Can an information economy replace our fossil fuel economy?

Evolution has for three billion years proceeded, despite a few dramatic setbacks, to move life from a few simple pools of bacterial slime to colonies of multicellular animals, then to advanced life forms living in complex ecosystems such as rainforests and coral reefs. Throughout this unimaginable period of time the matter and energy available to life has remained constant - the Earth has remained the same size and the Sun, our energy source, has remained roughly the same temperature - yet it has been possible for individual organisms to become ever more advanced and intelligent and social structures to become ever more complex.

Despite this dramatic growth and development, the Earth's resources were not consumed nor did life suffer an energy crisis or global pollution. Living systems, simple or complex, survive upon the approximately one kilowatt per square metre of energy provided almost eternally by the Sun and upon the same eternally recycled resources used by their ancestors over previous millennia.

The same is true of human evolution; the Earth's limited resources and energy supplies have not limited the evolution of the human brain. It is probable that a citizen of ancient Athens used no more energy or resources than an inhabitant of a Greek cave in the Stone Age - they would even have grown their crops in the same recycled soil - yet they achieved a vastly higher quality of life.

Dreams of a great escape
Something then happened a few hundred years ago that changed the way we thought about progress. We discovered additional energy resources in the form of coal and then oil. Coal fuelled the industrial revolution in Britain and then oil fuelled the global process of 'development'. Liberated, as we saw it, from the limits set by the one kilowatt per square metre of energy provided by the Sun and the need to live on the recycled resources of previous generations, we envisioned futures of ever increasing energy and resource consumption. The idea developed that hitherto we had been 'bound by nature' but that now we were ready to free ourselves. We could have unlimited material goods, we could travel anywhere and buy goods from everywhere, trade would be global, nuclear energy would be too cheap to meter, we could use it to level mountains to make agricultural land, we would live in cities levitated by magnetic fields, eventually we would all have our own personal spaceships and 'escape' from the Earth to colonise the galaxy.

The ideology suited those in power in almost every kind of nation; it was expressed both in the form of the 'American Dream', (though it is just as much the European's dream!) promulgated by big business to increase their sales, and in the form of the technocratic visions of Stalin's Soviet Union, designed to boost the centralised power of his military-industrial state. Increased consumption of energy and resources was seen not merely as a possibility but as a duty. Nations were no longer ranked in terms of their cultural advancement, quality of life or social complexity but by how much energy they used, how much plastic they produced and how much money each citizen, in consequence, was able to earn and spend. Anyone who stated that such a future was either undesirable or unsustainable was denounced as anti-progress, anti-science or even anti-human.

Waking from the dream of eternal growth

Whilst the wealthiest nations have proceeded some way with this new model of development, it is becoming clearer to all that the longer term aims cannot be achieved for long or by many. Maybe there are the resources for the few hundred million Europeans and Americans of this generation to fly each year to another continent for their holidays, to eat green beans flown in from Africa, to own a fridge, freezer, dishwasher, washing machine, car and television - but it is impossible for all six billion inhabitants of the planet to have these or even for generation after generation of wealthy westerners to have them. And looking further ahead, if even in the wealthiest nation we cannot make our deserts inhabitable or prevent the creation of new deserts then what hope is there that we will ever be able to colonise Mars?

About thirty years ago the problems with this vision began to become very obvious and with each subsequent decade they have become more serious. In the 1970's Rachel Carson wrote her ground-breaking book, 'Silent Spring', documenting the widespread decline in wild birds resulting from the use of agrochemicals. Meanwhile the first oil crisis hit and petrol prices began to rise. In the 1980's we realised we were rapidly destroying all the world's rainforests - the main repositories of life. In the 1990's we began to recognise the true scale of the likely catastrophe of global warming and the plain impossibility of endlessly increasing energy and resource use. It is widely agreed that this year is 'peak oil' year - the year in which the hundred year growth in oil extraction levelled off in preparation for an equally rapid decline as reserves become scarcer, less accessible and more aggressively fought over.

We have finally realised that fossil fuels - coal, oil and gas - are not unlimited resources that will free us from nature, they are nature's slowly accumulated capital. The natural world, for hundreds of millions of years, has not used all the energy that the Sun has provided, but has saved up a tiny surplus each year in the form of buried trees (coal) and buried sea creatures (oil and gas). Instead of living sustainably on nature's annual solar income, for the last two centuries we have rapidly frittered away over two hundred million year's worth of nature's slowly accumulated savings - and now they are running out.

We have simultaneously begun to realise that our happiness bears little relation to our level of energy and resource consumption and that people in all sorts of (generally endangered) medieval and tribal societies around the world, who use hardly any energy or resources, are at least as happy as us and usually more so.

Back to the stone age
One response to this crisis, almost a mirror image of the technocratic naivete of the 1950's, has been a despairing technophobia, a belief that we will simply have to revert to a medieval or even stone age lifestyle. The battle cry is for us to go 'back to nature'.

However, in reality we have never escaped from nature, we have simply disobeyed her 'rules' but will certainly not escape the consequences. As James Lovelock explains in his book, 'Gaia', we are inescapably part of the living planet - dependant not only upon its active biological processes for our food but also for our oxygen, for air purification, for regulation of the Earth's temperature, for protection from ultraviolet radiation. It can survive without us but we cannot survive without it.

Technological development, in itself, does not constitute 'liberation from nature' any more than human social evolution or the biological evolution of life constituted any such liberation. Progress, whether biological, social or technological, is only progress if it is sustainable - if it constitutes an advance within those bounds of reality that we call the 'rules of nature'. Progress is either sustainable or it isn't progress at all. All sustainable progress, progress abiding by 'nature's rules', is as much part of nature as any other kind of evolution - so we don't need to go 'back to nature', we can instead choose again to follow a natural trajectory of evolution. The choice is not between embracing a technology of ever increasing energy and resource use or abandoning all technology; the choice is between many technologies that violate 'nature's rules' and many others which abide by them.

Abandoning the oil juggernaut
Cutting our energy consumption now is a bit like trying to turn around an oil tanker. We have so much invested in the way we are currently doing things that we are hardly willing or able to change. Nations that have just built series of power stations are understandably reluctant not to use them. The oil industry is the main sponsor of many political parties; in many nations the President or senior members of the government are owners of oil businesses. The US President, himself an oil man, has for years denied global warming and opposed the Kyoto treaty - but this year even he admitted the nation was addicted to oil. In Britain, due to public pressure, the Government has made more show of being concerned, but whilst the UK Government signed the Kyoto Treaty it has admitted that it will in reality not cut CO2 emissions. It seems almost certain that the risk of losing elections through public fuel protests combined with loss of industry support will mean that most Governments will do nothing practical to avert disaster. We may instead be saved by an odd bit of luck - purely by chance we are running out of oil just as the global warming crisis hits. If we'd had only one tenth of the oil reserves we do then the industrial age would have ended well before we even knew of the potential problem of global warming. If we had ten times the reserves then our politicians would have procrastinated and filibustered for decades whilst we fried to death. We're running out of fuel just in time to limit the scale of the catastrophe: energy prices may increase tenfold within a decade - we should be thankful!

Pseudo-solutions
A vast number of solutions are being proposed to the energy crisis but very few of them really address the problem. One proposal is for us to grow our own 'bio-fuels'. This, of course, is what we used to do thousands of years ago before we discovered coal and oil, when our main fuel supply was harvested wood. The problem is that the discovery of coal and oil led both to a massive increase in the world population and a massive increase in energy consumption per person. We have used two hundred million years of the Earth's accumulated energy in two centuries - can we really get this same energy output per year simply from annual harvests? Even if all America's cars and planes could be converted to run on corn oil, it would be necessary to either abandon food production in the USA in order to provide the necessary land or to fell the Amazon or to buy up all the corn currently being eaten by Africans - none of which are acceptable options. And where would the energy come from to plough and irrigate all the fields, to fertilize and spray them and to transport and process the crop?

Another pseudo-solution is the 'hydrogen economy' - the use of hydrogen as a clean fuel for cars and planes. The problem is that hydrogen is not an energy source any more than a car battery is an energy source - it is merely a way of storing energy made by other means - such as by using nuclear, wind or solar electricity. It may be useful but it does nothing to solve the energy crisis.

The problem with trying to maintain our energy consumption at levels significantly higher than the one kilowatt per square metre of energy provided by the Sun is that it leads to the worsening of virtually all of our current environmental problems. A development strategy that focusses upon the creation of unlimited supplies of cheap energy encourages us to maximise resource consumption instead of the efficient use of resources. This means that whilst energy-intensive open cast mines of all kinds pepper the planet no effort is put into the development of energy-saving recycling technologies. Instead of buying our food energy-efficiently from local shops and farms we let them close whilst airports and motorways are built to import the food produce of the 'global economy'. To protect this food on its global travels vast amounts of wasteful packaging is used simply because cheap energy makes this possible. Instead of bothering to conserve our agricultural soil we let it wash away and its organic matter deplete because we can make cheap fertilisers to replace them, likewise farmers have forgotten how to naturally control crop pests because it is currently cheaper to spray them with energy-intensive agrochemicals. In such a cheap-energy economy it makes economic sense for Japan to chop down Borneo's forests and ship them thousands of miles to make disposable chopsticks - or for us to throw away our clothes every year instead of repairing them.

Trying to find new sources of energy so that we can continue to fuel a resource-intensive economy is a temporary technical fix and not a sustainable solution to our real problems - though any other way of obtaining our energy is now clearly preferable to burning more fossil fuel. We need to massively shift our investment away from energy production and into technologies that enable us to live better on less - that dematerialise our needs. For example, the most important factor in heating your home in a post-oil economy is not whether you switch to using nuclear-generated electricity or to wind-generated electricity or even to solar water heating - it's whether you insulate the house thoroughly. If you can cut your energy use to one tenth of your current consumption then where it comes from becomes a far less pressing question. Whilst some governments may currently be offering grants of a few hundred pounds or dollars per house for domestic roof insulation, if fuel prices increased tenfold then many home-owners would consider spending thousands or tens of thousands of pounds or dollars to massively reduce their domestic energy use.

We waste vast amounts of energy not because we need to but simply because it is available and cheap. Its very availability prevents us from thinking of other solutions. If we can't keep our bathtubs full because the hot water keeps running out then our tendency nowadays (I only exaggerate slightly) is to think about installing a larger water heater rather than a vastly more cost-effective plug. The same is true of global energy economy - it is vastly more cost-effective to plug the energy gap by investing a billion dollars in energy conservation than by investing it in building a new power station of any kind. Amory Lovins, energy advisor to the UN and US Government, points out in "Factor Four" that it is far more practicable and affordable to reduce US energy consumption to a quarter of its current level than it is to continue trying to supply energy at current levels. As Lovins points out in one of his many illustrations, US industry produces waste steam in quantities that could enable it to generate half of the industry's electricity needs. It also has the capacity to increase the efficiency of its electricity use by a factor of four. Conclusion: US industry could stop buying electricity and could sell it instead. But, in addition to this, the heat in the waste steam and hot water would be sufficient to heat a large proportion of America's homes if only it was channelled into domestic radiators instead of into rivers and the atmosphere. If fuel prices sky-rocket then this is sure to happen.

Nature's technologies
As pointed out at the start of this article, for all but the last two centuries of our three billion year biological evolution and our one million year human evolution we have managed to make remarkable progress without any increase in our energy and resource use. The biological energy and resource needs of Albert Einstein were little different to those of an 80 kilogram sheep or even of 80 kilograms of bacterial slime. Beyond the bacterial stage evolutionary progress became increasingly 'dematerialised' - progress is a process of the emergence of complexity not of increased consumption of matter.

Beyond the direct energy and resource needs of the cells in our bodies, none of our other needs, strictly speaking are dependent upon the use of energy or resources. The ancient Athenian was more advanced than the Stone Age cave dweller not through any increase in energy or resource use but as a result of the use of the written language, literature, poetry, art and intellectual skills - none of which required significant energy or resource consumption.

Abraham Maslow, the American psychologist, posited a 'hierarchy of human needs' - the higher needs becoming significant once the more basic and essential needs had been satisfied. The hierarchy began at the base with 'biological needs' (food, water, physical shelter of the body), next up was 'safety', then 'love and belonging', then 'status / esteem' and finally 'self-actualisation'. What is significant for our purposes is that none of these needs except the very first one has any essential dependence upon energy or resource consumption. Personal safety, in some societies, could be achieved with massive stocks of weapons, but in others would be delivered by a stable local community. Higher needs such as status or esteem can, as we know all to well, be provided by resource-intensive status goods, but in other societies can equally well be provided through non-material means.

Much of our belief that we need our main resource-intensive consumer goods are based upon a very shallow evaluation of our needs. A common claim is that everyone nowadays needs a car to get to the shops and to take the children to school. Could we not instead claim that everyone needs shops and schools nearer to their homes? After all the only reason why all our local shops have been replaced by out of town shopping malls and all our village schools have been replaced by factory farms is that cars have made it possible. We do not, in principle, need cars in order to feed ourselves or to keep our children safe or to provide with status or to meet any of the other needs Maslow identifies - we have simply learned, or been persuaded, to satisfy all these needs through the use of cars.

Information technologies and the dematerialised economy
A massive increase in energy costs could be seen as one bit of good news that will force us to shift to a path of sustainable development. The other bit of good news is that during the decades in which the crisis of industrialism became apparent, purely by chance, a range of post-industrial technologies began to emerge that are not in principle dependant upon ever-increasing energy and resource use - and that could offer ways to reduce both.

One emerging post-industrial technology was the creation of semiconducting silicon wafers. A thin wafer of pure crystalline silicon, doped on one side with some boron or arsenic atoms, will only conduct electricity through in one direction - it acts as a diode or semiconductor. If sunlight shines on this side then the electromagnetic vibrations of the light generate a current in the permitted direction. These wafers are both the basis of photovoltaic panels to make electricity from sunlight and the basis of the microchips that operate our computers.

The technologies of the digital revolution include any devices for the transmission, reception or processing of information. By their very nature these activities require minimal energy and resources because information is not a material entity . Every need we have that is currently satisfied through the intensive use of energy and resources and that is capable, instead, of being satisfied through the transmission, reception or processing of information is a need that can in theory be 'dematerialised'. For example, for decades there has been a demand for highly energy-intensive supersonic air transport between European and American cities for business travel. The real need of all these people is not to move from continent to continent but to communicate easily and intensively with people in other continents. A few businesses now use videoconferencing centres instead - they send audiovisual data around the world instead of people. If supersonic business flights began to cost tens of thousands of dollars a time then nearly everyone would happily choose videoconferencing instead. This need would be 'dematerialised'. Of course whilst oil remains cheap most businesses continue with vast amounts of international travel and simply do videoconferencing AS WELL rather than INSTEAD.

The same technologies enable 'telecommuting' - they allow us to work for a business from home instead of daily commuting in our millions for hours a day into and out of the centres of our cities. If everyone did this the implications would be massive - a vast reduction in car ownership, road building, air pollution, stress, traffic fatalities, urban sprawl and wasted time. Many of the self-employed are doing this already - but a tenfold increase in fuel prices would result in nearly all of us doing it. The entire physical transport infrastructure would become redundant - another need would have been 'dematerialised'. Of course it has not happened like this - we now commute to the office, do the 9-to-5, commute back again and then do the telecommuting in the evening on top of this.

All the data that businesses and governments and educational establishments used to print out on paper and stored in libraries and archives, or landfilled, can now be stored, edited and transmitted electronically. The amount of forest that could be saved through the adoption of 'paperless offices' and the dematerialisation of information storage is vast - to say nothing of the reduction in transport, postage, landfill sites and wood pulping mills. Whilst this is already possible now, our offices use more paper than ever because the energy to make it remains too cheap.

The next stage, well under way, is for all sorts of bulky computer hardware - CRT monitors, computer towers, televisions, hi-fi's, faxes, cameras, telephones etc. - to be replaced by a single integrated and miniaturised device. With a solar-powered mobile phone / text messenger / palmtop / digital diary / camera / MP3 player gadget in your top pocket you could almost abandon consumerism entirely to become a post-industrial digital nomad. Of course the rather less visionary reality is that all those bulky electronic items we bought just four or five years ago are now on their way to be converted into toxic landfill and we have replaced them not with one wonder-gadget but with half a dozen different large devices and several tiny wonder-gadgets that will all be binned in a few more years - and we continue to do all the travel and use all the paper that these gadgets were supposed to replace. Furthermore, microchips, LCD screens, phone batteries and the like require lots of energy and many toxic chemicals to be manufactured. Until we really do learn to make do with a single pocket diary sized wonder-gadget that does not need replacing for decades - and actually give up the air travel, the car, piles of printout, and all the other home and office gadgets - we will not really have dematerialised our lifestyle.

So CAN an information economy replace our fossil fuel economy? In theory it could go a long way towards doing this. The majority of our business, educational and entertainment needs that are currently satisfied through the intensive use of material resources could be met digitally - resulting in a massive reduction in environmental impact.

But WILL an information economy really replace our fossil fuel economy? Almost certainly not, unless unavoidable and massive oil price rises force us down that path. Moving from a fossil fuel economy to an information economy need not threaten progress or our quality of life - nor, counter-intuitively, need a tenfold increase in energy prices threaten them.

Robert Vint