The End Of The World As We Know It
published: June 29th, 2008
The end of the world as we know it…
image: donncha@inphotos.org
Rome collapsed and plunged the western world into a time of barbarism and the Dark Ages. No-one at the time thought “we are in the dark ages” and of course there were bright flashes within the Dark Ages but largely this was not a good time for the human race. Dogma, superstition and general ignorance thrived. Belief in an angry and malevolent Creator replaced the enlightened thinking and practices that the Greco Roman world had striven to implement and establish within the Western psyche.
Is our own culture or civilisation so well placed to ride the storms that will inevitably come as the looming energy crisis gets closer? Resources become more scarce and therefore more precious, oil breaks new records on a daily basis and the brief period of mass global transportation and the easy movement of millions of people looks to be coming to an end.
In order for our culture to continue it will have to find an alternative source of energy to the fossil fuel dependency that has come about since the advent of the Industrial Revolution. It began in England with the scarcity of wood that had been the fuel source for thousands of years and coal became the fuel that replaced it. Coal in turn fuelled the advent of the Industrialisation of human society and laid the foundations for the world that we now live in.
What is the alternative to fossil fuel as coal was the alternative to wood? Steam power created levels of output and harnessed energy that had simply never been known before. What we face now is the apex of the Industrialisation of the world. Current levels of growth can’t be sustained as long as all the world’s people aspire to the middle class lifestyle of the developed world.
It may well mean that we return to the conditions more common in the nineteenth century, where travel was the preserve of the wealthy and the privileged. Our networks of roads on land and in the air may become obsolete as the fuel to keep them moving simply runs out. We may return to a more agrarian age when agriculture becomes the main occupation for most of the people of the world, seasonal eating patterns return and people return to eating only those things produced near to where they live.
Our huge metropolises and conurbations will, in these conditions, simply cease to be viable as the means to provide power and food for their occupants dwindle. This leaves us with the reality of huge overpopulation. A population that is massive, seven billion and rising, will need supporting and the means with which to do that will simply stop. I go to my local food store and pick up fruit from the other side of the world that has been flown to England in the depths of winter from New Zealand. Tomatoes from Israel, berries from South America, fresh produce from the four corners of the world. All this will stop.
Products that have been made cheaply on production lines in China will no longer fill the container ships that clog the world’s shipping lanes. The great container ports and hubs will cease to be viable. The disposable culture we have created, the one where it is cheaper to throw something away and replace it than repair it, will stop. The wardrobes full of clothes, the houses full of gadgets, all of this will cease. The acquisitionist culture whereby your success in life is determined by how many material things you can acquire before you die will be no longer tenable.
Should this scenario come to pass, how will the great nations distribute what is left among themselves? Will China and the USA sit down amicably and divide up the last few barrels of oil, tons of coal or cubic metres of natural gas? Will old grievances resurface, old resentments cloud the reasoning of negotiators?
Rome collapsed and the barbarians picked at the corpse of its civilisation. Destroying what it had become and plunging the western world into an era of chaos and anarchy. The stability and order that Rome had represented evaporated gradually and in its place came the barbarian hordes, Goths, Vandals, Visigoths, Huns, Ostrogoths and the various others who sought to fill the power vacuum that Rome’s demise created.
We cannot escape the fact that the world we now live in was forged and shaped by the Imperial and Industrial power of the Western nations. Revisionists try to wriggle out of this one but they can’t. The order we have experienced and benefitted from was built upon the anvil of an inflexible will to grow and expand on the part of the West’s empire builders, whether nationalistically or capitalistically motivated. The politically correct cries of ’shame’ over this past are less than juvenile, they miss the point that in the urge for world domination, once the touchpaper was lit, someone was going to claim the podium, someone was going to get the prize.
Perhaps it oversimplifies the case but much of the anti capitalist, anti imperialist, anti colonial rhetoric is little more than sour grapes on the part of those who were not the dominant parties in this era of world history. The industrialisation of the world, more than anything else, shrank it. Suddenly the mills of Lancashire, the foundries of the Black Country, the shipwrights of the Tyne, Mersey and Clyde became integral to what was happening in India, China, Africa, the Americas, Australasia. Just as today a shopkeeper in Los Angeles sells goods from the Far East, Thailand is a playground for young Westerners, a social and economic model emerged that is based solely upon cheap and readily available energy sources that are about to run out.
What will we be left with? The nightmare scenario points us toward the disintegration of society as we have come to know it, world history is full of such shifts so don’t be surprised at whatever the future may have in store, and a breakdown of the world order. Anarchy, chaos, competing fundamentalisms, and another ‘power grab’ by contemporary barbarians are possible scenarios. Some people are quite content to see this happen, but remember, when it goes, everything goes, not just the bits you don’t like, the whole thing goes up in smoke, good bad and indifferent. This is why sometimes it is necessary to endure the less acceptable facets of where we are in order to allow a smooth transition to where we want to be.
The case has to be made for a viable alternative to fossil fuel. Not something ridiculous, remember Mao’s initiative in the 50’s to build backyard furnaces as part of the Cultural Revolution and the damage done by that policy to the Chinese people. Remember the schoolchildren employed en masse to kill the birds that ’stole’ the crops harvested for human consumption and the subsequent plague of insects which killed millions through starvation because the food chain had been ruptured. So not some half cocked scheme, a windmill on every-one’s hat type thing, but a practical solution that is manageable and implementable.
One thing is certain, we will live through massive change in the coming decades, we will either advance because of it or it will confound us and we will witness social disintegration on a scale that we can barely imagine.
I see three viable options. The first is the sun, this is the giant furnace whose energy is, to us, infinite, let’s face it if the sun goes out we’re finished anyway. The second is tidal energy, I have written elsewhere of the huge power involved in lifting the planet’s oceans in some instances by as much as 56 ft. The third is the most controversial but, at this time, most viable and that is nuclear power; the huge stumbling block here is the volatility of nuclear waste which is extremely toxic.
If any or all of these three energy sources can be harnessed and a system of storage and distribution developed then our world may change for the better. Without this we are sleepwalking towards a precipice. I don’t know what is at the bottom of that precipice, what I do know is that the world as we know it will disappear and be replaced by something none of us will recognise.