Shifts and Devices

Here is an excerpt from the ‘Archdruid Report’, looking at the impact cheap energy has had on the development of our culture and technology over the past 25 years. The part below touches on the Internet, which has evolved into a far different, more complex, and perhaps more brittle, structure than the original ARPAnet designers intended.

For a 25-year interval [1980-2005], by reckless overproduction of rapidly depleting resources pursued for short term gain, the cost of energy was driven down to artificially low levels that had never been seen before – and, barring a whole concatenation of miracles, will never be seen again. The resulting glut of energy fostered ways of doing things that make no sense at all under any other conditions.

The explosive spread of the internet [was] a product of the era of ultracheap energy. The hardware of the internet, with its worldwide connections, its vast server farms, and its billions of interlinked home and business computers, probably counts as the largest infrastructure project ever created and deployed in a two-decade period in human history. The sheer amount of energy that has had to be invested to create and sustain today’s internet, along with its economic and cultural support systems, beggars the imagination.

Could it have been done at all if energy stayed as expensive as it was in the 1970s? It’s hard to see how such a question could be answered, but the growth of the internet certainly would have been a much slower process; it might have moved in directions involving much less energy use; and some of the more energy-intensive aspects of the internet might never have emerged at all. It remains to be seen whether a system adapted to a hothouse climate of nearly free energy can cope with the harsher weather of rising energy costs in a postpeak world.

Full Text: http://thearchdruidreport.blogspot.com/2008/02/back-up-rabbit-hole.html

A synopsis of Canada’s oil supply bifurcation by Gordon Laxer:

Canada needs Strategic Petroleum Reserves – short-term stores of oil that can be released during supply shortages to meet regional needs.

Canada is a producer and net exporter of oil. Yet this national status masks an important regional divide; Eastern Canada is a net importer of oil, receiving up to 90 percent of its oil from overseas, much of it from OPEC countries like Algeria, Iraq and Saudi Arabia. Eastern Canadians are vulnerable to global oil supply shocks. … There is not enough east-west oil pipeline capacity to transport western oil to Eastern Canadians in times of supply shock.

Unfortunately, unlike in most industrial countries, Canadian governments in recent years have not prioritized domestic energy security. Canada exports 67 percent of the oil it produces to the United States, and NAFTA’s proportionality clause prohibits Canada’s government from reducing this proportion, even in times of crisis.

Laxer goes on to propose a Strategic Petroleum Reserve and other specific measures, to give at least some resiliency to our dangerously brittle oil supply system, which currently holds only between 8 and 21 days of supply in Eastern Canada at any one time.

Full Text: http://www.straightgoods.ca/ViewFeature8.cfm?REF=70