If I was a billionaire, I wouldn’t believe what I’m about to write. Firstly, because my training, and especially my experience of getting richer in a growth based economy would have taught me that these ‘perfect storms’ when resource/financial bottlenecks supposedly loomed, historically worked out to be opportunities that spiked my digital wealth and incremental social power. Secondly, if I were a billionaire I wouldn’t believe what Im about to write because all my peers, advisors and friends would tell me that it's caca. And lastly I wouldn’t believe what Im about to write as the implications would be too threatening, at least on the surface, to comprehend let alone integrate into my world view. All the same, if I were a billionaire, based on my understanding of our particular juncture of history, likely on the verge of transitioning away from marker claims back to real capital, here is what I would do....

How economic progress comes from the accumulation of privately owned tools of production; demonstrates the need for tools by showing a young couple with their infant child in a wilderness with nothing but natural resources and their hands.

A Campfire post with an actual campfire!

This is a guest post by Cameron Leckie, known on The Oil Drum as leckos. Cameron is an officer in the Australian army. He is a member of ASPO Australia and lives in Brisbane with his wife and two young children.

The other day, whilst visiting the in-laws, I was involved in a conversation that in my view opened a window to the future of technology. My mother in law, who works in a small retail outlet was packing her lunch. My wife asked why she was putting an ice block in with her lunch box. The answer was that the owner of the shop had removed the staff refrigerator (and turned off the hot water system) to save a couple of hundred dollars a year. As someone who strongly believes that the most likely outcome for a debt based economic system approaching a world of declining net energy supplies is economic contraction and lower standards of living (at least materially), this started me thinking about the process by which industrial civilisation may abandon some of the technologies that we currently take for granted.

There are many reasons why we humans adopt new technologies, but in my view the root cause is that the benefit provided by a new technology outweighs its cost. Importantly costs and benefits can be measured both in financial terms and by other less tangible factors, something that will be important when considering which technologies are abandoned. One reason that we may abandon a technology is the flip side of the reason for its adoption - that the costs outweigh the benefits obtained. Thus the fridge has been abandoned because the cost of maintaining it outweighs the benefit of keeping lunch cold. Other reasons might be that the technology is no longer supportable (for example, If you cannot access fuel, your car is not going anywhere) or another technology appears/reappears to replace it.

In this post, I would like to propose a theory by which some, or potentially many, modern technologies could be abandoned. This is an important issue because of its implications for government policy, business investment and of course society as a whole. I will briefly examine the relationship between technology and complexity, detail a theory to explain how technologies might be abandoned and finally propose some questions for discussion.

If the world will be changing, what should we be saying to our children about it?

Should the peak oil story be taught in schools?