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Societies beyond Oil: Oil Dregs and Social Futures
What would a de-carbonised society be like? What are the implications of a general de-globalisation for our social futures? How will our high-carbon patterns of life be restructured in a de-energized world?
As global society gradually wakes up to the new reality of peak oil, these questions remain unanswered. For the last hundred years oil made the world go round, and as we move into the century of 'tough oil' this book examines some profound consequences. It considers what societies would be like that are powering down; what lessons can be learned from the past about de-energized societies; will there be rationing systems or just the market to allocate scarce energy? Can virtual worlds solve energy problems? What levels of income and wellbeing would be likely?
In this groundbreaking book, John Urry analyzes how the twentieth century created a kind of mirage of the future that is unsustainable into even the medium term and envisions the future of an oil-dependent world facing energy descent. Without a large-scale plan B, how can the energizing of society possibly be going into reverse?
As global society gradually wakes up to the new reality of peak oil, these questions remain unanswered. For the last hundred years oil made the world go round, and as we move into the century of 'tough oil' this book examines some profound consequences. It considers what societies would be like that are powering down; what lessons can be learned from the past about de-energized societies; will there be rationing systems or just the market to allocate scarce energy? Can virtual worlds solve energy problems? What levels of income and wellbeing would be likely?
In this groundbreaking book, John Urry analyzes how the twentieth century created a kind of mirage of the future that is unsustainable into even the medium term and envisions the future of an oil-dependent world facing energy descent. Without a large-scale plan B, how can the energizing of society possibly be going into reverse?
304 pages, Paperback
First published January 10, 2013
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October 16, 2019
The last hundred years or so have been powered by the availability of cheap and easy to extract oil. This book provides a bit of a history of how we became quite so dependent on oil. It also explains why ending that dependency is likely to prove harder than most of us imagine. Not least since we have designed our world on the assumption of endless supplies of virtually costless oil – and, as the author makes all too clear, the bill for what we had taken to be a free lunch has now fallen due.
When I was a child, let’s say around 1970, my mother used to get me to go around to the local petrol station with a large tin can that I could barely carry once it was filled with kerosene. We had a portable kerosene heater at the time. I remember liking the smell of the fuel burning, but I haven’t smelt that for decades and can’t really bring it back to mind. I remember the metal handle used to dig in deep into the palm of my hand. If you’d asked me, I would have said it was a five gallon drum, but that would make it weigh about 20 kilograms, and that seems far too much for an eight year old to carry. It still surprises me that the man at the petrol station would fill up a container of that size with a highly inflammable liquid and allow a child to take it away with him. They were very trusting times, it seems. I wonder if my mother would have thought twice about sending me on this errand if she had known kerosene is aircraft fuel? Somehow that sounds much more dangerous. When all this was going on the world’s population was getting close to 4 billion people.
Kerosene was first used for lighting – whale oil had become expensive, and that was for similar reasons to why oil is becoming expensive now – overuse of a limited resource.
Koala’s are very cute animals, but they have made their way down a very narrow evolutionary cul-de-sac. This is because they eat, and only can eat, the leaves of one type of tree. As that tree disappears (with more than a little help from Australians who like nothing better than the sound of trees hitting the ground) koalas are going to too. The evolutionary lesson here might seem to be, if you can, become an omnivore. Humans can also be quite cute. And we humans like to think of themselves as omnivores – however, truth be told, we really only eat oil. Oil transports our food to us, it provides the fertilizers to grow it, it powers the farm equipment we use to harvest it... All of which will be a bit of a problem if we were ever to run low on super cheap oil.
The super cheap part of this has contributed to the problem here. We have never valued oil at anything like its real value. Bottled water is more expensive.
I didn’t learn to drive until relatively late, I was in my early 20s. By that time the population of the world was nearly 5 billion people. Driving doesn’t feel like a luxury in Australia. Melbourne prior to the 1950s radiated out from the centre of the city in long fingers with empty gaps between them. This was because politicians in the late 1880s had made a fortune building train lines – although, the real fortune was made in insider trading, buying land beside where the lines were to be laid and then selling it after they announced the location. The land that was too far away to walk to one of these lines remained basically empty of people. The car changed all that. It also pushed the size of the city further and further out, making it impossible for those who lived in the outer suburbs to do anything other than get around by car. The car created the modern suburban city – very much a mixed blessing, causing social isolation on quarter-acre blocks and endless suburbs with limited infrastructure.
I started working as a trade union organiser in 2001, on the day in September after some crazy guys flew their planes into various monumental buildings in the US. The population of the planet at the time had only recently clicked over to 6 billion. A large part of my job involved driving around the state of Victoria to meet up with members of my union. I drove over 40,000 km per year for the eight years I worked there. I used to joke to people that that meant I drove the equivalent of once around the equator each year.
I used to have to drive around the state to visit members who were working in the water industry. A lot of their work was complicated by the fact that we’d been in drought for much of the 8 years I worked for the union. By the time I left the union the population of the world was nearly 7 billion. Those people, as I said before, owe their lives, no matter how brutish, violent or short, to the easy availability of large quantities of nearly free energy derived from oil.
But peak oil has been and gone. These things are hard to really know, since countries such as Saudi Arabia don’t tell us how much oil they have left, but we are on the downward slope. All the same, our thirst for oil has proven insatiable. That means that the oil we will be getting from now on will be increasingly hard to obtain, even if burning it didn’t accelerate climate change. That is going to be a problem because that also means that oil will be more expensive. That is an issue because we are going to need lots and lots more cheap energy very soon if we want to sustain our lifestyles – never mind if people in the developing world are to have lifestyles that approximate ours.
China is the real testcase here. Most of the lifting of people out of poverty that has occurred recently has all been down to China, a nation that gets praised for being capitalist when it lifts people out of poverty and communist when it represses the citizens of Hong Kong – I guess it must be a kind of Schrödinger's nation. This book makes it clear that in that shift from poverty China has learnt few lessons at all from the terrible experiences of the developed world. Not that there is much incentive for them to learn from that experience, of course. The US, for example, with around 5% of the world’s population, and uses a quarter of the world’s oil. The US stranglehold on world resources helps explain its need for military bases all over the world and its propensity for going to war, something Presidents even boast about – saying the US way of life is non-negotiable, even if the US consumes five times its share. But then, lots of things prove non-negotiable, and I suspect physics and chemistry may be similarly stubborn.
I had hoped that hydrogen might prove to be the hero that would jump in right at the last moment, the deus ex machina that, despite the increasingly irresolvable plot, saves the day at the last moment – but the author makes it clear that any technological fix is going to require significant infrastructure and will have many problems of its own to address – hydrogen being a corrosive, for example – and so if we are now five minutes to midnight, we might end up needing more than five minutes to implement that new technology.
The author provides a number of possible futures for us, these are interesting and many of them might even provide you with some hope that things will not necessarily be as bad as they could be – but as one of the world’s great pessimists, I think the most likely scenario is that we run out of oil, we don’t have a viable alternative, we start running out of water and food too and everything turns incredibly nasty relatively quickly. That this is even a remote possibility ought to motivate us to do some pretty urgent mitigation work right about now. But mostly the only urgent work being done is lip service. The free lunch is over – the bill is due, but we still behave as if the past is the only future available to us. But that past can’t be our future. Something needs to give.
The word ‘crisis’ is overused. But what I like most about it is that it is from Greek and means ‘decision’. That is, it is the point at which a choice must be made – at the moment the choice we are making is ‘business as usual’ – that will have consequences too, of course, consequences that will bring about yet more crisis points.
When I was a child, let’s say around 1970, my mother used to get me to go around to the local petrol station with a large tin can that I could barely carry once it was filled with kerosene. We had a portable kerosene heater at the time. I remember liking the smell of the fuel burning, but I haven’t smelt that for decades and can’t really bring it back to mind. I remember the metal handle used to dig in deep into the palm of my hand. If you’d asked me, I would have said it was a five gallon drum, but that would make it weigh about 20 kilograms, and that seems far too much for an eight year old to carry. It still surprises me that the man at the petrol station would fill up a container of that size with a highly inflammable liquid and allow a child to take it away with him. They were very trusting times, it seems. I wonder if my mother would have thought twice about sending me on this errand if she had known kerosene is aircraft fuel? Somehow that sounds much more dangerous. When all this was going on the world’s population was getting close to 4 billion people.
Kerosene was first used for lighting – whale oil had become expensive, and that was for similar reasons to why oil is becoming expensive now – overuse of a limited resource.
Koala’s are very cute animals, but they have made their way down a very narrow evolutionary cul-de-sac. This is because they eat, and only can eat, the leaves of one type of tree. As that tree disappears (with more than a little help from Australians who like nothing better than the sound of trees hitting the ground) koalas are going to too. The evolutionary lesson here might seem to be, if you can, become an omnivore. Humans can also be quite cute. And we humans like to think of themselves as omnivores – however, truth be told, we really only eat oil. Oil transports our food to us, it provides the fertilizers to grow it, it powers the farm equipment we use to harvest it... All of which will be a bit of a problem if we were ever to run low on super cheap oil.
The super cheap part of this has contributed to the problem here. We have never valued oil at anything like its real value. Bottled water is more expensive.
I didn’t learn to drive until relatively late, I was in my early 20s. By that time the population of the world was nearly 5 billion people. Driving doesn’t feel like a luxury in Australia. Melbourne prior to the 1950s radiated out from the centre of the city in long fingers with empty gaps between them. This was because politicians in the late 1880s had made a fortune building train lines – although, the real fortune was made in insider trading, buying land beside where the lines were to be laid and then selling it after they announced the location. The land that was too far away to walk to one of these lines remained basically empty of people. The car changed all that. It also pushed the size of the city further and further out, making it impossible for those who lived in the outer suburbs to do anything other than get around by car. The car created the modern suburban city – very much a mixed blessing, causing social isolation on quarter-acre blocks and endless suburbs with limited infrastructure.
I started working as a trade union organiser in 2001, on the day in September after some crazy guys flew their planes into various monumental buildings in the US. The population of the planet at the time had only recently clicked over to 6 billion. A large part of my job involved driving around the state of Victoria to meet up with members of my union. I drove over 40,000 km per year for the eight years I worked there. I used to joke to people that that meant I drove the equivalent of once around the equator each year.
I used to have to drive around the state to visit members who were working in the water industry. A lot of their work was complicated by the fact that we’d been in drought for much of the 8 years I worked for the union. By the time I left the union the population of the world was nearly 7 billion. Those people, as I said before, owe their lives, no matter how brutish, violent or short, to the easy availability of large quantities of nearly free energy derived from oil.
But peak oil has been and gone. These things are hard to really know, since countries such as Saudi Arabia don’t tell us how much oil they have left, but we are on the downward slope. All the same, our thirst for oil has proven insatiable. That means that the oil we will be getting from now on will be increasingly hard to obtain, even if burning it didn’t accelerate climate change. That is going to be a problem because that also means that oil will be more expensive. That is an issue because we are going to need lots and lots more cheap energy very soon if we want to sustain our lifestyles – never mind if people in the developing world are to have lifestyles that approximate ours.
China is the real testcase here. Most of the lifting of people out of poverty that has occurred recently has all been down to China, a nation that gets praised for being capitalist when it lifts people out of poverty and communist when it represses the citizens of Hong Kong – I guess it must be a kind of Schrödinger's nation. This book makes it clear that in that shift from poverty China has learnt few lessons at all from the terrible experiences of the developed world. Not that there is much incentive for them to learn from that experience, of course. The US, for example, with around 5% of the world’s population, and uses a quarter of the world’s oil. The US stranglehold on world resources helps explain its need for military bases all over the world and its propensity for going to war, something Presidents even boast about – saying the US way of life is non-negotiable, even if the US consumes five times its share. But then, lots of things prove non-negotiable, and I suspect physics and chemistry may be similarly stubborn.
I had hoped that hydrogen might prove to be the hero that would jump in right at the last moment, the deus ex machina that, despite the increasingly irresolvable plot, saves the day at the last moment – but the author makes it clear that any technological fix is going to require significant infrastructure and will have many problems of its own to address – hydrogen being a corrosive, for example – and so if we are now five minutes to midnight, we might end up needing more than five minutes to implement that new technology.
The author provides a number of possible futures for us, these are interesting and many of them might even provide you with some hope that things will not necessarily be as bad as they could be – but as one of the world’s great pessimists, I think the most likely scenario is that we run out of oil, we don’t have a viable alternative, we start running out of water and food too and everything turns incredibly nasty relatively quickly. That this is even a remote possibility ought to motivate us to do some pretty urgent mitigation work right about now. But mostly the only urgent work being done is lip service. The free lunch is over – the bill is due, but we still behave as if the past is the only future available to us. But that past can’t be our future. Something needs to give.
The word ‘crisis’ is overused. But what I like most about it is that it is from Greek and means ‘decision’. That is, it is the point at which a choice must be made – at the moment the choice we are making is ‘business as usual’ – that will have consequences too, of course, consequences that will bring about yet more crisis points.
August 9, 2016
A somewhat useful introductory survey to peak oiler concerns. Style is easy to read but stilted - academese that has been rendered into a more journalistic form, but in a rather wooden manner. The book's treatment of energy in history is, as is all too common in such books, very overdeterministic, but some points are well taken. The four futurist scenarios - optimistic technogrowth, virtual lives, resource wars, and liberal relocalisation seem useful markers, though I know the market is flooded with these and I haven't been keeping up to date.
There is actually remarkably little in terms of 'sociology' in this book - I had expected a less materialist angle and wanted to hear more about alternative ideas of economic organisation, religion, non-Western views, etc. In Urry's world, western-style liberal capitalism (albeit a more powered down, local, civil society-infused form) is the most desirable end game in town. Almost Fukuyama-ish in some ways. But the notion that greater economic participation (more people making Apps!!!) implies more participatory democracy is rather limiting in imagination. Why not start from the other way around instead?
There is actually remarkably little in terms of 'sociology' in this book - I had expected a less materialist angle and wanted to hear more about alternative ideas of economic organisation, religion, non-Western views, etc. In Urry's world, western-style liberal capitalism (albeit a more powered down, local, civil society-infused form) is the most desirable end game in town. Almost Fukuyama-ish in some ways. But the notion that greater economic participation (more people making Apps!!!) implies more participatory democracy is rather limiting in imagination. Why not start from the other way around instead?
January 8, 2020
Although the aggressive proliferation of fracking in the US and the subsequent ramp-up in US oil production has blown the book’s core hypothesis out of the water, I still found the book to be a thought provoking read that, among other things, underscored the intractability of the problem of climate change and the sheer complexity of the work we have at hand.
Checking into “oil rehab” is probably Step 1 in a long laundry list of things to do in order to limit climate change.
Checking into “oil rehab” is probably Step 1 in a long laundry list of things to do in order to limit climate change.
April 6, 2017
Really interesting topic. well researched. Surprising to get a sociologist writing about climate change and sustainability. he presents a good and fairly short(!) synopsis of the history and use of oil and its impact on modern society. He presents a thorough theory about the impact oil has had on developing modern day life.
Often books like this stop at that point and don't address the future but the author devotes 30% of the book to the future. he outlines 4 scenarios and also a summary of whats likely to happen. All fairly gloomy I am afraid but thats probably the reality. the book is now 4 years old which is quite a lot in this field. But its still well worth the read.
Often books like this stop at that point and don't address the future but the author devotes 30% of the book to the future. he outlines 4 scenarios and also a summary of whats likely to happen. All fairly gloomy I am afraid but thats probably the reality. the book is now 4 years old which is quite a lot in this field. But its still well worth the read.
April 13, 2013
This book was really interesting. It really fleshed out the problems the world is facing with oil and also explores four possible futures, on a spectrum of everything's still good to the whole world has collapsed.
Displaying 1 - 5 of 5 reviews