Growing pressure toward collapse of civilisation
Below is an excerpt from The Hydrogen Economy by Jeremy Rifkin. It eloquently describes the way I see our point in history. We face the kind of threat the Romans did right before they collapsed. I say this because we, like they, are moving into the ending of the energy regime which made our society work. Theirs was fueled in large part on new conquests & their economy bouyed by influxes of plunder. In our case we have plundered the wealth left by previous geological eras in the form of oil and coal and while we are not running out just yet we must wean ourselves off all carbon based energy sources to avoid possibly catastrophic climate damage. We cannot blame our forebears for this use as they had no idea how it could affect the climate. As our ignorance shrinks though we are left without such an excuse.
It is becoming increasingly clear that we face a series of crises in the next few decades far greater than any we have faced before. In this blog I plan to concentrate on what humanity can do to meet these challenges and help those interested in the problem to find information on it. Please jump in and ask for clarification at any point where you believe I have not made the case fully enough or if you have something constructive to add (or ask).
“It has become increasingly apparent in recent years that the fossil-fuel age has a Janus face. The extraordinary benefits of utilizing coal, oil, and natural gas are too many to recite. Suffice it to say that eight to ten generations of human beings—those living between the time of the first widespread application of coal and steam technology and today—in Europe, North America, Japan, and elsewhere reaped unprecedented gains from the exploitation of these unique, non-renewable resources. We exhumed the organic remains of an earlier geological era and basked in a material cornucopia made possible by the energy we took up. Now, a number of forces are converging to create a watershed event of great historic proportions, We have reached the critical moment that many great civilizations in the past have confronted, some successfully, others not. That is the point at which the energy used to maintain the workings of the civilization becomes more scarce and expensive, and the accumulated waste and externalities built up from past activity become more costly to absorb. When that juncture is crossed, countries experience a lessening of the energy flow-through, a slowing of the performance of the many subsystems that make up the society, and a weakening of the institutional, economic, and social fabric, making the overall operational structure more vulnerable to external threats and internal collapse.
The choices that a civilization makes at the “turning point” in its existing energy regime determines whether or not it will be successful in reorganizing its systems and enjoy renewal, or face a steady deterioration and devolution of its infrastructure and eventual death and decomposition of the society. The oil-based civilization, the most successful energy regime in all of human history, is just a few short years away from the turning point. The paths of three defining forces are quickly converging, forcing society to make decisions about what steps to take to ensure the future. The interplay between the imminent peak of global oil production, the increasing concentration of the remaining oil reserves in the Middle East (the most politically and socially unstable region of the world), and the steady heating up of the world’s atmosphere from the spent energy—or entropy—accumulated over the course of the Industrial Age make for a volatile and dangerous world game, one whose outcome at this stage remains very much in doubt.
Fossil-fuel civilization is under siege. How well we respond to the triple threat at our front gates depends, in part, on how vulnerable our existing infrastructure is to attack, disruption, and disrepair. On this score, the prospects are poor. The complex, centralized infrastructure we have created to manage a high-energy, fossil-fuel economy—once our greatest asset—is fast becoming our biggest liability. We are increasingly vulnerable to threats and disruptions from without and within, making this moment in post-industrial history the most precarious in memory.”
Jeremy Rifkin – The Hydrogen Economy
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