Early Hints of Hell

A Wall Street Journal book review today (of Alex Epstein’s The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels) says, in a prominent lift-out in big type: Renouncing oil and its byproducts would plunge civilization into a pre-industrial hell—a fact that developing countries keenly realize.

Now of course I love that word “renouncing”—as if as a collective we actually would or even could. But, sure enough, the rest of the statement has the smell of truth. When we run out of oil, we’ll certainly know it.

Perhaps Mother Nature, a bit irate about having her deep-lying blood sucked, is giving us early hints. What with global warming (or is it aging and unmaintained infrastructure), power failures are a whole lot common. As I think back over the last four decades or so, they were extremely rare earlier in that period and much more frequent in the last decade. At our old house we experienced a slew of them in the last five years—due to maintenance neglect by Detroit Edison. Having moved, we’ve already had one of those—due to weather.

Around here everybody is on wells—and the wells need electric power. Those who’re on the sewer system need electricity to send the waste to those pipes. Power failure means not only no water but, for the more advanced, also means no flushing. The work around, what with a lake next door or bordering the lot, is to haul water; and to go across the street to toilets that still empty into septic tanks. That still leaves sump pumps in those houses lucky to have basements. As for heating, furnaces don’t function without current either although they burn gas. A sensible but expensive solution is to invest in a full-sized generator, in effect a power plant for a single house only. Cost is around $10,000. These systems come on seconds after a power failure and everything stays on. They’re fueled by natural gas. Plans are firming up around here to have one of those babies installed in the near future.

Meanwhile we hope that our descents into pre-industrial hell won’t last but fractions of a day—and it isn’t raining heavily while they last—so that the sump pit in the basement doesn’t overflow. But after the gas runs out too, as inevitably it will, it will be time to rip that gas-fueled contraption (it looks like a stack of logs) out of the fireplace to see if it will actually burn wood which, by then, we’ll have to saw by hand. While the saw lasts…

Darnay the Younger, Cato the Elder

The difference is that I’m neither a senator nor famous—and that Marcus Porcius Cato wearied the world about the necessary destruction of Carthage whereas I weary the world (in an obscure blog or two or three) about the world inevitably running out of oil. Cato’s dictum, inserted in his speeches everywhere, context permitting or not, never mind, was Carthago delenda est (Carthage must be destroyed), whereas my mantra is The World will run out of oil; that, rendered into Google Latin, is Excurrat olei mundi.

Another difference is that I still have my hair whereas Cato had lost all of his, but we are equally attractive as we look in the mirror after a shower. And if I’m to live as long as he did (85), I’ve still got nine more years to go.

Now another, and even more telling, contrast between us is that in part Carthage was destroyed because Cato was, like, on and on. Meanwhile the world will run out of oil no matter what I say. In his case navies and armies had to be set sailing and marching, but in mine one needs but turn the key in the car—which requires neither much consciousness nor emotion. But without that key, that car, lordy, what would we do?

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Image of Marcus Porcius Cato (234-149 BC) from Wikipedia (link).

A Mundane Look at Har Megiddo

Apocalypse is seldom far from collective human concerns, but if my mentor Arnold Toynbee is on target, they rise to a loud chorus at the end-stage of civilizations. The first science fiction writer (at least in the modern sense) was Jules Verne (1828-1905); he is best known for such feats as submarines and lunar rockets. But the apocalyptic mood is already there in the nineteenth century in H.G. Wells The War of the Worlds. And after that worthy sci-fi series almost routinely feature a kind of cleansing of the historical slate by some kind of Armageddon produced by disease, atomic war, or alien invasion; some authors use all three.

Armageddon is named in Revelations 16:16. It is a kind of final battle of the kings of the earth, assembled by-frog like demonic spirits who issue from the mouth of the Beast (read Modernity). Indeed the kings come. And then comes the relevant verse 16: “And they [the demons] assembled them [the kings] at the place which is called in Hebrew Armageddon.”

Online Etymology Dictionary tells me that the Hebrew was actually Har Meggido, har being “mount”. The Greek version was Harmagedon, the Latin dropped the H. Wikipedia, in turn, informs me that this mount was a so-called tell, thus a man-made elevation serving to hold a fort guarding a major highway linking Egypt and Mesopotamia (the Via Maris, link); it was thus convenient for all those approaching kings. The choice of this place for the Last Battle by the author of Revelation suggest that he had a down-to-earth sense of the arrangements of his own time. The mount was a strategic military strong-point, and for the author of this book, the world was small enough so that the “kings of the whole world” could conveniently reach this central place from the north and east as well as from the south and west.

For the modern mind Armageddon requires a somewhat greater context. The roots of this post go back to last October when I put on LaMarotte (link) a well-reasoned estimate of how much time we still have until the world, at least as we now know it, will also come to an end. The subject has interested me because I’ve also written apocalyptic sci-fi novels; early on I saw the world collapse in atomic war, later in a space-borne disease; and later yet by running out of fossil fuels—but that last novel I never finished. Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published some very similar data. I am showing their projections and mine side by side in the following tabulation:

Fossil Fuel Category	Wall Street Journal (Year of Running Out)	My Own Projections (Year of Running Out)
Oil	2058	2081
Natural Gas	2071	2073
Coal	2094	not projected

Both the Wall Street Journal and I used the same basic estimates of existing reserves. The differences in projection are due to such things as guessing at future consumption growth and on the selection of beginning point. I used the highest available estimates of reserves and past consumption rates rather than increasing usage into the future. A conservative estimate. For that reason, perhaps, my projections are more sanguine.

Armageddon, in this civilization, is certainly coming. But it will be everywhere. As for when it takes places, most of us reading this will no longer be around; and babies born today will have reached a venerable old age. So there is nothing to worry about, actually, is there? Back to grabbing some of that gusto.