The Low Energy Trap

I recently read Joseph Tainter’s outstanding book “The Collapse of Complex Civilizations,” which I recommend. It should be required reading for all politicians. Tainter’s theory is one of diminishing returns to bureaucracy, which we are clearly experiencing across many societies today. He also proposes one historic escape mechanism from such a collapse: a big energy unlock. We had a shot at that in the 1960s when we started building nuclear power plants, but then starting in the 1980s we instead chose to focus on energy efficiency. That has us now caught in a low energy trap.

It is extraordinary to see energy prices spiking in many parts of the world at the same time. Yes, there is the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And we are experiencing a big heat wave as part of the accelerating climate crisis. But these are ultimately just excuses. We should have built an energy system with so much capacity that these events would just be blips that barely go noticed. Instead we are facing brownouts and blackouts and prices at ruinous levels for individuals and companies.

Degrowth advocates would have you believe that the answer is less. Less consumption. Less production. Less energy. I suppose that all of that is fine if you want to go backwards. If you advocate for that you should be required to spell out what human carrying capacity you believe is sustainable under degrowth, because it certainly isn’t 8 billion people. If a degrowth advocate came out and said point blank that under their proposals it would be only say 2 billion people, at least that would be intellectually honest and I would respect that as a coherent point of view.

Personally though I believe in going forward instead. As I have pointed out in The World After Capital, that doesn’t necessarily mean an ever growing population, as we are well on our way to peak population. But to avoid killing off billions along the way through societal collapse we need a lot more energy and we need it fast.

What does having a lot more energy let us do? For starters we can avoid the worst of the climate crisis by aggressively shifting to electrification of transportation, heating and cooling, production and so forth. We can also deal with water shortages through desalination. We can produce food in climate controlled environments. And we can fortify and upgrade our infrastructure to deal with more extreme weather. When we are done we will have extra energy for all sorts of amazing activities, like building great housing for everyone.

Now pessimists and defeatists will say: it is too late, we missed our chance and there’s nothing we can do at this point. And of course if we continue to operate at present course and speed they would be right. But this is not a physical or labor resource issue. This is entirely a question of political will. Because if we make a hard shift now we could build our way out within a decade. Extraordinary things become possible when we activate human attention and resources at scale, as we saw firsthand during the World War II production effort.

I wonder who will be the first politician to run on a wartime platform. For once not war against another country, but war against the low energy trap and the collapse of civilization that it leads to. I realize that we have abused the war metaphor with the war on drugs and other ill advised policies. But in this context it is called for because the level of mobilization required to escape the low energy trap will have to match that of World War II, which was roughly 50% of all economic activity.

With that level of resource deployment we could build massive energy capacity quickly (and would ideally do so globally). We should aggressively build out wind and solar further, but at the same time make massive investments in geothermal and nuclear power plants. Let’s get out of the low energy trap!