History is a funny thing. On the one hand, it is clear that for most people, whatever happened more than 30 years before they were born is ancient history. I mean, whenever you hear about something that happened in the past, you filter it through your own experience. How could it be otherwise? Now, I guess that “your own experience” also includes whatever people have told you—in school, family, media, etc. This means that everybody can, in some way, relate to the victims of horrible things like the Holocaust or slavery. But we also have only a really very partial view. For example, after the Napoleonic Wars, when the UK outlawed the slave trade and tried to stop it, the Royal Navy based a squadron in Sierra Leone. Amazingly, the death rate among the sailors of that squadron averaged 50% per year, essentially due to tropical diseases. Yes, 50%. In fact, the mortality rate in 1825 was 86%. On slaving ships, it seems that the mortality rate among crew and slaves was lower but also pretty horrible. In fact, it seems to have been comparable among both groups—at the end of the day, the slavers had an interest in their cargo arriving alive. Now, Australia is famous because the British sent convicts there, but they also did that to North America before the American Revolution. Among those convicts going there in the years 1719–1736, there was a death rate of 11.3% per voyage. Here are some more data, this time about France: in the 18th century, half of all children died before age ten, and life expectancy was just 25. It reached 45 years in 1900, when 15% of all babies still died before age one.

Now, I didn’t mention all those dates to minimize the evil of slavery, but to show how little we can relate to the lives of people who lived not that long ago. Avocados were sold in the UK for the first time in 1960. At the time, few people had a fridge. The prepackaged sandwich, that staple of British cuisine, appeared in 1982. In 1930, agriculture accounted for more than a third of the French working population. Since then, agricultural production has increased about fourfold. When kiwis were introduced in Europe in the 1970s, people didn’t know if they had to peel them or not. When I was a kid in the early 1980s, the butcher at the corner sold coagulated blood that one could fry—apparently, you can still buy it, and you find recipes online, but I doubt they have it wherever you do your shopping. In 1936, for a three-day school excursion not far from Perlora, they took pigeons to send back news. Now, one can know about all those things, but it is really hard to relate to them at a personal level. If you disagree, look outside and then tell me.

It is amazing how much life has changed in little time. It is also amazing how little things changed before that: most of the population lived the same in 1550, 1650, and 1750. In France, for example, there was famine every 8–10 years.

Now, science is a first and evident reason why life has changed so much. This is most clear when it comes to medicine. Think of germ theory, vaccines, and antibiotics. There have also been fantastic discoveries in other areas—electricity, refrigeration, chemistry, you name it. Even topology, but if we are honest, that hasn’t really changed the world that much. But well, what would be the use of knowing about vaccines without being able to produce and distribute them at scale? In some sense, what has really changed is our ability to produce stuff cheaply and in huge quantities, and move it around. For vaccines to be useful, you need to actually produce them, put them in individual vials that have to be distributed while often keeping them refrigerated, and then you need a syringe, or at least a needle, per person. All of that is really not trivial. For example, a few years ago, it was basically impossible to get a TB shot because the only factory producing the vaccine had had some problem and was offline. Similarly, lack of vials slowed the distribution of COVID vaccines quite a bit.

It is actually all really complicated. When did you last have arugula or mâche? Well, unless it looked really dirty and came with a share of slugs, it was probably washed in chlorinated water. And if it came in a bag, that bag contained some specific mix of gases to keep it fresh. In fact, the greenhouses where they are grown also have a precisely regulated atmosphere, with more CO₂ than usual so that plants grow faster. And apples? Let me tell you that natural apples have worms and such. Those you buy were most likely picked unripe and then treated with something called 1-methylcyclopropene—they used to be sprayed with a fungicide, but it seems that this is no longer done—and kept for months in cold storage. At the end of the day, there are no apples to be picked in April, but you get them all year long. Now, if those apples look shiny, it is because they have most likely been waxed, with a plant-based wax coming from Brazil, India, or Thailand. And those salads and those apples are brought by refrigerated trucks to some distribution center near where you live, and then by smaller, also refrigerated trucks to the supermarket where you got them. And that happens all the time. It is estimated that at any given time, in a city like Paris, there is enough food to feed the population for about five days (pro tip: don’t go full preppy, but keep a few cans of baked beans at home because, in case of a major natural disaster, it might take something like three days, and up to two weeks, for help to arrive).

So, what has made possible all that explosion of the complexity of life? Well, if you think about it, it is all about energy and ways of harnessing it. At the end of the day, it all started with the Industrial Revolution—it is funny that the most important revolution in history is not commemorated like the French or American ones—the Industrial Revolution started with the steam engine. Now there are the explosion motor and electric motors, and it is those motors that move the machines that produce and pack vials, gases, the cover of your phone, your socks, and even the food my cats eat, at least unless they get themselves a mouse/rat/pigeon dinner. In fact, when people say that productivity has grown, what they mean is that people control more motors. Maybe also more efficiently, but definitely more. If you doubt me and think that I am being reductionist, try to figure out how many individual pieces—springs and such—your computer keyboard has: they were all built by motors. If you want to see what life without motors is like, come to my field to cut the grass using a scythe. I will be watching you and your productivity, and then I’ll do the actual cutting using the battery-powered machine we use.

Now, all those motors don’t move on their own. I am pretty sure that the most advanced AI in the world would stop giving you relationship advice once you unplug it. It is all about energy. Indeed, it is estimated that between 1800 and the year 2000, world energy consumption was multiplied by 32. That means it doubled every 40 years, although between 1960 and 2000 it tripled. Since the year 2000, it has grown again by 56%. World energy consumption is two and a half times what it was when I was born. As is just the consumption of coal. For oil/gas, it is about the same story.

Things might look different in individual countries, but it is mostly hard to get good data because one thing is the energy consumed in the form of energy, and another is the total amount of energy consumed. A bit like for CO₂ emissions. The motors producing your keyboard are most likely moving elsewhere, and if one wants a fair count, one needs to include them in the bill, not only the motors of the trucks that carried it to the store or to your doorstep.

Now, why do I write all this? There is the aspect of climate change, but let’s ignore that because, well, although totally criminal and irrational, it is not impossible that nothing effective will be done about it. Well, if it is not climate change, then what? The point is that I am convinced that we are going toward an energy-poorer world.

About 75% of the world’s energy consumption comes from fossil fuels, with roughly equal parts of coal, oil, and gas. Now, there is apparently a lot of coal, but it really seems that the other two are pretty much finite. Here are a few facts:

  • Between 2000 and 2024, the consumption of oil + gas grew by 43% worldwide.
  • Conventional oil production peaked in 2005–2006.
  • Global discoveries of oil peaked in the 1960s.
  • Nobody really knows how much oil there is at all, given that Iraq’s, Iran’s, and Venezuela’s reserves at some point tripled in a day, and that some estimates include reserves with an estimated 10% probability of being exploited.
  • At the current rate of production, Russian oil reserves will last 25 years.
  • Non-conventional oil has a production cost several times that of conventional oil and is more difficult to refine.

Now, all that was about oil, but gas seems to go the same way: unless hard-to-recover reserves are developed, Russia’s gas production will halve in 15 years. So, it seems clear to me that at the very least, the world will not be able to continue increasing fossil fuel consumption at the rate it has been. It also looks pretty likely to me that, in the medium term, oil and gas are going to become much more scarce than they are now.

I guess that from the point of view of climate change, that’s good news. From every other perspective, it is really dire because less oil and gas means less energy, fewer motors, and, in general, less stuff. Well, you can tell me, there is also nuclear and renewable energy. Yes, there is. But it takes years and years to build nuclear plants. And if one were to replace right now, by an act of magic, all oil and gas with nuclear, the known reserves of uranium would run out in about 10 years. If one wanted to replace oil with biofuels, one would need two and a half times the total arable surface of the Earth. And to replace oil and gas with electricity, one would need unbelievable amounts of metals like copper. Now, there seems to be plenty of copper to go around (mostly because it can and is recycled), but while in 1930 a ton of earth mined produced 17 kg of copper, this had already declined to 13 kg in 1970, and now it is about 7 kg. Since 2000, the price of refined copper has increased more than sevenfold. So, it is not getting any easier to get those metals. Now, you can hope for some amazing scientific breakthrough in fission. Or maybe one could use thorium instead of uranium. But in the best of worlds, all of this will take time and resources. At the end of the day, 10 years after the 1972 oil crisis, when all those reactors were built, nuclear energy was 2.9% of total energy consumption, about one-fourth of the energy recovered at the time from burning wood.

So, it looks to me that it is pretty reasonable to expect that for the foreseeable future, there will be gradually less energy to move motors and produce stuff. And that it will be a pretty sustained effect. And that the only reasonable thing is to prepare. Right now, the US does not want to hear anything about this, but in a report in 2005 (revised in 2016), this is what the US Department of Energy had to say:

The problems associated with world oil production peaking will not be temporary, and past "energy crisis" experience will provide relatively little guidance. The challenge of oil peaking deserves immediate, serious attention, if risks are to be fully understood and mitigation begun on a timely basis.

Evidently, it is not clear to me what “prepare” or “mitigate” means, but I see two aspects: the social and the individual.

From an individual point of view, I think that the best one can do is to come to terms with it all, try to get into good habits, and avoid locking oneself into situations from which it is hard to escape. It seems to me that in an energy-poorer world, it is probably better to train oneself to be sober. To teach oneself to get pleasure from reading, making puzzles, or biking somewhere nearby. To agree to mostly eat what is in season near you. To wear clothes until they are clearly not new. To get used to bringing one’s shoes to be repaired. To use gadgets longer. To not make one’s happiness dependent on flying for holidays twice a year. To work to get some decent social network wherever one lives, or to come to terms with a lot of one’s relationships being digital. It looks to me like a really bad idea to buy a nice big house that forces you to do it all by car. Now, living like that looks to me like a plausible description of what it is to live the good life, meaning that it should not be that hard. But if one has very different expectations, it could well be really painful.

Now, I said that there were the social and the individual aspects, but in reality, it seems to me that they are actually kind of indistinguishable. The point is that if your neighbors expect to have two cars because they have a long commute, and cars become more expensive, they will get pretty unhappy. And this happens. At the end of the day, in 2023, a new car in the US required 42 weeks of income, while it was 33 in 2019. Now, your neighbor might be forced to settle for just one car. Or to get a smaller one. Or maybe to buy it on credit (as 85% of cars are bought), but that is largely a way of hiding the cost: right now, between 3–4% of cars bought in the US are repossessed. Also, if what happens is that cars are electric, your neighbor’s house must be equipped to charge them, meaning that they might have to pay a lot to revamp the electrical installation. So, your neighbor might end up thinking that they cannot get cars as they used to, or they might think that they cannot go for holidays like they used to, and all things being equal, they will feel declassed. If this happens while society tells them that for people like them with two jobs, getting two cars and a large house is the way to go, they will feel that they are doing everything right and that they are unfairly treated. And they will find somebody to declare guilty: politicians, immigrants, employers, ecologists, rich people, brown people—take your pick. Summing up: unless society also adapts, we are up for a rough ride.

When it comes to the feasibility of individual adaptations once one comes to terms with the situation, I am pretty optimistic. When it comes to the social one, I see it as something much more difficult because the incentives are there for politicians to promise that all problems can be solved by the flick of a switch and stopping your good neighbors from being exploited by whomever they have convinced themselves is doing it. On the other hand, individual adaptations can also have an effect in one’s small surroundings. At least I hope so. For the meantime, I focus on how to educate the being, making her resilient, and this involves spending tomorrow 11 hours traveling by train to Barcelona, I guess.