22 Billion Energy Slaves: catabolic collapse

A house at the Frilandsmuseet in Copenhagen, displaying an impressive utilisation of thermal mass

Clicking around the peak oil blogosphere and reading about the Age of Limits meeting that took place in the US last week has left me with a curiously bewildered feeling. I'm not sure why, but it feels as if we have entered uncharted territory of late, as if there has been a ratcheting up of the general anxiety level and a tense atmosphere is hanging in the air. Perhaps it's because everyone is talking about religion and spirituality, rather than how many barrels are left in the ground. I'm all for that, but I need time to think and to digest.

I really feel that when we look back from the vantage point of the future we'll realise that 2012 really was the year when the latest stage of catabolic collapse began to get into full swing in the West. Here are just some randomish facts and headlines from the last week that float to the top of my mind as I sit here writing this late at night:

Petrol sales in the UK have dropped by 20% over the last five years. The newspapers say it is because we are all driving more efficient vehicles.
The Royal Bank of Scotland chairman told investors that share prices would not go up again 'in investors' lifetimes'.
50,000 less students applied to UK universities this year compared to last.
Thomas Cook – the UK's biggest and oldest travel agency – announced a loss of £330m and its share price has dropped by 90%.
British Aerospace has cut hundreds more jobs.
Millions of people are facing a pensions shortfall.
Pay freezes and cuts are the 'new norm' according to a business survey.
Capital flows are charging around the world looking for 'safe havens'. 100 billion euros has been taken out of the Spanish economy recently.

Part of the normal business cycle? I think not.

Still, I'm glad of one thing, and that's the fact that I 'discovered' a new (to me) peak oil writer in Carolyn Baker. Sometimes, when I read peak oil writers, I feel very humbled by the amount of work they put into their writing and the depth of their understanding of the issues that confront us - especially the more technical aspects. I, by contrast, am no expert in anything and this blog is normally written at the kitchen table on a Sunday morning with the kids running around me and the washing up piled nearby. It's hardly ideal, but it brings me onto another subject that I have been thinking about of late, and that is about where we live.

Yes, I'm talking about our homes. In Denmark, where I live, things can seem a bit topsy turvey, to use a technical term. You can buy a splendid old stone farmhouse in the country with acres of fertile land for next to nothing – but a tiny flat in a city costs a fortune. And what do you get in your flat? You get a lounge, a small kitchen, a tiny bathroom and a couple of bedrooms. Of course, some apartments are bigger than others and may or may not have a balcony, but one thing that they all lack is space.

And I'm of the opinion that we need space. We need space to make things in and space to be alone in. What we actually get is a tiny amount of space to live our just-in-time lifestyles in where hardly anything can be stored. There is no space to run a small manufacturing/crafts business and children are cooped up all the time and don't have the freedom to run around and play boisterous and noisy games (if they attempt that within the confines of their apartment they are labelled as having ADHD and given Ritalin).

All of this makes perfect sense in an age when work is provided by an outside agency for a salary, nobody makes stuff and children are conditioned from an early age to watch TV and play computer games. It also makes sense from an energy perspective – cramming all those people together makes it easier to keep them warm for less energy.

But living in an apartment isolates you from nature, limits you from being productive and, quite often, isolates you from your neighbours (who you only speak to via the medium of complaining about something or other).

So it made a nice change for me to head over to a part of the city which demonstrates that this hasn't always been the case. There's an area of Copenhagen, hemmed in by blocks of flats and motorways, preserved as a kind of museum - called the Frilandsmuseet (meaning 'open air museum') in which all the houses are freely available to explore. I can spend hours wandering around the place, taking mental notes of the blacksmith's tools, the miller's stones and the fisherwife's loom and bobbins and all the other things that are these days regarded as quaint artefacts from another age.

In its day it would have been a small hamlet, more or less self sufficient in the basics and with perhaps 20 families living there. A circle of stones was the community meeting point, with the head of each family being sat on each stone in any discussion. The status of each family was apparent in the intricacy of design work on items of furniture and the quality of the house builds. The miller seemed to be the best off family, with plenty of pious pictures on the walls and the grandest house of them all. But then he was the one most able to exploit the available primary energy sources – in this case wind and water – and process the raw materials into a refined product.

Wandering around, I wondered just what it would have felt like to live there in, say, 1800. Life would undoubtedly have been hard by today's standards, but it would also have had its comforts. Also, I wondered how self-sufficient, to use a modern term, the place would have been and to what extent they would have traded with outsiders for some of the fancier goods. A few of the dwellings are fishermen's cottages, so I'd guess that a lot of their protein came from the sea. That option wouldn't work today, with the Baltic being more or less fished out as far as small-scale fishing from boats are concerned.

It's probably at this point that some people will think that I am advocating a return to a medieval village type of existence and that perhaps I'm a feudalist. I don't and I'm not, although I can't help admiring the rural beauty and the elegant functionality of the hamlet and its houses and all the tools that they left behind which hardly anyone alive today knows how to use. Below you can see a few snaps I took while I was there.

That's all I really have to say in this post. Sometimes the ink flows and sometimes it does not. It's a couple of days earlier than normal because I'm off for a wedding in Odense for the weekend. It's a half Danish half Irish affair, meaning that it's going to be rather a late evening.

On a positive note I can reveal that I have started talking with someone who is selling five acres of mixed broad-leaf woodland which even contains some old charcoal pits. I'm sorting out my future 'career' inch by inch …