[SchroedingersCat]

With all the talk about peak oil, peak energy and powerdown it seems as though many people are discounting the other variable in the power equation -- time. Power is a unit of work divided by a unit of time. A watt is a Joule/second. One horsepower is about 750 watts. When we look at the coming crisis, we need to keep in mind the time variable.

Increases in productivity have enabled us to do more work in less time. Nearly all of these increases can be traced back to fossil fuels. Transportation, computers, more effiecient factories and production equipment are all tied to fossil fuel; primarily oil. Our economy itself is tied to the 'speed of money.' How fast will an investor get an acceptable return on their investment, and will that return happen sooner than the cost of that money accrues?

The viability of the suburbs is based on time. I live about 2.5 miles from my job. I could walk that distance in less than an hour each way. Not ideal, but do-able. A person living 20 or 30 miles from their place of work cannot afford the time it would take to commute without fossil fuel powered transportation. Period.

Much of the manufacturing done today could be done with much lower energy methods (excepting high-heat, high-pressure.) A human operating a pan-and-break can produce amazingly precise sheet metal products. Plastic and metal castings can be done by hand. Fabrics can be produced on hand looms. Ceramics can be hand cast. Etc. The difference is that these human-powered methods take much more time. So the cost is higher -- for now.

As the cost of oil and other fossil fuels increases, the time factor will become more important and more negotiable. Whereas now we have one guy run a machine to press out 300 gadget x's an hour, we may have 50 guys producing 200 per hour by a lower (fossil) energy method.

The biggest threat to the global economy will be that of time. Just-in-time production will go first. The cost of energy will kill it. The velocity of money will drastically slow, making investments less desirable. The cost of human horsepower will drop and methods will arise to make greater and greater use of it. I think we will be looking at a return to some sort of guild and craftsman society for much of what is produced.

The questions are: do we have the time to make these adjustments? Is powerdown more about slowing down? What sectors of production will be able to change themselves over to a slower form of energy.

It's not peak power. It's not peak liquid fuel. It all about time.

[ashurbanipal]

I have a number of thoughts about this post:

1) If you increase the units time in w=j/s, you've decreased w so long as j remains constant. I'm not sure I understand whether you're arguing that we can do the same things we do now, just at a slower pace, or not. If you are, then that's not my understanding of the issue--increase time with no compensation in joules and energy decreases.

2) Of course, everything will slow down, and that's a much larger issue than people realize. Eventually, it will be good, but for the millions who depend on their food being shipped to them quickly, it won't be so good at all.

3) A lot of people seem to talk about the economy as if it were just another element on a political survey, like the war in Iraq, Plamegate, etc. But it is infinitely more important than that. When we went from small groups of hunter-gatherers to a mainly agrarian society, we chose to have an economy as a means of survival. Rather than everyone going out and picking acorns, one person made food grow while another produced shoes and another made medicines, etc. That is, in it's bare essentials, what the economy is. The person growing the food could not do so-would have to go pick acorns-if it weren't for other people making shoes and medicines and other such items that he could trade his food for. The economy is how we survive. The economy is the farmer's plow and supply of seeds, it is the doctor's scalpel, it is the uniformed police officer, it is the fisherman's net. It is all those things that we depend on to get the necessities of life and distribute them. And when (not if) it unravels, saying that everything will become unpleasant is an understatement.

Until another economy develops, work of the sort you're talking about will be done only in fits and starts, and in many places, not at all.

[elroy]

Think of what this will mean for unemployment figures. Evaporate!

[SchroedingersCat]

It's hard enough trying to explain peak oil to people and then try to explain the element of time. Everything about our modern, western lifestyle is based on it happening now.

To keep any kind of basic society going will depend on a certain amount of work being done. If the amount of power decreases, the amount of time needed to do the same amount of work increases. What happens when people need 90 minutes to commute instead of 30 because they are using mass transit or human powered transportation? How do we adjust to needing someone to stay home and garden/can/prep?

Cheap oil has given us time more than anything else. The end of cheap oil means the end of free time. How does that affect everything we know?

[Rufoman]

Now if I get what you're saying it is that we could do everything we do now it would just take longer? if that's so then I'm pretty sure you're wrong.
I don't think you understand is that we use more power today, everyday, than we could ever hope to achieve by human/animal power, now a single barrel of oil has roughly 25 000 hours worth of energy in it, we burn something like 80 000 000 barrels of oil a day, now a fair bit of that is waste but even discarding that we would still produce a lot less goods in a lot more time than we do now, because we simply cannot equal our present day constuction without fossil fuels/ non-animal power.
If I've misunderstood your point go right ahead and correct me.

[airstrip1]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SchroedingersCat', '
')Cheap oil has given us time more than anything else. The end of cheap oil means the end of free time. How does that affect everything we know?

[SchroedingersCat]

I'm not so much trying to make a point as to stir a discussion. How will we deal with the need to use more time to accomplish everything? What sorts of things will not be practical or possible? How does this need for more time affect our society? What gets better and what gets worse?

[Frank]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SchroedingersCat', 'I')'m not so much trying to make a point as to stir a discussion. How will we deal with the need to use more time to accomplish everything? What sorts of things will not be practical or possible? How does this need for more time affect our society? What gets better and what gets worse?

[airstrip1]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SchroedingersCat', 'I')'m not so much trying to make a point as to stir a discussion. How will we deal with the need to use more time to accomplish everything? What sorts of things will not be practical or possible? How does this need for more time affect our society? What gets better and what gets worse?

[Paul64]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('Frank', '
')Well, when you spend more and more time on the "basics" (safety, shelter, food, etc.) there'll be less-and-less time for everything else. That's okay because there'll be less people around to worry about it and in some ways I think quality-of-life will improve.

[ashurbanipal]

I remember looking at an actuarial table for London for the year 1663, and I was really surprised at what it showed. There were quite a large number of deaths for a city of slightly fewer than 1 million inhabitants--about 25,000 that year, if I recall. Childbirth only accounted for some hundred or so deaths (I'm doing this by memory). Murder another couple hundred. Even the plague claimed less than 1000 people. Then there was the King's evil (undiagnosed tuberculosis, probably) that only killed 17 people. Rising of the Lights (Dropsy, not alien abduction) killed 38 people. And there were many other ways listed. But one thing killed more people than all the other causes combined. It stood out not just for the number, but for how inconceivable it is to us today. That cause was gingivitis--gum infection. Left untreated, gingivitis kills by locking the jaw and spreading to the brain/ neck. It killed close to 15,000 people that year, probably more painfully than we can imagine.

When Flemming invented penicilin, the first patient he tried it on was a police officer at a local hospital. The officer grew prize roses in his time off, and had been out tending them when a thorn scratched his cheek. It became infected, and then soon his entire head was infected. Flemming gave him penicilin and the infection started to go away, but he didn't have enough so eventually the officer died. Nevertheless, it was a promising enough outcome that penicilin was mass produced.

When I think about things like this, I wonder what a strange world it must have been that one might reasonably expect to die from being scratched on the cheek or from a gum infection. Personal hygiene was a vastly different thing 300 years ago. If you can imagine, people bathed no more often than once a week (more frequent use of water would have been considered extravagant and wasteful--the notion that people thought bathing would cause illness is mostly incorrect). Though we cannot know for sure, most people probably didn't have anything to clean themselves after defecating. Imagine what that must have been like--to walk around for a week without having wiped your ass, and then stepping into a bath after 2 other people had already used it, their own soil floating in the water.

The reason that trunks used to be (and still are in rural settings) kept at the ends of the bed was so that the bedclothes could be removed from the mattress in the morning, folded carefully and weighted with stones in the trunk. This helped smother the fleas and lice that lived there. Even in Roman built cities with underground sewers, cities stank like you probably wouldn't believe. Open or partially open sewers, people with multiple infections and lots of body odor, livestock, and butcher shops without refrigeration all contributed to the odor du-jour. And in this microbe-infested world our ancestors lived lives that we cannot imagine. But consider this if you want to know how bad it must have been: men were eager to die in a battle, rather than die old in bed. Consider that death in a war usually resulted from being cut to ribbons and lingering for weeks, and you get an idea what life was like.

Four things changed this state of affairs (in order of importance):

1) Development of large-guage pipes for carrying away waste-water.
2) Development of large scale water filtration systems to provide freer access to potable water.
3) Development of pesticides from petrochemicals.
4) Development of antibiotics.

Of all of these, only perhaps 4 might have been possible on a large scale basis without the widespread use of oil and the industrialization that came with it. But even that is doubtful. The others are not feasible without industry of some kind, and almost certainly the first three will not continue indefinitely post-peak.

With this as background, I have to wonder how anyone thinks that things will be better along any imaginable scale in a post-collapse world. Our ancestors bought into industrialization big-time for a reason. What's unfortunate is that they (and we ourselves) left us little to work with. We're not just looking at Peak Oil. We're looking at Peak water, peak fish, peak fertilizers, peak pesticides, and peak stable-climate. There were some romantic elements to life in, say, the late 1600's. Things were a lot slower, allowing time for contemplation and meditation for those so inclined. Honor still meant something. Recreational passtimes typically involved people relating to one another, not people relating to machines. There seems to have been a kind of vitality that people now lack.

What those who look forward to Peak seem to forget is that this picture of life depended on a certain natural balance staying in place, one that we cannot go back to for a long time. This picture of life relied, for instance, on a certain level of crop yields that in turn relied on good topsoil. We won't have that. This life relied on plentiful lumber. We won't have that. This life relied on plentiful stone that could be shaped at will. We won't have that. This life relied on a large number of people who worked themselves more or less to death at the behest of a church that commanded absolute faith, and could thus order society as necessary. No such church exists today. We will have to survive the rebuilding of our topsoil, the recycling of our stone, the replanting of our forrests, the repopulating of our oceans, all while the weather goes increasingly haywire. Saying this will not be easy is an understatement of stupefying proportion.

The worst criticism of Newtonian physics comes home to roost here: that the future is not distinguished from the past. Calculating the available energy by modulating time isn't going to tell the whole story, not by a long shot, because from time1 to time2, the type of energy available changes. Lots of our energy usage comes as embodied energy; some of it with enough of an inflection point that loss of petroleum or the equivalent locks us away from that embodiment forever. For instance, it's practically impossible to mass produce 4 foot pipe without heavy machinery. No process known to man, no matter how many people you employ, will give any meaningful output. Without large guage pipe, sewers cannot remain in a good state of repair forever. Eventually, they will fail. Cities without sewers will quickly become cess-pits; we will actually be worse off that way than people of 3 centuries ago. And there are thousands of other such examples that people scarcely notice. Not only will we learn, post-collapse, why our ancestors chose to industrialize, we will also learn the terrible price that must be paid for that temporary acquiescence in comfort. We cannot go back the way we came. But moving forward will be like wading through the detritus of the pre-industrial past, not like living it again.

This won't happen all at once, to be sure. But somewhere between ten and fifty years post peak, I think this is what we'll be looking at.

[The_Virginian]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('', 'T')he viability of the suburbs is based on time. I live about 2.5 miles from my job. I could walk that distance in less than an hour each way. Not ideal, but do-able. A person living 20 or 30 miles from their place of work cannot afford the time it would take to commute without fossil fuel powered transportation. Period.

[SchroedingersCat]

The railroads are an interesting point. During the final stage of construction of the US transcontinental railroad, one crew was able to lay over ten miles of track in one day! Granted, it was an all-out effort by scores of driven workers, but impressive none the less. Automated, fossil fuel driven track laying machines do about 1/2 that amount today.

[Kingcoal]

Forgive me if my memory is foggy, but isn't 'work' in physics defined as energy expended per unit time (joules/sec)? In other words, you can expend less energy and take more time or expend more energy and take less time and do the same amount of work. A better term would be productivity, which is product produced per unit of time. We really don't care how much work someone does, only how much money they spent per unit of time per product.

However, I understand your point. Cheap energy has allowed us to throw massive amounts of energy at stuff to increase productivity. Who cared that most of the time this was very inefficient when oil was so cheap. Oil is still fantastically cheap, by the way. All this will change as hydrocarbons become more expensive. I don't think all is lost though. As long as we can still generate large amounts of electricity, industry will move along. I worry much less about filling my car than powering my house. I think that the world will go on a huge nuclear power building boom.
Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste

[airstrip1]

$this->bbcode_second_pass_quote('SchroedingersCat', 'T')he railroads are an interesting point. During the final stage of construction of the US transcontinental railroad, one crew was able to lay over ten miles of track in one day! Granted, it was an all-out effort by scores of driven workers, but impressive none the less. Automated, fossil fuel driven track laying machines do about 1/2 that amount today.

[oiless]

Every "advance" man has ever made has been to increase productivity in the face of reproductive pressure. When our numbers push the limits of what can be supported by the system of activity we are engaged in, we change systems.
Hunter gathering gave way to agriculture because our increasing numbers could not be supported in the face of diminishing supplies of big game, even though agriculture led to longer days and a less nourishing diet.
It didn't happen because farming was easier, it happened because there was no choice, agriculture would feed more people.

Only in the last one hundred or so years has industrial progress actually resulted in increased standards of living for the drudges actually doing the work. Prior to that conditions were worse for participants in the new industrial world than they ever were working the soil under feudal lords.
However there was no choice. In the face of a rising population industrialization was the only option.

I suspect we are nearing the other side of that curve now, where living standards will decrease, work will be longer, and so on.
Normally, once everyone was near starving, we'd do something else, adopt a new system or new technology to increase productivity yet again, but I don't know if that option exists in this case.

Time is an inextricable part of the equation.