Post-Peak Oil, Take 435

If there is one common topic to this blog aside from libertarianism, liberalism, and the nexus of the two, it's a fascination with how peak oil will impact our nation--if it will happen at all. I am a firm believer that peak oil will happen and that it may well be happening right now. (What did the Chinese say about living in interesting times?) Setting that aside, what next?

I am also a firm believer that the market (even if it isn't exactly free) will adapt and respond, with consumers favoring fuel efficient vehicles, producers passing along higher fuel prices to consumers and encouraging more local consumption, housing prices changing to reflect shifts in transportation costs and heating prices, and so forth. This is a good thing and shouldn't be opposed.

And as a realist (and a cynical one) I am also a firm believer that the government will respond to a popular demand to "do something"(TM). I am not yet exactly sure what form this will take, but the pandering of John McCain and Hillary Clinton on a gas tax holiday is just a sign of what is to come. And I say that as someone who once toyed with the idea of a gas tax holiday to help consumers--back in 2006. I've realized the error of my ways. I worry that instead of the government stepping in to ease the transition from our oil addiction to a new post-peak oil society, the government will step in to prop up our oil addiction. Subsidizing corn ethanol is probably a prime example.

For a look at our post-peak oil future, there is an argument that peak oil will, combined with existing problems with the airline industry, make flying a luxury mode of transportation. I find this very realistic, our modern airline industry is already a dinosaur propped up by a government unwilling to let it crumble. Eventually, I think our financial house will be in such disorder we'll have to let it collapse and out of it will arise a much smaller, more expensive system of airline travel. Part of this prediction is based on the simple economics of the industry, an additional part is based on the realization that there may be no reasonable alternative to fossil fuels in sustaining our airlines. As the price of fossil fuels continues to rise, the price of air travel will continue to rise. There is no viable non-fossil fuel air travel (airships would have a vastly greater travel time in most situations, I think), the alternative to fossil fuel air travel is non-air travel.

Peak oil will have other impacts, such as with the automobile industry and our nation's housing patterns. While the price of oil may well flatten out and restrain demand, a lot of Americans are stuck in how much oil they will be forced to consume. As Ryan Avent explains:

Why is that? As I’ve mentioned (once or twice) before, the dearth of transit alternatives is one issue. Another, related, factor is the extremely unwise way in which we’ve invested in homes and automobiles for the last two decades. I’ve written before on Ed Glaeser’s research finding that population has migrated toward low home prices in recent decades, and those home prices are the product of loose land-use regulation. What this has meant, essentially, is extraordinary population growth in exurbs and in southern and western metropolises with development patterns sharply different from those in the older cities of the midwest and northeast.*

The problem was compounded by the American response to low real gas prices in the 90s and early 00s–mass purchases of inefficient SUVs. Vehicle purchases are trending smaller and greener now, of course, but the national vehicle fleet takes a long time to roll over. What’s more, the households most in need of more efficient automobiles–those with long commutes in the distant exurbs–are those most squeezed by high energy and fuel costs and the housing crunch. They don’t have much in the way of extra cash lying around.

Peak oil may well screw over suburban and exurban residents. This is especially true for a lot of the Southwest. We may see Arizona, Nevada, and Colorado follow the example of California--a state that was once the mecca for immigration that is now witnessing an out-migration of immigrants.

The subprime mortgage meltdown certainly doesn't help the situation of suburbs and exurbs. But as the cost of living in suburban and exurban areas continues to rise with increases in the price of oil--impacting everything from transportation to energy to food prices--these locations will become more and more unattractive to consumers, including those unfortunate residents stuck living there currently. I know some studies have shown the creative class attracted to the low-density areas of creative cities, but I think that the future will hit an equilibrium that is more suburban than exurban. And that prediction is especially likely with cities themselves having to face a re-concentration on their urban cores and downtown areas because of oil prices.

But all is not perfect for the urban areas of tomorrow. Even if higher-density seems, on the surface, to be the victor in our post-peak oil America, it's not necessarily true.

Our mega-cities will contract substantially. The fortunate ones will densify around their old cores and waterfronts — though sea level rise may affect many harbor cities. This process of contraction is likely to be problematic and disorderly. In America, there is certainly the potential for ethnic conflict.

Categorically, our colossal metroplexes will not be sustainable in a post-oil future — and despite the wishes and yearnings of many people, the truth is that no combination of alternative fuels will permit us to continue living at this scale. Some of our cities will not make it. Phoenix, Tucson, and other Sunbelt cities will dry up and blow away. In Las Vegas, the excitement will be over. Other mega-cities will have to downscale or face extreme dysfunction.

One thing that almost nobody is paying attention to: the skyscraper will not be a viable building type in our energy-scarce future. Six or seven stories must be the practical limit in a new age when electric supply is not necessarily as reliable as it has been in our time. Cities overburdened with mega-structures will have a severe liability.

As much as people talk about cheap energy making the suburbs possible, the same is largely true for massive urban areas as well. Civilization before the fossil fuel era was agrarian, decentralized and rural--neither exactly suburban, nor exurban, nor urban. I agree with James Howard Kunstler that the primary victors in this great sorting out will be small towns-the agurbs as I've seen them called. Right now, the creative class is favoring the least-dense of the metropolitan creative cities and the most-dense of the rural landscape. If the economics of peak oil cause too much of a spike in the cost of living in metropolitan areas, we may see the agurb end of the creative class spectrum winning out. If we can shift into our post-peak oil stage of civilization while maintaining our electronic infrastructure, even if transportation remains more expensive, agurbs may be even more inviting. The Washington Post even toyed with this idea (kinda) in their discussion of he future of the Washington metropolitan area.

After years of nationwide economic decline, energy crises and sporadic small-scale terrorist hits, Vivian and Victor's townhouse community filled with people inspired to follow President Heath Shuler's "New Pioneers" call in 2017 for Americans to decentralize, to leave behind the congested and crumbling 1960s suburbs and embark on a massive resettlement of the land beyond the exurbs. Shuler's lure was the great open spaces that were now finally fully linked to AmeriWeb, the wireless information network that extended into every community in the land, the result of the most massive public works project since the construction of the interstate highway system.

Despite my cynicism about the creation of the populace to peak oil, I remain cautiously optimistic about our long term chances at survival--not just as a species, but as a civilization. Ronald Bailey's post at Reason's blog reminded me that there is a very good argument for civilization shattering events in our future, but even if they shatter our possibility at space travel I don't think it will send us back to the Middle Ages or the Stone Age. So, just like with politics, I seem to be occupying a third way between neo-luddites and techno-evangelicals--or whatever the opposite could be called.

Ronald Bailey is referencing an article by Nick Bostrom. Bostrom runs anthropic-principle.com. As some may have perhaps noticed, a few times on this blog I have brought up the Anthropic Principle. I generally have ascribed to the Strong Version, but I will admit that current physical evidence doesn't really support it as strongly now. If you go with a weaker version, with which there are generally 2 versions, Brandon Carter's and Bostrom's, there have always been Doomsday implications of our own near extinction. All Bostrom is doing is writing a piece for Technology Review elucidating what he hopes is the outcome of observations on Mars based on his own Anthropic Principle, in terms of the implications for human extinction.

Let's take Bostrom's model of the Anthropic principle being observations as randomly selected from the class of all observations in its reference class. What this means that an observation we make at time t(0), where 0=now, should be held to be randomly sampled from all observations within our observable reference class of planets that have engendered or sustained life. What are we observing at t=now? We are observing that there is no ET communication but we seem to be observing that there there may or may not be planets that qualify to be in our reference class, that is, possibly could have sustained or engendered life. If we launch probes and discover evidence that indeed these planets have engendered or sustained life at one point, and thus are part of our reference class, and that we seem to be the only planet ET signaling, then then since our own observations are taken as a random sample from this reference class of "observation-moments," then a Bayesian probability calculation implies we are near extinction.

What Bostrom is hoping for, from his own transhumanist perspective, is that Earth is the only life-inhabiting planet in the entire galaxy or the entire observable universe(from earth's vantage point). But this gets into the Strong Anthropic Principle territory as far as I am concerned. However, I also think that a strong anthropic principle implies a closed Spacetime with the Topology of a 3 sphere. Currently, astronomical observations indicate the universe will indefinitely expand into an eventual heat death thermodynamical equilibrium. But this is not definitively conclusive. It's still an open question.

However, I should point there should be a distinction made between societal collapse events caused by things like Peak Oil and Human Extinction implications of applying Bayesian probability calculations based on weak(er) Anthropic considerations(which FD hinted at by differentiating between survival as a species and survival of civilization). And within the scientific community, the Anthropic Principle is only really ascribed to by the Theoretical Physicists, and begrudgingly at that. Most of the scientific community still ascribes to the Copernican Principle, that "supposedly" unseated any anthropic biases back in the 16th century.

Of course, my perspective differs from FreedomDemocrats(Logans). Even if I didn't start from my Strong Anthropic Principle assumptions(which implies a transhumanist position of sorts), it is clear to me that only technological jumps will allow humans to breach the confines of Statism in the context of human progress. Collapsing back to the Stone Age or the Middle Ages is just starting over, wherein the State will re-emerge. We've already seen this tale unfold. We just have to read our history books. FD's "3rd" way in my perspective, and I don't believe this is what FD is actually intending, is actually a perpetuation of Statist control. The "techno-evangelical" approach, as FD describes it, is the only mechanism to induce massive information connectivity and environment changing ability to supersede monopolist political enforcement. A lot of left-libertarian talk about "peak oil," but it should be acknowledged that the resource-management of fossil fuels by the State starting with the advent of the industrial revolution has marked the nadir of power of the Nation-State. From a libertarian perspective, a technological jump beyond "fossil fuels" offers much better prospects than the notion of succumbing to technological limitations in the twilight of the State no longer being able to manage such resources.

If "Weak Anthropic Principle implications" ultimately reign true, it really doesn't matter what we do. i'd rather we go down optimistically and fighting rather than pessimistically and hesitant.

Thanks for the detailed response.

While I think that the human extinction level event that someone like Bostrom envisions as a "filter" to explain the lack of other space faring civilizations is far different from peak oil, I think that you could still accomplish the same end result of a lack of space faring civilizations by applying the impacts of peak oil. It may well be uneconomical, permanently, to become a space faring civilization. I touched on this long, long ago and I might pull up that blog. But whatever space faring does develop in our Earth-based civilization will almost certainly be statist and dominated by governments that are misjudging what they'll get out of it (military superiority, technological superiority, glory, etc.)

My problem is that I think the "techno-evangelical" approach is faithfully depending on an eschatological event that may well never happen. A jump beyond fossil fuels is something that I'm cynical about. But we'll see.