[NYTr] Peak Tech?

[nytr at olm.blythe-systems.com]

sent by Mark Graffis (activ-l)

Atlantic Free Press - Jul 23, 2007
http://www.atlanticfreepress.com/content/view/2024/81/

Peak Tech?

by James Kunstler

Go anywhere in America, among any class of people  from the Nascar
morons to the Ivy League  and one expectation is pretty universal: that
technology will only bring us more wonders and miracles, and it will
certainly save-the-day where our energy problems are concerned. This
would seem natural for people living in an age when a simple cassette
SONY Walkman is superceded by an 80-gigabyte iPod in one generation.
But what if this assumption is off?

What if peak technology occurs roughly in the same wave as peak energy?

Of course, another nearly universal expectation is that we will go
through an orderly transition between the end of the oil fiesta and
whatever comes next  implying, naturally, that some new sovereign
energy resource is out there in destiny's green room, getting prepped
up, waiting to be sent on-stage. The confusion about this, induced by
strenuous wishing, is such that most people expect the next energy
resource to consist of technology itself.

This has been the heart of my beef with the rosy future crowd. Energy
and technology are not the same thing, not interchangeable or
substitutable.

If you run out of one (energy), you can't just plug in the other
(technology).

I certainly believe other energy resources exist besides oil and
methane gas, but I maintain that we will be grossly disappointed by
what they can do for us, given what we are currently running in
society. Nor am I categorically against the idea of using these other
things: solar, wind, bio-fuels, what-have-you. I can even be persuaded
on nuclear with its many hazards, if that's the only way to keep the
lights on. But all of these things will not preclude the extreme
necessity to make severe changes in our manner of daily living  and to
do so rather quickly.

Far from evolving triumphantly to yet-higher realms of technological
nirvana, I'd expect a raw struggle to preserve much of the knowledge
and applied technique that has already been acquired. I do happen to
believe that the petroleum twilight will bring quite a bit of disorder
to our society, which almost certainly means that the institutional
context for research and development will suffer. Most particularly, I
doubt that the big universities will be able to carry on in an
energy-and-capital-starved future. Exactly how they might disintegrate
is an open question. Last year, for example, I was shown the new
bio-medical research "facility" at the University of Michigan, a
building at least the size of a Cunard ocean liner, and wondered as I
beheld it exactly how they were going to heat the goddam thing ten
years down the line. But one might as well ask how the U might fund the
paychecks of the building's occupants as Michigan's economy falls into
an ever-larger crater.

Such is the hubris-induced weakness of mind among those in charge of
things that these mundane questions are not even asked.

The same pretty much goes for the big corporations. Their world is
going to change pretty rudely, too. Far from expecting them to take
over our lives even more comprehensively than is the current case, I
expect them to wobble, fall to their knees, and expire as the tonic of
globalism vanishes down the drain of economic history. Just as most
people expect technology to save-the-day for energy, the same people
expect the world to keep becoming an ever-smaller place of more
intricately co-wired parts. Not me. I expect the world to become a
larger place. I expect the wiring to unravel in a contest over the
world's remaining oil. I expect that the nations of the world will
eventually retreat back into their own continental regions (while that
retreat may be violent and messy). I expect our energy problems to
limit any organization's ability to project power and influence
whether it is a government or a corporation. I expect that anything now
running at the giant scale will either have to downsize real fast or go
out of business.

Few of the rosy futurists foresee anything but ever-greater peaks of
affluence among an ever-larger pool of players. I think they have been
watching too many installments of "Richistan" on cable TV. My own
notion is that capital will dry up quicker than rain on a Scottsdale
patio as our energy predicament becomes apparent, since expectations of
future growth (of economies and the capital representing them) are
keyed to an assumption of unlimited energy resources. When the truth
finally hits  that there are real limits to the things of this world
it will knock the capital markets on their asses. We will see large
numbers of men wearing Rolex watches weep into crumpled certificates as
the tranches of hallucinated wealth dissolve in the mists of their
hopes and dreams. This means, at least, that investment in technology R
and D on the grand scale will probably not meet our current
expectations.

In any case, it is getting pretty late in the day for us to just kick
back and nurture fantasies about the future of technology while the
prospect of an oil export shock resolves more vividly before us  the
first symptom of an industry that will shortly fly to pieces. Of course
the very last thing we should be doing  which everyone from the Nascar
morons to the Ivy League "greenies" is doing  is focus all effort on
how to keep the American automobile fleet running by some magic means
other than gasoline. I say, just as a mental jump-start, let's put at
least some of that effort into getting the choo-choo trains running
again  but this is too silly for the boys at MIT or even the Pentagon.

A few years ago, I went to the famous TED conference in Monterrey,
where the mandarins of computer tech gather every year to hear talks
about the neat things happening in the world beyond Silicon Valley. (I
was part of the "entertainment.") By far the most popular presentation
of the whole conference was the one on flying cars. Yeah, I know. It
was straight out of a 1937 edition of Popular Science Magazine. But
that's where their heads were at. All those twenty billion dollar
heads, and that was what really lit their wicks.

In case you wonder why I'm skeptical about where we're going in this
country.