Crossing the Threshold of the Long 21st Century

Before We Begin…

The rough draft for the decade from 2025 to 2035 ballooned to almost 6,000 words, so I concluded I would need to scrap my initial plan to tell the story of the coming century by the decade. Instead, each Friday will cover a five-year period, starting in 2025 and ending in 2125. On top of changing the chronology of the storytelling, I realized I had a second issue on my hands. I could tell the story of the coming century solely through a dry, textbook style, outlining momentous events and tracking broad trends. But to really tell that story, we need characters to follow. People who’s lives can give the imagination something more concrete to grip on to as the wild beast of history careens from one landmark event to another. So I've decided to take a page, and four characters, from the book that Dr. Mattson and I are finishing. At the start of Inequality by Design, we meet three high school graduates of the class of 1980, and follow them for 40 years, as their lives are buffeted by the corporate-approved creative destruction of the neo-liberal economic era. By the end of the opening chapter, as the main characters enter elderhood, their kids and grandkid are entering adulthood in the year 2020. So it is these four who we will follow through the first half of the unfolding Long 21st Century.

What better metaphor for the coming century, than a gate topped with barbed wire, dwarfed by an approaching storm?

Also, Oklahoma's wild weather generated this image, not AI. More on that later...

A fine read, even if it was
as much a way to talk about
the USA in the 60s and 70s,
as a detailed examination
of the Long 14th Century.

    But before we meet our protagonists, I want to throw out a quick note about the title of this post. Calling an era a 'long century' is, like everything else under the sun, not new. Perhaps the most well-know example come from Barbara Tuchman's book A Distant Mirror: the Calamitous Fourteenth Century. Published in 1978, the book covers the events of the Great Famines of the early 14th century, the Black Plague, the Papal Schism, peasant revolts, and the general breakdown of Western European society as it transitions from the Medieval Period (roughly 800-1300 AD) to the Early Modern Period which began sometime around 1453 with the conquest of Constantinople, the flowering of the Italian Renaissance, and the start of the Age of Sail. Setting aside the academic criticisms, the concept that Tuchman spoke to was the idea that the events which defined a period of transition didn't conform to the neat limit of 100 years. Thus, the changes experienced by Western Culture which were amplified by the beginning of the Little Ice Age, fundamentally reformed what it meant to be a member of Western Christendom. And that era ran for nearly 150 years, aka a century and a half. A long century, if you will. And that period seems suspiciously similar in length to the philosophy underpinning the Iroquois Confederacy's Great Law of Peace, a philosophy that one should consider the impact of their actions on the next seven generations. Arabic thinker and historian Ibn Khaldun's Dynastic Change and Its Economic Consequences posits a similar length of time as the life cycle of any given dynasty.

    This is all to say that I believe we, the people of North America, have already crossed the threshold. While I don't know what event future historians will point to as 'the' triggering event: September 11th, the Great Recession, Calderon's War on the Cartels? Heck, they may even reach back to the first iteration of NAFTA, which went into effect in 1994 and ushered in a transformation of the North American economy from three big, separate entities, into functionally one, tightly interlinked mega-economy. Indeed, if the Long 21st Century began in 1994, and runs until some seminal event circa 2125, that would bracket the Long 21st Century quite nicely. 

For giggles, I played with AI image generation for the four main characters. This was a for-fun experiment and I will return to stock images. But let us return to the four characters of the narrative, shall we?

    The first is Marty Junior, first-born son, unsurprisingly, of Marty Senior. Growing up, Marty took his role as big brother seriously enough he had a few run-ins with the law, beating up anyone he perceived as picking on his little brother or sister. By 2025, Marty Junior is a 33 year old cyber security specialist who works for the State of Michigan. He lives in a suburb of Detroit, Michigan with a wife, Tina, and their (uncreatively-named) newborn son, Marty the third, aka Trey. 

    Little sister Jillian celebrates her 30th birthday in 2025. Her parents secretly joked that she got all the brains of the family. Those brains won her free rides to the University of Michigan and that to a Canadian medical school. A few years out of residency, she and her husband Chris run a health clinic in Ashtabula, Ohio, which operates at perpetual near-bankruptcy. Jillian is pregnant with the couple’s first child. 

    Our third character is the younger brother, 26 year old Bobby, who lives in Louisville, Kentucky. Like his father, Bobby suffers from dyslexia, which has made him a perennial temp-worker. He is a bit of a black sheep of the family, as their overworked father’s deteriorating health over the course of the 2010s left Bobby without a stable father figure. Bobby showed up quite drunk at the father’s 2020 funeral, and hasn’t spoken to Marty Junior or Jillian since then. 

    Apart from these three siblings we have 16 year old Allison, the granddaughter of Jenny, another protagonist from the first chapter of Inequality by Design. In 2020, her family left the rustbelt for the warmer climate of the Gulf Coast, but their 30 year old car only got them as far as western Tennessee before breaking down for good. In 2025, Allison is slogging through what passes for an education at a chronically underfunded high school. Unlike her mother at the same age, she is not boy-crazy. Having spent her entire childhood moving from one apartment to the next, always one step ahead of eviction, she never established close friendships, and was never quite able to pin down what she wants to do with her life. 

The Big Picture: 2025 to 2030

Is that a sunrise or a sunset?

The first few of the years are deceptively calm for both the United States, and our four main characters. International headlines periodically mention a devastating drought pushing the people of the Yucatan towards starvation. A dramatic series of financial and political crises across the northern border in Canada disrupts some cross-border trade, but most people in the U.S. are just trying to get by. Making basic ‘getting by’ harder, import tariffs cost every American roughly $2,600 each year, but US-manufactured goods to replace more expensive imports often fail to materialize. At the same time, attempts at mass deportation pursued by the Reactionary Party administration in Washington pushes more and more recent immigrants and native-born relatives into a shadow economy rife with exploitation and criminal elements. While events in the eastern hemisphere make trouble over there, North America appears a serene island of stability by comparison. But pressures in all three major countries are building. 

I don't know what this chart measures, but 
it certainly looks bad for Canada...

Three horsemen of the economic apocalypse visit Canada: first comes electoral chaos, with no obvious replacement for the Trudeau government, followed by the collapse of an inflated real estate market and declining exports to the US. These factors spark a government debt crisis. The western provinces demand grater financial accountability from Ottawa, and hold referendums to refusing to send tax monies on to the federal government. Like the independence referendum in Catalonia, the government responds with arrests and laws banning provinces from holding plebiscites. This goads Quebec into outdoing the western provinces, with the provincial parliament votes to formally ‘confederate’ with the rest of the country. The province will no longer enforce laws passed by the national parliament, and will explore creating their own currency. The move is meant to force the Canadian government to backtrack on banning plebiscites, but instead provokes the national government to send in the Mounties and dissolve Quebec's National Assembly. But the move backfires, and the western provincial parliaments side with Quebec, passing laws to explicitly ban local businesses from collecting federal taxes.  By 2028, the country is divided into two hostile camps, the confederates of the periphery, and the centralizer provinces in between. 

Mexico's drought monitor readings last year.
Yes, I know, the Yucatan looks okay for now.

If Canada suffers from a deluge of problems, to the south a lack of deluges causes a different set of problems. The failure of cool-season monsoons leads to crop failures across southern Mexico and Central America. Starvation pushes some five million desperate people to crime and lawlessness, a situation local criminal gangs are only too happy to exploit. While the government in Mexico City does attempt to ship gran to the region, most of the shipments end up looted by the starving or stolen and held for ransom by gangs. The Maya-speaking peoples of the region view the fight between the Spanish-speaking gangs and government forces as just another instance of second-class citizenship and historical brutality. The Maya break into outright rebellion, and they are quickly dubbed the Zapatistas Nuevas by the Spanish-speaking population. This Pan-Maya movement even appeals to Spanish speakers sick of being held at arm’s length by the central government in Mexico City and being forced to take in people deported from the United States. 

As the year 2028 begins, the United States appears insulated from the brushfires burning to the north and south. But that appearance is deceiving, and the US is just a much a tinderbox of economic and cultural resentments. Every conflagration requires a spark, and because history has a sense of humor, an income tax cut proves to be that spark. A law passed in 2026, supported by both political parties, goes into effect. It eliminates the higher tax rate on overtime, while simultaneously ending the requirement that employers pay overtime for any work past 40 hours a week. Most work-forces without a union contract, and even some with one, quickly find their OT disappearing from their paychecks in January. 82 million Americans work hourly-wage jobs, and many salaried employees also receive some form of overtime compensation, so the consternation and fury spreads quickly. 

If your start a republic by protesting taxation, why not end one protesting taxes?

Still believing the political process might solve the problem, Americans flood congressional offices with angry calls. But Congress fails to repeal of this despised reform, with some even responding to constituents to get different jobs. Since the right to strike was also eliminated early on in the reactionary administration, labor unions and non-unionized workers must turn to a more informal method of protest. They call for everyone in America to take a walk in the park on April Fool’s Day, and stay there until tax day on April 15th. Municipal parks across the USA fill with millions of people. The media sends the message that this April Fools joke will be a one-time event, but the next day, the parks fill up again. Then the next day. Then the next. A week into the General Strike, some 30% of the US labor force takes “walks in the park” rather than going to work. Many who do not call off work participate in slow downs and stoppages, vowing to do half the work expected. The strikes prove surprisingly successful, grinding the economy to a halt. 

The oligarchs hold the cards though, and tell every elected official in the country if they ever want to see a single cent in campaign contributions again, they will break the strikes. The majority of elected officials comply with their corporate task-masters. National Guard units are mobilized, and police officers called in for extra pay working on “park clearing” details. In some cases, local cops and national guardsmen refuse to comply with the orders. When this happens, private security companies fill in support roles, freeing up those who do obey orders to put on riot gear. 

It is NOT hard to find a real-life image of cops 
clearing protestors out of a park. Your challenge,
dear reader, is to guess which park clearing this
is a picture of...

At this point, our four characters re-enter the narrative, and we will follow them through the General Strike of 2028. So, let’s make this all personal…

Marty Junior

Marty Junior counts himself as one of the good guys. Working for the State of Michigan’s eponymously-named Office of Remote Surveillance, Marty monitors the online activity, especially financial transactions, of organized crime with a focus on human trafficking. Starting in 2025, the state received federal money and expanded definition of human trafficking, including labor organizers and charitable NGOs accused of harboring illegal immigrants or naturalized citizens targeted for deportation. Marty finds the expanded definition troubling, but a round of automation and job cuts puts to rest any doubts he may have. Junior even gets a promotion to shift supervisor, which largely insulates him from the job cuts. Plus, his superior assures him that ‘loyal men’ will be needed in the near future, rather than increased automation.

When the general strike begins Marty and his agency are more than willing to backstop National Guard and private security forces with communications and intelligence. They monitors both live feed cameras and cell phone traffic of the park walkers, turning the information suspected organizers of the strike over to local police agencies. Arrests take place overnight at suspects residences, before they can get to the protection of crowds at local parks. Marty goes home every day after work and loses no sleep about the possible fates of these political prisoners.

        In the years following the crackdown on the General Strike, Marty Junior boasts to his superiors about the vigor with which his office tracked down cell traffic and cash app transactions. He concludes the late-night arrests prevented the Detroit-area protests from getting out of hand. When speaking to people outside the office, Marty rarely mentions his work, and often draws on his experiences before the strike, if the other person asks anything like probing questions. Even with Tina, he rarely talks about the core of his work.

Like this, but with corporate sponsorship...

Jillian

Julie and her husband Chris thought they would be a power-couple; she would be the doctor providing care, while Chris the accountant would make sure they get paid. They even identified Ashtabula, Ohio as a community underserved by the health care system, thinking this would provide a stable customer base. But the joke was on them, as insurance payouts declined and patients found themselves unable to afford copays. To keep their clinic open, the pair find themselves having to hire additional staff to collect payments and manage paperwork, rather than provide direct patient care. 

While Jillian, Chris, and the fifteen clinic employees sympathize with the striker’s, they know they cannot take time off to join the strike, as the clinic would certainly lose too much revenue. The staff of the clinic demands some sort of solidarity, and a vote is taken to is taken to open the clinic to them anyone ‘walking the nearby park’ without up-front payment required. The Ohio governor declares a statewide curfew, and the State Police show up to close the clinic. Jillian and the staff leave, but show up the next day to operate as normal. Much like in Michigan, the state authorities in Ohio regard such actions as trouble making. Since he manages the clinic, state police arrest Julian's husband Chris while he is on his way back to a local park to spread word about the services the clinic might provide. This move infuriates both Jillian and the members of the staff who then vote to take half of their staff to the park to help treat any injured strikers. While Jillian stays to oversee clinic operations, half of the staff is present when the local park is surrounded by mounted riot police and the National Guard. 

Eventually, the tools of empire used abroad,
end up getting used on the people of the homeland.

When the protesters refuse to disperse, the state attacks. Hundreds, including the entirety of the staff are either injured or arrested very few escape the police cordon. The crackdown results in several deaths a number of critical injuries, and sparks general outrage across the state. The next day when protesters meet at the parks, they come heavily armed. In some places this results in tents standoffs with the police but in others, including Dayton and Toledo the strikers shoot first. Dozens are killed and hundreds injured across the state. Those currently in custody are beaten and tortured on suspicion that they are somehow coordinating the spontaneous riots on the outside. The victims of this state brutality include Juliana's husband Chris, who staggers out of the prison with broken shoulders and black eyes.

Bobby

As mentioned earlier Bobby works a series of temp jobs in Louisville Kentucky. Needing every dollar he earns, he does not participate in the first day of the general strike, referring to the people by the media moniker of April fools. As the strike enters its second week, Bobby loses his temper job unloading trucks at the Louisville train station.Most of the freight trains in the country are either halted or operating way way behind schedule. While Bobby is initially frustrated with the strike, an idle railway worker encourages him to go to one of the local parks and actually meet the people he's upset with. Bobby follows the advice and ends up befriending several strikers. With temp jobs dried up and rent due on the 15th, Bobby sews what’s left of his cash into his windbreaker, grabs his sleeping bag, and heads to the park. There, he joins hundreds of others on the path to homelessness. 

As word of the riots in Ohio filters down to Kentucky guns, improvised explosive devices, and Molotov cocktails begin showing up ay discrete locations around the park. Bobby is highly suspicious that at least some of these have been placed by agents of the state, and he and a friend actually detain someone leaving a crate of national guard issued hand grenades. 

Go south, young man!

When Bobby receives a phone call from his mother begging him not to participate in the strikes he tries to do the right thing and turn the hand grenades over to a police officer. This move predictably backfires, with Bobby arrested for possessing stolen government property. Fortunately for him, he's sitting in county jail when the crackdown begins in Louisville. The park he had been at is the scene of some of the worst fighting. Over 300 people, both strikers and security forces, losing their lives. Bobby is further fortunate that the governor of Kentucky is much more soft in his support of the corporate state and very quickly offers an amnesty to everyone arrested during the rioting if it will get the bloodshed to stop. This tactic, along with the collective horror due to the Battle of Louisville, brings the general strike to a slow-motion. Finding an eviction notice on his door, Bobby grabs his sleeping bag and jumps on an empty freight train. As the train rumbles south, Bobby calls his mom and lets her know he's leaving Kentucky.

Allison

I mentioned above Alison found everything about school boring: classes, teachers, fellow students, all of it. So she dropped out and started working full-time at a fried chicken place. At the beginning of 2028 Alison is 19 years old working as a shift manager. As the strike begins the fried chicken places teeters on the verge of bankruptcy because the franchise owner keeps demanding more and more profit from the business. The owner even visits the restaurant the day after the general strike begins, and threatens to fire anyone who participates going forward. To show he’s serious, the owner fires two line cooks who called out the day before. This action completely backfires. The entire staff walks out and heads straight to the nearest park. They make impromptu meals for fellow strikers and generally serve as a nucleus to organize everything people living in the park might need from food to clothing to shelter to sanitation facilities. Well this would mark Allison out as an organizer and someone targeted for arrest, the entire operation is done with sticky notes, pencils and absolutely no electronics. 

Allison throws herself into the organization of the strike camp with enthusiasm, finding a meaning that she never found in the mindless rigidity and conformism of high school. Allison and the other strikers are fortunate that the mayor of Memphis is one of few elected politicians in the state of Tennessee to not tow the corporate line. The Mayor argues quite publicly that the police department has better things to do than kick people out of parks that are technically owned by the public which currently is filling them up. This buys the strikers an few extra weeks until the Tennessee National Guard moves in to clear out the protest camps in early May. The Tennessee state government then dissolves the city government of Memphis, turning all its functions over to the county and declares that anyone found in the parks after the middle of the month will be arrested and charged with domestic terrorism. 

Allison and her work crew stolidly return to the restaurant. Their boss agrees to rehire them, on the condition that they pay back the franchise potential profits lost during the strike. This move has the double effect both garnishing meager wages while simultaneously showing the employees just how much profit they provide the franchise owner. The workers in public agree to this, but hold a secret meeting and decide to assassinate the franchise owner. The restaurant’s bartender has military experience and improvises an IED from household items. A week later, the franchise owner’s car blows up shortly after leaving the restaurant. Everyone in the restaurant is suspected of participating, but they all keep quiet and the police can never actually pin it on anyone. From the silence surrounding the bombing of the boss's car, emerges an unspoken consensus; "We could do that again."

"I don't know what happened, we were busy at working..."

The View From the Golden Mesa

    Humanity stands on a high vantage point, looking back over the past, at empires that rose and fell. We tell ourselves that the industrial world is unique, untethered from the constrains of the past. But if we turn and look to the future, we see cloud and shadow. We step forward and the ground beneath our feet undulates. The gold dust that spreads out around us bounces into the air with each step forward. Then the realization hits; what we mistook for solid ground is just a thick, black goo. The endless expanse of oil-fueled wealth does, in fact, have an edge. We stand atop a golden mesa, and beyond the edge lies a steep cliff.

Imagine the pitch meeting, "Yeah, it's gonna smell 
awful, and you won't want to go to the beach,
but it's gonna make you rich, fellas! Well,
it will make the local nobility rich..."

    While humans have know about and used petroleum oils for thousands of years, Russian engineer Vasily Semyonov drilled the first modern well near Baku, in 1846. In North America, the first commercial wells went into operation in Canada and the US in 1858 and 1859 respectively. It took a bit more than a century for oil to become the largest source of energy, in the USA by 1950, and globally in 1964. Since then, it has only grown in importance as a natural resource. Some 95% of all transport fuels are oil based: gasoline, diesel, marine fuels, and aviation fuel. Oil makes up 33% of global primary energy supplies. Add on to that the dizzying array of plastic products made from oil, and it seems reasonable tot say that no other single resource contributes more to the continued viability of the industrial age. And this primacy of oil as an industrial resource, makes the question of how much longer it will remain available for human use, important to the future trajectory of North America as an industrial economy. 

    Before continuing, I do want to address two issue: one semantic, and the other farcical. Liquid petroleum is a nonrenewable resource. This simply means it is a resource used by human beings that does not naturally replenish itself on a timeline meaningful to human beings. In the broad sense in terms of geologic time, yes, fossil fuel will probably replenish themselves via Earth’s carbon cycle. Eventually, today’s plant life and animal life will die and return to the Earth. Some small fraction of it will be trapped, compressed and heated over time into fossil fuels. How long will that take, you may ask. Well, consider that the Permian basic in West Texas, one of the most productive layers of petroleum-bearing rock in North America, formed between 485-320 years ago. The oil-bearing rock of the the relatively young field of Gehwar in Saudi Arabia, is about 160 million years old. 

Abiotic Oil Theory: wish fulfillment for people
 who's mother didn't tell them 'no' as kids.. 

    Semantics aside, I suppose this is the point where I need to address the abiotic oil theory. This theory as been around for decades, and holds that somewhere deep within the mantle, kindly Mother Earth produces new petroleum from mysterious processes. Processes which stand completely at odds with our understanding of the chemistry of hydrocarbons. Because of the tremendous pressures within the mantle and under the Earth’s crust, this a-biotic oil then seeps up to the surface to pool conveniently in cap rocks, where it waits patiently for us to use. This theory has been debunked over and over and over again, by people for understand the geology and chemistry better than I do. Even if this theory were true, which, again, it isn’t, it doesn't really matter because the rate of depletion of mature fields suggests that the Earth doesn’t replenish the abiotic oil supply at a rate sufficient to match human consumption.

    Now that we’ve gotten the minor quibbles out of the way, we should get to the core of the issue; what will the future hold for world oil production, and what does that imply for the future of North America? To assess the situation, I will focus on United States oil production, as it is three times higher than Canada, and Mexico's production has been in decline for almost a decade. With the US data, I'd like to direct your attention to the details, rather than the big, top-line numbers. And as we all know, the devil is always in the details. Much like Mephistopheles, this devil offers us a few more decades of oil, but at a very real, economic cost. And like the two horned Prince of Darkness, this devil has two horns, rate of depletion and energy returns. So let us get acquainted with the fracking devil, shall we?

    Setting aside local environmental impacts and the longer-term impacts of more CO2 in the atmosphere, both the US and Canada increased petroleum production from sources that historically have been considered unconventional. While the technology underlying both ‘tight’ oil production and oil sands processing goes back decades, until the 2000s, both sources weren’t economically viable. Until roughly 2005, the low cost of production of conventional crude oil kept global prices below $30 per barrel. But starting in 2005, global crude oil production stalled, and prices tarted to rise. Anyone reading this who bought gas in around 2008 surely remembers the high prices at the pump. Global price peaked that year at $147 per barrel. What most may not remember is that in the wake of the 2008-09 recession, global prices crashed, then rose again. By 2011, global crude prices were back around $100 per barrel. These higher prices made fracking for tight oil and digging up and processing oil sands economically viable.

Welcome to Mordor. No, wait, that's Alberta!

    Currently, a fracking  well costs between $46 and $58 per barrel, though can cost upwards of $90 per barrel, just to drill and pump out of the ground. And that price doesn’t include the cost of shipping and refining these barrels of tight oil. Tar sands run a broader range of costs, but mostly vary between $48 and $84 per barrel. Over 2023, the West Texas Intermediate price, which is the benchmark in the North American market, averaged $77 for a barrel of oil, compared with the Brent crude price of $83 per barrel.

    These trends imply two things: one - that higher prices are the new normal, to support North American oil production from unconventional sources, and that the lower priced conventional crude oil production cannot keep prices down through more drilling. 

        And who is that? Well, buried in the US Energy Information Agency projections which assume growing oil production over the next 20 years is a bit of an admission; conventional production has remained roughly flat from 5 million barrels per day in 2008 to 4.6 million barrels per day in  2023, so in a certain sense, we’ve already seen the future. This last point cannot be overstated, as it cast a whole lot of lamplight over the dim outlines of the future. North American oil production will, more and more, come from more expensive, dirtier sources of petroleum. The EIA estimates that fracked tight oil and shale gas, accounts for 64% and 70% of US production respectively.

Ignore the colorful bits and take a second look at the gray area.

    One might argue that the higher costs, both economic and environmental, are worth is to keep the petroleum party going. But before you consider fracking a solution to North America’s oil production problem, it’s worth considering that fracked wells experience much steeper rates of decline after the first few years of production. So where conventional wells can remain productive, albeit at very low levels, for decades, fracked wells typically experience decline rates of 50-75% over their first year in production, leaving them with negligible rates of production within a 60 months. While it wouldn’t be technically true to say these wells run dry within a decade, the typically have to be shut down or re-fracked, just to maintain production. This means that drillers must work fast and faster to maintain the same rates of production from any given field. In other words, fracked wells producing tight oil, won’t put an end to long term production decline. The tar sands face a similar problem, one a slightly longer timeline. Here's a good examination of that issue.

    But wait, there’s more! The problem isn’t just about the economics of tight oil and the swiftly approaching decline of oil production. Another, sneakier problem lurks in the background of all this: net energy. The light sweet crude that used to build industrial civilization and support the 8 billion or so people that live in it, was incredibly easy to get out of the ground. In most cases in the late 19th century all it took to dig in oil well was a team of mules a whole lot of iron piping and a drill bit. In most cases you didn't have to dig too deep and once you got there, the oil came to you. That first well drilled by Semyonov outside Baku, was a whopping 21 meters deep. In fact even as late as the 1920s, a lot of the oil that came out of the ground was so light and so sweet that you could literally scoop it with a bucket pour it directly into a car's gas tank and drive off. Nowadays I'm pretty sure that you couldn't perform that feat using the oil from any well in the world, even Saudi Arabia and Russia. 

Mules - keeping costs down for thousands of years.

    But the problem isn't just with refining. The energy return on energy invested in the 19th century was possibly as high as 300 to 1. Even as late as the 1920s, the energy return on energy invested was still a phenomenally good 100 to 1. By the 1950s, that ratio dropped to 75 to 1. I've read that by 1970 the ratio was down to about 50 to one which is still a really good investment but it's nowhere near what it started out at. The problem is that as improved techniques made technically difficult wells viable, more and more specialized equipment and more and more specialized people had to be brought in to produce the same amount of oil. Today, the EROEI ratio globally hovers somewhere between 20 to 1 and 4 to 1. This is of course a difficult number to qualify, especially because you're talking about investments that compound over time, but the trend is clear and the trend is down. Why does this matter going forward? 

Windmills, like mules, have a 
place in the future...

    Eventually we will reach a point where the energy invested in extraction of the resource is equal to the energy pulled from that resource. But before we get to a 1 to 1 breakeven point, we will probably pass a point where, even when the energy return is still positive, the energy return won't be enough to maintain everything else in the industrial economy which depends of fossil fuels. That's probably when the oil age will end. 

    And one might cheer the end of the oil age, until one recalls that roughly 31% of all energy used by human beings in the world today comes from liquid petroleum. 24% comes from natural gas in another 27% comes from coal. Those keeping track at home that means roughly 82% of the world’s energy production and consumption, comes from fossil fuels. The remainder is split between hydroelectric dams (7%), nuclear power plants (4.3%) and a tiny fraction, about 5.7% comes, from other renewables. Even the ‘renewable’ sources of electricity generation, wind, solar, hydroelectric and geothermal, are also produced using fossil fuels. To my knowledge, nowhere in the world uses a wind turbine or photovoltaic cells solar to produce more solar panels or wind turbines. Compounding this is the problem that industrial civilization built an entire economic model around perpetual growth. What happens when economic growth no longer materializes, because fossil fuel production is in decline, and renewable can't fill the gap?

    But again, the decline is not instantaneous, or even necessarily steep. The oil age began 180 years ago, so the implication for the future is that if we are at the end of the plateau and oil production is about to go into decline, we may have 150 to 180 years of oil “left.” The difference is this time, the about of oil produced for human use will go down, not up. And since oil is the basis of industrial economies, this implies both extended economic contraction, and eventually, contraction of the human population. 

    What will this contraction look like, and where will it end up? The global human population in 1846 was somewhere around one billion people. Industrial production was largely limited to the northwest Europe and the east coast of the United States. The population of the United States in according to the 1850 census US population was 23.1 million people. The vast majority, somewhere around 90%, lived outside of urban areas and overwhelmingly engaged in agriculture or some trade that directly supported agriculture. The estimated annual energy used per person in was 1/10 of what it is today.

... but they probably won't look like these.

    Two things: first, that the bedrock resource of industrial civilization will be more expensive going forward, and second, the fundamental, underlying problem hasn’t gone away: oil is a non-renewable resource that will not be with us forever. It's also worth remembering that when someone that tells you that we can have a future full of battery powered vehicles, lithium is not a renewable resource, or even particularly plentiful. Just like oil, coal and natural gas, it will also hit hit a peak of production and go into decline.

    But do you know what isn’t in decline? The amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Next week we will take an overview of the flip side of burning all these fossil fuels - the man-made destabilization of the climate. That's right, we're going to go where Al Gore has gone before, and talk about anthropogenic climate change!