Twilight of Abundance: Why Life in the 21st Century Will Be Nasty, Brutish, and Short

172 Pages·2014·1.37 MB·English

by  David Archibald

CONTENTS
Foreword by Richard Fernandez of the Belmont Club
Preface
Chapter One The Time Is at Hand
Chapter Two A Less Giving Sun
Chapter Three Populations on the Verge of Collapse
Chapter Four Culture Is Destiny
Chapter Five Pakistan’s Nuclear Weapons
Chapter Six China Wants a War
A Picture from a Possible Future
Chapter Seven The Leaving of Oil
Chapter Eight Not Quite the Worst That Could Happen
Postscript
Notes
Index
FOREWORD
BY RICHARD FERNANDEZ OF THE BELMONT
CLUB
The hardest thing to sell people on is the obvious. That is because the
self-evident is so familiar that many instinctively have contempt for it.
Like a prophet in his own country, the obvious is often too mundane to
overawe.
David Archibald’s book, Twilight of Abundance, is a collection of ideas that
it seems we might have thought up ourselves. Archibald points out that we have
been living in an unprecedented time of food and energy abundance in a period
of peace unprecedented since the fall of the Roman Empire. And he supplies the
evidence to back his point up. Then he argues that our civilization can’t count on
winning the lottery every week.
And yet that is what we have effectively done and intend to continue to do,
in thrall to agendas that command our full attention, though we have forgotten
what they are supposed to achieve. Issues such as “global warming” or “gay
marriage”—which may have some worth in themselves—are treated as
existential problems, even as far more pressing issues are shunted to the side.
Archibald’s major contribution is to put the obvious front and center again.
Once having awakened our interest in the undeniably real existential threats, he
argues that policymakers ought to take prudent steps to transition into new
technologies and arrangements necessary to ensure global security and sufficient
food and energy for the world’s population—instead of living in the dream that
these goods are givens, or falling into an ideological obsession with returning to
some sylvan eco-paradise that never existed.
For his troubles David Archibald will probably be dismissed as an extremist
—a “climate change denier” or some such—although it is hard to see what he is
extreme about. Perhaps the strangeness is really just his departure from the
talking points that are endlessly prescribed by the media, a kind of disorienting
looping around to the place where we began.
That is precisely the value of his book. And while you may not subscribe to
his arguments in their entirety, there is no doubt that David Archibald is asking
the right questions. What will we use for energy in fifteen years’ time? What
will the world eat, given its burgeoning population? Can we really count on the
Pax Americana continuing indefinitely into the future? Important questions all.
And if the answer to any of these is “I don’t know” or “Nobody on TV is
talking about this,” then perhaps politicians should begin to focus on them.
Better at least than continuing with their current obsession with trivial but
politically correct pursuits.
The one obvious defect in Archibald’s book is the title: Twilight of
Abundance. This book is not about unavoidable impending tragedy. Archibald
argues that we are not doomed to a new dark age. On the contrary, an even more
prosperous and fulfilling future awaits us, but only if we keep our eyes open and
use our common sense.
PREFACE
This book had its origins back in 2005, when a fellow scientist requested
that I attempt to replicate the work a German researcher had done on
the Sun’s influence on climate. At the time, the solar physics
community had a wide range of predictions of the level of future solar
activity. But strangely, the climate science community was not interested in what
the Sun might do. I pressed on and made a few original contributions to science.
The Sun cooperated, and solar activity has played out much as I predicted. It has
become established—for those who are willing to look at the evidence—that
climate will very closely follow our colder Sun. Climate is no longer a mystery
to us. We can predict forward up to two solar cycles—that is, about twenty-five
years into the future. When models of solar activity are further refined, we may
be able to predict climate forward beyond a hundred years.
I was a foot soldier in the solar science trench of the global warming battle.
But that battle is only a part of the much larger culture wars. The culture wars
are about the division of the spoils of civilization, about what Abraham Lincoln
termed “that same old serpent that says you work and I eat, you toil and I will
enjoy the fruits of it.” This struggle has been going on for at least as long as
human beings have been speaking to each other, possibly for more than 50,000
years. The forces of darkness have already lost the global warming battle—the
actual science is “settled” in a way quite different from what they contend, and
their pseudoscience and dissimulation have become impossible to hide from the
public at large—but they are winning the culture wars, even to the extent of
being able to steal from the future.
The scientific battle over global warming was won, and now the only thing
that remained to be done was to shoot the wounded. That could give only so
much pleasure, and the larger struggle called. So I turned my attention from
climate to energy—always an interest of mine, as an Exxon-trained geologist.
The Arab Spring brought attention to the fact that Egypt imports half its food,
and that fact set me off down another line of inquiry, which in turn became a
lecture entitled “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.” Those apocalyptic
visions demanded a more lasting form—and thus this book.
While it has been an honor to serve on the side of the angels, that service has
been tinged with a certain sadness—sadness that so many in the scientific
community have been corrupted by a self-loathing for Western civilization, what
the French philosopher Julien Benda in 1927 termed “the treason of the
1
intellectuals.” Ten years before Benda’s book, the German philosopher Oswald
2
Spengler wrote The Decline of the West. Spengler dispensed with the traditional
view of history as a linear progress from ancient to modern. The thesis of his
book is that Western civilization is ending and we are witnessing the last season,
the winter. Spengler’s contention is that this fate cannot be avoided, that we are
facing complete civilizational exhaustion.
In this book, I contend that the path to the broad sunlit uplands of permanent
prosperity still lies before us—but to get there we have to choose that path.
Nature is kind, and we could seamlessly switch from rocks that burn in chemical
furnaces to a metal that burns in nuclear furnaces and maintain civilization at a
level much like the one we experience now. But for that to happen, civilization
has to slough off the treasonous elites, the corrupted and corrupting scribblers.
Our civilization is not suffering from exhaustion so much as a sugar high. This
book describes the twilight of abundance, the end of our self-indulgence as a
civilization. What lies beyond that is of our own choosing.
It has been a wonderful journey of service, and I have had many help me on
the way. They include Bob Foster, Ray Evans, David Bellamy, Anthony Watts,
Vaclav Klaus, Joseph Poprzeczny, Marek Chodakiewcz, Stefan Bjorklund, and
the team at Regnery. Thanks to all.
CHAPTER ONE
THE TIME IS AT HAND
Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and
keep those things which are written therein: for the time is at hand.
—Revelation 1:3
The second half of the twentieth century was the most benign period in
human history. The superpower nuclear standoff gave us fifty years of
relative peace, we had cheap energy from an inherent oversupply of oil,
grain supply increased faster than population growth, and the climate
warmed because of the highest level of solar activity for 8,000 years. All those
trends are now reversing. We are now in the twilight of that age of abundance.
Consider some facts.
World population was 2 billion in 1930. Now it is 7 billion, up 250 percent.
World grain production was 481 million metric tons in 1930. Now it is 2.4
billion metric tons, up 392 percent thanks to the green revolution pioneered by
Norman Borlaug and others. Grain prices fell all through that period—up until
the last few years. Developing-country wheat yields peaked at 2.7 metric tons
per hectare in 1996 and have plateaued thereafter. Developed-country grain
yields have plateaued from 2000. In the last decade, the supply overhang has
been absorbed, and now grain prices are running up. Meanwhile, each day sees
another 200,000 people added to the world’s population. As adults, each day’s
cohort will need 66,000 metric tons of wheat per annum to keep body and soul
together. That means that an additional 25 million metric tons of wheat
production will be required to feed the world’s population each and every year.
Most of the world’s population already spends a quarter to a half of their income
on food. Thus rising food prices will have a severe impact on their discretionary
spending, shrinking the market for goods and services.
If the climate were actually warming, vast areas of Canada and Russia could