastball, but slipping on ice surprises us. No matter how fast the ball is thrown it’s moving at a constant speed, while gravity accelerates exponentially. Exponential rates of change confuse most of us except for a very few well-trained mathematicians; so please don’t be put off by any doubts you may have about fully grasping this concept.
WATCH:
Chapter 3 of The Crash Course
TOPIC: Exponential Growth
URL and LINK: See Web Links
Fortunately, there are some relatable ways to understand how critical exponential growth is to our economy—one very good one is presented in the chapter on Exponential Growth within our online video series, The Crash Course. If you haven’t yet seen it, it’s worth taking a few minutes to watch it now, if you’re able to (it’s only six minutes in length). It really makes the concept easy to grasp.
Another good one is the Rule of 72, which works like this:
Suppose we said that we wanted our economy to grow by 5% per year. The Rule of 72 allows us to quickly answer the question: How long will it be before our economy has fully doubled in size?
To answer that question all we have to do is divide the rate of growth into 72. While 5% doesn’t sound like very much growth, the Rule of 72 tells us that in just 14.4 years (= 72/5) an economy growing at 5% per year will be twice as large.
As in “fully doubled” in just 14.4 years!
Everything will be twice as big: twice as much economic activity, twice as many cars sold, twice as much food grown and eaten, twice as many airline miles travelled and trips taken—everything will be two times bigger.
Imagine you live in a small city that is growing by this modest 5% per year and you have a child. Before that child’s 15th birthday, your small city now has twice as much of everything. By the time that child has almost reached her 29th birthday, the city in which she was born will now be 4 times as large because it has gone through two doublings. If the growth persists, by the time your child is 58 years old, her small city will be 16 times as large as when she was born. More frighteningly, just 14.4 years after that, at the ripe old age of 72, the city will now be 32 times as large. 32 times!
If that same economy were to grow at 7.2%, the current reported rate of China’s GDP growth, then that economy would double every 10 years.
Do you see the predicament here yet? If every economy in the world is growing exponentially, and they are all doubling away every decade or two, eventually they’ll run out of resources and room. That’s just common sense, right?
The world is already mired in low growth and saddled with some $200 trillion of debt, up a whopping $57 trillion just since 2007. Sadly, the world didn’t take on all that new debt because of clear-eyed confidence in the future, but because worried politicians borrowed it from scared central bankers, both of whom merely wanted to the keep the whole system from imploding.
The core of the problem, never publicly recognized by either the politicians or central planners, is that our system of money and our banking and financial systems are all hopelessly addicted to exponentially growing piles of debt and money. As long as they are growing exponentially, everything is stable, but the minute they stagnate or shrink(!), as happened in 2009 after the real estate bust, the financial and banking systems threaten to collapse.
Does having monetary and financial systems whose very stability are built around the idea of perpetual exponential expansion sound particularly robust or intelligent? If it doesn’t, then you are on the same wavelength as your authors.
WATCH:
Chapters 6 - 18 of The Crash Course
TOPIC: The Risks to our Economy
URL and LINK: See Web Links
Okay, we’ve got just one more topic to cover before we can assemble this all into a coherent call to action.
ENVIRONMENT
Even at today’s level of world economic output, there are already hundreds of flashing warning signs saying that we’re taking too much from the natural world and putting too much waste back in to it.
The “plan” of every single one of the world’s leaders is to double the rate of economic output of their country, and then double it again. Forever. But as we can all deduce, it’s not possible to endlessly double the size of something contained within a fixed space.
The world is very big, but it is not infinite. This is the reality that the generations alive today have to confront. However difficult it proves, either practically or emotionally, we are the first ones in history who are going to slam into the Earth’s limits to growth.
It’s not going to be possible to double the rate at which oil currently comes out of the ground. And even if it were, climate scientists tell us that would be a terrible idea. Certainly ocean fish stocks are not going to double anytime soon; they’re in full-blown collapse as it is. Nor are we going to double the water taken from depleted aquifers, or the food from rapidly-depleting soils. We may be able to eek out a little bit more from these stressed systems for a few more years but that bought time will come with a terrible cost.
Wedged between an energy system that cannot possibly expand forever, and an economic model that demands endless expansion, we have clear, ominous, troubling evidence—mountains of it!—that humans are impacting the natural world in destructive ways that will result in disruptive changes and ecosystem collapse.
Biological diversity is the very foundation of the natural world. In times past a human could live an entire life lasting 80 years and, on average, experience one species extinction during their lifetime. Now we are losing, on average, several species per day by some estimates (or several hundred per day, by others).
More than half of the world’s major aquifers are now in a state of dangerous depletion, and the millions to billions of people who depend upon them have no alternative supplies to draw upon.
Fertile soils are being degraded and eroded such that we can calculate when they will be entirely gone. Under current farming practices we may have as few as 60 to 100 harvests left. No soil means no food means no humans.
The oceans are acidifying at the fastest pace in 300 million years. We know that the largest mass extinction in Earth’s history, the Permian extinction, the one that erased more than 90% of all life forms in the oceans and on land, happened because the oceans acidified too much and too fast.
Climate change is now a matter of scientific record. The only questions left are how extreme it will be and how much damage we will experience. The glaciers in Antarctica are calving off at an accelerating pace, and their hundreds of gigatons of inertia will carry them into the sea, raising ocean levels, no matter what we do.
In response to these existential threats, most of the responsible nations are doing little more than making soothing noises publicly, while continuing with ‘business as usual’ in the background. Talk is cheap, but real solutions will be among the most expensive and radical tasks ever undertaken in human history. Our entire food and energy production systems will have to be re-engineered. Our species will have to convert from being wanton consumers of natural resources to responsible stewards of them. Where and how we live, how we transport ourselves, how we transact, and how we interact with nature—all will have to change dramatically.
The big question is: Will those changes be on our terms, or other terms? With each passing year that the human race ignores or delays action, the answer being ‘other terms’ continue to increase.
Okay, thank you for sticking with us this far. Take a deep breath and let out whatever tension you are carrying. Here’s where it all comes together.
THE THREE ES
Now you know why we believe that all three Es must be viewed at once. They’re so interconnected we can’t simply address one without impacting the others. So to the extent that central bankers are busy pulling monetary levers while ignoring the trends in the environment and energy sectors is the extent to which they are making grave errors.
Add up all the Three Es and you see we have:
1. an economy that must expand, connected to
2. an energy system that cannot expand, all wrapped up in
3. an environment that is both being depleted of resources and saturated with pollutants.
The inescapable conclusion to all this? Things are going to change. Big time.
At Peak Prosperity, we remind ourselves with the punchline: The next 20 years are going to be completely unlike the past 20 years. Never before has humanity had to deal with such a massive set of intertwined predicaments (problems have solutions; predicaments only have outcomes that need to be prepared for). We simply don’t have any relevant history to inform our decision-making here.
This means we can’t count on the cavalry to ride to our rescue and make these issues disappear. That’s just not going to happen given the number and scope of the challenges we face. Instead we, as individuals, are each going to need to prepare for a very different and quite possibly turbulent future.
Our old habits and assumptions will conspire to steer us wrong in most cases. But by focusing on developing resilience, we can dramatically increase our chances of mastering whatever rules the coming future will require us to live by.
In short, it’s time to get ready. That’s where the rest of this book comes in.
