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WinnersBeyond Peak Scenario Contest |
Two Scenarios
By William I. Stanton
I offer two linked scenarios, one pessimistic, one with just a touch of optimism.
The pessimistic scenario is the one that is virtually inevitable, given humankind's genetically hard-wired Darwinian nature. When survival is at stake, selfishness rules. The strong use their strength to rob the weak of such life-supporting resources as they may possess. The strong survive, the weak do not. The scenario applies to individuals, to families, to cultural or racial clans and tribes, to nation states and to international religions. Eventually, when the surviving population is small enough to live sustainably, without fossil fuels, the Darwinian slaughter can end.
The optimistic scenario assumes, with almost no justification, that humankind has the intelligence to see the planetary holocaust coming. It decides to adjust its lifestyle accordingly. It aims to avoid Darwinian slaughter by reducing its demand for resources faster than they are used up. This can only be achieved (except in the shortest term) by continuously shrinking the number of consumers until sustainability is reached. The optimistic scenario shows how this could be done by facing the future in ways that, although they demand the abandonment of some "civilized" values, are neither physically nor intellectually impossible, or even unreasonable.
Both scenarios open when world population is about 7 billion. Peak oil production has been reached. The price per barrel of Brent Crude, which averaged $28 in 2003, $38 in 2004, $55 in 2005 and $62 so far in 2006, may exceed $100. The price rise has not been exponential, because high cost drives down demand. The other fossil fuels are similarly expensive, gas because it is substituting for oil in many uses, and coal because a significant proportion of its energy content is expended in mining, transporting and processing it into liquid fuel. Tension is building up between have- and have-not nations, as regards their fossil fuel reserves.
Both scenarios close about the year 2150 when fossil fuels are largely exhausted and world population has fallen to about 0.6 billion. This is what it was before the Industrial Revolution began in the mid-18th century. It is stable, sustained by renewable energy, especially biomass, with an unpredictable proportion of nuclear energy. However, whereas in 1750 almost everyone was poverty-stricken by modern standards, in 2150 a fairly comfortable standard of living may be attainable by the use of inherited science and technology. The scenarios examine how the reduction of population from 7 billion to 0.6 billion may be achieved.
Sustainability is a tricky concept. The energy budget must be positive. Output must exceed input. Too much tends to be expected of renewable energy generators today, because the contribution of fossil fuels to the input side is poorly understood. For example, a wind turbine is not successful as a renewable generator unless another similar one can be constructed from its raw materials using only the energy that the first one generates in its lifetime, and still show a worthwhile budget surplus. Or, if corn is grown to produce bioethanol, the energy input to ploughing, sowing, fertilizing, weeding, harvesting and processing the crop must come from the previous year's bioethanol production. Input must also include, proportionately, mining and processing the raw materials and building the machines that do the work, as well as supporting their human operators.
There are many precedents for population growth and collapse in parallel with the exploitation and exhaustion of a critical resource. Saint Matthew Island in the Bering Sea had no large indigenous mammals before 1944, when 29 reindeer were introduced to browse the lichen (reindeer moss) that carpeted the island (Klein, 1968). By 1964 the reindeer population was about 6000, but the lichen, the critical resource, was all consumed. The reindeer starved to death.
Diamond (2005) describes how Easter Island in the south Pacific was settled by a canoe-load of Polynesians about 900 AD. They found it forested, with plenty of timber to make deep-sea fishing canoes. By about 1600 the human population had reached 17,000, and the last trees
(the critical resource) were cut down. Unable to go fishing, the islanders' lifestyle changed from plenty to poverty. Families and clans fought and ate each other in the Darwinian struggle to survive. The first European visitors in 1722 found about five thousand islanders, living in squalor.
The rise and fall of population in these cases, and the rise and fall in consumption of the resource that sustained them, follows an irregular bell curve. Planet Earth's human population is nearly at the peak of its bell curve. Depletion of its critical resource, fossil fuels, is well under way, and the most convenient fuels, oil and gas, are about half consumed.
Campbell (1997, 2003) used a bell curve, the famous Hubbert Curve, as a basis for plotting each nation's oil production and calculating its oil reserves. On a time-scale of several thousand years the bell curve of world oil and gas production, beginning about 1850 and ending about 2100, appears as a small almost insignificant pimple ("Hubbert's Pimple") on the long horizontal x-axis. World fossil fuel production at the same scale would form a pimple somewhat higher and wider (because coal reserves are very large). It would coincide closely with the world population pimple, because fossil fuels were the critical resource that powered the Industrial Revolution, stimulating food production and the population explosion. When the critical resource is exhausted the bell curve will be complete.
The Pessimistic Scenario
Now in 2006, the pessimistic scenario is about to begin. The West is taking a close interest in countries with large oil reserves, and some of those countries, such as Iraq, Iran, Venezuela and Nigeria, are reacting in hostile fashion. As year follows year, these tensions will heighten. A powerful nation, short of oil or gas, may well try to take what it needs by force. Anticipating this, an oil-rich nation may try to develop defensive nuclear weapons, or agree to supply a different powerful nation in return for protection.
Nuclear energy from conventional and breeder reactors will certainly be capable of replacing mains electricity from fossil fuel power stations for many decades to come. Electricity is not, however, a practical form of power for air and road transport. Up to 70% of electrical energy is lost in the electrolysis - hydrogen - fuel cell cycle. Marine bulk carriers could of course have nuclear engines. But "peaceful" nuclear energy will be unaffordable to many nations, especially those that inflict poverty on themselves by maintaining birth rates higher than their economies can support.
It is easy to see why a nation with a history of successfully managing nuclear energy would not wish to see it developed by nations sympathetic to religious fundamentalist groups that nurture suicide bombers. Pre-emptive nuclear strikes on such nations might be considered necessary for self-preservation.
Multiculturalism, so popular in politically correct circles, invariably ends in Darwinian slaughter when depleting resources can no longer support the whole population. Around the world the most threatening situations are those that are developing between fast-breeding Muslims (Stanton, 2003; tables 3.1, 3.2) and the inhabitants of regions in which Muslims form a rapidly increasing fraction of the population. Examples: Israel, parts of Western Europe, Southeast Asia, Africa and Caucasia, Bosnia, Kosovo, and even between different Muslim factions in the same country, such as Iraq and Afghanistan. Genocides such as Rwanda in 1994 or the Jewish Holocaust during World War Two will seem insignificant when multiculturalism finally breaks down.
Some 80% of the world's population is urban, living in cities or large towns. Few if any of the urbanites could grow their own food if the need arose. So when the shortage of fossil fuels makes mechanised farming increasingly unproductive, starving city-dwellers will flood out over the countryside, looting and pillaging. Rising sea levels will have the same effect on coastal populations.
The world's refugees, displaced across and within national boundaries, numbered some 20 million in 2005, compared to 8 million in 1987. The majority of them live in huge camps and shanty towns. The charitable aid that supports them now will peter out when living in the donor countries becomes more expensive, and the slogan "charity begins at home" is resurrected.
Most scientists seem to believe that climate change, especially sea level rise, is the greatest threat to humankind's future. Politicians, advised by big business lobbyists, tend to disregard scientific advice until the last possible moment. They make plans to expand airports, build new towns, widen motorways, etc. for several decades into the future. Neither politicians nor the majority of scientists realize that fossil fuel scarcity is far more imminent than climate change.
In all the dangerous situations outlined above, as life-supporting oil, gas and coal resources become progressively more scarce and desirable, strong groups will attack and slaughter weaker groups to take the resources for themselves. Weaker groups may carry out unexpected pre-emptive strikes on stronger ones, using secretly assembled unconventional weapons. Revenge attacks will bounce back and forth. Victims of famine, drought, poverty and natural disasters will be ignored. As time goes on and fossil fuel reserves dwindle to insignificance, groups that once were strong will weaken and become victims themselves. The ultimate winners will be those that have planned their Darwinian survival most effectively.
There may be several winning groups dispersed around the world, relieved of the need for further strife because the territory now available to them is adequate to supply food, biomass for energy, and waste materials to recycle into machines and infrastructure that they still know how to create. Hopefully, the misery and suffering that they have endured for 150 years or more will have taught them that a future of peace and reasonable prosperity lies before them as long as they maintain their populations at the sustainably low levels that they have achieved with such pain.
The Optimistic Scenario
The optimistic scenario addresses the same basic problem as the pessimistic one: how to reduce an unsustainably inflated world population that depends on plentiful oil, gas and coal, to a level that is sustainable when the fossil fuels are used up. It must achieve this goal peacefully, avoiding Darwinian conflict. I consider it optimistic because it adopts the unlikely premise that Homo sapiens will be willing to abandon its self-indulgent lifestyle in favour of an intellectually determined Spartan one, merely to steer clear of planetary economic collapse and genocide.
The starting point is the unsustainable Peak Oil population of about 7 billion. The goal is a world population of about 0.6 billion, dependent on renewable energy, that was sustainable in the past and can be again, with a better standard of living. The working plan, continuous rapid population reduction, must be kept constantly in mind.
The scenario is based on the assumption that a well-managed nation state can provide security to the individual citizens that nurture it. Planet Earth is still an assemblage of nation states, the best of which work for the benefit of their citizens. The power and well-being of the nation state must always override the ambitions of individual citizens, or it will not be strong enough to protect them in a chaotic world. If, in consequence, the scenario invites comparison with an ant colony, or communist ideology, that is simply a measure of the predicament that humans are in after thousands of years of Darwinian development.
The scenario is as follows:
A rough calculation suggests that by following these Draconian but simple rules, the population of a nation state could be reduced by 10% to 15% during the first ten years. If this was thought too fast or too slow, the child entitlements could be modified. Pain would be involved, but it would not be the misery and physical suffering of Darwinian conflict. It would be the mental pain of self-discipline, as experienced in a nation at war, the people working together to achieve a far-off goal.
It is too much to hope that more than a handful of nation states would be strong-minded enough to attempt the optimistic scenario. Some might transfer to it after testing the pessimistic one. States with a low population density would be well placed to succeed. Densely populated states would need military strength in the early decades to obtain the resources they lacked from the lawless outside world. Nation states trying the scenario could band together for protection of trade routes.
Some will see the optimistic scenario as a shocking betrayal of human rights and civil liberties, but they are mistaken. The concepts of human rights and the sanctity of human life are modern, less than 2 centuries old. They emerged when, for the first time in human history, science and technology provided enough food for everyone to survive without having to fight for it (Stanton, 2003). This anomalous period of weak restraints on growth, made possible by abundant oil, gas and coal, is about to end, taking the modern fantasies of political correctness with it, as Darwinian competition for resources returns.
References
Campbell, C.J. 1997. The Coming Oil Crisis. Multi-Science Publishing, Brentwood
Campbell, C.J. 2003. The Essence of Oil and Gas Depletion. Multi-Science Publishing, Brentwood.
Diamond, J. 2005. Collapse. How Societies Choose to Fail or Survive. Penguin Books, London.
Klein, D.R. 1968. The Introduction, Increase, and Crash of Reindeer on St. Matthew Island. Journal of Wildlife Management, 32, 350-367.
Stanton, W. 2003. The Rapid Growth of Human Populations 1750-2000. Histories, Consequences, Issues, Nation by Nation. Multi-Science Publishing, Brentwood.
