Resilient Communities
The two greatest engines of change in the next decades will involve improvements in the health and longevity of human beings (Resilient Humans) and the development and increasing robustness of the local environment (Resilient Communities).
John Robb writes about the dangers that Globalization engenders in our increasingly connected world. He is, in some ways, the mirror image of Tom Barnett. However, his discussions of Resilient Communities as a response to, and protection from, the inevitable dangers of increased connectivity, is worth exploring. In John Robb's conception, a Resilient Community is one where the people can survive and thrive even in the face of major disruptions in its connectivity. Imagine a successful terrorist attack in which the electric grid is damaged or rendered useless for two weeks. Few communities have food and water reserves that can last for that long and far too few people have two weeks worth of provisions on their property. Here is the interesting point: John Robb and Tom Barnett are both correct. Increased connectivity and increased community resilience are going to continue to co-evolve and the results will prove to be fascinating. The future will be forced by developing technologies and cost-benefit/risk-benefit calculations that will all point in the same direction.
We are entering a period of time when most of the things that we depend on are becoming more expensive. The cost of energy is escalating, even with the current temporary decrease in gasoline prices; while free markets could well prove to manage the price of energy without marked increases even in the face of peak oil (which is a theory, not a fact), the point is that we do not have free markets in energy production in the West. Our layers of regulation, based on the fear of environmental catastrophe (a nuclear "China Syndrome", Anthropomorphic Global warming, etc) and the NIMBY mentality means that even if the political environment were to change markedly, it would still take years to ramp up production adequately to force the price to do much more than moderate its inexorable increase; the era of cheap energy is over. The down stream effects mean that everything that needs to be moved from one area to another will become more expensive with time. One answer lies in the possibility of mini-nuclear reactors:
Commercial Shipping Uses 9% of world oil and is Major Air Pollution Source
Factory mass produced small nuclear reactors like the one being developed by Hyperion Power Generation or variants of the pebble bed reactor being made in China or new liquid flouride thorium reactor proposals would all work for total nuclearizing commercial shipping. There would also be the benefit that the ships would need to rarely stop for refueling and in general could operate at faster speed.
While the article is focused on the costs of shipping, the possibility of using mini nuclear reactors (MNRs) to supply electricity to communities has already been broached (and China is moving toward full scale production of such MNRs.) Even if the United States refuses to move into large scale use of MNRs, other nations will have to use them to generate more and more of their energy. They will have very little choice in the matter since petroleum is not getting cheaper any time soon. But, in fact, there may well be an alternative to MNRs in your back yard.
Analyst: Solar approaching grid parity in U.S
By 2015, two-thirds of the U.S. will have achieved grid parity, the point at which electricity generated from photovoltaics is equal in cost or less expensive than grid power, an analyst said Monday (July 13). At that point, solar power will be no more than 5 cents per kilowatt hour more expensive than grid power for 99 percent of the country, according to Travis Bradford, founder and president of the non-profit research group The Prometheus Institute for Sustainable Development.
So far, the environmental lawyers have not yet found a way to attack Solar Power and as time goes on the logic of using solar power for very local power and a means to become partially independent from the grid will become compelling. The idea that we are going to decide to upgrade our electrical system to a "Smart Grid" is a chimera. It will cost (see NPR) somewhere between $100 billion to $2 trillion (and maybe more once the government and the lawyers get involved), and there is no possibility of such a large scale infrastructure development taking place in the foreseeable future. In addition, it may well prove to be obsolete even before it is started. Once a significant portion of our electric power comes from local sources (our homes, cars, MNRs) with any excess being sold back to the grid, the next logical step will be to increase manufacturing and farming on a local basis; from John Robb's Global Guerrillas:
JOURNAL: The Switch to Local Manufacturing
Here's a think piece that you may find of value:
It is likely that by 2025, the majority of the "consumer" goods you purchase/acquire, will be manufactured locally. However, this doesn't likely mean what you think it means. The process will look like this:
...
Local fabrication will get cheap and easy. The cost of machines that can print, lathe, etch, cut materials to produce three dimensional products will drop to affordable levels (including consumer level versions). This sector is about to pass out of its "home brew computer club phase" and rocket to global acceptance.
By all means read the entire post and keep in mind that although he may have some of the details wrong, even if the price of raw materials, labor, and transportation remain low, the logic of home based desktop fabrication is unassailable. Having a fabricator at home that can produce goods on demand for negligible prices means that for all but the most intelligence intensive products (those with the highest degree of complexity) it will be cheaper to have it made at home than going out to buy something made by someone on the other side of the world. Please note that the first generation of desktop fabricators, still basically novelties, are already available. Adding powder and getting a dinner plate may not be very exciting, but such fabricators will almost certainly follow their own version of Moore's Law, which suggests most of us will be fabricating simple products within the next 10 years. In addition, desktop printers that can produce cheap high tech electronics and biologicals are already in the works.
Food production may follow. I doubt local farming of more than a small percentage of our food is likely except under certain circumstances. For example, an electricity outage and failure of the transportation system of two to three weeks duration in a large section of the country (think Katrina times 10 or an EMP) could lead to food shortages rather quickly. The lesson of such an event would encourage interest in and development of local farming. Proof of concept for city (vertical) farming already exists, and suburban and rural farming would be a matter of simply scaling up. Short of actual food shortages, such developments seem unnecessary and unlikely, but the option will be there if needed. Upscale communities are likely to indulge in local farming if the quality trumps imported food.
[It is possible that a high budget Hollywood production depicting a post-EMP Dystopia could move a significant number of people toward local farming. The recession has already had some effects in that direction, as well.]
Once energy, material, and, possibly, food production have become local, entire communities will be more robust, more self sufficient, and more able to sustain themselves in the face of large scale disruptions. They will be Resilient in ways not seen in 100-200 years but with the advantage of high technology that would be indistinguishable from magic to our ancestors.
Such communities will develop their own trading patterns with other communities, facilitated by an internet vastly more robust and sophisticated than our current version. Local wireless nets would connect through fiber and wireless to the larger internet; the local net would be able to survive a disastrous failure of the global network and would have firewalls in place to protect the local net from malicious software. Each community would have their own defenders.
Beyond the logic of price there are additional factors which favor the development of Resilient Communities and this has everything to do with the coming acceleration of the development of Resilient Humans. It is also important to understand that these developments, as all technological advances are wont to do, will occur first in certain wealthy communities, a point I will expand upon in the next post.
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