[Tanada]

OPEC has been a controlling force of the World Economy since 1973 and it looks to me as if their day in the sun is coming to a close. From 1973-2013 the countries in OPEC could set quota's and influence the behavior of people in ways most have never pondered because we are busy with our daily lives and worries. As a history nerd I am often shocked at how people miss what is blatantly obvious to me. All through human history all the way back to the stone age tools we were using 200,000 years ago manufacturing has been the key to our success. Or was it trading manufactured items?

Before OPEC we used Coal for most domestic purposes and you can find plenty of info on how 'big coal' controlled prices during the 1880-1950 period. Any time you get massively large entities in control of any vital commodity they end up setting the price. Sometimes they are benign and let the little fishes keep selling into the market, other times they are monopolistic and try to crush all competition. In the benign scenario the little fishes have to accept the price and innovate or get lucky to compete without the benefit of economies of scale. Before it was Coal driving transportation it was the canal networks and large shipping companies, but most canals were like most highways are today, government built and controlled. Before canals we are all the way back to toll roads which were quite common all the way back to the fall of the Western Roman Empire.

That may seem a bit of a wandering narrative but everything in the list is about transportation and trade, no matter what the Marxists may think it is not manufacturing that drives economies. It has always boiled down to ease of transportation from point of origin to point of use. Small towns needed a blacksmith and a cobbler and a haberdashery and so on and so forth all as small businesses because it was difficult or expensive to move stuff from here to over there just to sell it. Canals and Trains in their turns created towns all along their routes because easy transportation made it cheap to move stuff to and fro. Highways were the great leveler, when the American Autobahn system was created in the 1950's living anywhere near one was much more convenient that not, but the small town system created by railroads and canal morphed into suburban sprawl.

The difference between the stone age craftsman who made axes, hammers, spear heads, knives, arrow heads and every other sharp tool out of stone and the first diversified towns was a type of specialization. It appears that each stone age tribe of the neolithic age started this by having some stone tool makers who were better at it than anyone else. These specialists were able to trade their superior stone tools to their fellow tribe members in exchange for bartered goods like favorite foods.

When Agriculture developed these specialists were crucial in helping their tribal group do a better job growing crops and livestock and over the course of generations some members became specialists at raising particular livestock or crops, while others learned how to fell trees and do carpentry, or harvest raw clay and create pottery. Eventually the civilization became complex enough to mine high grade ores and produce metal tools, native copper, tin and Bronze were the first worked metals.

Agriculture had other consequences as well. If you were growing a field of crops you came to think of it as 'your' land and you became very reluctant to just move on if the climate changed a bit and the old game you hunted moved away. This sense of ownership spread throughout every agricultural society with no exceptions that I am aware of. This was a huge change from the hunter gatherer cultures that existed before fixed agriculture, where everyone shared tools and worked together for the survival of the tribe as a whole.

Agriculture also allowed for a much higher population density in any location where it was viable, by limiting the natural diversity of the agricultural land and concentrating on just a few different plants and animals that people considered most valuable. Woodlots that supported a few deer and birds people could harvest were replaced with fields of rice or wheat or apple trees or pasture for goats or donkeys. Actually most farms grew as many varieties of plants and animals as they could because everyone liked a varied diet. By hard work and experienced passed down from generation to generation farmers could feed ten times the population density in a location as hunter gatherers could support in the same territorial expanse.

Most people were farmers, but with a farm village 3000 years before today you got a lot more than just food on your dinner table. You got specialists who were able to learn how to work wood, stone and metal, pottery, local government with law enforcements and courts of a fashion. As cities grew from these first villages and towns you kept getting a better and better standard of living because the more specialized the artisans were the more efficient they became at their particular skill.

In many ways the standard of living in a town of a thousand people was excellent compared to the hunter gatherer lifestyle it replaced. Instead of 30-100 members of a tribe living in a migratory pattern over a territory you had a village of 300 or a town of 1,000, with all the implied complexity that allowed to develop. The artisan specialists of your village or town lived well, and their goods or services were what we would think of as expensive. But everything they made was done by hand labor with skills learned over a lifetime, and those things were made to last as long as possible. The house I grew up in had some old wooden chairs that had been in the family for most of a century that were still sturdy and useful long after the people who constructed them had passed on. Before World War II there were many buildings in Berlin Germany that had stood for hundreds of years because they were built with pride to the best of the ability of the construction workers who assembled them in the late 1600's or even earlier.

Before the 1600's hardly anyone on Earth used fossil fuels for much of anything. A few surface seams of coal were harvested for use by blacksmiths or the desperate poor, but most coal gives off vile odors when burnt in an open hearth and most people preferred wood. Surface seeps of crude oil were used to waterproof ships or occasionally grease wagon axles but not for much else. In a rare few places flaming natural gas seeps were regarded as nearly magical and said to have all sorts of mystical significance. Other than that everything was water/wind/muscle powered with wood fires for cooking and charcoal for most metal working.

All the way from 200,000 years ago up to the 1600's the driving force behind standard of living was the skill of your local artisans and the yield of the average farm surplus to use in exchange. If nobody in your village or town made a certain item that you wanted, say a felt hat, then you either went without or you paid a huge transportation cost to get it from the closest neighboring town where someone who made felt hats had their business. If you were in Europe and lived along one of the old Roman Imperial roads your transportation costs were much lower than if you lived out in the countryside where road was a euphemism for a path that was deep in mud several months each year. However most people who were farmers also were born, lived out their lives and died without ever going 20 miles from home. Travel was difficult and dangerous.

In the 1600's Europe started experiencing a new way to transit goods and people with canal works being built in Germany and France to connect rivers and make travel cheaper and easier. In the 1700's the first successful steam engines were developed and after almost a century of refinement this lead to Railroads. Canals were essentially a muscle powered transportation system where the canals were dug by hand, locks were built by hand and boats were towed by animal teams at a walking pace. With patience, a little engineering skill and lots of hard work anyone could build a canal out of local materials. Railroads were fundamentally different. A railroad needed rails with large quantities of iron. Even the first successful railroads used wooden rails capped with iron bands to keep the wood from wearing out. They used wooden cross ties and stone ballast to stabilize the track and promote drainage to help preserve the wood. They were powered by steam engines that were mass consumers of wood, charcoal or coal. It required a large influx of money to build and constant flows of money to maintain a railroad, much more than it did for canal systems. Without the Industrial Revolution and cheap iron Railroads simply would not exist. Without coal the steam engine driven industrial revolution would not exist because there is not enough biomass to feed an industrial system based on steam.

Industry before steam engines meant a water mill or wind mill driving wooden machinery. Sometimes a village would have a muscle powered mill for grinding grain where livestock would be harnessed up and walk in a circle for hours to drive the grinding stones if they couldn't harness the water or wind to do the job.

Infrastructure before steam engines meant roads, bridges, canals and ports that promoted transportation of goods from place to place. The better your infrastructure the higher your standard of living and the greater the degree of specialization you could have access to at a price you could afford to pay. Before the steam revolution 90 to 95 percent of people worked part or full time in Agriculture, because if you don't have food you have problems. In general roads and canals were built in the places where it was most practical, if the Roman Empire or Napoleon wanted a road from point A to point B it would wind its way around natural obstacles whenever possible.

Infrastructure after steam power came along meant making road or railroads as straight as possible. If that meant digging down a hill or filling in a valley them by gosh and by golly the steam powered shovels and dump trucks would do just that. Railroads are normally limited to very gradual grades of slope because it is hard to drag a train up hill and hard to control the speed of a train going down a steep hill. This encouraged some very serious tunnel blasting when the first railroads were being built all to keep the track bed as level as possible. In many cases the amount of blasting to wind around a mountain at a fixed level would actually take more effort than just blasting a tunnel straight through.

When the USA decided to build the national expressway network in the 1950's it was actually designed to serve a dual purpose. Just like the Railroads the hills and valleys were flattened out as much as possible. Also though most people never notice the system was designed so that within each 5 mile stretch their are at least 2 miles that are strait and level with no trees, bridges or other obstructions on either side. Why? Because at the dawn of the military jet age the system was designed so that in the event of war any fighter or bomber aircraft which survived but had their air bases destroyed could use the express way network as emergency landing fields. It was believed that while any potential enemy might manage to destroy every airport and air base in the continental USA they would never be able to damage a significant portion of the expressway network.

Well that is enough thoughts for the moment, more on this later.

[Tanada]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('pstarr', 'T')anada, can you reduce this to a couple talking points? For the short-of-attention disabled among us.

[Cog]

Thank you Tanada for posting this. I work as a supervisor that controls construction type surveying and well know the effort that a society puts into moving goods, people, etc. from point A-B. Whether we builds roads out of 12 inches of aggregate, capped with 4 inches of asphalt, and then 10 1/2 inches of concrete(the project I am working on now) or we simply have a smoothed out dirt path, we want to connect to each other and make travel possible.

Even if we crash as a society, there will always be a need for roads to connect us together. Might be a wagon path but there is still a connection.

[radon1]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Tanada', '
')That may seem a bit of a wandering narrative but everything in the list is about transportation and trade, no matter what the Marxists may think it is not manufacturing that drives economies. It has always boiled down to ease of transportation from point of origin to point of use.

[sparky]

.
so much to think so much to digest ,
basically all good with a few quibbles

on early farming , it also introduced hierarchy , farmers are very vulnerable ,
it wouldn't be too wrong to assert it was switching from a predator life style to a vegetal one
the roots keep you from moving , a warrior class ( with a chief ) is needed to provide protection
it can be seen during the fall of the roman Empire in the Balkans ,
while Romania reverted to wasteland , the Bulgar herders simply moved away from the invaders path

the increased complexity of farming also created a need for a judicial process and an established religion
the warriors ,priests and judges fed happily on the labor of the farmers

transport cost were critical not for village societies which were very much autarchic ,a farmers would be able to produce all of their needs , either by himself , with a communal help system or by some marginal specialization
there was no need for money , all the exchanges were either in goods or in personal obligation ,
a very strict form of credit ,a deal was done by slapping of hand and woe unto someone who welshed on a deal ,
his name was dirt , no one would ever help him

transport cost were critical for cities , an agglomeration of a few thousands has a lot of problem living from the surrounding countryside , location , location , location , a river is pretty much a requirement
not just for the food but also for the building supplies , forage , raw materials ..etc ...etc
the best is the estuary of a river on the sea , then there is the best of both worlds sea borne and inland trade
as an example the tower of London was build with stones quarried in Normandy ,
it was cheaper to get good stones two hundred miles by sea than twenty miles by land

the only way to pay for the cost of transport was through the spending of judge , religion and lord
who had their staff and residence in cities plus specialized high quality production
and the big asset ,much sought after, a market right.
large markets were a big plus for any town on the make , it would act as a pump drawing product and services from abroad and provide a way of changing the local goods into cash
if someone was less than good it hardly mattered as long as his money rang true

transport is all about exchange with a profit margin , the cheaper and faster the transport the better the margin
when railways were introduced in Germany and England it was possible for one town to send its ( better) beer to other
towns, local breweries disappeared by the dozen ,
smith lost the market for farm tools , newly established shops could provide a plenty of good quality hardware
local town smiths had to purchase horse shoes blanks made in far off factories , it was so much cheaper and better than to go to the trouble of forging one from scratch
a bit of on the spot shaping was all that was needed , and the metal was better too !

a railway cutting was big and expensive job , all the expenses were up front ,
railways needed banks , banks wanted to see legal guaranties of monopoly to ensure profits to repay the loans

the better the transports the greater the exchange network ,
I was amazed to see Australian pears sold in Europe cheaper than they were in Sydney ,
the cost of transporting a TV set from California to Kansas is not much more than transporting it from Guanzou to L.A.

P.S. there was long distance trading during the stone age ,
beside the famous amber trade covering all of Europe , there was specialized mining of high quality flint whose products were found hundred of kilometers away ,
sadly there was also the sign of the first industrial accident one of the flint miner body was found under a cave in

[hvacman]

One item not mentioned so far in the evolution of more sophisticated technical infrastructure is the political evolution also starting in the 1600's that took Europe from feudal kingdoms and city-states to larger nation-states. Railroads, canals, well-made roadways and large-scale commerce would not be viable where there is a border every 30 miles, with a whole different set of laws, taxes, property divisions, etc. Going back to another era, the Roman Empire demonstrated how vital central political control is to building infrastructure. When the empire collapsed, so did the advancement of more infrastructure.

[SeaGypsy]

Well you got a ball rolling here Tanada! (I love your OP, outstanding writing!)

With regard to stone age manufacturing, trade, travel:

(Tanada is 100% correct& AD's opinion of 'dialectic' ownership of the term reeks of cultural appropriation. My rave should explain why...)

(Leading on from Sparky's post mentioning high quality flint; one of my expertise is aboriginal oral history & anthropology/ archaeology.)

Mainland Australia has very few sites for 'glassy rock'. Tasmania has many but was cut off from the mainland about 15,000 years ago. The very best stone for napping was found on the Kimberly coast, the far north western ranges, & only in one small area. The spearheads made there for thousands of years show exactly what Tanada talks about, the evolution of artisanship. By the period of white invasion, the craft had been perfected & spear tips were found among the southernmost 'Pitlanders' (Pitjinjatjarra affiliated language group) 3000 km from where they were napped.

Making stone tools was a very busy occupation. If you go to the Kimberley or McDonnell or Flinders ranges, the most unsullied rocky country on the continent, you find massive quarrying & scree pits where for thousands of years people returned to collect & nap not just prime glassy rock, but any slaty sedimentary which might yield a useful edge.

The Pitlanders had complete control over a vast section of central & southern Australia, they were empirical, dominant through their monopoly on the ability to cross the continent. They were rapidly building a vast empire of stone age tribes, using an extremely potent nicotine containing plant- Pituri, which they carried as far as the east coast. They returned with the best of whatever anyone they did business with, particularly women.

The traders learned the languages of their slave wives, which the Pitlander elders would use to strategize. There were serious battles involving several hundred warriors, but only at the northern frontier, because the Luritja & Arrende people had plenty of Pituri, the called it Devils weed & looked down on the Pits from the lofty MacDonnell
Ranges & threw rocks at them, for at least 8,000 years. Meanwhile the Pits grew the empire & plotted on getting the numbers from the south to defeat the northerners.

Aboriginals did all this on foot, no beasts of burden & no more complex machine than a spear with an extension handle. Nothing which would pass as agriculture. Yet they sustained themselves long enough to form 500 languages, inhabit 90% of the continent, which the Pitjinjatjarra were in the process of turning into a country.

This example holds up Tanada's thesis that travel, even in the stone age, is the key to power.

[SeaGypsy]

You are being a nut. The OP is a great wide open conversation starter which you find offensive because it dismisses your favorite brand at the outset, rightly. The narrow point that Marxism misconceives the basis of human progress is correct. One of the reasons there is no Marxism of modern significance is because it is so offensive to all forms of freedom, especially personal adventurism. That's why while I have much sympathy for communist rebels in particular situations, I would be doing what they do, against a Marxist government.

Anyway I am sure Tanada will sort out our chicken's gizzards soon enough.

[sparky]

.
I'm not quite sure what "manufacturing" means for american dream
it's a French word meaning "made by (many) hands" the word Factory come from it

Large workshops were rare but not unknown before the 18th century
in roman times very large workshops existed ,
Venice armament center , the Arsenal , boasted of a chain assembly for warships , all made with standardized parts
the efficiency was demonstrated when a visiting king of Poland was invited to watch
the keel being laid early in the morning , the evening , the war galley , fully fitted out ,
sailed the grand canal , firing a salute .
Colbert the French finance minister encouraged the setting up of "manufactures" with taxes and legal privileges
this example was followed by all of Europe
large industrial production was often seen in the military and above all the navy ,
it created a market for large subcontractors , often charged with rigging the prices

[Tanada]

So as I was writing the entire scope of human history has demonstrated a fundamental truth. For some people this fundamental reality is offensive because it violates their belief system in the same way a radical religious fanatic is offended by other fundamental truths of reality.

That fundamental truth goes something like this. Any individual persons standard of living is dependent on infrastructure. If all you have is your ability to walk while carrying a burden like the Aboriginals SeaGypsy used in his example then your rate of trade is very low. You can build a nation from that foundation, but the assembly takes many generations to form because the infrastructure is virtually non-existent. From this natural abundance of 'sticks and stones' humans learned how to work natural materials into tools and improve on their situation.

Chimpanzee, Bonobo, Gorilla and Orang-U-Tan have been observed in their natural environment picking up natural materials and using them as tools. However so far as we have determined they do not modify these natural materials by very much from their found condition, and they discard them as soon as the particular task they are using them for is complete. For example they sometimes use grass or straw stems to extract ants or termites from mounds to eat. They will use sticks and rocks as clubs or hammers to break open nut shells to extract the edible portions inside, or to display their abilities to attract mates. For these 'cousins' of ours the step from tool use to tool manufacturing has not taken place.

For us the better our tools the more speed and efficiency we have used to improve our infrastructure, which in turn has given us greater standards of living. The pinnacle of this process before fossil fuel use were animal towed canal boats. When we started out as stone age humans on foot we could reasonably carry about 30 kg of material for trade about 15 km per day. When we got to pack mules we could haul about 100 kg per animal in a caravan.

When we got to travois we used simple leverage to drag twice as much per human/animal.
http://www.backcountrychronicles.com/travois-game-drag/
A travois is just about the simplest device you can use to give you a mechanical advantage when moving any burden from place to place.

The next step up from a travois is the wheel. By putting a wheel between the burden end of the travois poles and you reduce the force needed to pull your burden so long as you are on relatively flat and firm terrain. On moderate hills a travois offers advantages because it resists the pull of gravity better when going up hill and doesn't easily roll forward going down hill.
A travois based cart on a flat firm surface increases your burden capacity by another factor of two, depending on the length of the draw bars and the slope of the terrain. The biggest disadvantage is that the wheeled version of cart or wagon requires more than a game trail quality pathway. With a narrow cart with a single wheel, like a Wheel Barrow, you can traverse relatively rough terrain but there is a much greater risk of tipping over and having to re assemble the burden into a compact mobile configuration. The first roads were intended to improve this by widening and leveling the pathway by hand. Game trails in general are no more than two feet wide when passing through woodlot in my experience so humans pulling burdens had to create their own 'roadway' around obstacles. During the stone age these roads were little more than paths that bypassed natural features like marshes or dense stands of trees to provide routes during the dry season or in the colder regions the frozen season. During the wet season you only went as far as absolutely necessary because mud is exhausting to travel through.

When native copper and tin and lead were discovered and formed into tools of bronze or pewter infrastructure improved again, this time by using those metal tools to more effectively widen and flatten roads, and in resource rich places to even pave them to a certain extent. I grew up not far from a road called 'the old Plank road' that was first improved by laying logs crossways through a semi swampy area bordering the local river. The logs were not bound hard up against one another when the road was constructed. They were more like railroad ties that would prevent wheeled vehicles from sinking up to the axles in mud during the spring and fall wet seasons. It must have been a jarring experience for people in the 1800's to use it, but it worked, and all it required was a stand of trees and much labor with axes and saws. The next improvement was when they nailed planks across the embedded logs to give the oxen and horses firmer footing and the passengers a smoother ride.

When iron tools came along in the 1100 BC period of ancient Greece in Europe and around 700 BC in China stone working took on an entirely new context. Instead of seeking out frangible stone to be shaped into tools humans now turned to stone as a workable building material. Some stone work was done long before iron came along, the ancient Egyptians used bronze and even hammer stones to build the first pyramids and obelisks. Even the Inca, Maya and Aztecs of the America's built many worked stone structures without metal tools. However when the Iron tool arrived the ease of building was much greater. When the Roman Empire arose they took stone work construction to new heights with thousands of miles of roads, thousands of bridges, aqueducts for water, stone buildings and paved streets in cities. Each of these infrastructure improvements lead to more robust trade in all seasons. A hard surfaced properly drained road is usable in the rainy season or drought, unlike the muddy roads they replaced. Even the first practice of excavating drainage ditches along side otherwise dirt roads caused them to dry out much quicker after the rainy season ended.

All of these advances from foot to travois, to cart, to wagon were accomplished with hand labor and renewable fuels. Boats on lakes and rivers and ships upon the sea were also built from mostly renewable resources and required no fossil fuels. Galleys were the most common designs where human muscle provided the energy to move with supplementary sails to help when the wind was blowing the right direction. Galleys remained competitive transportation for several thousand years, only being fully displaced in the late 1700's in Europe when sailing ship technology finally surpassed them. Each and every one of these transportation improvements played its part in raising the general standard of living of the average human in the effected area.

Finally the pinnacle arrived. Well actually not finally because canals were being built as far back as the Bronze age in Egypt. I don't mean the irrigation canals either, I mean the boat canals that first served galleys, and then eventually cargo boats towed by animal power. At their peak around 1840 in Europe and North America and China a simple canal boat with one person handling the tiller and a second guiding the draft animal could move the weight of the boat plus sixty metric tons of cargo. The transition from 30 kg carried by a human to 60,000 kg carried by a canal boat took about 70,000 years. But nothing in that entire time required any use of fossil fuels to accomplish. If you lived anywhere on a river or canal network served by tow boats your standard of living was greater than that of any king or queen who reigned before 1500 AD. You had a much greater selection of foodstuffs to choose from at a lower price, and because of the low transportation costs provided by the infrastructure you could afford to import goods from incredible distances. Where common people before 1700 AD rarely traveled further than 30 km from the spot where they were born over a 70 year lifespan you could book passage on a canal boat and cross England or France or Germany within a week. In 1840 you could start out in Albany, New York and be in Toledo, Ohio in ten days, a distance of 950 km. All of this, every bit of it, was accomplished without the use of fossil fuels in any meaningful quantity.

[Timo]

Excellent topic for discussion! T and SG both present positions that are very well explained and backed up by documented history. Cheers to them for being the oddballs they are to even care about those facets of human history and human culture, and thanks for bringing their understandings and position here to share with the rest of us.

Reading through the (long) posts to get to this point, however, a question came to me that i fear may ruin this entire thread. Have we reached the point in human history where we are now victims of our own success?

In other words, we have fundamentally changed the foundation of the planet upon which we live, and we have "evolved" to become more dependent on our technological abilities more than our physical abilities to survive. We have created an environment for ourselves that is the basis for our own survival. Have we passed our own abilities to maintain this environment that is requisite for our own survival?

The requisites to maintain what we've built for ourselves now seem overwhelming, and we balk at the thought of the expenses we have locked in for the perpetuation of our built environment, without which we simply cannot continue. Have we gone too far, too fast? Have we overshot our abilities to keep up with ourselves, and in so doing, have we ruined the planet's natural ability to compensate for our successes in building the environment we've evolved to depend on?

[hvacman]

Tanada - spot-on. Though Man the Talker was one vital aspect of man's evolution, the other great evolutionary breakthrough that "elevated"man from the rest of life was (as he says modestly:-)....Man the Engineer....who figured out conceptually and practically how to build and use the wheel, the windmill and water mill, the boat, the plow, the arrow head, the bow, the transportation canal. But the Engineer guy that discovered fire...he's the one that created all the grief:)

re: Timo's question on overshooting our abilities. Well, yes, it appears clear we have overshot, just as countless other species have overshot over the earth's history. With a planet robust enough to successfully overcome asteroid blows, I don't think we could actually "ruin" the planet's natural ability to compensate. We may not like the earth's compensating process, though. It used a 90% life die-off to compensate for the last major asteroid hit.

We are the first species, though, that is self-aware of the overshoot and is using the same process that drove our overshoot (scientific thought and advancement) to study the overshoot and contemplate what might be done to modulate it.

To paraphrase Stewart Brand - We be as gods, are not very good at it, but are still learning and trying.

Can we learn and achieve our own compensation fast enough to avoid earth's more natural compensation process? Ah, that is the question.

[Tanada]

So here we are in 2015 and people say, what difference does it make how we lived from 200,000 ybp to 1840 AD?

Starting around 1840 we started using Coal on an industrial scale. First we used it for heating and cooking and small scale forge work with metals, but around 1840 we started building Blast Furnaces on an ever larger scale. With an 1841 era blast furnace you could take Anthracite coal, limestone and iron ore and produce cast iron at a rate of tons per day.

Compared to wrought iron make by using charcoal, iron ore and limestone in a hand bellows blown retort where a good smith could make a few pounds of iron in a week the costs were trivial. Then a couple decades later Bessemer developed a method for converting very high carbon cast iron into low carbon steel and suddenly things really took off. Cheap cast iron meant a lot of consumer goods ranging from pots and pans to Franklin stove type cook stoves and furnaces to heat your homes and cook your meals using coal instead of wood. Cheap steel meant much more reliable steam boilers with far fewer manufacturing flaws, railroad tracks made of high durability steel allowing high durability steel wheel railroad cars to transit with very low friction and all the huge cost savings that implied.

Good quality steel and high pressure boilers in turn spawned more efficient shallow draft paddle wheel river boats and steel hulled steam powered ships to cross the oceans faster than ever before. Commodity prices for goods imported from far away dropped, then dropped again as Coal and the revolution in Steel manufacturing it started swept around the world. Infrastructure underwent massive improvements as steam shovels dug down hills and even mountains and people built canals and railroads and regular roads that were straighter and cheaper to use than ever before. People stopped concerning themselves with harvesting renewable energy resources in a sustainable way. Nobody worried about clear cutting the old growth forest, after all when the wood ran low we could just switch to cheap King Coal for our heating and cooking fuel. Then just 60 years later we started mass producing a new way of travel, the gasoline fueled Automobile. Auto meaning self and Mobile meaning moving as opposed to the horse and buggy. A few years after that Henry Ford integrated the ideas of the moving assembly line with auto manufacturing and was able to drop prices so low an average working class person in America could afford to buy their own car piecemeal. Yes I wrote that correctly, instead of getting a bank loan to buy a complete car Henry Ford had a different plan. You could buy every individual part to his Model S and Model T cars by mail order along with assembly instructions as you could afford them. Over the course of a year or two you could acquire the frame. axles, wheels, engine and so forth as you saved up the money for them and put them all together yourself. If you were less well off you could build just the crucial aspects needed to have a mobile object, and if you were upper middle class or wealthier you could have every part customized to really make your car stand out from the crowd.

From the first systems of trading humans took practice in as far back as Archeology and Paleoanthropology can determine humans had traveled in caravan style for reasons of safety and efficiency. It didn't matter if it were five tribesmen hauling what they could carry by shear muscle power or a steam locomotive pulling a dozen rail cars, we always traveled in groups.

Automobiles changed that. In a generation we went from Wagon Trains to Steam Trains and then in two more generations we went to private cars. A Conestoga Wagon of the style most commonly used in the days of wagon trains was a very expensive investment. It was built to survive the harsh trail conditions from Saint Louis, Missouri out to California, Oregon or Washington while hauling all of your worldly possessions. The self contained Model T Ford mass produced in Michigan in 1912 sold for a fraction of the price of a Conestoga Wagon in 1841. It was the marvel of its age, you could flip a switch, hand crank your 4 horsepower engine and drive until you ran out of gasoline at a rip roaring 25 miles per hour, faster than a racehorse could run and a great deal further than 1 mile.

Naturally driving 25 mph over a muddy path in spring was nearly impossible, but a British fellow by the name of McAdam had a solution. If you dumped gravel in a layer a foot or more thick on the road bed during the dry season the mud was greatly reduced in the wet season. Even better if you could pour a concrete or asphalt surface on top of the gravel. So naturally people petitioned their governments to do just that, and gravel paving started getting put down everywhere there was a road bed. Of course gravel is a limited natural resource so in short order people took to blasting rock formations and crushing the resulting boulders in giant fossil fueled machines to make gravel whenever they ran out of natural sources.

Through all of human history before 1840 infrastructure mostly meant what you could do with hand labor to improve ease or travel. With the coal/steam/steel revolution starting about 1840 infrastructure suddenly meant something very different. Instead of a road that meandered through valleys around hills and mountains we started building roads that were arrow straight. At first they went up and down hill following terrain because our automobile cars didn't get exhausted hauling us up slope and risk losing control rolling down the opposite slope. That wasn't good enough for us with our cheap coal and cheap oil so after World War Two we went on a flattening binge. Every highway that undulated up and down hill was a target for digging down the highs and filling in the lows. The next time you travel on an interstate expressway envision how much energy was consumed to make your pathway flat so that you could speed along at many times walking pace comfortably. Think about all the earth dug up and moved to make overpasses and entry/exit ramp structures. The amount of energy consumed to make nice flat straight highways is mind boggling when you realize there are thousands of miles of them in the USA, Canada and around the world.

All that energy invested in all that infrastructure for one simple reason, to improve your standard of living. It used to be said all you needed was a roof over your head and enough food to keep body and soul together. In the abstract sense you could build a one room hut and sleep on the floor eating cold dried jerky or beans. If you did the modern culture would consider you to be in abject poverty, but your ancestors from 150 years ago or before would consider you pretty well off. When 90 plus percent of your population works to supply the food for everyone having a full belly and a weather proof home is a large accomplishment.

Doing things like building expressways and paving hundreds of hectares of land for airports and parking lots is pure energy extravagance. If we had not figured out ways to use fossil coal, and oil, and methane so cleverly how would we be living in 2015?

In all likelihood long distance travel would be completely dominated by water, canal, riverboat or ocean ship. Other than gliders it would cost far to much to fuel any powered heavier than air craft so whatever air travel existed would be by balloon or dirigible, and those only for the very wealthy. You would be able to afford a house or apartment with furnishings that were made of natural materials and designed to last generations. Many of them would have been passed down to you from your ancestors who in turn had received them from their ancestors. There would be no such thing as the consumer society based on cheap disposable goods hauled long distances at trivial cost.

Much more of the population would be employed in agriculture as has been the case from 12,000 ybp up until about 1920 AD. This would be a necessity because without pesticides and herbicides you needed farm labor out in the fields daily to remove the weeds and pests from the fields by hand. About a quarter of the land farmed would be pasture and crops dedicated to feeding the livestock and keeping them healthy enough to do work.

The 'Manufactories' that existed would be water or wind powered because nobody could afford enough biomass to feed steam engines or internal combustion engines to power machinery. This would still provide enough power to work metals and wood to turn out durable goods that would be useful for generations, but not nearly enough to produce throw away consumer items. Depending on the location you might have access to hydroelectric dam produced electricity, but this would not be nearly enough for the hundreds of consumer gadgets we take for granted today. A few electric light bulbs and perhaps a fan to make your heating more efficient in the winter and slightly cool you off in the summer.

So when the Peak gets here what will become of us, the spoiled generation who have never even raised a garden, let alone depended on crops we grow to feed ourselves? The people who go everywhere looking at the electronic device in their hand instead of seeing the real world all around them? In a real collapse of civilization the death toll is beyond comprehension, at least my imagination fails. We have so specialized ourselves because of the bounty of fossil fuel energy that most of us would be totally at the mercy of circumstance without our ever present and pervasive technology.

[Timo]

Tanada, your last paragraph sums up my fears, exactly! We are the servants to the monster that we, ourselves, have created.

And that monster is destined to kill us.

[Subjectivist]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Timo', 'T')anada, your last paragraph sums up my fears, exactly! We are the servants to the monster that we, ourselves, have created.

And that monster is destined to kill us.

[SeaGypsy]

Tanada, if you take language as the first human technology, & use Australian aboriginals as a reference, it is clear that your thesis fits. The canoe builders along the east coast pushed out the foot bound inland people. These took thousands of years before the Pitlanders worked out a strategy, essentially about carting a potent drug of addiction around on their backs, to begin to build a great inland nation capable of rivaling the east coasters. There is no suggestion there was intent to war with these en-masse, but to regain access to thousands of kilometers of abundant coast.

My suggestion is that your model fits, as far back as it it possible to look.

Where this train of thought takes me?

Well whether or not it is going to be AGW & PFF economic Apocalypse these principles are going to apply for as long as there are people. That's why 'oddballs' (lol) like me find this stuff fascinating. I am not looking for a crystal ball solution for overshoot, I am quite sure there is only one & it doesn't require a plan for society, it is the end of society as we know it.

What I like about Tanada's rave is how it is so very thought provoking & open ended. I'm sure 10 people reading it will have 10 personal takes on what it means for them.

For me it reminds of my alignment with Orlov & Newfie & Zeyang.

Instead of strength in a failing world being about who controls the FF dinosaurs in the MIC, in the long run strength will be with the light, fast, agile, flexible, knowlegable, connected & mobile.

Knowing these fundamentals is a starting point for a personal revolution.

[SeaGypsy]

The history of glass is very long & interesting.

Humanity's fascination with glass is ultra primitive. A stone aged human would get much more excited about finding a seam of glassy rock than gold, the former being the most prized toolmaking commodity.

About 800 years before Christ, the Egyptians began making glass vessels. They realized from meteorite impacts that where sufficient lime was present, silica would form into stable glass. They worked out how to create temperatures hot enough to cook sand & lime into glass, using various metals as flux, including antimony. Shortly after learning how to make straight iron rods, the crafters were using a plug of dung & clay to form a vessel from liquid glass. They also perfected annealing processes. All without a thermometer.

About 800 years later, or 50BC the Romans either developed or co-opted the blowpipe, & the age of glass blowing began.

The glass furnaces of Venice burned up virtually all of Italy's forests over the next 1700 years. The Roman glass was immensely important to their economy. It was regarded as a product of alchemy, magic, inspiring awe & prices only the rich could afford.

All of this period, glass was produced in an artisan model, a family business with apprentices & knowledge kept tightly in the family.

When Drake managed to steal the Spanish' stolen gold, the British early industrialists paid huge bounties to get glass masters from Italy. These were given knighthoods, lands, treated as royalty. Through the 1800's the British perfected factory production of glass in a manner whereby the Lord owner was completely in control. The original artisan having taught one how to mix, one how to make the crucibles & furnaces, one how to cook/ batch, one how to make & test colours, one how to blow & shape, one how to anneal. Each specialty then being run under the artisan model, generally father to son apprenticeships. By the time the old Italian master had died, there was no one person capable of starting up in competition.

The same cycle recently repeated, with the master Lino Tagliapietra travelling the world giving away the ancient secrets of Murano. He spawned the modern art glass movement, virtually single handedly. Every modern glass blower traces their lineage to Lino, except for those he betrayed on Murano. This time around though it is China replicating what the early British industrialists did- utilize economies of scale, mass production techniques, & capacity to get product to market, to completely undermine the market. Just as the early industrialist Britain & Austria undermined the artisan glass market of the 18th & 19th century.

Point of rave/ the concept that the industrial revolution came in any way out of nowhere because of fossil fuels is incorrect. Batching glass is high science, extremely difficult to get right even with modern equipment. Industrialization came about as an organic response to market growth. The process took thousands of years & can be seen as being at it's zenith now due to being able to move ideas to developers/ investors, investment & resources to labour & product to market virtually without restraint.

Transport, of ideas, people, products, is fundamental human nature. For good or for evil, for as long as there are people this will continue to be the case.

(I have family & friends in Indonesia & the Philippines have been recommending I get into the ferry business there for years. I may just....)

[Tanada]

Well access to specialty glassware is certainly a standard of living improvement. There were many 'industries' that were doing mass production before fossil fuels made access to energy cheap. Someone pointed out the Venetian ship arsenal that was considered an engineering marvel in its day.

As I recall the Chinese had a military arsenal way back that produced crossbows and crossbow ammunition (Quarrels?) of cast iron. They let the person who built the arsenal arm and train more troops than any other warlord of the era and I think he eventually became Emperor when the other recognized he could out produce all of them put together. Because they used cast iron the arrows were useless for any other purpose, it was very difficult to work them like wrought iron because they would shatter or crumble when hammered depending on how hot they were.
$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'I')n north China the earliest iron artifacts appear to be from the late fourth century B.C., but by this time the spread is quite rapid, and by the early third century B.C. iron has become the metal of choice for all implements and edged weapons. An important piece of evidence here is a mass grave of fallen soldiers of the state of Yan in Yixian County, Hebei (Liu Shishu 1975; KG 1975.4: 241-243). The date given by its excavators, the early third century B.C., appears to be very reliable. The soldiers were buried with their weapons, and we thus have a less biased sample of weapons of the time than graves normally give us (cf. Trousdale 1977). Very nearly all of the weapons are of wrought iron or steel; a few implements were also found in the grave, and these were of cast iron. A crossbow-lock is of bronze; the superior casting properties of bronze make it a better material than iron for this type of artifact. Nineteen crossbow-bolts have cast iron shafts and bronze tips, again presumably because of the better casting properties of bronze. There are only three edged weapons of bronze (compared with 51 of iron), and these can be explained as symbolic objects, perhaps symbols of rank, not intended for use in serious fighting.

[SeaGypsy]

Yes Tanada, fascinating. A friend of mine has a copy of the machine you mention's predecessor, same idea but for working wood into replicate ornaments, mid 1700's Netherlands technology.

(The first robotic lathe)