Cheap Labor. Cheap Material.
America has undergone profound changes, not all for good because of cheap energy.
November 14, 2008.
There is a bumper sticker that says, "Unions: The Folks Who Brought You the Weekend". The truth is different. A true bumpster sticker would read "Oil, Gas, and Coal: The Fuels That Brought You the Weekend".
Indeed, if you follow the history of workers rights in our country, it would be closely linked to the expansion of fossil fuel use. Mechanisation, powered by fossil fuels, allowed people to work less and work with better working conditions. People need not do difficult work any more, fossil fuels will do the work for them.
The advent of oil, coal, and natural gas, meant that materials became cheap and human labor became expensive. Humans became a scarce resource, while materials became plentiful. Governments created new labor laws. You could always mine more materials, but at the same time you couldn't exploit people. Labor law provided a new sense of fairness, and because such levels of human exploitation was no longer necessary with the event of cheap energy.
In the 1950s and 1960s when fossil fuels use was becoming highly refined with advanced devices, we saw the dramatic result of cheap energy over expensive labor. Designs in that era overwhelming preferred automation and extreme simplicity without labor-intensive and therefore expensive detailing. Buildings built prior to 1900 emphasise labor over material. They tended to have intricate designs, including detailed facades that where often hand-sculpted.
Today's modern buildings tend to emphasise material over intricate designs done by skilled craftsmen. Modern buildings tend to have massive facades of concrete or other materials, they impress by their size of their often unique materials. In contrast to old buildings, modern buildings often have little detailing or complicated facades. Brutalist Architecture, with it's massive rough concrete facades is the essence of modern design.
We celebrate the progress of labor reforms. Yet just like Brutalist Architecture is noted for it's ugliness and insensitivity to the human condition, there is much wrong with cheap energy. We have built modern urban landscapes that are distinctively anti-human and automobile centric, that do little to inspire the human-psyche. Building better cities is too expensive, because of the cost of labor, particularly the kind of labor that spends hours designing and building intricate facades.
Everybody agrees, nobody should be required to work in unreasonable conditions. Yet, liberating conditions of fossil fuels has made modern man lazy and changed his whole world not necessarily for the better. Fossil fuels have seriously polluted the environment, and made it possible to consume massive amounts of non-renewable resources at levels that we never imagined possible. Fossil fuels have made the world ugly but gave modern man leisure.
As energy gets more expensive as global demand for fossil fuels increases, our world will change. We will forced to reconsider how we organise our society. Materials and energy will once again become the rarity, and labor cheaper. New buildings and infrastructure in a post-peak oil will be less massive, and use less materials, but be far more intricate.
