Principles for the Post-Peak Oil Job Market

Many types of jobs will cease to exist: public relations executive, marketing directors, et cetera. I think work will be very hands-on, and a lot of it will revolve around food production.
                  -- James Howard Kunstler, 2003

When I speak before college audiences about peak oil, I often ask if there are any engineers present. I suggest that they concentrate on jobs that will produce rather than consume energy, particularly energy that is renewable and doesn't create greenhouse gas emissions. While it is difficult to tell exactly what kinds of jobs will be available in the post-peak oil age, inklings of some broad principles are coming into view.

To discern those principles I propose to contrast what is valued in today's job market with what will likely be valued in a post-peak oil job market. First, let's look at what has traditionally been valued in pre-peak industrial society. William Catton, Jr. explains in his book, Overshoot, that humans engage in two strategies to enlarge the carrying capacity of their habitat: takeover and drawdown. Takeover is essentially taking over habitat from another species. That takeover might take the form of farming which essentially appropriates habitat from other animals and plants and dedicates it to crops for feeding humans or their domestic livestock.

Drawdown is the second major strategy. Drawdown is the drawing down of finite resources to provide increased carrying capacity temporarily. In this case, "temporarily" can mean more than a century. The prime example is the extraction of coal, oil and natural gas to produce the energy, fertilizers and myriad other products that allow more than 6 billion people to live on our planet.

It is easy to see that drawdown is, by far, the more highly rewarded activity in pre-peak society. (After all, how many billionaire farmers have been celebrated in the business pages?) Huge fortunes have been made in the fossil fuel and mining industries. Today, those industries are thought to be the industries of the past, the old economy. But, in truth, they continue to provide the basis for the so-called new economy. Without our colossal extractive industries to produce the essentials of modern civilization such as oil, copper, zinc, platinum, and iron, the new economy wouldn't even exist. In fact, much of the new economy consists of manipulating information to increase our drawdown and takeover activities. (Admittedly, some of that technology creates more efficient use of resources; but to date it has failed to reduce overall demand for resources. For why this is so, see Jevons Paradox.) The new 3D seismic surveys of the deep ocean done in search of oil and the elaborate computer-controlled processes which extract oil from the Canadian oil sands are two excellent examples of how technology is used to abet drawdown. Countless other industrial processes are also aided by new economy technologies. Those technologies both increase demand for the products of drawdown and help accelerate that drawdown to meet that demand.

The post-peak oil age will in all likelihood lack the essential ingredient for ever-accelerating drawdown, i.e. cheap energy. (While it is true that knowledge can also help humans increase drawdown, it is doubtful that knowledge can grow quickly enough to offset the somewhat imminent decline in the production of oil and other fossil fuels. Even if this were not the case, we would face another crisis later as other resource limits were reached.) Drawdown of oil and natural gas has enabled the creation of an industrial agriculture that erodes the soil and destroys its fertility. That agriculture then attempts to make up for the lost fertility with natural gas-derived nitrogen fertilizers and oil-based pesticides. So, the loss of cheap hydrocarbon fuels and feedstocks has large implications for agricultural productivity and for the type of agriculture we will be able to practice. The end of cheap fossil fuel also has implications for the availability of water, both for irrigation and drinking. Cheap energy has led to the drawdown of many sources of water much faster than they replenish. And, the pollution that industrial societies create has made water purification one of the largest uses of energy worldwide.

These illustrations suggest that in a post-peak oil world a premium will be placed on decreasing drawdown through increased efficiency and through the outright curtailment of certain activities such as industrial farming with its heavy reliance on petrochemicals and irrigation. Takeover may also have to be curtailed in order to preserve species, land and waters which perform essential eco-services for human populations such as pollination and water retention and purification.

Perhaps now we can say with a little more confidence what principles should animate those entering the post-peak oil job market in comparison to the pre-peak one:

Pre-Peak	Post-Peak
General Principles	General Principles
Increase drawdown	Decrease or eliminate drawdown
Increase takeover	Decrease takeover
Detailed Principles	Detailed Principles
Emphasize quantity	Emphasize quality
Emphasize competition	Emphasize cooperation
Emphasize power	Emphasize efficiency
Mine soil nutrients	Increase soil fertility
Deplete finite resources	Build capacity of renewable resources
Shift environmental costs to public	Bear all environmental costs you can't eliminate
Design linear product cycle	Design closed product cycle (Recycling)
Build in planned obsolescence	Build in long life for products
Ignore necessary eco-services such as water purification and pollination	Safeguard and enhance needed eco-services
Focus on financial profitability	Focus on ecological sustainability

I don't claim this list to be exhaustive. But I believe it offers a beginning for thinking about what mindsets and attitudes we need to inculcate in those who will be faced with working in a post-peak oil world. Right now most of what people learn in preparing themselves for work has little or no relationship to our ecological destiny. That needs to change and soon.