The Retro Future by John Michael Greer

Author:John Michael Greer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New Society Publishers
Published: 2017-07-24T04:00:00+00:00

The Economics of Sustainable Technologies

It’s a source of wry amusement to me that when the prospect of sail transport gets raised, even in the greenest of peak oil circles, the immediate reaction from most people is to try to find some way to smuggle engines back onto the tall ships. Here again, though, the issue that matters is economics, not our current superstitious reverence for loud metal objects. There were plenty of ships in the nineteenth century that combined steam engines and sails in various combinations, and plenty of ships in the early twentieth century that combined diesel engines and sails the same way.

Windjammers powered by sails alone were more economical than either of these for long-range bulk transport, because engines and their fuel supplies cost money and take up tonnage that can otherwise be used for paying cargo, thus cutting substantially into profits. For that matter, it’s possible that solar steam engines, or something like them, could be used as a backup power source for the windjammers of the deindustrial future. It’s interesting to note that the renewable energy used for shipping in Erikson’s time wasn’t limited to sails; coastal freighters of the kind Erikson skippered when he was 19 were called “onkers” in Baltic Sea slang, because their windmill-powered deck pumps made a repetitive “onk-urrr, onk-urrr” noise.

Still, the same rule applies; enticing as it might be to imagine sailors on a becalmed windjammer hauling the wooden cover off a solar steam generator, expanding the folding reflector, and sending steam down below decks to drive a propeller, whether such a technology came into use would depend on whether the cost of buying and installing a solar steam engine, and the lost earning capacity due to hold space being taken up by the engine, was less than the profit to be made by getting to port a few days sooner.

Are there applications in which engines are worth having despite their drawbacks? Of course. Unless the price of biodiesel ends up at astronomical levels, or the disruptions ahead along the curve of the Long Descent cause diesel technology to be lost entirely, tugboats will probably have diesel engines for the imaginable future. So will naval vessels, since the number of major naval battles won or lost in the days of sail because the wind blew one way or another will doubtless be on the minds of many as the age of petroleum winds down. Barring a complete collapse in technology, in turn, naval vessels will no doubt still be made of steel—once cannons started firing explosive shells instead of solid shot, wooden ships became deathtraps in naval combat—but most others won’t be; large-scale steel production requires ample supplies of coke, which is produced by roasting coal, and depletion of coal supplies in a post-petroleum future guarantees that steel will be much more expensive compared to other materials than it is today, or for that matter during the heyday of the windjammers.

Note that here again, the limits to technology and resource use are far more likely to be economic than technical.

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