by Michael Smith (Veshengro)
This statement, let's call it acknowledgment, by the United Nations that the world is entering a post-industrial age which will, though this has not been mentioned, come together with, by necessity, a post-carbon age, means that we will have to make serious changes and do things in “new ways”.
In order to prepare for those coming changes we all will have to learn for many of us new ways, skills and trades. Those ways, skills and trades have been in use before (and some still are) and thus we do not have to start from “zero hour” and the stone age.
The post-industrial age will be, more or less, the pre-industrial age but with a lot more modern knowledge, ways and things, such as wind power and hydro-power (without the large dams though), and solar, obviously, if we can still make the photo-voltaic cells.
However, we will have to restrict our electricity usage, no two ways about it, as the way we will be going no longer permits the wattage that we are using and have been using until now.
In such a post-industrial world, that we will have to realize, manufacture of good will be very much on a different scale than it is today as the plants as they exist at present simply will no longer exist; they can't.
Manufacturing plants of the size and kind that we find everywhere today are too energy hungry to be able to remain viable. In fact they never really have been viable and definitely not sustainable.
The making of things, including manufacturing, will, more than likely, be done in small to medium size workshops and by small factories who will be powered by other means that today.
But it will not only be manufacturing, the making of things, that will change but life and society as a whole will and also the way we will live.
We will have to imagine a life like in the pre-industrial age, combined with new ways, to understand, to some degree, what life will be like when it happens and the industrial age comes, finally, to an end.
Life will slow down, because transportation will be much slower and much better for all of us and there will be communities again helping each other and working together in a co-operative way. There is no other way than that.
Will we still have cars? Probably not. Will we still have computers?More than likely but they will be large desktops again, I should think, rather than laptops, notebooks, netbooks and tablets. Will we still have the Internet? Possibly, but not, I should think, in the way we have become used to it over the last couple of years to a decade or two.
If you wonder as to when and how it will happen I cannot answer you that and you would have to ask a good psychic. He or she may know but I don't. However, as the United Nations are talking about it we can almost bet our bottom dollar that it will happen and that that day may not be that far off.
© 2014
