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169 comments on The Freezing Point of Industrial Society
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Good article.
One of my thoughts about industrialization VS deindustrialization is that industrialization depends on excess wealth. If a society takes a certain amount of "resources" (a term deliberately left vague) to maintain the existing population and infrastructure, only those resources in excess of the amount needed to maintain can go into new infrastructure, new business, new technology, etc.
An industrialized society does not need excess resources to stay industrialized, but the amount of resources necessary just to maintain the system is greater. Overall, my guess is that it takes fewer resources to stay industrialized than to become industrialized. Does it take more resources to build a factory or maintain a factory? The fact that some countries have seen declines in wealth, but no country has deindustrialized absent of war and bad dictatorial policies, seems to support this assertion.
On the other hand, it's hard to imagine that a country could possibly deindustrialize without some kind of major political catastrophe, which might disguise the fundamental cause of the deindustrialization. We may never know for sure just how much fuel a society needs to maintain industrialization.
Another issue is the financial system. If a country gets stuck at a certain level of fuel consumption, it could wreak havoc on the financial system and in the extreme case cause deindustrialization even if sufficient fuel is available.
it seems to me that over the last 15-20 years the us has de-industrialized
any thoughts
The US has offshored much of its industrial capacity, but Americans still enjoy industrialized commutes, industrialized entertainment, and work in industrialized agriculture. Despite the high level of imports, the United States still has a high level of manufacturing capacity per GDP. So no, I don't think it's fair to call the US a deindustrialized country.
The US has exported the part of industry that makes actual machines, clothing, chemicals, steel and some other products to a virtual empire. These industrial colonies get all the disadvantages of the resulting pollution and can be attacked by the Pentagon at will, but the US has no responsibility for their well-being. So they are a plausibly-deniable extension of our country.
What remains of actual US manufacturing is trucks, food (since it's become too unnatural to be called anything but a manufacture), refining (though we've begun to import a lot of gasoline), and houses. I'm not thrilled.
You forgot to mention the biggest part of remaining US industry: weapons.
There's a difference between letting your manufacturing sector go kaput, and "deindustrialising" in the sense that this article means it. I meant an industrial lifestyle - as I said, having lots of roads, computers, pharmaceuticals, mobile phones, cheap t-shirts, and so on. You could have all that and have zero actual production in your own country. I mean, Monaco, Vatican City, Abu Dubai, these are all "industrialised societies" but they produce nothing materially.
To answer whether it's "an industrialised society" or not, simply ask yourself, "if I took away all the fossil fuels today, would it make any difference." For somewhere like Albania, the answer is "not much." For the US or Australia, "hell, yes!" So the first is a manual economy, the other two are industrialised economies. Places like China, where in the east the answer is "yes", in the west, "no", they're mixed.
[double post]
Well, the "excess wealth" bit is what I was getting at with "wasteful industrial" economies, and talking about how much food people could buy. Again, Laos could have $0.01/lt fuel and still wouldn't industrialise, because with only $500 or so they just can't do much at all.
For most machinery other than transport, the energy and material inputs are 2-10% of construction annually. So if you run a factory for more than 20 years, it takes more to maintain it than it did to make it - but looking at it from one year to another, it's way more to build than maintain. There are obvious exceptions for very energy-intensive machinery, like aluminium smelters.
No country has entirely deindustrialised, but lots have partly deindustrialised, going as I said from a wasteful to a mixed-industrial economy. There are heaps of abandoned cities and factories in the old Eastern bloc, lots of places where the tractors stopped and the hoes and oxen came out. The entire country didn't go under, some industry always remains, but large parts became manual economies.
Another factor is that so far all of the economies that have gone through a regressive change like that, there were others who could back them up. Poland joined the EU, North Korea is subsidised by China and kept from starving by South Korea and Japan, Cuba gets oil for power stations from Venezuela, and so on.
That is, the wasteful industrial economies declining to manual economies had other wasteful industrial economies to back them up, and keep them at least only mixed-industrial. But imagine Poland or Cuba entirely on their own...
Whereas with global peak oil, no-one can back you up. If the world produces only (say) 50Mbbl/day, I really doubt that the US or Saudi Arabia are going to say, "dear Australia, wouldn't like to see you go under, here's a million barrels a day to keep you going."
In terms of the financial system, this article notes that each +/-1% in oil supply gives us +/-0.7% in GDP. I'd expect this effect not to be linear, though, but to have cascading effects.
pepper2000
great distinction between the amounts of energy necessary to change and the political disruption caused by deindustrilsation. I wasn't quite as coherent as you, but it was the point I was trying to make with my thoughts on possible regional secession in Texas. I'm not in favor, but I was raised with those greedy, narcistic bastards. A "major political catastrophe " is just S.O.P..
The giant empire is at an end without cheap transportation. Look at the practical administrative area of the Roman Empire as the limit, or any other number of empires pre-industrialisation. The Renaisance European empires wre based around water transportation routes because its impossible to supply an army very far with animal transportation, and rail is very vulnerable. Even if the countries maintain air with Kerosine from coal ect., air has proven ineffective to maintain a modern force, any number of modern attempted conquests prove that-the US can't even whip the Taliban who don't seem to be either popular or smart, or the Somali war lords.
So I expect the giant empires to break up. The US can keep their name on as much useless desert as it wants, the Canadians Alberta and the Russians can keep Siberia because of no native population, and wanting these areas? for specific resources. But empires with more than regional control?
The great part about this is it will make decent post-industrial societies possible. Energy resources which are renewable and easy to maintain with local industries can provide a new focus of wealth. And regional information centers will gain new importance as the autocrats commit suicide trying to overreach themselves to have the empires of their piratical ancestors. The key is going to be to build up local structures that can be maintained-wind farms, solar concentrators, chemical plants from lignite (brown coal) microhydro and tidal energy harvesting and have them near water transportation like oceans with natural ports the rivers and interstate canals, and oil that is producable at low but profitable rates.Two thousand foot wells that will ooze a couple of barrels a day forever and can be pumped with a horse' head on a timer, or a submersible. The other key is to build up local populations of aware and progressive folks that will maintain knowlege and tradition, but be unafraid of the future because they understand it and want to contribute as decent humanistic people.
Our only enemy is our own fears. That's why I deplore the people who try to stir up fantasies of fear and hopelessness. With human knowlege storable electronicially and so easily shared ther is unlikely to be another dark age unless we are fantasticly improvident, the breakdown of the megaempires will ensure that such fate never happens. Bob Ebersole