Rex Weyler on Peak Oil

A response to those who think COLLAPSE will result in all of us living nicely while others die off quietly.

Most serious analysts, who understand peak oil and human habitat overshoot, project a decline in human population in the post-peak-oil world. The following notes are a response to particular proposal that 40-million humans could live sustainably on Earth with a modern affluent lifestyle, including public transportation and modern technology.

Human population, which swelled during the oil era, is indeed a major factor in planetary overshoot, but the idea of 40 million people living a sustainable modern consumer lifestyle with comfortable trains appears delusional for several critical reasons:

1. Collapse scenarios: There will indeed be a die-off during humanity’sresource downslope, but a die-off from 7-billion to 40 million (99.4% die-off) would not be a well-organized descent to utopia, it would be chaos, and the most desperate would lay waste to social infrastructure before they’d let your children and their friends convert cars to electric trains or any such thing. It might work on paper to have 40-million people living your present lifestyle, if you could blow the excess people out like candles, but in the real world, a social collapse of that magnitude would be sloppy, violent, and dis-integrating. It is more likely that the indigenous people in the Amazon and New Guinea would be the survivors, not the sustainability consultants and permaculturists in BC or Washington State. Your scenario is not realistic.

2. Who are the labour force?: And once humanity reached 40-million, all living at your pleasant level of goods and services, with trains running on time, who is keeping the hydroelectric projects running, and cleaning out the silted reservoirs? Who’s mining the copper and lithium and mineral ores. Recycling? Who is doing that? Where is the energy coming from and the energy infrastructure to recycle copper and rare earth metals out of old computers and cell phones? How are these materials getting shipped around to manufacturing centres? Who is doing the manufacturing? Who is growing the food for the miners and recyclers and manufacturers?

It could not and would not happen like that. If 40 million humans were left, one-half of 1-percent of present population, they would likely be living off the perennial output of whatever is left of nature’s bounty (not tearing up land each year to plant annual grains, for example).

You appear to me to be forgetting that all of the world’s affluent society living today as you describe (5-7 % of society) lives on the collective energy and materials flow provided by plundering nature and exploiting the masses to do all the dirty work.

The last time there were 40 million people on Earth, about 4,000 years ago, civilizations had irrigation and chariots, but achieved this with animal power and slaves, and by destroying forests to smelt copper. Many cities collapsed between 5,000 BC and 1000 AD.

The inequity and unsustainable lifestyles of the oligarchs brought these empires down. We possess no technological miracles that can change this reality. All of our techie toys exist on top of a giant pyramid of resource extraction, nature-destruction, and human exploitation.

I have proposed (to you and in other places) that a more reasonable way to stabilize and then reduce human population is with:

1. universal women’s rights

2. universal contraception available

3. universal basic education.

Wherever these are achieved, the reproduction rate plummets.

Furthermore, the secret to surviving overshoot is to simplify, not just kill off the masses and try to preserve a complex society based on plunder and oppression of those very masses.

All solutions to overshoot involve simplifying. Less population is one way of simplifying, which nature usually imposes on animals that overshoot the capacity of their habitat. Nature is already imposing this on humanity, even though we still have an annual net increase in #s. The starvation and die-off is already well underway.

I urge you to forget the Shangri-la dreams. The human collapse will not work anything like that. On paper, if you could hand-select the survivors, and just erase everyone else off the Earth, then you might be able to have a fairly decent lifestyle, but even then, not based on high-technology tools. And in any case, it doesn’t work like that, so the dream is impossible.

Better if we provide humanity with real tools for peaceful decline and survival on the downslope, and these tools would support modest survival modes: growing food, restoring natural ecosystems, harvesting from perinnials, community health care, return to family and community governance, reducing throughput, women’s rights, social equity, and so forth. What survives in nature is not a species but a species-in-a-habitat. A relationship. It’s the relationship that has to change.