There is a new television show out about the aftermath of a total loss of electricity and some people have found fault with the picture of total chaos and confusion and societal collapse that the series portrays. I thought it would be worthwhile, though, to examine the ways in which our global culture is dependent on electricity and how a total loss of electric power would make our current population unsustainable on the face of the earth. This is not intended to scare or frighten people, but rather a sort of thought experiment to look at the “worst case scenario” of a loss of electricity, even if that scenario is limited to the United States.
In a previous blog entry, I noted that there are four main staple food exports, and that the United States was either the lead exporter or among the lead exporters of these four staples: wheat, corn, rice, and soybeans [1]. Given that the agricultural sector of the United States is small and highly dependent on irrigation and dams [2] as well as farm machinery, in the absence of a large amount of agricultural workers in many of the staple crops, a loss of electricity (and fuel) would make it impossible for the United States to farm given our current capital-intensive, labor-scarce farming model. Not only would this shut down America’s export of food crops (which would cause immense hardship for other nations who depend on imports from the United States), but the United States would be utterly unable to feed itself, with obviously disastrous consequences.
For the sake of argument, let us ponder what that would mean. With water pumps and irrigation dams and aqueducts, our agriculture (and ability to feed ourselves) are completely jeopardized. The city of Los Angeles only has enough water for 100,000 people in its own aquifers. Aside from the Owens River Aqueduct, all of the other water sources of Los Angeles depend on high amounts of electricity (desalination, water from Northern California or the Colorado River). There are ten million people in the Los Angeles basin. Do the math–that would mean there is not sufficient water for about 99% of the population of Los Angeles. No amount of water rationing or recycling can overcome that kind of water deficit. Much of the Western United States (especially Nevada, Wyoming, Colorado, Idaho, Montana, North and South Dakota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Arizona, and New Mexico, as well as Eastern Washington and Oregon and Western Texas) would be uninhabitable, and certainly unable to produce food crops, without energy-intensive irrigation (that is already subsidized by the American taxpayers). Without electric power, almost the entire West becomes a giant desert and its people starving beggars without water or food.
Obviously, these are not good options, and we are dealing with a massive humanitarian collapse. Assuming that there was sufficient water in the Eastern United States for subsistence agriculture, we could possibly feed enough people at subsistence levels if we only had population levels around the Civil War period (around 30 or 40 million people or so, requiring a 90% or so death rate). Of course, we would have to scramble to find unskilled farm workers to pick up the slack from the loss of tractors and electric, and food storage would be difficult without refrigeration (which would make Florida nearly uninhabitable, with no air conditioning or even electric fans), but on the plus side the large number of starving hordes of people would make labor cheap, if you were lucky enough to have enough land and water to grow food for yourself with a small surplus.
Having put it that bluntly, though, to lose electricity would be a total disaster. To farm entirely like the Amish would require about 90% of the United States to die of starvation, and life would be very miserable and basic for the 10% that survived. A society that cannot feed 90% of its population would not last very long (of course, communication would totally fail given that all of our communication methods depend on either modern transportation or high-tech communication that would be entirely useless without electricity). A study of logistics reminds us of the sustainability of given models of agriculture. Labor intensive agriculture cannot support the same population of people as higher technology methods, nor at the same standard of living, and so any disaster that forces the increase of farm labor to replace technology would worsen the position of mankind, particularly given our world’s food reserves and infrastructures appear to be without a large amount of slack.
So that is the bad news. The good news is that this is only a hypothetical example on a show. We all ought to be concerned about the security of our food supplies (it is a subject that I think about far more than I want to), but to do something about it requires a lot of personal responsibility as well as some resources and cooperation with others. Those who live in rural areas probably have more space to work with and a greater tolerance for the sort of physical labor that is required to grow at least part of one’s own food supply. For those in the city, some experience with urban gardening could be useful at least to supplement food stores, if one is in an area where food supplies are rather limited. But to replace entirely one’s market purchases requires a lot of effort and resources that are hard to find. To give one example, even with a group of students all working at least half-time in various fields here in Thailand, we still only grow about 15% of our own food supplies (and none of our meat), though we are working hard to increase that.
So, praying for disaster and calamity would be an extremely foolhardy move for any of us. Most people who make a living out of preaching doom and gloom are not in a place of depending on their own labor and efforts to feed themselves, but rather benefit from logistical networks that are fairly efficient at earning them resources beyond the level of ordinary citizens. A disaster that would threaten business as usual in the food supply would lead to there being no more resources to feed for superfluous elites, leaving everyone to either be a direct part of whatever logistical network was left or to be an unskilled farm laborer. Otherwise, we had better hope to keep the black rider at bay, because the alternatives to our present agricultural and economic systems are highly unpleasant, and there is precious little slack and extra resources in our systems as it is. That makes our situation only the more precarious, although what can be done at this late hour seems rather limited.
Edge Induced Cohesion 