In order to save space, programmers in COBOL and other antiquated programming languages from the 1960s and 1970s recorded years in a two-number format, and assumed the “19.” So, for instance, 1998 would be “98.” This same notation is often used popularly, and for early machines with major memory constraints, this kind of space-saver could have significant returns. Naturally, programmers did not expect their programs to still be in use in 30 years, and gave little thought to the turn of the century—until the turn of the century began to approach, and much of that software was still running in systems that banks, corporations and other organizations had never bothered to replace. Long unemployed COBOL programmers found themselves back in work again, auditing millions of lines of legacy code to change over to a four-digit year format, lest on 1 January 2000, the computers believe it to be 1900.

The hysterics became overwhelming. The “Y2K bug” was going to lay waste to all of civilization, or so they said. I dismissed the problem as nothing more than hysteria, though I’ll admit to a brief moment of anxiety at 11:59—and then a nervous laugh and a, “See, I told you!” at 12:01. Y2K came and went, remarkable only as “one of most anticipated non-events in human history.”¹

Of course, Y2K now ranks nearly as highly as the Great Disappointment² in the long annals of failed apocalyptic predictions.³ So of course, it’s no surprise that even our good friend and colleague Toby Hemenway cited it as an example:

The phrase “the end of the world as we know itâ€? has been uttered so often in the last decade that some Peak Oil advocates simply use its acronym, TEOTWAWKI. This awkward shorthand was once employed by Y2k catastrophists, and that heritage alone—the most unnecessary “sky is fallingâ€? panic in my lifetime—is enough to make me skeptical of the negativism embraced by many of my fellow Peak Oil believers. Peak Oil is as inevitable as death and taxes. But for every convert that Peak Oil’s doom-and-gloom extremism sweeps up, it alienates plenty of people who might otherwise climb down from their SUVs. Peak-Oil catastrophism’s repetition of doubtful facts and its sometimes muddied thinking betray a lack of critical analysis that discredits the Peak Oil movement. I’d like to delve into some of the errors and half-truths surrounding Peak Oil catastrophism, not as encouragement for those who want to party on blindly into the end of oil, which would be tragic, but as a way of refining and bolstering those arguments around Peak Oil that are valid.⁴

More recently, the Y2K comparison has been picked up by another colleague, John Michael Greer.

In the late 1990s, as my readers will doubtless remember, computer experts began to warn that many older computer systems had no way to process year-numbers beginning with a 2 rather than a 1, and could crash when the calendar rolled over from 1999 to 2000. Early surveys of the problem showed that a very large number of systems could be affected, especially in banking, telecommunications, and government. By the beginning of 1998 or so, it was clear that a major mess was in the making unless something was done.

This real and serious problem, though, quickly got blown out of proportion by the apocalypse lobby – the sizeable number of people for whom faith in the imminent collapse of civilization is an emotional necessity. By 1999, survivalist visions of social collapse and mass death via Y2K spilled out of this subculture and percolated through American society. I knew many people who confidently expected the end of civilization as we know it on New Years Eve of 1999, and waited all night in their basements for the blackouts, systems failures, and rampaging mobs that never came.

Some pundits have used these failed predictions to argue that the whole Y2K crisis wasn’t real in the first place, but this misstates the whole lesson of the experience. The threat was real; the apocalypse lobby simply missed the four most important words in the prediction – “unless something was done.� Faced with a credible threat, a hard deadline, and a clear course of action, people responded predictably by doing something about the situation. Sales of Y2K-compliant computers and software soared off the charts, and software jockeys made money hand over fist reprogramming old machines. Some of us used simpler fixes; I simply reset the calendar on my old and non-compliant computer to December 31, 1949, and went through the rollover to January 1, 1950 with no trouble at all.

The fallacy that bedeviled the Y2K survivalists was the belief that government, business, and ordinary people, faced with an immiment threat and obvious responses to it, will sit on their hands and do nothing until catastrophe overwhelms them. This same odd belief can be found all through discussions of peak oil. As oil plateaus and then declines, energy prices will rise sharply; that’s the threat. The obvious response, which succeeded brilliantly in the 1970s, is to reduce energy use through conservation. This factor is already helping to drive swings in energy prices, as demand for petroleum and natural gas fails to meet speculators’ expectations.⁵

As a techie, Y2K was perhaps the finest hour of my day-job profession. We averted disaster, a near-miss apocalypse that more often than not makes us the butt of jokes. The threat of Y2K was quite real; it became “one of most anticipated non-events in human history” only through our efforts.

I’ve spent more time on those crucial four words—”unless something is done”—than most might immediately appreciate. The key lies in those three elements Greer identifies—”a credible threat, a hard deadline, and a clear course of action.” The first element is emerging: people are beginning to understand the threat peak oil poses. It’s the second two that are in the air. While evidence might indicate that we are already at peak oil,⁶ many experts continue to push the peak out by decades, which has the effect of delaying our response.

It’s the last element—”a clear course of action”—that’s most in question. In our Dei ex Machinis series, we’ve been evaluating our possible responses to peak oil, and the various candidates that have been suggested as replacements. To date, all have been found wanting in one way or another. It is not clear that there is any alternative to oil—there is no clear course of action. This differs markedly from the Y2K bug. It was simple to see what needed to be done; we geared up and did it. We’re good at that. World War II and the Manhattan Project are also often used as examples of how much we could accomplish in solving peak oil, but again, these were relatively straightforward challenges—all it took was the application of sufficient energy.

Some have used the analogy about supersonic flight; “they said we’d never break the sound barrier.” That belongs to the same problem class as America’s World War II production, or the Manhattan Project, or solving the Y2K bug. How to solve it is straightforward: you apply the energy needed. The question of making our civilization sustainable (essentially, how to grow forever, sustainably) is better compared to the problem of going faster than the speed of light. The problem is not simply a question of applying enough force, but an essential contradiction in the goal itself.

As we currently understand physics, mass increases with speed. As any object approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinite, and so, the energy required to accelerate become infinite as well. You can never break the speed of light, because at the moment that you reach the speed of light, you have infinite mass, moving with infinite energy. Traveling faster than the speed of light is not a simple matter of applying more energy: it’s a matter of finding a loophole in the laws of physics.

Likewise, the problem of making our civilization’s use of energy sustainable is much more basic than just applying enough energy, like Y2K or World War II or the Manhattan Project. How does one make a system dependent on constant growth sustainable, inside of finite resources? The short answer—and very likely the correct answer—is that you can’t. In all probability, faster-than-light travel is probably impossible. Likewise, a sustainable civilization is probably an oxymoron. Like faster-than-light travel, minor exceptions may be viable: a small, geographically constrained pocket might be able to support a civilization, at least for a little while, just like one might be able to dream up faster-than-light schemes involving tachyons or wormholes that require just a little too much suspension of disbelief to count as valid scientific hypotheses.

Perhaps even more importantly, peak oil is only one of many possible proximate causes that may lead to collapse. The ultimate cause is the diminishing returns curve on investments in complexity, and in this regard, everything we do to escape a proximate cause is self-defeating. Any new fuel or combination of fuels adds to our complexity, and drives down our marginal returns still more. Any government solution involving new legislation or bureaucracy adds to our complexity. Education or research just adds more complexity. There is no clear course of action, and what we consider the most obvious routes are also the most self-defeating ones.

Greer goes on in his article to discuss some of the economic measures that nation-states will likely employ to deal with the shocks of peak oil. I assume those measures will be used. I also assume that market forces will bring conservation, recycling and more sustainable means of living into vogue. I assume that permaculture will be practiced in the cities and suburbs, and Holmgren’s ideas about retrofitting the suburbs⁷ will be employed. But these are means of slowing the inevitable, not reversing its course. As Greer himself notes so eloquently:

Mechanization depends on massive infusions of cheap energy, and that combination of abundant energy at low cost is exactly what won’t be available in the future. If the last three hundred years funneled wealth to those who could exploit fossil fuels to the fullest and build centralized, technologically driven economic structures, the next three hundred years will see exactly the opposite; success will go to those who get ahead of depletion curves by reducing their reliance on fossil fuels further than others, and relying instead on human skills and sustainable, low-intensity energy inputs.⁸

Greer’s main point is to debunk those who expect the collapse of civilization to happen suddenly, and I think our disagreement here is primarily one of perspective. There will be catastrophic losses, but there will also be recoveries. I expect collapse to proceed somewhat faster than Greer seems to predict, because we are ultimately dealing with investments in complexity. Withdrawal of such investments can have a cascading effect, like a run on an over-evaluated stock, such that collapse becomes its own sort of positive feedback loop, returning a society fairly swiftly to a more sustainable level of complexity. I expect such crisis levels to emerge as early as 2012-2015, from a convergence of various factors including peak oil, but also ecological inputs and problems with complexity. At the same time, however, there will undoubtedly still be cities clinging to the old ways even a hundred years from now. When Greer measures the length of collapse, he usually takes his examples from the last outliers. My estimates are more focused on the loss of global hegemony. As we discussed in the podcast,⁹ while the Roman collapse took centuries, most of the damage was done in a fairly short period of time, in the Third Century Crisis.¹⁰ Indeed, one could go so far as to talk about the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in terms of events leading to the Third Century Crisis, and its aftermath. I focus on the Third Century Crisis as the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, while Greer looks at the long, start-and-stop, halting attempts to recover the empire.

The crisis our globalized civilization faces in the near future looks, right now, to be on par with the Third Century Crisis. It will not be the total end of our civilization, but it will be the point of no return—an aftermath that could last as long as 500 years as the scrap metal of our industrial civilization is consumed in a neo-Iron Age in some regions could very easily be in our immediate future. But the path back to equilibrium will begin. The window of opportunity will be opened, and wild places will be free, where people will have the chance to live as people again. Will the cities suddenly break down on 12 December 2012? I’ll be very surprised if they do. But every day after that crisis, after the peak of our civilized complexity, the toll our civilization takes on the planet will diminish in a mirror image of our escalating holocaust over the past 200 years of industrialism, and the ten thousand years of agriculture before that. Every day, there will be more room for cultural diversity as life in the cities becomes increasingly difficult. Every day, the earth will heal itself of the damage we’ve done. Every day, we’ll come a little bit closer to home.

The crisis we face isn’t comparable to Y2K. Y2K had an easy answer; the only question was whether we had the will to see it done. As Greer notes, “[f]aced with a credible threat, a hard deadline, and a clear course of action, people responded predictably by doing something about the situation.” This is not the same situation at all. We face an entirely different class of problem. There is no hard deadline, and there is no clear course of action. This isn’t a matter of just applying the energy necessary, though I’m sure the efforts Greer discusses will be used to slow the process down. This is a matter of making the unworkable, workable, and the oxymoronic, sensible.