Visions of a Post-Oil Civilization

Since the beginning of humans on Earth, when cave dwellers first moved into the neighborhood and painted the walls of their caves with pictures of the Wooly Mammoth brought home to feed their families, mankind has been trying to better itself. Until recently, we have lived within our means and in harmony with the environment. The total population of humans on Earth stayed under one billion until around the year 1804 [1], which could be argued as the optimum carrying capacity of the planet, considering how long we stayed below that level.

Coincidentally, around that time, we also saw the rise of the Industrial Age, when money and power became more important than humanity’s future [2]. We began using carbon-based products such as petroleum, coal, and natural gas to power agriculture, refrigeration, transportation, and distribution, as well as providing chemicals for insecticides, pesticides, and fertilizer and later adding plastics that enabled humanity to produce, preserve, and deliver more food for more people and to more distant corners of the Earth. The additional availability of food made for a sudden and spectacular increase in the world population on the long archeologic scale, to over 8 billion humans today in just slightly more than 200 years versus the previous fifty thousand years or so.

If we agree that using carbon-based resources such as petroleum, coal, and natural gas provide the foundation and energy required for an extra 7 billion humans to exist on this planet, what happens when that foundation is removed? We are assured that it will be gone, one way or another, either due to the mounting environmental problems or it will simply run out. When that happens, will the total population eventually drop back to 1 billion or fewer people as it was for millennia?

Every significant increase in the world population has come about as a result of new energy sources increasing the carrying capacity [3] and the most significant increase of the past 200 or so years has come about as a result of oil. As stated above, it also gave us the additional benefits of modern chemistry. However, as we look to a future without oil, it becomes difficult to calculate how many billions of people our planet’s ecosystem will support.

Will technology that was not available for the past ten thousand years enable us to feed more than one billion people? For that matter, will there be more than one billion people? O’Sullivan asserts that:

“Unless political will is rapidly restored for voluntary family planning programs, the global population will almost certainly exceed 10 billion, rendering sustainable food security and a safe climate unachievable”  [4, p1].

Some claim the carrying capacity of the Earth to be as low as one billion people and others as high as 10 to 11 billion, but most base that upper number on using current agricultural practices that include the use of mechanized farm equipment and chemical fertilizers, insecticides, and pesticides along with various means of preservation and distribution. These things will disappear when the small amounts of remaining oil become too expensive to extract, in either dollars or environmental damage, and we run out. If sustainability is the goal, then we must find an equilibrium within the natural capacity of the planet.

Studies have shown that it would take approximately one hectare of fertile ground to feed a family of 4 with simple maize using old-fashioned manual slash-and-burn farming techniques [5] or 0.25 hectares per person. Maize is grain corn and on its own, makes for a very poor diet. But in theory, counting only kilocalories, it can provide the minimal number of calories required for survival. However, adequate nutrition requires more than just calories to maintain a healthy life.

But here is the rub: according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, in 2016 there were around 4.8 billion hectares of farmland worldwide of which a third is used for crops and the remainder for grazing livestock [6]. Arable land requires adequate organic matter and minerals, with proper amounts of water, sunlight, and temperatures. Since the human population has grown, the strain on agricultural land, a limited resource, has also grown. The available global cropland per person decreased to 0.21 hectares per person in 2016, down from 0.45 hectares in 1961 [7]. This means that with 10 billion people, the available farmland does not feed all 4 family members, most of whom will not know about farming anyway.

Add to that the distribution problems of a world without carbon-based transportation systems, and we feed even fewer people. With these limitations, we know that agriculture must change the way it operates, and we must change what we eat. Certainly, big agriculture and factory farms must devolve. Their supply chains are impossibly long and they rely far too heavily on carbon-based fuel from planting to harvest. Logistics and transportation of food must change drastically.

A viable solution is to significantly shorten the supply chains and the only way to do that in a world without long-haul transportation is to make the geographic distances shorter. The future of humanity may have to change from big city living to rural isolates, small villages, surrounded by small family-operated farms. Commerce will be primarily local, with occasional trade items brought from one village to another via pack trains or whatever electric vehicles remain until those too are worn out without replacement parts.

Commerce will change on a fundamental level. Instead of dollars, we may trade in FIBs (Food It’ll Buy) as a monetary unit. Bitcoin will evaporate as will Non-Fungible Tokens and other ridiculous concepts. The stock market will cease to exist as it looks today. In a future where trades of pork or poultry for bushels of wheat are being made locally, there will be no interest in a stock exchange on Wall Street. A shovel and a hoe will have more value than corporate stocks as we might use old dollar notes to light warming fires in our brick fireplaces and pot belly stoves.

On the subject of heating and cooling, consider the large homes being built today. At 4000 to 6000 square feet, even the electrical bills of today are huge to keep them warm in winter and cool in the summer. Now consider cross-cutting and splitting enough firewood to keep that gigantic shell of a house warm in the winter and having no way to cool it in the summer unless you possess some of the remaining solar panels to drive your air conditioner.

In the future, big cities may be abandoned for lack of food, water, and security. At first, some neighboring isolates will fight one another and expand and contract until they finally settle into a peaceful co-existence as tribes. We will find that in every corner of the Earth, the indigenous people who originally lived there were much better in their ecosystem management and much smarter in those areas that really support life. Unless we can convince the world at large that our carbon-based lifestyle has a built-in expiration date, namely when the energy is gone.

References:

[1] Population Division Department of Economic and Social Affairs United Nations Secretariat. The World at Six Billion. October 12, 1999.

[2] Britannica, The Editors of Encyclopaedia. “Industrial Revolution”. Encyclopedia Britannica, February 8, 2024. Accessed 16 February 2024.

[3] Zabel, Graham, April 20, 2009. Resilience, Peak People: The Interrelationship between Population Growth and Energy Resources

[4] O’Sullivan, Jane N., September 2023. World 4(3):545-568, Demographic Delusions: World Population Growth Is Exceeding Most Projections and Jeopardizing Scenarios for Sustainable Futures

[5] David Pimentel Ph.D., Marcia H. Pimentel M.S. Food, Energy, and Society. Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2008.

[6] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Land use statistics and indicators.Global, regional, and country trends 1990–2019
FAOSTAT Analytical Brief 28.

[7] Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations. Land use in agriculture by the numbers, 07 May 2020.

Richard Durrenberg retired from the US Forest Service. He has an MA in Education from Chapman University and a BS in Industrial Technology from Southern Illinois University, where he taught various manufacturing courses in their military campuses at Travis AFB and Mare Island Naval Shipyard. Richard has been independently studying Peak Oil and Post-Oil Civilization for twelve years and has presented seminars on the subject at the University of Dayton’s Osher Lifelong Learning Institute. He is currently in graduate study for the Master of Sustainability, Security, and Resilience program at Ohio University.

The MAHB Blog is a venture of the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere. Questions should be directed to joan@mahbonline.org