Tainter makes this observation; substantial increased costs occurred late, shortly before collapse and were incurred by a population already weakened by a pattern of declining marginal returns. It was not a challenge that caused the collapse but a system that had been unproductively complex was unable to respond.
Tainter says that the only solution for over complexity is simplification but complex systems are unable to voluntarily simplify. Collapse is nothing more than involuntary simplification.
The above is from my review of Joseph Tainter’s The Collapse of Complex Societies and the introduction to my review of Howard Kunstler’s A World Made By Hand. Howard Kunstler has made of career out of predicting the collapse of our particular society. In 2006 he published The Long Emergency: Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century where he discussed the end of the oil age and how it has the possibility of being the end of our oil based society as well. Chris Martenson interviews Kunstler four years latter for some straight talk.
Kunstler has a couple of observations that I share:
- Americans and if fact the world are just as oblivious or at least in denial about peak oil as they were four years ago and probably will be until you have to wait in line for hours to buy a few gallons of very expensive gasoline.
- We no longer have the resources to do what would be required to mitigate the impact of no more cheap oil.
When asked what he would do now if he were in charge he has these suggestions:
- I would commence a public debate on whether we go forward with a nuclear power program, to weigh the hazards involved — but, frankly, there may be no other ways to keep the lights on in a decade or so. It may turn out that we are too short of capital to carry out such a program, or our society may be too disorderly in the years ahead to run it, or we may decide the hazards are not worth it, but the discussion must start now.
- I would direct major capital resources to repairing the conventional passenger railroads in the US, because commercial aviation as we know it will not continue another ten years, and ditto Happy Motoring, and this is a big continent-sized nation. If we don’t get regular rail running, we may not be able to go anywhere. We should just put aside our fantasies about high-speed rail or mag-lev. We’re too broke for that, and we need to temper our techno-grandiosity. But, believe me, Americans will be deliriously happy ten years from now if they can go from Des Moines to Chicago at 80 mph on time. During the Obama years, we’ve stupidly poured our dwindling capital resources into building more highways. This foolishness has got to stop. I would promote public transit at the smaller municipal scale as well, to go with regular rail.
- I’d begin the task of rehabilitating our inland waterways so we can move more goods around the nation by boat — and in particular the port facilities that have been mostly removed in places like St. Louis and Cincinnati and around the Great Lakes.
- I would put an emphasis on walkable communities. I would prepare the nation for the possibility of gasoline rationing, since events could shove us into criticality at any time.
- I would begin closing down scores of unnecessary overseas military bases, and I would terminate the nation-building project in Afghanistan since there is no possibility that we can control the terrain or the population there for anything more than the shortest run.
- I would direct the Attorney General of the US to mount investigations of the Bank of America, JP Morgan, Goldman Sachs, and other big banks in connection with the massive swindles and frauds in house lending and the securitization of mortgages — because the rule of law requires that somebody be held accountable for the demolition of the banking system.
He admits that few if any of these things is likely to happen. Martenson asks him if some areas will fare better than others when the oil spigot runs dry.
It ought to be self-evident. I mean, compare Phoenix and Portland, Oregon. Phoenix is utterly toast in a few years. They can’t grow any food there without expensive and heroic irrigation. They have water problems. They’re slaves to their cars. They’re in a place where even the hamburger flippers need air-conditioning to survive. It’s quite hopeless there. Portland, on the other hand, has turned itself into one of the finest walkable cities in the USA and the Willamette River Valley is one of the most productive farming micro-regions in the world. Human beings will continue to live and thrive to some extent there. Similarly, I think the Great Lakes region is undervalued these days. It is whole lot of good ag land surrounded by the world’s most extensive inland sea — kind of a Mediterranean of fresh water. I remain pessimistic about Dixieland, which I think will be prone to violence and political disorder. In the longer run I believe it will become what it was before World War II: an agricultural backwater. But, really, everybody in every region of the country will be touched by the problems of the long emergency.
Perhaps those of us in the Pacific Northwest will get the last laugh after all.
And is China really the future?
A lot of people think so. I’m not so sure about that. They have problems that are orders of magnitude greater than ours with population overshoot, dwindling fresh water, industrial pollution, relatively little oil of their own, and legitimacy of governance. They’ve become net food importers.
We look at them and their recent accomplishments in awe — and they’ve come a long way from the point thirty years ago, when most Chinese lived like it was the twelfth century. But they came to the industrial fiesta very late. They are making some rather dumb choices — like, trying to get their whole new middle class in cars on freeways, putting up thousands of skyscrapers. Their banking system is possibly more corrupt and dysfunctional than ours — since it’s run by the state, with very poor accountability for lending. As a Baby Boomer, I well remember China’s psychotic break of the 1960s, when the country went cuckoo under the elderly, ailing, paranoid Mao Tse-Tung — which is to say, they’re capable of flipping out on the grand scale under stress. They are reaching out these days in a resource grab using their accumulated foreign exchange reserves. At some future time — say, if the global banking system implodes, and their forex reserves lose value — I wonder if they will reach out militarily for resources, and how the world might react.
In any case, I take issue with the Tom Friedman notion that the world has become permanently flat. The world is going to get rounder and bigger again. We’ll discover — surprise! — that the global economy was a set of transient economic relations that obtained only because of a half century of cheap energy and relative peace between the big nations. Ahead now, I think you’ll see the big nations shrink back into their own corners of the world. I’m not saying we’ll see no international trade, but it will be nothing like the conveyer belt from China to Wal-Mart that we’ve known the last few decades. And the prospects for conflict are very very high.
Cross posted at Newshoggers