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."

Comments

We have already figured most of this out.

[The Other White Meat]

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 biggest challenge appears to be the lack of tar and asphalt for road construction; we'd have to find a workable substitute. For everything else, suitable engineered substitutes exist.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[dwywit]

We've already got a lot of roads - where would we need to build new ones, if there's a collapse?

There are existing roads connecting our major centres - granted, they'll need maintenance, but that's mostly patching, as opposed to kilometres of new roads - so why would we need more than maintenance-level stocks of tar and asphalt?

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[itzly]

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 ?

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[CeasedCaring]

So _that's_ why all the roads are full of potholes? I did wonder!

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[houghi]

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.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[NotDrWho]

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.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[MightyMartian]

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.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[judoguy]

Roads go to crap surprising quickly. I was in a workshop shortly after the Soviet Union collapsed. The presenter took a little time off topic to talk about a book and newsletter he was publishing in Russia. Entire city's were becoming accessible only by poor train service because the roads were simply going away. It made delivering a monthly newsletter quite problematic.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[plopez]

Diesel engines were originally designed to run on vegetable oil and the Model T was originally designed to run on alcohol fermented from agricultural waste. So two prime movers could exist without fossil fuels. Burning oil and alcohol can also run steam engines. As could chemical batteries. Evidence suggests the Greeks and even Egyptians used available metals to build batteries. So we could have electricity, cars, trains, and ships. Perhaps even airplanes. At that point you can boot strap up. Most of the Science used in Engineering these days is hundreds of years old. So while it may be slower it is plausible.

Diesel died under mysterious circumstances, some people suspect assassination by oil interests. The Model T's ability to burn alcohol was killed by US Prohibition. Some people say Prohibition was at least some what driven by the oil interests trying to kill off alternative fuels.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[bobbied]

It's like trying to switch to an all self-grown, vegetarian diet after growing a single tomato and saying "See, it's easy to grow all your own food."

I so love this example. How many people even have enough space in their suburban yards to grow enough vegetables to meet their needs for even a few weeks, much less for a full year? Yea, you might get enough tomatoes out of that garden to put on your salads for a few months and even have enough to can a few jars worth, but you are NEVER going to feed even one person on a quarter of an acre.

Add to that this idea that we can just grow biodiesel producing plants to fuel our cars and I'm laughing. There is simply no way we have enough land, water and natural fertilizer to make that work on a world wide scale, unless you don't mind having a large fraction of the world's population starving...

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[Ethan Black]

In other words: do not look for a technical solution for a social problem.

Too true. Technology is not 100% of the solution to the problem. It can be used for good, evil, or anything in between.

That being said: modern technology has allowed us to dramatically increase life expectancy and quality through modern medicine. We have transitioned from a civilization where the vast majority of people have to be involved in agriculture or other basic survival tasks in order for the society to survive, to a civilization where a negligible fraction of people are involved in those tasks. I think that that progress certainly qualifies a technical solution to some of humanity's biggest (former) problems.

Imagine a world where a single moderately wealthy person's means can feed and house millions in comfort. Imagine a world where food and shelter are as cheap as fresh air. Even barring some kind of dramatic "technological acceleration," we might be closer to that goal than most of us imagine. Could this lead to dystopia? Certainly. It might also lead to paradise on Earth: It depends on us and what we do with the power that those technologies gives us.

A lot of social problems in Africa, Eastern Europe, and Asia are caused by poverty. Like you said

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.

Just because we are technically able to does not mean that it would be easy. Even in the US, one can scarcely support oneself, much less a family, while working hard on minimum wage. If, through technological advances, we reduce the cost of the basic necessities even more, that change will filter out to the less privileged parts of the world. If food and shelter are free (or almost free), it will be much more difficult for warlords to keep food from the starving. It will be much more difficult for groups like ISIS to gain traction surrounded by a healthy comfortable populace that has basic luxuries and does not fear starvation.

We need more than just technology to make the world a better place, but don't underestimate the amazing potential for extreme social change (whether positive or negative is up to us) that is inherent in certain advances!

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[OrangeTide]

blacktop roads exist because we didn't know what to do with all that sludge from the refineries.

if money and labor was no object we would make roads out of roman concrete, and would probably pave far fewer roads than we have.

That blacktop is crap anyways, it falls apart in northern climates after a few seasons and patches are less stable than the original leading to a cycle of deterioration. (drive in Michigan to see what the post-apocalyptic highway system will look like)

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[rgbatduke]

If I had mod points today, I'd mod you up. Personally I'm skeptical that CO_2 will lead to a climate disaster, but either way burning all our oil and coal is incredibly stupid as they are the base stock for pretty much all organic chemistry synthesis, and while sure, if/when we master fusion or get off of our backsides and start burning thorium and drop PV solar to the point where it can interpolate or provide industrial daytime energy in suitable locations we can work comparatively inefficient magic with other materials, aside from methane the carbon itself is likely to be entropically downhill from where we'd like it to be and it will cost us a lot of energy to reverse that. I'm pretty skeptical, however, of electric cars -- maybe a bit less so of biofuels -- I don't think people realize that it would require 100% of an entire day's worth of clear-sky production of their $20,000 5 KW rooftop solar system to not-quite replace 1 single gallon of gasoline. No matter how you amortize that, it isn't going to be pretty. Biofuels have the same issue, they just get to the gallon via different route -- a lot of land surface, water, human effort, and capital investment per gallon equivalent of fuel.

Fusion is really the critical technology. If we master D-D commercially scalable fusion, as long as we can don't lose the knowledge and can bootstrap a single fusion plant we can "reboot" civilization. The problem we're soon going to be facing, however, is that all of our knowledge is going to be stored in a volatile form that will be absolutely unreadable post-apocalypse, and in another generation or two humans will get so lazy and dependent on instant access to information they had to at one time internalize that a collapse will lose nearly everything we know in a single generation. Paper isn't a perfect medium for preserving knowledge, but it does have the advantage of lasting for as long as centuries with reasonable care and not requiring any particular technology to read from it, and only very modest technology to produce it and print to it.

So let's all sing a canticle for Liebowitz and imagine a post-apocalyptic world in which priests are running around conserving -- usb sticks, old dvds, ancient hard drives, or little tiny chips of plastic with tarnished brass that individually could contain a good chunk of Wikipedia but are as useless as a boar's teats without a mountain of technology too high to imagine any primitive culture surmounting in any amount of time.

rgb

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[funwithBSD]

They did before they were available. They dug the Panama Canal with Steam Power and manpower. If you can build that, you can build almost anything.

Building raceways to use mechanical water power is even easier, and can help bootstrap the other technologies. Before steam, most factories were water powered.
One such factory took in ore, and brass products like pots, pans, pins, wire, etc were produced.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[wiggles]

This is what killed Diesel as a car fuel in the US

That, and how dirty, sooty, and smelly the pre-EPA regulated diesel was. And the higher taxes levied by states in order to tax trucking more than cars due to their higher incidence of damage to the roads. And the tendency for non-treated diesel to gel in the winter time making it unreliable for cold environments until relatively recently.

The failure of diesel to catch on in the USA is hardly mysterious.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[Penguinisto]

This, right here.

Asphalt gets worn down by rain and sunlight (yes, UV radiation.) Plants and ice force cracks into it. temperatures make it shrink and grow, causing mini tidal actions of a sort that eventually breaks it down. Landslides, erosion, and slow-motion soil subsidence will cover or tear off bits of it in all but the most level of terrains. Trees and wind will cover it in dirt until plants take root in that dirt and do the rest. Out here in the Pacific Northwest, moss and lichens will, if not treated, cover the road in a carpet and allow seeds to take root in it.

You'd be amazed how fast a modern-built road goes to hell. I think only the Romans were able to build a road that lasted for any real length of time with little-to-no maintenance, but only because they really over-engineered the things (on the plus side, even today a couple of millennia later some stretches are still used and routinely ignored maintenance-wise).

Put it this way: The Chinese have a saying that a new road is good for ten years, but bad for the next ten thousand. ;)

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[slew]

Asphalt is aggregate (usually crushed rocks) stabilized with petroleum tar products. Concrete on the other hand uses similar aggregate, but is bonded with cement (often portland cement), which although doesn't contain petrol products, but takes a lot of energy to mine and kiln fire which gives it a large carbon footprint which is only partially offset by the fact that during the "setting" process, cement actually absorbs carbon dioxide from the air (converting calcium-hydroxide into hard interlocking calcium-carbonate crystals).

FWIW, they already have a way to make asphalt equivalent material by replacing tar with pine-rosin and pitch.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[bored_engineer]

Probably not*. The "old asphalt roads" are 90-96% aggregate (rocks). The asphalt is really just a flexible binder for the harder stuff. Also, the lighter volatiles have long since evaporated from the asphalt cement, so it won't readily light. Come to think about it, the asphalt cement is, cut with water, emulsifiers and other additives to improve application and durability.

*I did some calculation to determine the heat content of asphalt concrete roads as compared to wood, and I've decided that both may be useful, depending on context:

1. 1. Decent hardwood (think birch, not hickory) has a comparable Btu content as asphalt concrete:
2. 1. --Seasoned Birch: 6.95 kBtu/lb, 162.5 kBtu/ft^3 (these are based on cord density, not wood density);
   2. --Old Asphalt Road: 8.82 kBtu/lb, 64.9 kBtu/ft^3 (based on in-place density, 5% cement content & 30% additive content).
3. 2. I will guess that wood will release the heat more quickly, while the aggregate in asphalt concrete will store heat and release it slowly over time.
4. 3. Wood and "old roads" will require approximately the same handling. The wood needs to be cut, split and stored while the asphalt needs to be broken up, then the (potentially useful) aggregate will need to be (re)moved.
5. 4. The asphalt cement will need an existing hot fire to start. The ignition temperature of asphalt is ~900F, so the entire mass including the aggregate will will absorb a great deal of heat before it starts contributing anything.
6. 5. profit?

I set out to demonstrate that your comment wasn't very useful, but it looks like old asphalt roads may, in fact, be useful for keeping warm, with the caveat that some other material will be needed to start (and maintain) an asphalt concrete fire.

Re:We have already figured most of this out.

[DanielRavenNest]

Solar cement kilns have been demonstrated. The limestone and shale that are calcined to make Portland Cement don't care how they are heated, They just need to reach a high enough temperature for a while. We mostly use fossil fuels today for the process, but concentrated sunlight works fine.

Humans are Human

[Mr D from 63]

The idea that human society would operate in a fundamentally different manner after an apocalyptic event is probably not very realistic. We would have little reason to worry about anything but erecting energy production facilities as quickly and easily as possible. Fighting for survival trumps all.

The idea that an apocalyptic event would provide an opportunity for a big do-over is also probably not very realistic. The science fiction scenario is mass death, few people left, little knowledge retained, but is it much more likely large numbers of people would survive or nobody would survive.

Re:Humans are Human

[oodaloop]

There have been many many collapses of civilizations since man started making them. Egypt, Rome, Easter Island, Greenland, Incas, Anasazi, Khmer, etc. In fact, most large civilizations have collapsed, and for very similar reasons: over consumption of resources. We're doing the same thing, but on a global scale and consuming food, wood, land, oil, etc at ever increasing rates. A global collapse of civilization seems quite likely to me, and it won't be pretty.

Re:Humans are Human

[khallow]

In fact, most large civilizations have collapsed, and for very similar reasons: over consumption of resources.

Parasitism. There's a common thread in the end of most empires, large or small. The build up of incompetent bureaucracies and the elevation of power struggles and who gets what over survival of the empire.

Re:Humans are Human

[khallow]

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.

Economics would be the problem

[ProzakLord]

The main problem in a re-booting would be the way we consider value and employ resources, energy in itself can come from other sources but what made oil so prevalent was that it was cheap and that it could be burned 24/7 giving energy the low cost it has and enabling all the rest.

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.

Re:Economics would be the problem

[meta-monkey]

Complete loss of human knowledge is also a common trope in post-apocalyptic fiction, but I think that too would be unlikely. I doubt something is going to completely fry every single circuit and book. The entire content of wikipedia fits on a thumb drive. I've got one. And while no, wikipedia itself is not the same thing as having every technical journal, you can get a pretty good idea of the concepts that drive our technological society from it. Not having to re-derive Maxwell's equations is a huge leg up.

How far back, perhaps

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:How far back, perhaps

[njnnja]

After an apocalyptic event, the definition of "safe" would change. Unlimited energy for weapons production and agriculture versus the possibility of a meltdown? In a world where might makes right and food shortages are a major problem, nuclear power, no matter how unsafe, becomes incredibly safe relative to the alternative. If such an event ever happened, manhattan project level nuclear technology would be the the most valuable thing to salvage in terms of rebooting civilization.

Hydroelectric

[AndyCanfield]

Water provudes lots of clean (i.e. solar) electric power. Maybe not as much as New York City wants, but when half the people are dead, the rest can rebuild without coal or oil. Yeah, we can do it.

Yes

[Tx]

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.

Re:No

[itzly]

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.

Olde-timey carbon fuel

[nojayuk]

The classic multipurpose "biodeiesel" of old was charcoal, a renewable source of fuel for high-temperature furnaces suitable for making iron and high-quality steel. Its use today is pretty much limited to barbeques and re-enactment smithing but a post-apocalyptic world could easily return to it for such purposes.

Trees don't grow quickly and the production of charcoal was never enough to sustain the demands for process heat for a society even a tenth as large as it is today but assuming a massive post-apocalyptic die-back and natural reforestation it would probably work. It doesn't require any process plant or chemicals to produce after all.

Lower-temperature needs such as locomotive and boiler steam could be met with simple logging of reforested areas without the extra step of turning wood into charcoal.

Re:Olde-timey carbon fuel

[zennling]

Can you make charcoal out of any cellulose? Such as bamboo? Banana plants? Other quick growing plants?

Re:Olde-timey carbon fuel

[Bob the Super Hamste]

Yes. Things that are woody (like bamboo) work better than say things like grass clippings as you get more charcoal but any plant matter would work. Even things like oil can be made from them using various thermal depolymerization processes like the Fischer-Tropsch process. There are other processes as well that produce liquid fuels from similar feed stocks. Also from what I can tell a lot of waste from the initial process is carbon compounds like may be useful as a soil amendment

Re:Olde-timey carbon fuel

[DerekLyons]

The classic multipurpose "biodeiesel" of old was charcoal, a renewable source of fuel for high-temperature furnaces suitable for making iron and high-quality steel.

Yes... and no. During the charcoal era, iron and steel were produced in very small quantities because the amount of fuel and labor needed to produce the charcoal was immense. (And resulted in massive deforestation.) What make iron and steel cheap and powered the industrial revolution wasn't charcoal, it was coke - a fossil fuel.
 

It [charcoal] doesn't require any process plant or chemicals to produce after all.

Yes... and no. Low tech methods of producing charcoal typically involve losing as much as 80% of the process material to produce mostly low quality (I.E. insufficient for iron and steel making) charcoal.
 

Lower-temperature needs such as locomotive and boiler steam could be met with simple logging of reforested areas without the extra step of turning wood into charcoal.

In a low population, charcoal powered scenario, you're unlikely to have locomotives and boilers - it would take literally decades and square miles of forest to produce sufficient iron and steel.

What most people don't grasp when they postulate post-apocalyptic scenarios is the synergistic nature of the advances that powered the industrial revolution - and that ultimately fossil fuels lay at the root of them all. Coke for cheap steel and coal for cheap long distance transportation in particular.

Re:Olde-timey carbon fuel

[Anonymous Coward]

You heard wrong. There is almost no anthracite of any appreciable quantity left. The best coal was all mined out ages ago. What is left is for mining today of poor quality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peak_coal

High-BTU anthracite coal peaked in 1914;[5] and declined from 44 million tons in 1950 to 1.6 million tons in 2007. Bituminous coal extraction has also been declining since 1990. The gap has been taken up by large increases in subbituminous coal extraction.[14]

not a new topic

[Zobeid]

As an old-timer (or at least a mid-timer), I can remember this very issue being raised and discussed as far back as the late 1970s by people in the SF community, such as Jerry Pournelle, for one example. Of course, then we had the prospects of global thermonuclear war hanging over our heads as well, so the idea of the world having to rebuild everything didn't seem far-fetched at all.

The other issue was whether we could even keep modern technological-industrial civilization running. There was a very serious fear that "resource depletion" would cause everything to collapse without any need to invoke armageddon. Those fears have, thus far, proven mostly unfounded for reasons alluded in TFA: because we have developed high-tech machinery that can recover even low-grade deposits of ores and fossil fuels. That still doesn't mean the question won't crop up again at some time in the future, though, and we still have periodic scares over commodities such as: copper, gold, rare earths, and of course, "Peak Oil". The solution that Pournelle advocated back in the 1970s, exploiting the resources of outer space, is still out on the fringe somewhere.

Re:No

[Blaskowicz]

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.

Without them completely? No

[BitZtream]

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.

The problem is SUPPLY CHAIN!!!

[calexontheroad66]

The current state of complexity of our civilization is given by a web of supply chains that make it possible to produce very specialized and sophisticated products.
Liquid fuel production requires more than extracting oil from the ground, you have to distill the fractions, filter unwanted contaminants, crack heavy fractions to produce lighter compounds, and do pyrolysis to get gasoline from what is essentially tar.
This all requires a supply chain of materials to be able to construct the tools and equipments to produce what you'll pump into your car.

Then there are fertilizers, you needs sources of fossilized guano that are located around the world, and others like Ammonia based fertilizers that are mostly produced using fossil fuel sources.
Then you have catalyzer metals for reactors, the list is enormous...
And if you think that since the trade barriers have mostly gone, that has meant that most countries have shed duplicate capacity and have specialized and concentrated on only some parts of the supply chain.
That means if things go downhill you pretty much have no way to get some resources, tool or equipment spares and no knowledge how to remake those.

Re:No

[thaylin]

That was not the argument the OP made. He said it is impossible for renewables to power current tech.

However it is also not necessarily true that the current panels would not last long enough to give that sort of boost to get new ones made.

Re:No

[NotDrWho]

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).

Re:No

[itzly]

Early fossil fuels, when our society first starting using them, were basically free. Oil was seeping out at the surface layers, and good quality coal was easy to reach.

After a reboot, the remaining oil will be so well hidden, and so expensive to exploit, that it will probably never happen.

Re:No

[itzly]

Related. Here's a fun presentation from a guy trying to build a simple toaster from scratch.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

Odds are it would not be a global collapse

[MikeRT]

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.

Re:No

[wonkey_monkey]

You know that saying about how when an elderly, distinguished professor says something is impossible, he's probably wrong?

Imagine what that means for an AC on Slashdot when he does the same thing.

Re: Steampunk

[kent_eh]

But, without lubrication, how would you run your machinery?

Use the lard extracted from liposuction.

It's a vast untapped resource.

Re:No

[judoguy]

A social/environmental collapse would still leave a MASSIVE amount of usable stuff just laying around. A single skyscraper would be a fantastic resource mine. Even a fairly large war doesn't make the insulated copper wiring suddenly vanish from buildings. You'd have to dig it out, but that's a very low tech activity.

Classic postmodern stupid

[argStyopa]

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.

Re:Without them completely? No

[AttillaTheNun]

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.

Re:No

[Shakrai]

He said it is impossible for renewables to power current tech.

And it is. Do you think you can smelt aluminum with solar panels? That's an extreme example, but a legitimate one. Want something easier to relate to? I could cover my roof with solar panels and not have enough juice to run my air conditioning or clothes dryer. Of course, I could easily have a solar rig that uses the power grid to make up that deficit, and to absorb my surplus when I'm not running such appliances, but that's not exactly using renewables to power current tech.

Renewables can be used to supplement carbon based energy sources but they can not replace them. There is a technology that could, but the usage of it is politically controversial.

Well

[koan]

If you're going to start over then start with human behaviour, and can we recover without fossil fuels?
Yes, look at first comment and realize that fossil fuels were never the way to go, and human BEHAVIOUR is the problem.

Your best bet would be hydropower

[Applehu Akbar]

This would start with the same hydromechanical power that preceded the industrial revolution: small dams providing direct mechanical power for mills and machinery. At the same time, you can smelt metals with wood, After initial reboot, being able to machine metals and draw wire would lead to hydroelectricity.

Re: Steampunk

[Anonymous Coward]

castor bean oil is an excellent lubricant used in many industrial situations.

False Dichotomy

[catchblue22]

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.

Re:False Dichotomy

[DanielRavenNest]

A combination of solar furnaces (mirrors and a steering mechanism to track the Sun), and thermal depolymerization ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... ) can break down most anything organic into crude oil type feedstocks. That includes items like paper and animal byproducts. There is lots and lots of feedstock buried in landfills. So to reboot that part of civilization, you can use those ingredients.

Re:Steampunk

[Spazmania]

Most electric plants are just fancy steam engines. Even the nuke plants. Boil water and drive the generators with the steam pressure.

Coal is just a more efficient version of wood. Wood is renewable and we already know we can run an industrial society on coal.

Also, look up the Stanley Steamer some time. We don't even need oil to have motor cars, just high enough quality metallurgy to build pressure containers. And if we save the books, we save metallurgy.

Primary obstacles: Blame and fear

[Falconnan]

Given enough time, the fact that basic principles of electricity, magnetism, and combustion are well disseminated throughout society seems to guarantee an eventual rise form the ashes. However, it will not be rapid. Wind power will be the easiest to re-establish. Coal remains fairly abundant and easy to find (easy to mine is trickier). However, this is not the initial problem. Roving pirate gangs would be a major threat to any attempt to settle and grow. Immediate needs will almost certainly trump the desire to rebuild when a person's child will be dead from hunger next week. Thus the amount of mental and temporal capital invested in the idea of rebuilding will be limited. I submit getting back to the age of steam would be fairly quick in some areas, but anything like modern society will take a very long time. My friends and I have had this discussion many times over the last 15 years and determined the following: Petroleum was not a major economic consideration in the West until the mid- to late- 1800s. The biggest impediments to rapid rise back to such a level would be loss of knowledge and difficulty in locating easy-to-extract coal. After that, we will have a tougher time rebuilding unless we embrace other sources of energy. Remember that solar will not be a likely option as the energy to purify large quantities of silicon (currently a requirement) will not be initially available. Unless one embraces solar-fueled steam power.

The hard parts is the integrated circuits ...

[kbahey]

I would argue that fossil fuel is not the only determinant ...

The hard part is that we have become almost dependent on integrated circuits. This goes for any computer device, all control devices in manufacturing, and much more ...

If civilization collapses, how can we get back the IC fabs going with specialized material?

I wrote about it in a previous comment: 19th century technology vs. mid 20th century.

And expanded a bit on it in information readability and longevity in the digital age.

Re: Steampunk

[wierd_w]

low RPM wind turbines can make use of graphite dust. Graphite is a mineral, and is geologically stable over time.

Alternatively, "lead bearings" are also a potential solution to that problem. Not everything needs to be made from oil.

Re:No

[Shakrai]

This path has absolutely devastated our options, as far as a sustainable future goes. Eventually, the yeast drown in their own waste (CO2 and alcohol - so fitting). That's what will happen to us.

That's a very depressing and cynical outlook. A sustainable future simply requires a sustainable source of energy to power civilization. You mention such a source -- nuclear -- but you simultaneously believe that civilization as we currently know it is doomed?

I'd be curious to know how you arrived at the 1,000,000,000 figure as the ceiling of a sustainable population? I don't see a practical limit as long as energy is available. You see doom and gloom, I eventually see a future more like Star Trek, where nearly limitless (by modern standards) supplies of energy are available and we have an abundance economy. I guess we can check back in a few generations to see which one of us was right..... :)

At least we agree that humanity will still be around, in one shape or another. The doomsday people that think we're going to wipe ourselves out annoy me to no end.

Re:No

[Shakrai]

The solar constant is approximately 1.4 kilowatts per square meter. Aluminum smelting requires power input measured in the high megawatt/low gigawatt range. Have fun acquiring enough land to do it with solar power, whether thermal or photovoltaic. If you do manage to do that, have fun competing against the manufacturers that are using cheaper sources of energy that work 24/7/365.

Re:Wrong problem

[Jack Griffin]

Personally, I feel that many earlier non-mechanized societies were at least if not more civilized than we are now.

As long as you were the same race, gender, religion and sexuality as the people in charge of your local village, and there were no competing civilisations nearby that wanted your stuff, and you didn't get the flu or any minor illness which generally resulted in death...