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Can Civilization Reboot Without Fossil Fuels?
An anonymous reader writes: We often talk about our dependence on fossil fuels, and vigorously debate whether and how we should reduce that dependence. This article at Aeon sidesteps the political bickering and asks an interesting technological question: if we had to rebuild society, could we do it without all the fossil fuels we used to do it the first time? When people write about post-apocalyptic scenarios, the focus is usually on preserving information long enough for humanity to rebuild. But actually rebuilding turns out to be quite a challenge when all the easy oil has been bled from the planet.
It's not that we're running out, it's that the best spots for oil now require high tech machinery. This would create a sort of chicken-and-egg problem for a rebuilding society. Technological progress could still happen using other energy production methods. But it would be very slow — we'd never see the dramatic accelerations that marked the industrial age, and then the information age. "A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanization, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We'd better hope we can secure the future of our own civilization, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake."
It's not that we're running out, it's that the best spots for oil now require high tech machinery. This would create a sort of chicken-and-egg problem for a rebuilding society. Technological progress could still happen using other energy production methods. But it would be very slow — we'd never see the dramatic accelerations that marked the industrial age, and then the information age. "A slow-burn progression through the stages of mechanization, supported by a combination of renewable electricity and sustainably grown biomass, might be possible after all. Then again, it might not. We'd better hope we can secure the future of our own civilization, because we might have scuppered the chances of any society to follow in our wake."
If you take the cost of energy out any development would be as fast if not faster. But that is an economic problem, not a technical one. You could produce solar energy for free if you decide that those technologies are owned by everyone.
If we wind up with the level of 1950s technology, there is always nuclear. Since thorium and uranium are relatively plentiful, it wouldn't take much to get civilization back on its feet by using the mighty atom.
Right now, this is an impossiblity. Carter's presidential order after 3MI banning all new construction on commercial reactors has royally fucked us over as a country, marrying us to coal and oil for the known future. However, a future society that isn't led around by the short hairs by a fossil fuel lobby can get back on track, if not further by good old fission, and do it in a safe manner.
I don't see the problem. Switching to e.g. bio-fuels is a problem now because you're diverting established agricultural output from food crops to bio-fuel, reducing the supply of food in the existing market, and driving up prices. If you're "re-booting" civilization, then you don't have an established market to upset, so there aren't the same issues. It might slow things down a bit to have to generate your fuel in renewable ways, but you'd still get there in the end. Burn wood (and re-plant the trees), make ethanol from grain, maybe make the switch to battery power sooner, with solar/hydro/tidal/geothermal sources of energy.
The first electric cars were made in the 1800's, but they didn't get much of a chance then, because fossil fuel powered cars were there. Without fossil fuels, they would probably have been developed faster and become much more significant. Lighter-than-air aircraft were swept aside by fossil fuel powered airplanes, but without the fossil fuels, that type of craft might have developed and prospered, and the skies might be filled with Zeppelins.
Sure, history would take a very different course, but there are plenty of technological paths for human ingenuity to follow without fossil fuels.
Oh no... it's the future.
Who cares that solar panels only can convert about 10-15% of the power it receives now
That's not the issue. The problem is that solar panels deteriorate over time, and that a collapsed society doesn't have the technological means to build new ones.
Note that 90% of energy is wasted in datacenters for autoplaying videos, tracking, web 2.0, "we recommend you these stories", inefficient implementations etc.
Client devices could do with a single MIPS core and an unlit monochrome LCD, servers could run tight code written in C or whatever instead of PHP etc., and serve actual content rather than padding all pages with background noise and 3000x2000 background pictures.
so why would we need more than maintenance-level stocks of tar and asphalt?
Because people dig up the old asphalt roads so they can burn the tar to stay warm ?
Without them for energy? Yes.
Fossil fuels are far more important as fertilizer and medicine than they are as energy products. We can, fairly easily, replace them as energy sources with alternatives that may be more expensive but are viable.
We don't have shit for a way to replace the fertilizer supply, which means we'd probably have a great dying due to starvation if we completely abandon fossil fuels.
Then of course theres all the medicines we make from oil. If the starvation dying doesn't get you, the lack of medical supplies is going to curb another large portion of our population.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
It goes much deeper than that. Even something as basic as modern wiring has become heavily dependent on petrochemicals and oil. We would have to relearn a whole new way of making wires with old-fashioned rubber insulation and hand-mined copper. And that's the SIMPLEST thing. Every single component that goes into modern electrical components is heavily dependent on petroleum. We used diesel powered machinery to mine for all the metals. We use petrochemicals and oil dependent polymers to make the insulators and many other parts. To construct a modern electrical grid without petroleum would require a complete re-engineering of our entire manufacturing infrastructure from the ground up (with engineers having to rethink almost almost everything they know).
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Technically we are able to give everybody enough food. Technically we are able to distribute wealth better. Technically we are able not to kill each other.
That does not mean that we do that.
In other words: do not look for a technical solution for a social problem.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
We already know how to create biodiesel and other fuels from non fossil sources. If we limited their use to critical needs, and had everything else using renewable electric sources, then we probably could do without oil.
The problem is that we don't just use fossil fuels for fueling our cars and power pants. It makes the polymers used in almost every electrical component. It fuels the industrial mining of almost every metal and mineral used in those components (good luck hand-panning for rare earth minerals, or removing millions of tons of earth using only steam engines). It fuels the entire shipping industry that moves everything around (enabling modern industrial processing of raw materials).
Oil and coal do a fuckload lot more these days than make gasoline for our little cars and run our power plants. That's just the obvious use that most of us see every day. Odds are that every single thing your own today is either made from petrochemicals or somehow heavily dependent on them. I myself own exactly one piece of wood furniture made by a local artisan and a few books left by my great-grandmother that may be exceptions to this. Everything else was shipped using petrol, created with coal-based power, or contains petrochemical based polymers. Even the food I eat is mostly shipped in from large farms and ranches in another part of the country.
SJW's don't eliminate discrimination. They just expropriate it for themselves.
Advanced civilization of some sort exists in at least pieces on every continent now. Odds are very low that it would all collapse overnight short of an extreme nuclear conflict. Let's be honest. If most of global civilization collapse and one or two major states survived, battered and bloody from whatever chaos happened, they could reboot advanced civilization where it previously existed. From the American perspective at least, if most of the world went to Hell, the US could simply invade and conquer most of the petrol states and distribute their oil to the broken states in large enough quantities to reboot their economies and political systems.**
** If we truly faced a global collapse and the US military were mostly intact, it would be operating under totally different rules of engagement. Troops landing in Saudi Arabia, Sudan, etc. to start pumping the oil would not be "policing," they would likely have the latitude to annihilate entire population centers if the natives prevented them from jump starting the European and Asian economies.
I would argue that using hydrocarbons, particularly the long-chain hydrocarbons like petroleum and bitumen, as a source of energy (motive or otherwise) is the most ludicrously wasteful use one can imagine. Oil's importance to material technologies and industrial processes is enormous, and using them to make gas for automobiles is, quite frankly, profoundly stupid. That's not even taking into account the various environmental hazards of the combustion of such substances.
Some day we'll have the energy production capability to create long-chain hydrocarbons out of methane, and then we'll have a nearly unlimited supply of stock for producing materials we make out of oil today, but until then, what we put in our cars seems much more like a short-term problem.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
But, without lubrication, how would you run your machinery?
Use the lard extracted from liposuction.
It's a vast untapped resource.
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"I can't complain, but sometimes still do..." Joe Walsh
And there's some indication that reduced farm fertility may have helped destabilized the Roman empire as well as several Chinese empires. My point remains. Climate disruption is not an automatic death knell. But societal parasitism tends to undermine adaptability.
Stupid article, written by stupid elite intellectual postmoderns sitting in an airconditioned office whose familiarity with living in such conditions stretches perhaps so far as reading about it in the doctor's waiting lounge or "camping" modern 21st century American style, ala hundred-dollar footwear, thousands of dollars of advanced fabrics, aluminum everything, carefully crafted nutritional freeze-dried meals, all used to camp at prepared campsites where the major concern of the campers is "how do I keep my 'sport' beverages cold?" or "how do I make sure I my organic shampoo doesn't run into the pristine nearby lake?"
It's hard to even know where to start tearing this thing apart.
His initial sentence is ludicrous: "It took a lot of fossil fuels to forge our industrial world. Now they're almost gone." What? We have thousands of years of coal at current consumption rates, setting aside the fact that such an apocalyptic scenario he's talking about would mean that likely 75-90% of humanity is dead and our consumption rate would obviously drop. While coal today may be hard to retrieve IN BRITAIN, it's not hard to find in other places.
Secondly, even the use of oil (that he keeps referring to) presupposes an extant level of technology that is unlikely to survive such a situation. If we've fallen so low that we can't retrieve coal from the ground, do you really think we would be able to build engines that could even use oil? People seem to forget that there's a crapton of accumulated skills and techniques - mostly forgotten to the bulk of civilization - involved in building things like steam engines. Hell, he goes off on building a society based on alternative generation of electricity, failing to note that even making WIRE involves a rather high level of technological development.
Thirdly,"How could an industrialising society produce crucial building materials such as iron and steel, brick, mortar, cement and glass without resorting to deposits of coal?" Well, there are ample examples of civilizations that were quite 'civilized' that didn't use coal or oil - Rome, etc used WOOD, and they were able to reach rather comfortable levels of advancement without fossil fuels. Last time I checked, the Romans were pretty damn good at engineering and cement - in some ways better with cement than we are today.
He then maunders off mulling the ability of such a rebuilding society focusing on using solar power or wood gasification, setting aside the final reality: if one is in an apocalyptic situation, desperate for food, shelter, clean water, and simply working hard trying to live, "giving a shit" about the environment, CO2 loading, and pollution outside your immediate circumstances falls far below one's level of concern because it's ultimately a LUXURY to worry about impacts on future generations when you're trying to survive tonight or to the end of the week.
Seriously ridiculous article, starting from ridiculous premises and reaching ridiculous conclusions.
-Styopa
I'll admit I have no idea of the link between fossil fuels and modern medicine. I was under the impression that most medicines are extractions of natural compounds.
I can cite many examples of scalable food production systems that don't depend on fossil fuels, however, and demonstrations that industrial agriculture that is reliant on fossil fuels for fertilizer are non-sustainable beyond the constraints of supply - they degrade and deplete soil fertility in the long run, leading to desertification.
Have a look at the works of Bill Mollison, Geoff Lawton, Alan Savory, Mark Shepard, Sepp Holzer, Willie Smits if you're interested.
I believe global warming and ocean acidification is a serious threat. I also believe that solar energy has great potential as an energy source. However, I think the question being framed here creates a false dichotomy. Is it not possible that we might have a world where we have renewable, nuclear, and fossil fuels? Just because we reduce the use of something doesn't mean we have to eliminate it. The fact is that modern civilization needs plastics, mechanical lubrication, and other fossil fuel bi-products. Even if we reduce fossil fuel use by 80%, we can still have these things.
This and no other is the root from which a tyrant springs; when first he appears as a protector - Plato (423 to 327 BC)