Mine's a beer

Richard Heinberg is one of the best-known peak oil writers and speakers around the place. Over the weekend, I listened to a "bad news, good news" pair of talks here (click on "Writings") by Heinberg and the owner of the site, permaculture pioneer David Holmgren.

Heinberg explained how when wine is made, the yeast population in the vat increases exponentially as it consumes the sugar in the grapes, then almost equally rapidly dies off as it's poisoned by the alcohol it's created by doing so. This process, or at least the first part of it, has striking similarities to the rapid growth of human population over the last few centuries on the back of fossil fuel energy. Heinberg posed the question "Are humans more intelligent than yeast?". Individually I think some of us probably are, but collectively, it's not clear to me we'll do any better in practice.

There are actually three ways a fermentation can go, though, exemplified by the processes of making sweet wine, dry wine and beer. To make a dry wine, you ensure there's just enough sugar in the solution for the yeast to produce as much alcohol as it can (about 12%-14%) before killing itself. Then you have as strong a drink as you can get without additional procedures like distillation, and virtually no left-over sugar. To make a sweet wine, you put in more sugar than the yeast can use; by the time it poisons itself, there's still plenty left over. When you make beer, you go in the other direction, and put in a lot less sugar; the fermentation then stops when the sugar's gone, while the alcohol concentration is still low enough (around 5%) for the yeast to survive. Its population crashes through starvation, not through poisoning. If you then decant the beer into bottles, you can add a little extra sugar to each one and the surviving yeast will ferment that too, creating a nice "head" to the beer.

In our human situation, the sugar is the oil in the ground, and the alcohol is the carbon dioxide and other pollutants. Depending on how the system is set up, the fossil fuel party might come to end when the oil's gone (beer), when the pollutants get too concentrated (sweet wine), or when both happen about the same time (dry wine).

As I understand it, our situation is most like a "medium sweet" wine: climate change is the more serious threat, but peak oil is only a little behind it, and its effects may well be felt earlier, just as the yeast may start to notice a reduction in the available sugar before it's overwhelmed by alcohol poisoning.

Can we collectively make this whole analogy inapplicable by our intelligent approach to these two challenges? As Heinberg says in his talk, that's the experiment that's going to be carried out this century. I'd bet that the analogy will apply, except that if I'm right, neither the bookies nor I are likely to be around when it's time to collect my winnings. If we do make it through, though, it's likely to be because of a deep change in attitudes, rather than because of some wizzo new eco-friendly technology coming along in the nick of time to rescue us. The Archdruid explains why, again using the analogy of a microbial culture.