Stumbling Towards Apocalypse

What "Slouching Towards Utopia" gets right and wrong

By now, I imagine most long-time readers will know what my main objections to Slouching Towards Utopia are. The first and foremost being:

"It's the energy, stupid!"

One of the things the peak oil discussion highlighted was the vital role energy plays in our economy. Energy underpins everything in nature and in human systems. Energy is the currency of life. All biological lifeforms harness energy—plants (aka primary producers) use photosynthesis from incoming solar energy, while animals mostly use the adenosine triphosphate molecule, or ATP, which comes from consuming primary producers or other animals.

Humans were the first species to be able to harness and manipulate energy outside our bodies in the form of fire (that is, extrasomatic energy). It has been argued that the use of fire engendered biological changes in human physioanatomy, including a larger brain and smaller teeth and digestive tract, due to fire's ability to make food softer and its nutrients more bioavailable. Fire was also used to scare away predators, to keep warm in cold climates, in toolmaking (e.g. heating substances to make pitch or resin, etc.), and to reshape the natural environment (known to biologists as niche construction).

For all of human history, this ability marked us out from other species. We were able to use these tools and methods to intentionally reshape our habitat allowing us to divert more and more of the earth's primary productivity to our own use and away from other life forms. Niche construction, farming and domestication are all examples of this. These capabilities translated into population growth, just as Malthus predicted. However, no matter how clever or innovative we were, we were always constrained by the hard lid of earth's annual solar budget.

The Industrial Revolution kickstarted the process of harnessing of millions of years of stored sunlight in the form of fossil fuels which had been only sporadically used before. The key invention was the discovery of the thermodynamic cycle. All thermodynamic cycles turn heat into work in some form. Another term for this is a heat engine. Heat engines transfer energy from a heat source to a cold sink, harnessing the ability to do useful work in the process. That work can be translated, for example, into rotational energy, as in a car engine via a crankshaft, or directly via a turbine.

The most well-known thermodynamic cycle is the Otto cycle which powers the internal combustion engine used in most automobiles today. The Diesel cycle is another well-known one. Others include the Brayton cycle, which models gas turbines, the Rankine cycle, which models steam turbines, the Stirling cycle, which models hot air engines, and the Ericsson cycle, which also models hot air engines. (Wikipedia). The thermodynamic cycle can also be reversed, creating a heat pump. Heat pumps are used for air conditioning and the cold chain which allows perishable goods to be shipped around the world.

The understanding of energy and thermodynamics is one of humanity's greatest scientific achievements, and one which is still not sufficiently appreciated in my opinion. Energy flows are critical to the study of biology and ecology, however, they are absent from mainstream economics.

So the first major breakthrough was turning heat into work. The second was the discovery of massive deposits of hydrocarbons under the earth's surface representing a store of untapped energy not dependent on the sun's annual energy budget because it had been stockpiled over millions of years by previous solar energy budgets. To use a financial allegory, it was a stock rather than a flow, or a savings account as opposed to income. Hydrocarbons release energy by breaking the bonds between the hydrogen and carbon atoms. This reaction also produces waste products which have to go somewhere.

By combining these two discoveries, we were able to increase the amount of energy available to humanity by orders of magnitude in a very short time span. This is why Malthus's depiction fell so short of the mark. When he worked out his theory, the amount of energy available to humanity was still mostly limited by the earth's solar budget, although the key technologies had already been discovered. This was also an ideological limitation of Physiocracy, which was the very first school of economic thought.

This ability to harness energy on a vast scale and translate it into work caused the equivalent of billions of human workers to be suddenly added to the global labor pool. Moreover, these were workers who did not have to be birthed nor fed—no more eating for two and no need to clear massive amounts of land to feed them. Of course, these imaginary workers—often referred to as energy slaves—were not added to the global labor pool equally. They were mostly added to the labor pool of the global north, meaning that other parts of the world were still constrained by the earth's solar energy budget and the pool of human workers.

Nate Hagens summarized this thesis in a 2020 paper (my emphasis):

Major transitions in human societies over the past 10,000 years were linked to the benefits from different energy types and availability. Industrialization changed the historic human relationship of energy capture from using the daily flows of nature to using technology fueled by large amounts of cheap fossil energy.

One barrel of crude oil can perform about 1700 kW h of work. A human laborer can perform about 0.6 kW h in one workday. Simple arithmetic reveals it takes over 11 years of human labor to do the same work potential in a barrel of oil. Even if humans are 2.5x more efficient at converting energy to work, the energy in one barrel of oil substitutes approximately 4.5 years of physical human labor...

Although modern industrial output is energy inefficient, it is extremely cost efficient because fossil energy is much cheaper than human energy. This is the “fossil subsidy”, that makes modern profits, wages and standards of living considerably higher compared to previous civilizations based on diffuse renewable flows. The average human in 2015 produced 14 times more GDP than a person in 1800 – and the average American 49 times more! Modern Americans—via their energy subsidy—now have the physical metabolism of 30+ ton primates...

In 2018, the global economy ran on a constant 17 trillion watts of energy—enough to power over 170 billion 100-watt light bulbs continuously. Over 80% of this energy...was the 110 billion barrels of oil equivalents of fossil hydrocarbons that power (and is embodied in) our machines, transportation and infrastructure. At 4.5 years per barrel, this equates to the labor equivalent of more than 500 billion human workers (compared to ∼4 billion actual human workers).

The economic story of the 20th century was one of adding ancient solar productivity from underground to the agricultural productivity of the land. These fossil ‘armies’ are the foundation of the modern global economy and work tirelessly in thousands of industrial processes and transportation vectors. We didn’t pay for the creation of these armies of workers, only their liberation...

Economics for the future – Beyond the superorganism (Ecological Economics)

Why 1870?

This energy surplus—and the ability to harness it—was, I argue, the cause of what has been termed the Great Acceleration. Most economic historians focus only on the technological innovation aspect while ignoring the energy story completely. And while previous technological innovations did indeed make human labor a lot more efficient and produced bigger surpluses, they couldn't have lifted us out of the Malthusian trap without the consequent growth in our energy supply. Population would have eventually caught up, just a Malthus predicted.

But the question remains—what was so special about the 1870 date? If the fossil fuels and the thermodynamic cycle had already been discovered before then, why do we see this date as the beginning of the long twentieth century and not earlier?

It's difficult to say because there are so many confounding factors, but in my opinion, four things especially stand out:

1.) The discovery and exploitation of liquid fossil fuels (i.e. petroleum), and later, natural gas.

2.) The harnessing and deployment of the electromagnetic force (i.e. electricity).

3.) Advances in metallurgy.

4.) The assembly line.

Let's take a closer look at these:

1. It's notable that Hagens uses a barrel of oil as a work equivalent. While coal (and peat) was the first fuel of the industrial revolution, oil had qualities which made it superior in terms of energy density, usability, supply, and portability. Unlike coal, it can be transported via pipelines, which coal cannot (unless it is liquefied first). This allows oil to be transported much farther distances easily and cheaply.

Oil usage is generally traced back to the Drake Well drilled in Pennsylvania in 1859. Originally, petroleum was sought as a replacement for whale oil (spermaceti), which was used for lighting. Petroleum was refined into kerosene, which was used for oil lamps, with gasoline being a waste product. This waste product, however, turned out to be far more valuable as it could be used to power many different types of heat engines like the ones listed above. The use of kerosene for lighting eventually died out after the invention of electric lighting.

Natural gas, or methane, was originally also considered to be a waste product of oil drilling and was often flared off. Eventually, natural gas, too, became harnessed and transported through pipelines. Today, the substitution of natural gas for coal is driving lower carbon emissions. Methane is notably used as a feedstock for the Haber-Bosch process, which creates the fertilizer necessary for crop yields to be as high as they are. It has been estimated that the human population would be 1/3 lower without this process due to crop yield limitations.

2. Electricity. The harnessing of electricity is one of the great milestones in human invention. In my view, pretty much all of modernity has bootstrapped on the harnessing of this protean atomic force, including the laptop I'm using to write this. Electricity can be transported in high-voltage wires over long distances at the speed of light and used to do just about anything. The entire telecommunications/IT revolution would be impossible without it.

The timing works out. The first public electricity supply was a water wheel in Godalming, Surrey in 1881. This was followed by the first purpose-built electrical power stations: Edison's Pearl Street station in New York City and the Holborn Street Power Station in London, both coming online in 1882. Also in 1882 the first hydropower station was constructed in Appleton, Wisconsin and the Miesbach–Munich Power Transmission in Germany was the first long-distance transmission of direct current (DC) electrical energy. Starting in the 1890s and thereafter, alternating current (AC) started taking over. The Edward Dean Adams plant at Niagara Falls built in 1895 was the first large-scale AC generating plant.

Although surprising to us today, before the 1920s and 1930s, electrification was rare outside the major cities. Wikipedia notes that, “by the 1920s electricity was not delivered by power companies to rural areas because of the general belief that the infrastructure costs would not be recouped. In sparsely-populated farmland, there were far fewer houses per mile of installed electric lines.” The Tennessee Valley Authority was established by the Roosevelt Administration in 1933 to bring electricity to the rural, underdeveloped Tennessee Valley and served as a model for other places. The world's first national energy grid came online in the UK in 1935. In other words, all of this is quite recent—only about 100 years old or so.

Note from this chart that coal use overtakes wood (which was declining) for the first time in the 1880 time frame, and energy availability continually goes up from there as more sources come online. (source)

3. Advances in metallurgy. The Bessemer process was a major advance in steel production, but a bigger leap forward was the Siemens-Martin process which used the open-hearth furnace. These advances made it possible to make steel at a large-enough scale to make the other innovations of the Industrial Revolution possible, including railroads and steamships. The timing is right: the Bessemer process was patented in 1856 and the Siemens-Martin process was developed between 1857 and 1865.

4. The assembly line. I'm surprised DeLong did not mention this, as it's usually included even in conventional histories of how capitalism transformed daily life in the twentieth century. The idea for the assembly line came from the overhead conveyor belts used by meatpackers in Chicago which began being used in 1867. Henry Ford's moving assembly line went online in 1913 and could produce an automobile every 93 minutes.

Mass production, the assembly line, and interchangeable parts are commonly seen as making new inventions cheap enough to be available to the masses rather than just a few wealthy individuals. Some have even speculated that the electrification of the assembly line contributed to the Great Depression by producing a glut of goods far in excess of people's ability to buy them!

In fact, DeLong describes these innovations in great detail in chapter 2: Revving up the Engine of Technology Driven Growth. DeLong discusses the Siemens-Martin process on pages 63 and 64, and his description of AC power generation is the best I've read for the general public (I wish I could quote it, but it's quite long). However, he misses the basic driver that made all of these things possible: energy.

Without energy, there is no way to generate electricity (which is not an energy source). Without energy, there is no way to ship goods around the world or transport them to consumers in every remote town and village. Without energy there is no way to produce the vast amounts of steel and concrete that make modern infrastructure possible—including the water and sewer systems that reduce disease vectors. Without energy, there is no way to make enough fertilizer to stave off famine. Without energy there are no offshore platforms drilling a mile under the ocean floor. Without energy there is no artificial lighting and work stops once the sun goes down like it did in preindustrial times. Without energy most people have to work as farmers and ranchers to make sure there is enough food for everybody to eat. Without energy there is no industrial research laboratory to make those other innovations possible. I could go on.

At times, DeLong appears to acknowledge the role that energy and resources per capita played in increasing living standards, for example:

...we economists note that even as late as 1929 China produced only 20,000 tons of steel, less than 2 ounces per person, and 400,000 tons of iron, or 1.6 pounds per person. Meanwhile, it mined 27 million tons of coal, or 100 pounds per person. Compare this to America's 700 pounds of steel per capita in the same year or 200 pounds in 1900, or to America's 8,000 pounds of coal per capita in 1929 or 5,000 pounds of coal per capita in 1900. (pp. 124-125)

And:

The tripling of world oil prices worked its way through the economy like a wave, which then flooded and passed through the economy again and again—not a one-time rise in the price level, but a permanent upward ratchet of the inflation rate. The rising rate of inflation from 1965 to 1973 predisposed people to take last year's inflation as a signal of what next year's inflation would be... (p 432).

But he never makes the explicit connection between the energy cost and availability and the exponential rise in economic growth and living standards.

In addition, I think two other important factors should be considered:

5.) Political struggles waged by workers which forced more of the industrial surplus to be diverted the common man rather than hoarded by wealthy elites.

It's hard not to be struck by the timing of the increase in living standards and major events in labor/capital conflicts. For example, the Great Upheaval in the United States began in 1877 which was a railroad strike that affected the entire nation. The Haymarket Affair, which enshrined May 1 as International Workers Day, happened in 1886. In both of these incidents, many people lost their lives. Nor were those the end of conflict. The Coal Wars took place from 1890 to 1930 in many places across the US.

Similar struggles unfolded in Europe and elsewhere—basically everyplace that industrialized. The Paris Commune took place in 1871. The German government under Bismarck was the first country to introduce national health insurance in 1883, followed by accident insurance in 1884, disability insurance in 1889, and unemployment insurance in 1927. These programs were expressly designed to take the wind out of the sails of socialist movements. In Great Britain, the Liberal Reforms were passed between 1906 and 1914, including old age pensions, free school meals, National Insurance and labor exchanges (BBC).

Is that a coincidence? This seems hard to believe when you overlay the timeline of worker organization and increases in pay and living standards. While DeLong discusses some of these events in chapter 3, Democratizing the Global North, he places them in an overall context of democratization and doesn't appear to give them much credit in the ensuing broad-based prosperity after 1870 compared to what came before. On the other hand, I think these political changes are significant in explaining why the 1870 date is important in rising living standards across all of society rather than just a small elite as in the early days Industrial Revolution, and why living standards have stagnated or degraded in the subsequent neoliberal era.

6.) Centralized governments became powerful enough to implement public health measures. This—along with increased availability of food due to global trade, especially from breadbaskets in North America and Ukraine and beef from the American West and the Pampas—led to lower death rates, lower infant mortality, and other biological markers of improved health.

The germ theory of disease and the invention of medical research labs (just as important—if not moreso—than technological research labs) also led to further public health improvements. I recall a doctor saying in a lecture that the three biggest contributors to public health were 1.) better nutrition, 2.) improved sanitation, and 3.) antibiotics. Everything else is a footnote.

Here, too, we see a number of landmarks after 1870. Events in London like the 1854 Broad Street Cholera outbreak and the Great Stink prompted investment in improved sanitation. Sir Joseph Bazalgette's engineering initiatives reduced cholera epidemics in London as well as typhus and typhoid outbreaks, contributing to lower disease mortality. Louis Pasteur administered vaccines for animal diseases in 1880 and 1881. In the 1860's, based on Pasteur's work and that of Ignaz Semmelweis, Joseph Lister pioneered antiseptic surgery using carbolic acid. In 1884, Robert Koch argued for the causality between microorganisms and disease, later known as the germ theory of disease. These discoveries are strangely absent from DeLong’s text.

In my view, DeLong's timeline of the long twentieth century can more easily be explained by these key technological breakthroughs than by his three factors of globalization, the corporation and the industrial research lab. I see these as epiphenomena of the fundamental cause which was the extraordinarily sudden—and almost accidental—increase in surplus energy available to humanity. These really came into their own only after 1870 with the discovery and harnessing of petroleum and natural gas, the deployment of alternating current electricity, the assembly line, and the germ theory of disease, along with political struggles.

Corporations had been around a long time by 1870. Globalization made a big difference, certainly, but we can't dismiss the fact that what made globalization possible was the energy that allowed ships to get bigger and faster and move around the world even in the absence of wind. Telecommunications technologies like the telegraph would not have been possible without an understanding of electromagnetism, nor would modern computing.

The industrial research lab is a bit closer to the mark, but what was happening in those research labs is just as important as the existence of the lab itself, and most of it was finding new ways to harvest the energy surplus and turn it into useful (and profitable) technologies. Each discovery built upon previous discoveries, and none of them would have been possible without the energy surplus. The amount of surplus was so immense that it was simply impossible for human reproduction to outpace it the way Malthus assumed it always would. However, disparities in energy per capita would explain much of the unevenness of this growth around the world, and why some places remained impoverished.

The Future

What does this alternative explanation of the long twentieth century portend for the future?

Well, the first and most obvious problem is that fossil fuels are finite, and will eventually be exhausted, just like a bank account being drawn down that is not receiving new deposits.

The energy gradient which powered the long twentieth century has gone into decline. I've written about this before. My long twentieth century is the American one between 1870 and 1970 (which just happens to be about a hundred years). That was a time of unprecedented growth in living standards for the average American. People began to see higher living standards as a birthright rather than an aberration—the so-called "American Dream." During this timeframe, periods of economic growth and recession almost perfectly correlated to the price of oil, which does not seem like a coincidence.

In addition, the economic gains of the long twentieth century can only be realized once. You can only electrify once. You can only get mass literacy once. You can only build the Interstate Highway system once. You can only send women into the workforce once. You can only invent heat engines and antibiotics once. The economist Robert Gordon is cited in the text, but his major thesis is strangely omitted. He believed that the inventions that had fundamentally transformed people's lives had already been fully integrated by the early 2000s, and that future innovations would not be able to produce results that were anywhere near as dramatic or transformative as previous inventions, hence future growth would necessarily be lower than past growth.

Gordon's thesis was, of course, widely pilloried in the media and treated with disdain by economists. Gordon himself, in fact, walked it back, despite his prediction of slower growth being accurate. In the years since, every new technology has been touted as miraculously causing huge growth gains like those from 1870-1900. The list of candidates is long, from cell phones, to electric cars, to pharmaceuticals, to cryptocurrency, to the latest hype: artificial intelligence (AI). In fact, I would go so far as to argue that many recent innovations are actually detrimental, regardless of how much money they make for investors and corporations.

Another is that we now know that treating the planet's atmosphere as an open sewer—without which the Industrial Revolution would not have been possible—has dire consequences. This was speculated as far back as the 1880s, but is now the general consensus. Climate change is happening even more rapidly than scientists feared.

I'm skeptical that we can go back to living within the planet's annual solar energy budget the way we did before the Industrial Revolution and still be able to maintain kind of infinite growth, globe-spanning, corporate capitalist economies that we've been living under during the long twentieth century. Renewable technologies rely on diffuse, intermittent energy flows, and when the fossil fuel subsidy goes into permanent decline, it's difficult to see how we keep economic growth going (genuine growth, not just an increase in monetary transactions) and living standards rising. I just don't see how the math works out.

An alternate to the economists' view was the World3 model in The Limits to Growth which used systems modelling techniques like inputs and feedback unlike the simplistic models used by economists which see resources as infinite and pollution as negligible. Economics also does not take account of energy or population, unlike the World3 model. When we look at The Limits to Growth, it's no surprise why the long twentieth century is finally coming to an end, and why another economic El Dorado is not on the horizon:

There is very little doubt that we are in the final decade of growth. Growth is already starting to level off as we approach the peak, and degrowth will necessarily begin soon. Importantly, we are depleting not only non-renewable resources, but also renewable ones at an alarming rate, by over-consuming faster than they can renew. The resulting overshoot has effectively caused the resource-providing capacity of our ecosystem to permanently decline.

Collapse is 100% going to happen and very soon. Any outcome past the current day is unknown, but we would have had to make radical changes as far back as 1972 to actually avoid it... we did not. In 1972, the collapse was predicted to occur around 2024. It is now 2024 and we have followed most of their predictions reasonably closely, and nothing has been done to change our trajectory in the last 50 years. We're in the final years now. Optimistically, I would say we have no more than 3-5 years left, at most... although a true "best case" scenario has us running out even sooner, because the more we grow the harder we fall.

2023 recalibration of 1972 BAU projections from Limits of Growth (Reddit)

Of course, with the technology at our disposal we can still lead far better lives than people who lived before the long twentieth century. After all, we still have things like electricity, mass production and the germ theory of disease, among others. But our slavish adherence to the endless growth model developed during a very unique period in history may condemn us to losing even some of those hard-won things. Rather than slouching towards utopia, I fear that—due to our current economic and political situation—we may be stumbling towards apocalypse.

Fun fact: while this long twentieth century seems so transformative to us humans, many lifeforms were alive for the beginning of it and were alive at the end of it. Jonathan the tortoise was born in 1832 and is still alive today.