And the king sat upon a throne of purest virgin plastic,...

[winterkoninkje]

...more valuable than the whole of his kingdom.

"Why not seize the pleasure at once? How often is happiness destroyed by preparation, foolish preparation?"

~Jane Austen

There's been a lot of talk about Peak Oil lately. Both on livejournal and elsewhere. For the record, with a strong interest towards sustainability, I do believe that peak oil is coming. I remember in seventh grade my biochemistry teacher told us all, children unknowing of politics, that within our lifetime — not soon, but within our lifetimes — that we would have to choose whether the remaining reserves of petrochemicals should be spent for power or for plastic.

It has even been suggested, for those who don't believe in peak, that it is largely irrelevant whether or not the notion matches objective physical reality because so long as people believe it to be the case they will act in accordance with that belief. But this is not what I'm here to talk with you about today.

Today I'm here to talk about a different facet of peak oil than the political force behind the meme. A couple days ago I came across the Life After the Oil Crash page. For those who think that peak oil is only referring to one's ability to drive their car around, I highly encourage you to read that page to get a better idea of the true implications of decreasing supply of oil.

As LAtOC points out, the whole of our socioeconomic system, every level of the chain from seed in the ground to your plate, is dominated by a requirement for oil. Even alternate energy sources like solarcells and windfarming require an initial payment in oil to construct the necessary facilities. However, I don't think their assessment's entirely accurate, or well, it's accurate but it's not quite precise. Many sectors of our econosystem do indeed require petrochemicals and, as yet, would fail without easy access to them: fertilizer for agriculture, plastics for microwafers and screens for computers, etc. But many of the other levels — such as powering combines and tractors, transporting food to market, u.s.w —, while they use oil, do not require oil per se.

What they require, is power. Energy. It does not matter what form that energy comes in, though the system is set up in such a way as to require a cheap ubiquitous supply of energy. So part of the problem is that the system as constructed is frivolous with its energy use. That is not to say that this issue should be downplayed — restructuring the system would take an enormous involvement and would require us to alter many of the basic assumptions about our lives — but that frivolity hides a greater systemic failure.

If we have learned nothing from computer science (and it is certain that we've learned nothing ;) the one thing which should never be allowed in a load-bearing system is to permit a single point of failure. The robustness of a system is not determined by it's strongest element, nor even by the average strength of each element, but rather the strength of a system is defined entirely by the weakness of its frailest element. If there is a single element which all other elements depend upon and that single element goes down, the entire system has collapsed and the cost of the loss, let alone the cost of recovery may be astronomical.

The problem with out econosystem is not that it requires oil at every level but rather that we've allowed the costs at every level to be traced back to a single resource. Single resource fails, the entire world economic system collapses. What is necessary then is that, while we still have the cheap resources available, we use them to reconstruct our economic system so that it no longer has a single point of failure but rather that the energy costs at every level are abstracted out of the heart of the system so that any source of energy may be plugged in to be used at any level, and at the same time designing the energy-supplying subsystem so that it draws from multiple resources rather than just a single fickle source.

Comments

part II

[winterkoninkje.livejournal.com]

We already have a national power grid which gets us much of the way to abstracting energy sources away, but there's still a lot left. The biggest "built-in" oil costs are in transportation/motility whether that's automobiles, tractors, or what. The obvious solution would be to make them battery powered, but there are problems with that. The biggest problem is that it's difficult to get batteries to the necessary specifications (size, weight, capacitance, discharge rate, recharge rate,...), though there are other problems about the costs of creating/replacing them.

The important thing to change here is making farming equipment able to run without oil, for which some sort of wiring (as per electric trains, either in tracks or overhead) could be employed. The second big step (and another reason politicians shy from the topic) is to get everyone out of their damn SUVs. Can you fathom how much more it costs to haul around an extra ton or two of steel on your daily commute (which is quite long thanks to people's unfathomable love of suburbia), even just comparing it to a compact car?

And while we're getting rid of the SUVs we should get rid of all the other cars too. Move all city personal transportation infrastructure into public transit (whether bus, train, or whatever). Cargo transportation will need some other mechanism, though it could probably use the same tracks/wires/etc. Increase urban density to reduce the suburbs to reduce the areas of necessary coverage. Have another system of low energy transportation between cities (i.e. trains not trucks or planes). Some sort of individual personal transport will still be necessary for things like heading out of the city, though this should be done in a system like car rentals of flexcar rather than allowing personal ownership.

In short, to get rid of the built-in oil usage we need to get rid of the car culture, which will be a prodigious task though in some small places we seem to be making progress. And, given how ingrained the car culture is in the US, that means some major overhauling of all cities' layout. Basically suburbia has to go (another American treasure) and all cities need to be built up, as in vertically. If we manage to get rid of the cars we could narrow a lot of the streets and reclaim some density that way. Taking a look at Japanese cities like Tokyo will give a good idea of where to aim for.

But unless/until we're willing to massively reduce human population to a sustainable level there's only so high you can build cities. In which case, provided the technology and the energy, the way to go is building arcologies. Which, I hear there was one underway near Shanghai a few years back; I wonder if that's still in progress? In other countries that aren't so tied to the notion of the car and the suburban house things'll be easier, but the goal is the same.

But I think the biggest reason politicians don't discuss this is because we don't force them to. People look at the "oil crisis" and think that means we just need to find a new hole to dig in, they don't look at it and ask how their lifestyle consumes energy and how that's got to come from somewhere. So when we ask how the politicians are going to deal with energy, we ask them how they're going to guarantee the oil supply, not how they're going to help control energy expenditure. Genius stroke or no, now that the idea's been brought up the only thing is to go in and ask them, make them give us answers to the new question.