Ship of Fools: Post mass industrialisation

Thread: Post mass industrialisation Board: Oblivion / Ship of Fools.

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Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

Question, because I'd be interested to know the answer:
What technologies have been developed in the past two hundred and fifty years that would be sustainable supposing that we are unable to maintain current levels of power generation?

It seems at least possible that fossil fuels (and fission) will run out, or become prohibitively expensive without renewables making up the gap. (Presumably governments would continue to run power stations for military use.) What technologies do we have that civilians could still use that their counterparts in the early eighteenth century wouldn't have had?

Posted by Hairy Biker (# 12086) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:

It seems at least possible that fossil fuels (and fission) will run out, or become prohibitively expensive

Not in our life times.

Posted by blackbeard (# 10848) on :

Well, oil is playing hard to get.
But there's still lots of coal.
And oil shale, apparently.
Not sure how much U-235 there, but we don't really need a lot. Maybe we will learn how to do fusion, there's an awful lot of deuterium in sea water.

Meanwhile.
Wind power.
Hydro-electric power.
And tide power.
Just a minute - didn't the eighteenth century have windmills, and watermills, and tide mills? It's all old technology, just scaled up a bit ...

Posted by Sioni Sais (# 5713) on :

I suppose the biggest change since The Olden Days is that many of us travel much further to work every day.

The devices we use to access the Ship and the boards provide about 90% of the hardware and software to work effectively at home for almost anything that's done in an office*. That would save a heck of a lot of energy.

I'm sure that making better use of the fuel we have is smarter in the medium term.

*Excluding weird stuff after Xmas parties that is.

Posted by Sighthound (# 15185) on :

I would suggest that the insulation of houses and public buildings is still in its infancy. Much more could be done. There are also options for home generation of electricity which are also in their infancy. We will learn to extract power from the sun much more effectively than we do now.

Posted by ToujoursDan (# 10578) on :

The issue isn't when we're run out of fossil fuels. The world will probably always have some somewhere that is extractable at the "right" price. However, over time any finite commodity goes through a bell curve whereby a production peak is hit and then falls as more is extracted and used by industry than is replaced by discoveries in new places. In oil production this bell curve is called The Hubbert Curve.

Our economic crisis will occur when the costs of fossil fuels make them impractical for industrial use. This will occur long before we "run out" of oil. The ever-growing demand for fossil fuels will some day collide with falling production caused by depletion of existing oil fields and fewer new finds. The law of supply and demand will drive the costs to something that becomes impractical for everyday economic use and people will turn to alternatives, or do without.

But no one knows when that will happen. It was believed it was imminent, but the jury is out with regard to fracking and extracting of shale oil. At the very least, conventional sources of oil are in decline. The world's largest producer of oil, Saudi Arabia, will run out of oil in 17 years time. Other Gulf States may run out sooner. While shale oil is a promising new source, it remains questionable whether the entire world's ever expanding oil needs can be replaced by it for long.

(The nightmare for a 46 year old like myself is in 17 years time (or sooner). The economic and political unrest that will occur when the oil in the Persian Gulf becomes scarce and the Kuwaitis and Saudis will not have enough money to feed, house, air condition and buy off 35 million people living in one of the inhospitable parts of the world is hard to fathom. Those people won't (and can't) go back to their pre-oil nomadic lifestyles. What that will do to the world economy is anyone's guess, but I think it's going to be ugly.)

[ 13. January 2013, 13:53: Message edited by: ToujoursDan ]

Posted by Dafyd (# 5549) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
I suppose the biggest change since The Olden Days is that many of us travel much further to work every day.

The devices we use to access the Ship and the boards provide about 90% of the hardware and software to work effectively at home for almost anything that's done in an office*. That would save a heck of a lot of energy.

That's the question I'm asking. If the world's current levels of energy usage became unsustainable, would we still be able to manufacture computers? Or are they reliant on industrialisation?

Posted by Hairy Biker (# 12086) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:

quote:
Originally posted by Sioni Sais:
I suppose the biggest change since The Olden Days is that many of us travel much further to work every day.

The devices we use to access the Ship and the boards provide about 90% of the hardware and software to work effectively at home for almost anything that's done in an office*. That would save a heck of a lot of energy.
That's the question I'm asking. If the world's current levels of energy usage became unsustainable, would we still be able to manufacture computers? Or are they reliant on industrialisation?

I'd say that the mass production of computer hardware is far more dependent on plentiful, cheap labour. That's why everything's made in China. As the economic inequalities straighten themselves out, I think we'll see the cost of production start to outstrip the demand for these gadgets. And inequality is declining faster than fossil fuels.

Posted by Angloid (# 159) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Hairy Biker:
And inequality is declining faster than fossil fuels.

Care to expand on this? At least in the UK, inequality is increasing rather than shrinking.

Posted by Hairy Biker (# 12086) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Angloid:

quote:
Originally posted by Hairy Biker:
And inequality is declining faster than fossil fuels.
Care to expand on this? At least in the UK, inequality is increasing rather than shrinking.

Mudfrog pointed it out to us in a New Year thread, but we chose to use it to discuss the current UK government. However, if you read the article in a more global context:

quote:
Never has there been less hunger, less disease or more prosperity. The West remains in the economic doldrums, but most developing countries are charging ahead, and people are being lifted out of poverty at the fastest rate ever recorded.

The rest of the world is leaving us behind. It won't be long before we're sweating in factories to feed the demands of African, Chinese and Indian consumerism.

Posted by Angloid (# 159) on :

Doesn't it rather mean that the elites in those countries are forging ahead while the poor remain as poor as ever?

Posted by no prophet (# 15560) on :

Don't worry about oil. There's enough in the Canadian tar sands to distil into gasoline to run your automobile for perhaps 300 years. And if that runs out, after the environment where the extraction happens is completely gone, we can always liquify coal. Midwest American farmers produce more than enough corn to sweeten all sorts of food in which corn sugar and syrup doesn't belong, which is why they want you to burn it in your car too. We'll have plenty of crap to burn for centuries.

We're not interested in sustainability really. Money's the thing.

Posted by Hairy Biker (# 12086) on :

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:

We're not interested in sustainability really. Money's the thing.

I wouldn't put it so cynically. Sustainability is a red herring. There is no need to be sustainable, because there is always the next thing when the current thing runs out. What if we'd banned horses in London because of the horse manure issue? Would we have invented cars sooner, or just been poorer as a society? We should use whatever makes economic sense today. Tomorrow will take care of itself. (Matt 6:34)

Posted by ToujoursDan (# 10578) on :

When there are 10 billion people on the planet; the rainforests have been clear cut; the seas have been fished out; the climate is 6°C warmer and the crop growing areas have shifted to the relatively infertile subpolar regions, how much oil/tar sands is left isn't going to matter much anyway.

Posted by OhSimone (# 16414) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Hairy Biker:

quote:
Originally posted by no prophet:

We're not interested in sustainability really. Money's the thing.
I wouldn't put it so cynically. Sustainability is a red herring. There is no need to be sustainable, because there is always the next thing when the current thing runs out. What if we'd banned horses in London because of the horse manure issue? Would we have invented cars sooner, or just been poorer as a society? We should use whatever makes economic sense today. Tomorrow will take care of itself. (Matt 6:34)

Just like it made best economic sense for the slave traders to supply the demand for labour, or for children to work in mines in this country, or for Shell to cripple the local economies of the Niger delta, and so on ad infinitum. For many people caught up by the best economic sense of the time, there is/was no tomorrow to be taken care of. That's a horrendous misapplication of that verse.

Posted by Hairy Biker (# 12086) on :

quote:
Originally posted by OhSimone:
]Just like it made best economic sense for the slave traders to supply the demand for labour, or for children to work in mines in this country, or for Shell to cripple the local economies of the Niger delta, and so on ad infinitum. For many people caught up by the best economic sense of the time, there is/was no tomorrow to be taken care of. That's a horrendous misapplication of that verse.

I'm not arguing for an abandonment of social responsibility. All I'm saying is that "sustainability" in the sense of not doing anything that depletes natural resources, is not a helpful end. We should use what is available and work out what we'll use tomorrow when we get there. If we'd stopped using oil in the 1970s because it looked like it might run out, then I wouldn't be sitting here today typing this. I'd probably be breaking stones with a sledgehammer all day, or walking round a treadmill to generate power. (Which, incidentally, is what some of the carbon neural brigade advocate for developing countries in order to "offset" developed countries emissions.)

Posted by iamchristianhearmeroar (# 15483) on :

quote:
"sustainability" in the sense of not doing anything that depletes natural resources, is not a helpful end.

I don't think anyone is suggesting not doing anything that depletes natural resources, but rather that we need to take care of how quickly we deplete any finite resources.

quote:
We should use what is available and work out what we'll use tomorrow when we get there.

But that surely leads to exactly what OhSimone mentioned? It also depends who "we" are. If we happen to be the people who control all the oil, say, then we're probably laughing, but if we're the people who have bugger all, then what?

quote:
breaking stones with a sledgehammer all day, or walking round a treadmill to generate power. (Which, incidentally, is what some of the carbon neural brigade advocate for developing countries in order to "offset" developed countries emissions.)

Really? Source?

Posted by Hairy Biker (# 12086) on :

quote:
Originally posted by iamchristianhearmeroar:

quote:
breaking stones with a sledgehammer all day, or walking round a treadmill to generate power. (Which, incidentally, is what some of the carbon neural brigade advocate for developing countries in order to "offset" developed countries emissions.)
Really? Source?

Sorry, couldn't find the source. I just remember being utterly shocked at the first wave of carbon offsetting projects I heard about which included that kind of of malarkey, in poor communities of course, not in the developed world. Breaking rocks by hand is a totally sustainable business of course. Perhaps the industry's moved on since then.

A man can break 12 buckets a day (I can give you a link for that one)without seriously impacting the supply of rock. He produces effectively no CO2 compared with using a heavy machine to do the same job in 10 minutes. But is this really all we should expect our health males to contribute to our world?

(p.s. I only got involved in this thread because I thought it was about something that happens after a service of Holy Communion.)

Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Hairy Biker:

quote:
Originally posted by iamchristianhearmeroar:

quote:
breaking stones with a sledgehammer all day, or walking round a treadmill to generate power. (Which, incidentally, is what some of the carbon neural brigade advocate for developing countries in order to "offset" developed countries emissions.)
Really? Source?
Sorry, couldn't find the source. I just remember being utterly shocked at the first wave of carbon offsetting projects I heard about which included that kind of of malarkey, in poor communities of course, not in the developed world.

Utterly shocked - but somehow not shocked enough to remember any details that would let such a ridiculous claim be checked? (Or was it so shocking that there was swooning involved?)

Posted by iamchristianhearmeroar (# 15483) on :

quote:
A man can break 12 buckets a day (I can give you a link for that one)without seriously impacting the supply of rock. He produces effectively no CO2 compared with using a heavy machine to do the same job in 10 minutes. But is this really all we should expect our health males to contribute to our world?

I'm familiar with rock breaking in Tanzania. I taught there in a different region from Dar (Kilimanjaro) for 8 months and on a certain path between villages there was a man who sat and broke stones all day long, similar to the lady shown in the video.

My point of contention would be that this would ever be encouraged from a sustainability point of view.

There are surely many other reasons than reduction of CO2 production why someone would rather have these poor souls breaking rocks by hand rather than using a machine - cost and availability for example. At Tsh150 per bucket of broken rocks this work would barely earn a dollar a day per worker. This is using precisely "what is available" in Tanzania, i.e. cheap labour which allows you to extract a huge profit.

Posted by Hairy Biker (# 12086) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:

quote:
Originally posted by Hairy Biker:

quote:
Originally posted by iamchristianhearmeroar:

quote:
breaking stones with a sledgehammer all day, or walking round a treadmill to generate power. (Which, incidentally, is what some of the carbon neural brigade advocate for developing countries in order to "offset" developed countries emissions.)
Really? Source?
Sorry, couldn't find the source. I just remember being utterly shocked at the first wave of carbon offsetting projects I heard about which included that kind of of malarkey, in poor communities of course, not in the developed world.
Utterly shocked - but somehow not shocked enough to remember any details that would let such a ridiculous claim be checked? (Or was it so shocking that there was swooning involved?)

Well here we go. Sorry it's from Spiked, but there's a limit to my googling time today. It's a bit old, and might be the original article I remember.

For the sake of balance, here's Climate Care's sales material for the project. You decide - enslavement by David Cameron, or freedom from reliance on fossil fuels?

Posted by ken (# 2460) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dafyd:
That's the question I'm asking. If the world's current levels of energy usage became unsustainable, would we still be able to manufacture computers? Or are they reliant on industrialisation?

I think relative costs are more important than absolute ones. If the price of one input goes up faster than others, so goods or services which use a lot of that input rise in price faster than others. So as energy costs rise faster than other prices, so things which it takes a lot of energy to provide get more expensive. Just as in the 19th and most of the 20th century the price of labour rose faster than most other things in industrialising countries, so personal servants disappeared (for everyone except the very rich). Or more recently the price of land has gone up very fast (here, if not everywhere). So there are people in their twenties and thirties and even forties, with decent jobs, whose parents live or lived in houses of their own, who now have to share flats - even though they are in other ways much wealthier than their parents were at their age.

Some things get relatively cheaper, some things relatively more expensive.

Fore example, as far as I know (I'm no expert) it takes a lot more energy to extract aluminium from ore than it does iron. So as energy costs rise, the price of aluminium goes up faster than the price of steel, so aluminium gets relatively more expensive, and steel relatively cheaper (even if absolutely more expensive) so if there is a choice of substituting one for the other in some product, steel will tend to be used more and more.

Most obviously, the cost of services is likely to rise more slowly than goods, so the chances are we will tend to move of our discretionary spending away from stuff and physical products and towards things like entertainment, education, financial services, software, and so on. This is already going on in wealthier parts of the world and has been for at least 130 years. So that's like a continuation of the trends of modern history. Before the Industrial Revolution, people who had money to spend (not so many of them then) tended to spend it on paying people to do things for them directly. You are my servant, do this, do that. Mass industrialisation made manufactured goods relatively cheaper and wages relatively more expensive, so people with money bought more stuff, and employed fewer servants. Now we've moved onto a different phase where our money is mostly spent on non-personal services (How much of your spending actually goes on stuff? Very little I bet. Quite likely less than half. Maybe in a hundred years it'll be a lot less than that.)

I suppose we could speculate on what gets more expensive - and the flip side of the coin is what gets relatively cheaper.

I would guess that as the cost of fuel goes up :

Sea transport becomes relatively cheaper, air transport relatively more expensive
Public transport relatively cheaper, private cars more expensive
Rail relatively cheaper, road more expensive
Urban living relatively cheaper, suburban and exurban more expensive

In rich countries rural living gets relatively cheaper if (without fertiliser) you can grow enough plant material to use as cheap fuel, and if you can generate your own electricity with windmills or whatever, and if you have easy access to lots of water - then you can become more or less self-sufficient (or "go off grid" as the current fashionable phrase is). If you don't have those things, if you are tied in to paying market rates for fertiliser, power, and above all water, then you are probably going to get stuffed. (it might be different in poorer and less industrialised countries - there, as long as there is enough water, its likely that agriculture will prosper in the mid-term future. As long as there is enough water)

Plant products, such as wood and natural fibres, get relatively cheaper compared to synthetics, though probably not by much in rich countries because of fertiliser and energy input into agriculture. Naturally grown crops become cheaper relative to high-input agriculture that uses irrigation and fertiliser and lots of machinery. Though quite likely not enough to replace high-input agriculture, because of lower yields.

Computers and electronic doo-dahs in general, as it happens, probably stay available because the energy input is comparatively low and falling - compared to things we might purchase instead of them, such as cars or foreign holidays. At the moment a decent weekend away in a foreign country costs about the same as an ipad. A new car might cost me as much as twenty-five ipads. I don't see those ratios falling as energy costs go up - so I get more likely to buy an ipad and less likely to buy a car. A house costs five hundred ipads - you could buy one a month for forty years for the money you'd spend on a mortgage - will our descendents be forced give up the ideal of separate family homes and live rooms in some sort of communal hostels or boarding houses? (as lots of city dwellers did up to our grandparents times)

Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Hairy Biker:

quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:

quote:
Originally posted by Hairy Biker:

quote:
Originally posted by iamchristianhearmeroar:

quote:
breaking stones with a sledgehammer all day, or walking round a treadmill to generate power. (Which, incidentally, is what some of the carbon neural brigade advocate for developing countries in order to "offset" developed countries emissions.)
Really? Source?
Sorry, couldn't find the source. I just remember being utterly shocked at the first wave of carbon offsetting projects I heard about which included that kind of of malarkey, in poor communities of course, not in the developed world.
Utterly shocked - but somehow not shocked enough to remember any details that would let such a ridiculous claim be checked? (Or was it so shocking that there was swooning involved?)
Well here we go. Sorry it's from Spiked, but there's a limit to my googling time today. It's a bit old, and might be the original article I remember.

For the sake of balance, here's Climate Care's sales material for the project. You decide - enslavement by David Cameron, or freedom from reliance on fossil fuels?

Thanks for the links, HB. But I don't see anything in the treadle pump (not treadmill generator) program that comes anywhere near justifying terms like "enslavement" or "bondage", which imply an element of compulsion notably absent even from the hostile article you cite.

If villagers in Uttar Pradesh find these more cost effective than diesel pumps, why shouldn't they use them? And if the program can raise money by selling carbon offsets, I don't see why that should be any less acceptable than other methods of raising funds.

Posted by Hairy Biker (# 12086) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
[QUOTE]
If villagers in Uttar Pradesh find these more cost effective than diesel pumps, why shouldn't they use them? And if the program can raise money by selling carbon offsets, I don't see why that should be any less acceptable than other methods of raising funds.

I'm sorry you don't see the connection between enslavement and saying "I'll buy you a rickety old foot pump that you'll waste hours of your life plodding away on, so that I can use a luxury jet and no one will object". The point is that the carbon offset scheme of this kind can only exist if their is massive inequity between those buying the offsets and those selling them. If we really lifted these farmers out of poverty then the equation wouldn't work any more. The farmer has to live in poverty, and his only contribution to the economy has to be his muscle power (or that of his children). If we really lifted him out of poverty by giving him his own diesel pump then the carbon offsetters wouldn't be interested.

Posted by iamchristianhearmeroar (# 15483) on :

But the argument doesn't work in the biogas example though does it. People exchange the physical effort involved in collecting fuel wood (which supposedly endangers the tiger) and instead collect cow dung and water which is processed in a digester to produce methane and (as a by-product) composted manure which is a useful fertiliser. Biogas digesters are being used all over the world to convert what might otherwise be a waste product into a portable, highly calorific energy source.

I do think the anti-developmental points are well made in the spiked article. Equating a manual labour job automatically with poverty seems to be going a bit far though. Surely poverty is measured by a range of factors? The linked carbon offset site did at least seem to suggest some genuine benefits to the users of these treadle pumps over diesel pumps: lower cost, constant availability, no issues over fuel supply. A major disagreement I would have with the particular scheme is that money "invested" in it does not actually buy anyone any kit by the looks of things.

Posted by Dave W. (# 8765) on :

quote:
Originally posted by Hairy Biker:

quote:
Originally posted by Dave W.:
[QUOTE]
If villagers in Uttar Pradesh find these more cost effective than diesel pumps, why shouldn't they use them? And if the program can raise money by selling carbon offsets, I don't see why that should be any less acceptable than other methods of raising funds.
I'm sorry you don't see the connection between enslavement and saying "I'll buy you a rickety old foot pump that you'll waste hours of your life plodding away on, so that I can use a luxury jet and no one will object".

Offering someone an alternative technology (which they're entirely free to accept or refuse) isn't even remotely comparable to enslaving them.

From the information at the links you've provided, they're being offered a better option than what they have now - one which (according to the Acumen fund study) actually doubles their annual income. That sounds a lot more like "helping to lift them out of poverty" than "enslavement". I see no reason to accept the overwrought rhetoric of an editorialist who appears to have a peculiar phobia about anything that can be connected to the idea of environmentalism.

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