Will the internet survive energy contraction?

[ben m]

The problem with all that is, the Internet is a key component of a societal framework that is unsustainable, IE industrial civilization.

Um. Industrial civilization was unsustainable in terms of nonrenewable resource consumption in 1900, and 1910, and 1920, and 1930, and 1940, and 1950, and 1960, and 1970, and 1980. Then industry/govt/scientists got on the Internet. Industrial civilization remained unsustainable in 1990. Then everybody got on the internet. Industrial civilization remained unsustainable in 2000 and 2010.

The Internet is a key component of communications. Communications are used in industrial civilization, of course, but also in everything else---family, education, government, etc. Did pre-industrial people not try to communicate? No, they communicated as much as they could afford to. They spent small fortunes on it, they complained incessantly about how slow it was, and they leapt hungrily on any technology that made it cheaper and quicker.

It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to figure out that any way of living that’s based on the use of non-renewable resources won’t last.

Energy is not a non-renewable resource. Fossil fuels are. Computers don't care whether their energy is fossil or non-fossil.

Using a computer is not inextricably entwined with non-renewable aspects of civilization. You are inventing this intertwinement out of thin air. Yes, computers are consumer products---so what? Does "consumer product" mean "unsustainable" in your mind? Horseshoes, bags of wheat, plots of land, flints, paper, pens, firewood, and anything else that non-hunter-gatherer humans use can be consumer products. Anything that can be used can be bought and sold.

I can perfectly well imagine an indefinitely sustainable civilization consisting of industrial-scale farmers and crowded-city-dwellers, whose drastically-reduced net energy needs are supplied (somewhat expensively to be sure) by solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear. I'm sorry you can't. Maybe if you could imagine it you could help work effectively towards it.

 

[AvalonXQ]

An interesting calculation would be the minimum energy generation still possible assuming only the resources of a basic agrarian society. Assuming the internet can operate at that level, we're essentially done with "end of the internet" arguments for any scenario we care about.

 

[ben m]

An interesting calculation would be the minimum energy generation still possible assuming only the resources of a basic agrarian society. Assuming the internet can operate at that level, we're essentially done with "end of the internet" arguments for any scenario we care about.

That won't convince TFian. No matter what number you come up with, TFian can say people won't want it that way. Sure, energetically speaking someone could build a vertically-integrated computer factory in Iceland, a wind-powered fiber-optic plant in Denmark, and a solar-powered solar-panel-factory in Spain, but never mind that they could because they wouldn't. Because if they did that suddenly they'd want cars and suburbs and Happy Meals and out-of-season Chilean fresh fruit and obviously that's out of the question, so they must only want non-20th-century things.

How do we know what future people want? I presume TFian reasons as follows: We observe that medieval subsistence-farmers didn't have spend any effort exchanging data over large distances. Clearly this is a common property of subsistence farmers. Subsistence farming inherently means that your information-horizon is one-horse-day in radius and that's all you ever want. Since the future is obviously all subsistence farmers, there's no one left who needs communications.

 

[NewtonTrino]

Frankly the computers we have now are insanely overpowered for what we actually need them for. My phone could easily run off of a solar panel and it does a lot more than most computers did 20 years ago. If we tried to optimize energy consumption instead of processing power we could make things work with drastically lower power consumption. Current feature size on chips mean we could make incredibly small low power chips for almost nothing and distribute them widely.

 

[TFian]

How does that follow ?

Volcanoes predate business cards. You see where I'm going with this ?

Volcanoes are not man made though.

 

[TFian]

Wait...what? You're not only conflating the "Internet" with the "World Wide Web" again...you're contradicting yourself.

You talk of viability packet radio powered Internet, which I've detailed in previous posts, while saying the "Internet" is going to disappear.

Uhm?

Alright, I'll observe the difference in the future.

A packet radio Internet will be possible, for a while. Once we no longer have computers, we'll have to go towards pure voice based packet radio. Unless you can show me a computer that can be locally produced without fossil fuels.

 

[TFian]

If you're assuming there's enough wood to run a blacksmith's shop at all, then there is also enough wood to run a generator. Anything that runs on coal can also run on wood.

So I'm sitting in the agrarian future, standing next to the cord of wood that I've chopped and split laboriously under muscle power.

A) An itinerant blacksmith comes up to me and says, "Good sir, if you give me that entire cord of wood, I'll make you a horseshoe, with which you can make the two-day ride to London a few dozen times to resolve your glebe-land lawsuit."

B) A Swiss trader comes up to me and says, "Good sir, I have brought a shipload of laptops and cable modems from Iceland. Your townsfolk have pooled together a pound of silver to install a modem and five terminals at the library. If you'll donate one stick of firewood per year for the generator, and two silver pfennig for a share of the capital, you can email or Skype with London as often as you need to."

You and the Archdruid can spend your lifetime on those horses; I've got better things to do (farming) and will cough up the pfennig for computer time.

Your analogy is based on a false premise, that of the faraway Swiss trader coming to North America to sell you computers. Cable modems? What good would they be without the cable infrastructure?

Here, consider a cup of coffee. The energy needed to run the coffee maker is only a tiny portion of the total petroleum-based energy and materials that go into the process. Unless the coffee is organically grown, chemical fertilizers and pesticides derived from oil are used to produce the beans; diesel-driven farm machinery harvests them; trucks, ships, and trains powered by one petroleum product or another move them around the world from producer to middleman to consumer, stopping at various fossil-fuel-heated or cooled storage facilities and fossil-fuel-powered factories en route; consumers in the industrial world drive to brightly lit and comfortably climate-controlled supermarkets on asphalt roads to bring back plastic-lined containers of ground coffee to their homes. To drink coffee by the cup, we use oil by the barrel. This is exactly the sort of extravagance that will not be viable much longer as the age of cheap, abundant energy draws to a close. One implication is that, as fossil fuels stop being cheap and abundant, standards of living throughout the industrial world will sink toward the level of the nonindustrial world. There’s no way to sugarcoat that very unpalatable reality. In the last century, oil and other fossil fuels made it possible for a majority of people in the world’s industrial nations — and a small minority elsewhere — to embrace lifestyles that don’t require constant hard physical labor. Fossil fuels allowed people to wallow in a torrent of consumer goods — cars, exotic foods, expensive health care systems, and much more. As we head into the territory on the far side of Hubbert’s peak, all of that will go away.

In 1992, the MIT team that did the original Limits to Growth study ran their numbers again with updated figures; the resulting study pointed out that the industrial world had frittered away most of its options in two decades of unconscionable delay. The team found that in the previous two decades industrial society had gone into overshoot — the term environmental scientists use for a population of living things that is consuming vital resources so extravagantly that the ability of their environment to keep supporting them is at risk. Their new book Beyond the Limits urged an emergency program to stave off disaster. They pointed out, however, that the level of cuts in energy and resource use necessary to stave off disaster would require the American people to accept a reduction in their average standard of living that would bring it in line with that of Brazil.

 

[excaza]

You're still falsely assuming that once fossil fuels run out, we're not going have any source of energy.

At this point, you're just being intentionally dense.

 

[TFian]

Do you consider wood a renewable resource?
If not, then I guess fire is out.
If so, then what's wrong with running our computers on wood-fired generators?

Wood is renewable, albeit finite.

If we utilized wood to power our computers, then we'd run out of the world's supply of wood pretty quickly. Ala Easter Island collapse 2.0

 

[TFian]

An interesting calculation would be the minimum energy generation still possible assuming only the resources of a basic agrarian society. Assuming the internet can operate at that level, we're essentially done with "end of the internet" arguments for any scenario we care about.

I think an even more interesting calculation would be if a basic agrarian society could muster the possible energy generation to develop and produce things like microchips, motherboards, LCD monitors, CD drives, etc., etc.

 

[TFian]

Um. Industrial civilization was unsustainable in terms of nonrenewable resource consumption in 1900, and 1910, and 1920, and 1930, and 1940, and 1950, and 1960, and 1970, and 1980. Then industry/govt/scientists got on the Internet. Industrial civilization remained unsustainable in 1990. Then everybody got on the internet. Industrial civilization remained unsustainable in 2000 and 2010.

What is your point? Yes Industrial civilization has always been unsustainable, but of course it takes time for it to go through all the motions and kill itself off.

Did pre-industrial people not try to communicate?

Of course they did. My contention isn't that "communication" will go away, it's that we'll return to those pre industrial methods of communication.

No, they communicated as much as they could afford to. They spent small fortunes on it, they complained incessantly about how slow it was, and they leapt hungrily on any technology that made it cheaper and quicker.

And those leaps are only allowed when you have the energy available to make such progress. Try not to fall into the cultural myth of "progress" though. We will not forever progress from step to step, that's simply a mythology.

Computers don't care whether their energy is fossil or non-fossil.

Of course, no renewable resource could provide an easy way to power those computers.

Using a computer is not inextricably entwined with non-renewable aspects of civilization. You are inventing this intertwinement out of thin air.

No I'm not. Computing power is most definitely a result of the age of fossil fuels, and an age of abundance.

I can perfectly well imagine an indefinitely sustainable civilization consisting of industrial-scale farmers and crowded-city-dwellers, whose drastically-reduced net energy needs are supplied (somewhat expensively to be sure) by solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear.

And how would this work?

I'm sorry you can't. Maybe if you could imagine it you could help work effectively towards it.

By all means if it were plausible, I'd love to work towards something like that (though I'm not sure how). But it doesn't look like the industrial age will survive peak oil.

 

[Dancing David]

So TFian, when are you going back to the land and living by your words?

 

[TFian]

So TFian, when are you going back to the land and living by your words?

Depends on what you mean by "going back to the land". Not sure how I'd be living "by my words" by "going back to the land".

 

[Myriad]

Alright, I'll observe the difference in the future.

A packet radio Internet will be possible, for a while. Once we no longer have computers, we'll have to go towards pure voice based packet radio. Unless you can show me a computer that can be locally produced without fossil fuels.

There is no reason to require a locally produced source. Ever heard of ships?

Oh, wait, I'm falling prey to that erroneous "logic of abundance" thinking again. How could ships possibly move around and carry cargo from place to place without fossil fuels? That's why tea and coffee were totally unknown in North America and Europe, until steamships were available!

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[ben m]

Here, consider a cup of coffee. The energy needed to run the coffee maker is only a tiny portion of the total petroleum-based energy and materials that go into the process. Unless the coffee is organically grown, chemical fertilizers and pesticides derived from oil are used to produce the beans; diesel-driven farm machinery harvests them; trucks, ships, and trains powered by one petroleum product or another move them around the world from producer to middleman to consumer, stoppin ...

In a fossil-fuel-less world, look: yeah, fertilizer is more expensive; ships, trains and (yes) planes will run on (expensive) biodiesel and/or wind power. So it will stil be POSSIBLE to ship coffee from Kenya to London, just more expensive. More expensive means lower demand. If organic biodiesel-shipped and solar-percolated coffee were to cost $10/cup, I wouldn't buy it. But some people would.. Remember the 18th century, when all farming was organic and all transportation was wind- and horse-powered? Was Europe utterly without coffee? Not at all, the upper classes were addicted to the stuff. There's a Bach cantata making fun of the coffee culture of Leipzig (I think) circa 1730.

We've been through fossil-fuel-less cultures before, TFian. They did not stop trading, manufacturing, communicating, and traveling. They did so, with whatever resources were at their disposal, only at greater expense than we encounter now.

In the future we will have 17th-century-like fossil fuel access and also 21st-century-like electronics knowhow and a 20th-century head start on bootstrappable renewable-electricity infrastructure.

 

[TFian]

There is no reason to require a locally produced source. Ever heard of ships?

Oh, wait, I'm falling prey to that erroneous "logic of abundance" thinking again. How could ships possibly move around and carry cargo from place to place without fossil fuels? That's why tea and coffee were totally unknown in North America and Europe, until steamships were available!

Respectfully,
Myriad

Yes, yes you are. It's true ships moved around and carried cargo in the middle ages, with goods and foods shipped from far ends to one another, for the aristocracy. The vast majority of people though, produced and consumed everything locally, and lived only a tiny fraction of the living standard of the aristocracy, which is likely to return once we re enter the age of feudalism.

Was there 4000 mile Caesar salads in 1400? Sure, but only available to the aristocracy.

 

[TFian]

Was Europe utterly without coffee? Not at all, the upper classes were addicted to the stuff. There's a Bach cantata making fun of the coffee culture of Leipzig (I think) circa 1730.

Exactly my point. It was available, only to the aristocracy.

We've been through fossil-fuel-less cultures before, TFian. They did not stop trading, manufacturing, communicating, and traveling. They did so, with whatever resources were at their disposal, only at greater expense than we encounter now.

I'm aware of this.

In the future we will have 17th-century-like fossil fuel access and also 21st-century-like electronics knowhow and a 20th-century head start on bootstrappable renewable-electricity infrastructure.

I disagree. First off, what makes you think we'd retain this knowledge? After Rome suffered it's collapse, much of the scientific and technical knowledge was lost, not to be returned for at least another 1000 years.

Head start? That assumes we're doing anything now about it, which we aren't. Remember, a sinking system grows more conservative, and continues to do the same things killing it, at an alarmingly more frequent rate. Mind you, if we started doing substantial work about 20 years ago, industrial civilization might have been able to survive, but it's too late now.

 

[ben m]

And those leaps are only allowed when you have the energy available to make such progress. Try not to fall into the cultural myth of "progress" though. We will not forever progress from step to step, that's simply a mythology.

We will have energy. Solar, wind, hydro, and nuclear. And biomass. This is not as much energy as we have now from fossil fuels, so it will not be as cheap.

Of course, no renewable resource could provide an easy way to power those computers.

If only there were an Internet discussion board where you could show the numbers comparing the energy needs of the Internet with the amount of available renewable energy!!

And how would this work?

Just like it works today, except with electricity costing (my guess) $1-2/kWh instead of $0.1, and thus people reducing their consumption---that's how supply and demand works---and this reduced consumption matches the renewable energy supply.

 

[ben m]

Exactly my point. It was available, only to the aristocracy.

OK, you're catching on. Energy scarcity doesn't make energy-using things VANISH. It makes them MORE EXPENSIVE.

Not "infinity expensive". Just more expensive. Expensive enough that consumption is lower.

Will the Internet be more expensive in the future? PROBABLY---it depends whether more-efficient-hardware gets ahead of, or falls behind, increasing energy/manufacturing/shipping costs. Yes, these costs include the costs of new fab plants, servers, routers, cables, and home computers, and they probably ALL go up. Yes, these costs also include the costs of building new wind turbines, new reactors, new dams. Up to infinity? No, not at all. Just up to "more expensive than today".

How far up? You don't care, do you. You just think they'll go up high enough that everyone gives up and moves to farms.

I disagree. First off, what makes you think we'd retain this knowledge? After Rome suffered it's collapse, much of the scientific and technical knowledge was lost, not to be returned for at least another 1000 years.

Rome's collapse (a) had nothing to do with energy scarcity, (b) was localized to the Roman Empire, and (c) belongs in a totally different thread: "Would the Internet survive a global invasion of Visigoths?"

 

[TFian]

OK, you're catching on. Energy scarcity doesn't make energy-using things VANISH. It makes them MORE EXPENSIVE.

Yes, I know.

Not "infinity expensive". Just more expensive. Expensive enough that consumption is lower.

Expensive enough that the Internet will only be available to government agencies and large corporations yes. I've said this many times, as has the Grand Archdruid.

Just up to "more expensive than today".

Of course, just out of reach for the common man.

How far up? You don't care, do you. You just think they'll go up high enough that everyone gives up and moves to farms.

That's the idea. If we go back to a time when abundance is only affordable by the aristocracy, then we'll see a return to a massive peasant farming class. You seem to actually agree with this, so what's the point of contention?

Rome's collapse (a) had nothing to do with energy scarcity,"

Actually it did. It fell because it's energy base was experiencing diminishing EROEI, and it fell victim to catabolic collapse. See thread http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?t=189281