With one Governor General’s award under his belt for The Ingenuity Gap, Thomas Homer-Dixon set out to assess our political, social, economic and ecological systems, first to see what kind of trouble they are in, and then to determine how these complications may combine. The result: The Upside of Down, spelling out a concerning prognosis for our future.

JG:
Do you believe in ‘peak oil’?

THD:
I definitely think that we are going to get a peak in oil production in the next couple of decades. To deny that is really to deny common sense. Whether it is smooth or harsh is going to depend on what kinds of investments we make in innovation. At the moment we are not, especially in North America. We have to see this as a transition from essentially cheap energy to expensive energy. I don’t necessarily mean monetary cost. I mean how much energy it takes you to generate energy. We haven’t wrapped our head around exactly what that means. But there is no doubt that our technologies, our urban designs, our economic practices, the amount of trade we see within and between regions—all of these things are going to change dramatically as will our personal lifestyles, our leisure patterns and the kinds of employment that we have.

JG:
Can we rely on technology and efficiency to solve our energy challenges?

THD:
We have been making enormous strides in terms of efficiency of energy and materials. We have reduced the energy intensity of GDP dramatically, 30 or 40% in the last 20 or 30 years. But our absolute consumption of energy and materials has either stayed constant or gone up. Our overall economic growth is higher than the advances we are making in productivity. So I don’t see any prospect through technology alone or through efficiency alone reducing our energy and materials in any significant way. The techno-optimist line here is that we can get out of this situation just by being inventive. Instead, [the truth] drives you to confront the nature of our economy—the growth imperative, the consumption imperative. We don’t like to face these issues.

JG:
You say efficiency is not always a good idea. Why?