Will the internet survive energy contraction?

[TFian]

Anything that gets you off of the infinitely-expensive argument is a win in my book.

I never made that argument though.

OK, given that there's a "tiny amount of power", and a "tiny amount of global trade"---there's someone deciding what to do with that power, and deciding what to carry in that trade.

Yes, which is going to likely be the aristocracy.

What are they going to do? If you're in control of the Earth's only 20-megawatt hydro plant, you're not going to want to heat houses, run refrigerators, charge up electric cars, roast Portland cement, or smelt aluminum---those are all comparatively low-profit-margin activities. But you do have enough energy to manufacture solar panels and microcomputers, which lots of people are desperate for.

While that makes sense, it falls flat on it's face for one simple, uncomfortable reason. It makes the erroneous assumption humans will rationally use whatever resources they are given. If that were the case, we wouldn't be in the mess we are now. Humans are inherently irrational, stupid beings that squander whatever gifts they are given. We are the mice who multiply and eat away at the Grain, and John Greer puts it. While it may be rational to devote what little transalantic trade velocity there is to distributing these computers, they wouldn't. The aristocracy would use it to trade mere luxuries with one another, while their subjects live agrarian lifestyles requiring large amounts of hard labor from 90% of the population. That's our future.

And no, we wouldn't have the power to produce solar panels, that takes a massive surplus of petroleum to make.

(Why are they desperate? Because the lack of a microcomputer means that one of your farmhands has to spend a day on horseback to get to the big-town library to look up crop-rotation data. Because the lack of rapid weather data meant you missed a chance to harvest your apples before the hailstorm. Because you'll miss the turnip-planting window unless you can get the farrier to send you special cotter-pin before the first frost hits. Because your brother moved out West, but ought to have day-to-day input on your dying mother's care.)

You're assuming they will even know what a computer is.

 

[TFian]

Because if he doesn't, they will suck at everything, even subsistence farming, and his lands will be taken over by some other aristocrat whose subjects are, by virtue of their access to information, more competent and less plague-ridden.

We did just fine with subsistence farming without the Internet, so I'm not sure how that argument follows.

I'll also point out that by invoking feudalism, you are implicitly assuming your conclusion (that is, highly limited communications, to which the feudal system was an adaptation) in your argument. That is fallacious.

How is it a fallacy?

You keep trying to change the subject to salad. I don't need salad, and if I did, I can grow my own salad (and have done so). Try again, with commodities whose value is not so dependent on the speed of transport.

Well I'm not actually talking about salad. I'm simply using the 2000 mile ceasar salad as a metaphor, constructed first by the Great James Howard Kunstler.

Around 1833, during that terrible "no salad" era, men would go to sea for voyages lasting years, often circumnavigating the world, to obtain oil for lamps. You think if energy gets expensive, no one will bother to manufacture and transport dynamos and LEDs instead?

How can we produce "dynamos and LEDs" without fossil fuels?

Communications has always been valuable, and it is only more so today now that accurate information about things like science and medicine, unlike in those feudal times, actually exists.

Respectfully,
Myriad

What makes you think we'll retain our scientific and medical knowledge after a societal collapse?

 

[ben m]

It makes the erroneous assumption humans will rationally use whatever resources they are given.

I'm only assuming greed. I assume that the power-plant owner will do the most profitable thing he can think of doing. That's what people have always done. The Dutch East India company wasn't making some global-rational-sustainable decision when they decided to run shiploads of nutmeg from Java to Amsterdam. They realized that people would pay them handsomely for nutmeg, and they could sell more nutmeg by running more ships.

Was that "squandered"? Sure it was. It's just freaking nutmeg, for crying out loud. You eat it and it tastes good for a moment. If they were trying to serve the greater good they would have been shipping scholars, books, and medicinal plants back and forth. Nope! Nutmeg, pepper, mace, etc.

Again: can you think of something that our 20MW power plant owner will be inspired to do with his valuable resource? Do you think he's going to try to meter it at $0.1/kWh and sell it to local fridge-owning villagers? Do you think he's going to build a baseball stadium and play night games under arc lights? Do you think he's going to heat a greenhouse and grow nutmeg? Answer, please. Again, he's not a master-planner permaculturist. He's a greedy dam owner who wants profits.

And no, we wouldn't have the power to produce solar panels, that takes a massive surplus of petroleum to make.

We're talking about the guy who owns the 20MW hydro plant, remember? Do you know what a megawatt is? It's a quantity of power, in this case electrical power, which can do literally anything that petroleum-power can do except maybe serve as chemical feedstock. To make a 1m^2 solar panel (thin film type, 2010 tech) you need about 1MJ of energy. This guy's hydro plant has the energy to produce 20 m^2 per second, and you can run a cell phone with about 0.01m^2.

NUMBERS MATTER. The fact that computers require very little power (and thus very small solar panels) makes them DIFFERENT than refrigerators, cars, and home furnaces which inherently require a lot of power.

You're assuming they will even know what a computer is.

Why shouldn't he? His great-grandfather had one, as did his grandfather and father and so on. "Geez, I can't imagine what subsistence farming was like 2000 years ago when they didn't have computers. It's a heck of a capital investment, but then so was my steel plow blade. My neighbor Bob is still using his father's computer and can't afford a new one; I let him borrow mine around tax season as long as he pays for the power."

Again: if you want to discuss "Would the Internet be rebuilt after an apocalyptic loss of human knowledge", or "will post-peak-oil society suffer an apocalyptic loss of human knowledge" please start a different thread.

 

[TFian]

Was that "squandered"? Sure it was. It's just freaking nutmeg, for crying out loud. You eat it and it tastes good for a moment. If they were trying to serve the greater good they would have been shipping scholars, books, and medicinal plants back and forth. Nope! Nutmeg, pepper, mace, etc.

That's what I just said now, isn't it? We'll squander what little resources we have left and not use it for productive purposes.

Again: can you think of something that our 20MW power plant owner will be inspired to do with his valuable resource? Do you think he's going to try to meter it at $0.1/kWh and sell it to local fridge-owning villagers?

What 20MW power plant?

We're talking about the guy who owns the 20MW hydro plant, remember?

What makes you think you can maintain a hydro plant without fossil fuels to construct and repair them?

Again: if you want to discuss "Would the Internet be rebuilt after an apocalyptic loss of human knowledge", or "will post-peak-oil society suffer an apocalyptic loss of human knowledge" please start a different thread.

I'm not stating it would be an apocalyptic loss, but a gradual loss of knowledge, like Rome suffered after it's collapse. The topics are closely twined to what this topic is about, so I don't see why I should make a new thread about it.

 

[ben m]

We did just fine with subsistence farming without the Internet, so I'm not sure how that argument follows.

No we didn't. Subsistence farming was a horrible, wasteful process. The lack of weather forecasts caused huge (and wildly unpredictable) crop losses. There was no research (and no way of disseminating research) about pest management, crop rotation, farming practices, etc., so people ran their farms on tradition, superstition, word-of-mouth, etc..

Go ask your local organic farmer whether their job is information-intensive or not.

Go ask your local university's Agricultural Extension whether they think farmers need to access data over the Internet.

 

[ben m]

What makes you think you can maintain a hydro plant without fossil fuels to construct and repair them?

What makes you think you can dig the Erie Canal without fossil fuels ... oh, wait.

I'm not stating it would be an apocalyptic loss, but a gradual loss of knowledge, like Rome suffered after it's collapse.

Cool story, bro.

 

[TFian]

Cool story, bro.

In other words, "I don't have a retort to that, so I'll resort to something childish"

We can learn a lot form the end of Rome, which suffered the same catabolic collapse (dwindling energy supplies) we are suffering. The similarities are striking.

 

[TFian]

No we didn't. Subsistence farming was a horrible, wasteful process.

And yet, we survived a lot longer on it than we did industrial farming.

Oops.

 

[TFian]

The Roman Empire collapsed due to resource depletion. http://www.energybulletin.net/node/50025

Given so, it is relevant to point out how such a massive collapse can result in losing centuries of gained scientific knowledge. We shouldn't take our present knowledge base for granted, it might be gone very soon...

 

[TFian]

What makes you think you can dig the Erie Canal without fossil fuels ... oh, wait.

Completely irrelevant.

 

[soylent]

And yet, we survived a lot longer on it than we did industrial farming.

Oops.

Lives were nasty, brutish and short; even if you crop of infant mortality by looking at life expectancy starting at 5.

 

[TFian]

Lives were nasty, brutish and short; even if you crop of infant mortality by looking at life expectancy starting at 5.

No one said it was a comfortable life

 

[Garrison0fMars]

No one said it was a comfortable life

And we'd want to go back to that lifestyle....why?

 

[ben m]

And yet, we survived a lot longer on it than we did industrial farming.

You are making the fallacy of the excluded middle. You are pretending that the options are (a) keeping up exactly the modern fossil-dependent world, or (b) keeping up exactly the ancient zero-fossil agrarian world. The future can't be (a) so (you claim) it obviously must be (b).

This is nonsense. The future can't be (a) so it must be ... well, maybe (b), or maybe (c), or (d), or (e), or the rest of a list of options that you utterly refuse to consider. You seem to read any non-(b) future---like one in which we still have and maintain hydro and solar power plants---as indistinguishable from (a) and repeating all of its mistakes.

 

[Roboramma]

What makes you think you can maintain a hydro plant without fossil fuels to construct and repair them?

The fact that, as ben pointed out, energy is energy. It doesn't matter where that energy comes from, it's still energy. What's to stop us using the power produced by the hydro plant to do the repairs?

 

[ben m]

Completely irrelevant.

Explain. You seem to be arguing that it's impossible to build and maintain medium-sized infrastructures (like dams and turbines) without fossil fuels. The Erie Canal is an explicit counterexample---a large elaborate infrastructure project built without fossil fuels.

 

[Myriad]

We did just fine with subsistence farming without the Internet, so I'm not sure how that argument follows.

The argument is that those who use it can do better than those who don't. In a world of peace and harmony, everyone will want to use it, so they will make the effort to keep it available. In a world of vicious competition, ignorance is lethal, so those who won't make that effort will be violently replaced by others who will.

How well anyone did when no one could use it because it didn't exist is irrelevant.

How is it a fallacy?

It is circular reasoning. I explained why. You are attempting to argue that communications will decline because society will become feudal. But feudalism is an adaptation to lack of communications. If communications do not decline there is no reason for anyone at any level of any social hierarchy to prefer feudalism. So feudalism could conceivably be the result of such a decline in communications, but there is no basis for claiming that it would cause it.

Well I'm not actually talking about salad. I'm simply using the 2000 mile ceasar salad as a metaphor, constructed first by the Great James Howard Kunstler.

Well, salad is a really good metaphor if what you're talking about is the importance of high travel speed, refrigeration, and other energy-demanding requirements in the transportation of rapidly perishable goods. Is that what you're talking about? How much of today's global shipping is rapidly perishable and/or requires refrigerated transport? Are computers, modems, dynamos, or LEDs in that category?

How can we produce "dynamos and LEDs" without fossil fuels?

Same ways we produce them today, just with different energy sources and correspondingly greater cost (some small multiplier of the present cost). Given that LEDs and dynamos would supply a need that once required men to go on multi-year sea voyages at enormous risk and expense to supply, the cost of manufacturing dynamos and LEDs using renewable energy sources is likely to remain comparatively negligible.

What makes you think we'll retain our scientific and medical knowledge after a societal collapse?

Moveable type and flash RAM.

Too bad the Romans didn't have those.

Or maybe not -- most of their medical and scientific knowledge was wrong anyhow.

The real problem with the fall of the Roman Empire (actually, this had more to do with its rise; the Romans developed very little science or medicine) is that scientific and medical progress stopped. So they never got to antibiotics, or practical steam power, or electricity, or optics, or radio, or anesthetics, or computers, or nuclear reactors, or genes.

Stop our scientific and medical progress today and -- well, let's see, we remain stuck with cancer and the common cold, and we might never find the Higgs Boson or figure out what dark matter is, or land people on Mars, or repair genetic diseases, or be able to fit every science book and journal article ever published into a device the size of a thumbnail instead of, as now, the size of a whole thumb, or decisively determine whether any of the planets around distant stars are earth-like. That would be a big disappointment to many of us. But it wouldn't exactly leave us depending on interpreting bird omens (one of the "sciences" that the Romans were apparently quite proficient in, whose secrets were unfortunately lost when the empire fell) either.

Respectfully,
Myriad

 

[TFian]

You are making the fallacy of the excluded middle. You are pretending that the options are (a) keeping up exactly the modern fossil-dependent world, or (b) keeping up exactly the ancient zero-fossil agrarian world. The future can't be (a) so (you claim) it obviously must be (b).

This is nonsense. The future can't be (a) so it must be ... well, maybe (b), or maybe (c), or (d), or (e), or the rest of a list of options that you utterly refuse to consider. You seem to read any non-(b) future---like one in which we still have and maintain hydro and solar power plants---as indistinguishable from (a) and repeating all of its mistakes.

I'm not excluding the middle, in fact, I'm endorsing a middle option. The two main options generally presented in regards to a post peak oil future are A.) WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!, and afterwards a return to anarcho primitivism, ala the myth of the "end of days" and the apocalypse or B.) WE'LL FIND A INFINITELY CHEAP NEW CLEAN POWER SOURCE AND COLONIZE THE GALAXY ala Star Trek, and create some utopian space faring society ala the myth of infinite progress.

Me and the Grand Archdruid are proposing a moderate framework. Neither utopian, or dystopian. Instead of a return to a "stone age" society, or a "Star Trek" Society, we'll go back to an agrarian society, and have to give up the idea of "affluence" and living "well".

John Michael offered a spell — with the essential caveat that you have to know a good deal about handling such things deftly — to keep always at the back of your mind, when estimating what’s the most savvy way to get ready for what’s happening and what’s coming. It was:

“There is NO better future ahead.”

With the critically-essential caveat in mind too, that strikes me as a profoundly right estimate of where we’re going. And with that in mind, The Grand Archdruid's Green Wizard initiative seems to me to be right on the bullseye.

 

[ben m]

I'm not excluding the middle, in fact, I'm endorsing a middle option. The two main options generally presented in regards to a post peak oil future are A.) WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!, and afterwards a return to anarcho primitivism, ala the myth of the "end of days" and the apocalypse or B.) WE'LL FIND A INFINITELY CHEAP NEW CLEAN POWER SOURCE AND COLONIZE THE GALAXY ala Star Trek, and create some utopian space faring society ala the myth of infinite progress.

Baloney. I've been saying that we will have ENOUGH renewable power to keep making, and trading, and using very valuable technologies; specifically, the subset of technologies whose (a) embodied energy is low and (b) whose value to the users is high. You'll note that I think computers and telecom are IN this category, along with solar panels, nuclear power plants, and hydroelectric turbines. Perhaps you missed where I repeatedly, explicitly said that cars, air conditioners, refrigerators, and routine air travel are probably NOT in this category.

Does "no cars, air conditioning, or air traffic" sound like Star Trek utopianism? Or did I not say these things at all? You tell me.

 

[Myriad]

I'm not excluding the middle, in fact, I'm endorsing a middle option. The two main options generally presented in regards to a post peak oil future are A.) WE'RE ALL GOING TO DIE!!!!!!!!!, and afterwards a return to anarcho primitivism, ala the myth of the "end of days" and the apocalypse or B.) WE'LL FIND A INFINITELY CHEAP NEW CLEAN POWER SOURCE AND COLONIZE THE GALAXY ala Star Trek, and create some utopian space faring society ala the myth of infinite progress.

Me and the Grand Archdruid are proposing a moderate framework. Neither utopian, or dystopian. Instead of a return to a "stone age" society, or a "Star Trek" Society, we'll go back to an agrarian society, and have to give up the idea of "affluence" and living "well".

History isn't a menu.

Respectfully,
Myriad