#ecosophia.net

[arcticdementor]

Well, it’s about to happen all over again. I’ve been wondering how soon a certain marriage of convenience in contemporary cultural politics would come messily apart, and now we’ve seen one of the typical warning signs of that impending breach. Those of my readers who are concerned about environmental issues—actually concerned, that is, and not simply using the environment as a convenient opportunity for class-conscious virtue signaling—may want to brace themselves for a shock.

The sign I have in mind is a recent flurry of articles in the leftward end of the mainstream media decrying the dangers of ecofascism. Ecofascism? That’s the term used for, and also generally by, that tiny subset of our society’s fascist fringe which likes to combine environmental concerns with the racial bigotries and authoritarian political daydreams more standard on that end of modern extremism. If you’ve never heard of it before, there’s good reason for that, but a significant section of the mainstream media seems to have taken quite an interest in making sure that you hear about it now.

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The first thing I’d like to point out to my readers here is that, as already noted, ecofascism is a fringe of a fringe. In terms of numbers and cultural influence, it ranks well below the Flat Earth Society or the people who believe in all sincerity that Elvis Presley is a god. It’s one of those minute and self-marginalizing sub-sub-subcultures that a certain number of people find or make in order to act out their antinomian fantasies in comfortable obscurity, and enjoy the modest joys of being the biggest paramecium in a very, very small pond. It’s fair to say, in fact, that the chance that ecofascism will become a significant political or cultural force in your lifetime, dear reader, is right up there with the chance that the United Church of Bacon will become a major world religion.

So why is this submicroscopic fringe ideology suddenly on the receiving end of so many faux-worried essays in important liberal newspapers and magazines, and in the corresponding end of social media and the public blogosphere?  The reason, I’d argue, has to do with something else that’s been finally receiving its own share of media attention.

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That is to say, counting up all its direct and indirect energy costs, this one conference had a carbon footprint rivaling the annual output of some Third World countries—and you guessed it, the point of the conference was to talk about the menace of anthropogenic climate change.

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At this point, in fact, one of the current heartthrobs of climate change activism, Swedish teenager Greta Thunberg, refuses to fly anywhere because of commercial air travel’s gargantuan carbon footprint. Sensibly enough, she travels through Europe by train, and her rich friends have lent her a sailboat to take her across the Atlantic for her upcoming North American tour. This would be bad enough if Thunberg was an ordinary citizen trying to raise awareness of anthropogenic climate change, but she’s not—she’s the darling of the Davos set, a child of privilege who’s managed to parlay the normal adolescent craving for attention into a sizable cultural presence.  Every time she takes the train, she adds to the number of people who look at the attendees at the Sicily conference mentioned above and say, “So what about your carbon footprint?”

That, in turn, is fatal to climate change activism as currently constituted. For years now, since that brief period when I was a very minor star in the peak oil movement, I’ve noted a curious dynamic in the climate change-centered end of environmentalism. Almost always, the people I met at peak oil events who were concerned about peak oil and the fate of industrial society more generally, rather than climate change or such other mediacentric causes as the plight of large cute animals, were ready and willing to make extensive changes in their own lives, in addition to whatever political activism they might engage in. Almost always, the people I met who were exclusively concerned with anthropogenic climate change were not.

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To some extent this is common or garden variety hypocrisy, heavily larded with the odd conviction—on loan from the less honest end of liberal Christianity—that if you feel really bad about your sins, God will ignore the fact that you keep on committing them. Still, there’s more to it than that. Some of what else is going on came to the surface a few years ago in Washington State when a group of environmental activists launched an initiative that would have slapped a fee on carbon. As such things go, it was a well-designed initiative, and one of the best things about it was that it was revenue-neutral:  that is, the money taken in by the carbon fee flowed right back out through direct payments to citizens, so that rising energy prices due to the carbon fee wouldn’t clobber the economy or hurt the poor.

That, in turn, made it unacceptable to the Democratic Party in Washington State, and they refused to back the initiative, dooming it to defeat. Shortly thereafter they floated their own carbon fee initiative, which was anything but revenue neutral.  Rather, it was set up to funnel all the money from the carbon fee into a slush fund managed by a board the public wouldn’t get to elect, which would hand out the funds to support an assortment of social justice causes that were also helpfully sheltered from public oversight. Unsurprisingly, the second initiative also lost heavily—few Washington State voters were willing to trust their breathtakingly corrupt political establishment with yet another massive source of graft at public expense.

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If you haven’t heard of these followup studies, dear reader, there’s good reason for that. They argued unconvincingly that everything would be just fine if only the nations of the world handed over control of the global economy to an unelected cadre of experts, under whom the institutions of democratic governance would be turned into powerless debating societies while the decisions that mattered would be made by corporate-bureaucratic committees conveniently sheltered from public oversight. (If this seems familiar to those of my readers who endure EU rule just now, there’s a reason for that:  the state of affairs just described has been the wet dream of Europe’s privileged classes and their tame intellectuals for quite a few decades now.)  That’s the usually unmentioned reason why The Limits to Growth fielded the savage resistance it did:  a good many people in 1972 recognized it as a stalking horse for a political agenda.

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In the same way, the mere fact that certain people are trying to use climate change as a stalking horse for unrelated political agendas doesn’t mean that it’s a good idea to dump trillions of tons of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, or that doing so won’t cause epic disruptions to an already unstable global climate. Mind you, anthropogenic climate change isn’t the end of the world, not by a long shot; the Earth has been through sudden temperature shifts many times before in its long history, some of them due to large-scale releases of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere—that’s one of the things really massive volcanic episodes can do, for example.

Attempts to dress up climate change in the borrowed finery of the Book of Revelations—sinners in the hands of an angry Gaia!—have more to do with our culture’s apocalyptic obsessions, and with the desires of ambitious people to scare others into signing on to their agenda, than with the realities of anthropogenic climate change. That said, we can expect a good solid helping of coastal flooding, weather-related disasters, crop failures, and other entertainments, which will take an increasingly severe economic toll as the years go on, and help drive the declines in population and economic output mentioned a few paragraphs back. Yes, this is one of the things The Limits to Growth was talking about when it predicted the long slow arc of decline ahead of us.

The problem faced by the people who have been pushing climate change activism is that their political enemies have found a very effective way to counter them:  they can point out that the people who babble by the hour about the apocalyptic future we face due to anthropogenic climate change don’t take their own claims seriously enough to walk their talk. Thus the attendees at the environmental conference on Sicily mentioned earlier can no longer count on having their planet and eating it too—or, more to the point, they can’t count on doing so while still convincing anyone that they ought to be taken seriously. This is hard on certain delicate egos, and it also makes it hard to keep pursuing the agenda mentioned above while continuing to lead absurdly extravagant lifestyles propped up by stunning levels of energy and resource waste.

There’s a simple solution to that difficulty, though:  the celebrities, their pet intellectuals, and the interests behind them can drop environmentalism like a hot rock.

That’s what happened, after all, in the early 1980s. Environmentalism up until that point had a huge cultural presence, supported by government-funded advertising campaigns—some of my readers, certainly, are old enough to recall Woodsy Owl and his iconic slogan, “Give a hoot, don’t pollute!”—and also supported by a galaxy of celebrities who mouthed pious sentiments about nature. Then, bam!  Ronald Reagan was in, Woodsy Owl was out, John-Boy Walton and John Denver gave way to Gordon “Greed is Good” Gekko and “material girl” Madonna, and the Sierra Club and the Friends of the Earth had corporate executives on their boards of directors, and did everything they could think of to deep-six the effective organizing tactics that got the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act, the Endangered Species Act, and a galaxy of other environmental reforms enacted into law.

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I think we’re about to see the same thing happen to climate change activism, and one of the symptoms of the approaching swerve is the sudden flurry of mass media publicity being given right now to the tiny fringe phenomenon of ecofascism. Over the months ahead, I expect to see many more stories along the same lines all over the leftward end of the media and its associated blogosphere, insisting in increasingly shrill terms that anyone who pays too much attention to the environment—and in particular, anyone who expects celebrity climate change activists to modify their lifestyles to match their loudly proclaimed ideals—is probably an ecofascist. In fact, I would be very surprised if we don’t see a series of earnest articles in the media claiming that believing in ecological limits is racist; such claims are already being made in the blogosphere, and their adoption by the mainstream left is, I suspect, merely a matter of time.

[arcticdementor]

Yes, we need to talk about climate change again, and it’s probably necessary to start with a point I’ve made on this blog several times already: anthropogenic climate change is real and serious, and it’s being exploited by political and corporate interests to push a dubious agenda on the public. Many people these days don’t seem to be able to keep both these ideas in their heads at the same time. If you find it hard to do that, dear reader, I’m going to encourage you to make the effort, because a great deal of rhetoric is being deployed these days to make you forget that real problems can have fake solutions.

Imagine, to use the inevitable metaphor, that you’re on the proverbial ocean liner, which has just hit the proverbial iceberg. As you stand there on deck, someone grabs a bullhorn and announces that the real problem is that all the money in your pockets is weighing you down. He insists that if you’ll only hand all your money and other valuables to him, and let him row away from the doomed ship in one of the lifeboats, the people left on board just have to flap their arms vigorously and they’ll be able to fly away to safety in Newfoundland.

The problem you face is unquestionably real; go belowdecks and you can see the water rising. Does that mean that the solution being offered by the fellow with the bullhorn is the best option you have, or indeed that it will work at all?  Of course not. The fellow with the bullhorn is betting that you’ll be sufficiently panicked at the thought of imminent drowning that you’ll accept a claim that, under other circumstances, you’d recognize as utter nonsense. It’s a common theme of history that people can be convinced to accept claims almost as silly as the one in my metaphor if they’ve been whipped up into a sufficient state of panic. Yes, I’m suggesting that that’s one of the things shaping the contemporary debate on climate change.

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So the problem is real; the people who are worried about anthropogenic climate change have that much right. It’s the next steps that get complex. Those steps involve what’s coming, and what can and should be done about it—and in both these cases, we very quickly get into territory that’s rather reminiscent of the fellow with the bullhorn in my metaphor.

Listen to climate change activists talk about what will happen if something isn’t done right away and you’ll get to hear apocalyptic claims that rival anything Tim LaHaye and Jerry Jenkins put into their schlocky Left Behind series—if you’re not familiar with this, it’s more or less the Fifty Shades of Grey of Protestant apocalypse porn. Mark Lynas’ lavishly marketed 2008 climate-change opus Six Degrees, though a bit dated at this point, is typical of the genre in its gaudy portrayal of a world tucked under the broiler, as well as its proselytizing tone—again, the parallels with Left Behind are hard to miss. There’s plenty more of this sort of thing being splashed around by the corporate mass media these days.

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The difficulty, here as so often, lies in the complex relationship between scientific knowledge and the collective discourse of our time. In those disciplines that haven’t been wholly corrupted by money and fame, scientists tend to be highly cautious when talking to other scientists; they hedge every statement with caveats, because they know perfectly well that the people who are reading those statements have the necessary background to pick them apart, find the flaws, and send a letter to this or that scientific journal exposing your mistakes for all your colleagues to see. That’s a key part of the scientific method, and when it stops happening—when criticism within a discipline is no longer permitted and a rigidly defined consensus governs what you can and cannot disagree with—you know the discipline has sold out.

On the other hand, if you approach a discussion outside of the scientific community with all those caveats, and the subject is anything even remotely controversial, you can expect to have the caveats shoved down your throat by your opponents, who are used to a different mode of discourse. Scientists who find their feet in the public sphere thus quickly stop offering the caveats, and start using the same rhetorical tricks as their opponents. Unfortunately one of the most common of those tricks involves taking your argument further than the evidence will go, and making whatever claims you think you can get away with.

The late Carl Sagan was a notable example of this latter habit. Those of my readers who recall his career will remember that he coauthored the paper that introduced the concept of “nuclear winter” to public discussion. (For those who don’t recall this, it’s the theory that nuclear war would cause sudden global cooling along the same lines, and for the same reasons, as the Tambora eruption in 1816.)  That original paper—the TTAPS paper, as it was called after the initials of its authors—was a solid scientific study that showed that there was a serious risk of global cooling lasting for many weeks, and gave facts and figures to support that argument.

Sagan wrote two more pieces on nuclear winter, though, which were not intended for his fellow scientists. He contributed to a 1984 volume, The Cold and the Dark, which was aimed at an audience of scientifically literate laypeople. He also wrote a 1983 article for Parade Magazine—a weekly that at the time was inserted into Sunday newspapers around the country—which was thus aimed at the scientifically illiterate public. Compare those with the original study and a curious trend emerges. Where the TTAPS study predicted a period of cooling lasting for weeks, his piece in The Cold and the Dark replaced that with months, and the Parade article stretched it out to years. Sagan was involved in antinuclear activism, and apparently couldn’t resist the temptation to play fast and loose with facts to prop up the case he was trying to make.

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If you want to see just how far climate scientists have gotten into what we might as well call the Sagan syndrome, by the way, ask them about the global cooling scare of the 1970s. Odds are the immediate response you’ll get is an insistence that it never happened. If you present them with the titles and authors of books written during that period that treated global cooling as a reality—those aren’t hard to find—they’ll typically backpedal and insist that well, maybe so, but scientists didn’t support the global cooling scare. If you demonstrate that respected scientists did in fact do so—and again, this isn’t hard to do—they’ll either get angry and start shouting or insist that, well, maybe so, but it wasn’t the consensus among climate experts.

Don’t tell them about the 1972 climate conference at Brown University here in Rhode Island, which brought together 42 of the world’s top climate scientists, and ended up sending a letter to President Nixon and putting papers in Science and Quaternary Studies warning of imminent global cooling and a possible new ice age. If you do that, I promise that they’ll get angry and start shouting, because you’ve caught them behaving like politicians rather than scientists, and they’ll know it. You can get the same effect by asking dieticians why we should believe what they say about cholesterol now, when we all know perfectly well that in another ten years they’ll have changed their minds again. Laypeople aren’t supposed to question scientists like that—at least that’s what scientists like to tell themselves.

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So the shrill insistence that we’re facing a climate emergency and we have to take drastic action right now is a political claim, not a scientific one. The drastic action—well, that’s another matter. The open secret of climate change activism is that the solutions being offered by activists have uncomfortable similarities to the claims of the fellow with the bullhorn in my metaphor. Decades of heavily subsidized growth in solar and wind power haven’t dented the steady increase in carbon dioxide emissions, for example—not least because solar and wind power technologies depend on vast fossil fuel inputs for their manufacture, installation, maintenance, and disposal—so it’s disingenuous to claim that putting even more money into solar and wind power will do the job. As for vegan diets, bans on plastic straws, and the like, those are virtue signaling covering up an unwillingness to accept meaningful change.

For two decades now, in fact, the people who are loudest in their insistence that something has to be done about climate change have been the same people whose lifestyles disproportionately cause climate change. If you commute all alone in an SUV, fly to Mazatlan or Spain every year for a vacation, and keep up the other habits of absurd extravagance that go with an upper middle class lifestyle in the industrial world these days, even if you eat a vegan diet and never touch a plastic straw, your carbon footprint exceeds that of ten deplorables in West Virginia or a hundred ordinary people in Indonesia or Uruguay. If you’re one of the rich and famous at the forefront of climate change activism, your carbon footprint exceeds that of a Third World town.

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Au contraire, the behavior of climate change activists, and of the corporate media and multinational business interests that fund and promote them so lavishly, makes sense only if you assume that they want everyone else to stop using fossil fuels so that they don’t have to. The shrill claims of impending doom, the insistence that we’re in a climate emergency and everyone has to accept drastic restrictions that climate change activists show no trace of willingness to embrace in their own lives, make perfect sense if the game plan is to buffalo most of the people in the world’s industrial countries into accepting a sharply lower standard of living “for the planet,” so that the upper twenty per cent or so can maintain their current lifestyles unchanged.

If that’s what’s going on, though, it’s a losing game. The project of splitting industrial societies into an affluent minority and an impoverished majority by offshoring jobs and flooding the labor market with immigrants has already generated a furious populist backlash so forceful that in the US and Great Britain alike, globalist parties are desperately scrambling to avoid giving voters the chance to choose between their policies and those of the populist insurgency. From science through politics to the corporate media, the spokescritters of the status quo have been caught shoveling smoke so often that the prestige they once had is a thing of the past—and no, it won’t work to do as some privileged pundits are doing these days and insist, plaintively or angrily as the case may be, that the rabble ought to stop asking unwelcome questions and believe blindly in whatever their supposed betters tell them. Those days are over.

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I’m thinking here among many other things about a recent discovery at an Australian university. Did you know that cows like to eat seaweed?  Ranchers who raise cows near the sea routinely find their herds on the beach or even belly deep in the surf, munching seaweed. It so happens that one variety of seaweed has the effect of nearly eliminating the production of methane in cows’ digestive tracts. Methane is a far more powerful greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide, and has been coming out of the bellies of ruminants in vast quantities since long before humans arrived—think of the herds of buffalo that used to roam the North American plains, or the herds of aurochs (the wild ancestors of cattle) that once thronged the steppes of western Eurasia.

Could we fine-tune emissions by giving cows seaweed to eat, so that excess carbon dioxide (which benefits plant growth, by the way) is balanced out by decreased methane? It’s worth trying—and the Australian scientists are working on methods to raise the seaweed in question so it can become a common additive to cattle feed. That would have to be phased in gradually so the results didn’t swing the climate the other way, but that could easily be managed, given a less hysterical approach to climate change than the one being pushed by activists these days.

That’s only one example of the kind of appropriate technology that we could use to cushion our species’ impact on the biosphere. Replacing wood with hemp as a feedstock for paper and other uses could be another—the faster a plant grows, the more carbon dioxide it sucks out of the air, and hemp grows much faster than commercial softwoods. For that matter, large-scale tree planting is a viable strategy, deliberately copying the events that led to the Little Ice Age to cool things off a bit, especially if the trees are left to mature rather than being cut down early in their life cycle—again, we’ve got hemp as a replacement. Combine these and other bits of appropriate tech with the phasing out of a few absurd extravagances like private jets, and we can bring climate change to a halt, or at least slow it down to a pace that we and other species can handle.

[arcticdementor]

Well, we definitely seem to have passed a threshold of sorts. For most of the sixteen years since I started blogging, one of the things I had to point out constantly to my readers was the slow pace of historical change.  Whenever I posted an essay on the twilight of industrial society, I could count on fielding at least one comment from a reader who expected the entire modern world to crash and burn in the next few months.  I’d have to patiently remind them that Rome wasn’t sacked in a day—that it takes years of breathtakingly moronic decisions motivated by mindless greed, vicious partisan hatred, blind ideological dogmatism, and a total unwillingness to think about the long-term consequences of short-term decisions, to bring a civilization down.

Now of course all through the years while I was telling people this, decisions of the kind I’ve just described, guided by motives of the sort I’ve just characterized, were standard operating procedure throughout the industrial world.  Those proceeded to have their usual effect. I still don’t expect modern civilization to crash to ruin in the next few months, but it’s reached the point that I no longer have to tell people that the Long Descent won’t show up as soon as they think. No, at this point it’s my ironic duty to suggest that they make whatever preparations they have in mind sooner rather than later, because the world shows no signs of waiting for them.

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Part of this is the ordinary rhythm of idiotic excess followed by equally idiotic panic—up with the rocket and down with the stick—that sets the beat of economic life in a neoliberal economy. That said, I think there may be more going on here than that. I don’t know how many of my readers are aware that the simmering hostility between the US government and the oil-producing nations of OPEC is coming to a brisk boil just now. The steady rise in oil prices over the last year or so has caused stark panic in the White House, since increased gas prices correlate rather nicely with the fading of Joe Biden’s last dim hopes of reelection. Repeated attempts to pressure the OPEC nations to increase oil production and drive prices down have gotten no response, not least because the Biden administration isn’t offering anything in return, and has been noticeably hostile to the interests of several leading OPEC nations.

Cue the gibbering inmates of the US Congress to draft a bill that would make it possible for plaintiffs to sue OPEC nations for price fixing in American courts. Normally there’s a thing called sovereign immunity—in plain English, the governments of other nations can’t be held accountable to US laws—but this bill, the cutely named NOPEC Act, would strip OPEC nations of sovereign immunity in US courts for any decision that some US lawyer could label price-fixing. The target of this project, of course, is the gargantuan amount of money that OPEC nations have invested in assets in the United States and its client states, which could be seized to pay off judgments under the new law. Since governments in the US and Europe have engaged in exactly that sort of piracy toward Russian assets this year, this isn’t an empty threat.

So, dear reader, if you were a high-ranking official in a petroleum-producing country, and you picked up the newspaper and read about the NOPEC Act, what would you do?

That’s right. You would start quietly cashing out of your investments in the United States and its client states, so those investments wouldn’t be available for US courts to seize. Those asset sales would of course result in a general softening of market conditions, and might well trigger a crash in asset prices, but at least you’d get some of your money back, you know. Meanwhile there are countries outside the US sphere of influence that would be happy to provide a home for your investment money—Russia, China, and India come to mind, just for starters—and if the US and its client states get obstreperous, why, you can always do what your grandfather did in 1973, refuse to sell petroleum to the American market, and watch the price of oil soar in response.

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Still, it’s pretty clear that it has never occurred to anybody in the US Congress that OPEC nations might, you know, have their own interests in mind, and might respond to a hamfisted attempt at bullying by doing something other than groveling at Uncle Sam’s feet. I’ve noted before that the elite classes in the US and Europe today seem incapable of understanding that the rest of the human race doesn’t consist of little automatons that will always and only do as they’re told. That failure of basic reasoning is fairly common in senile aristocracies, and it very often plays a large and colorful role in the collapse of empires. It may well play such a role in the collapse of ours.

One way or another, of course, sky-high energy prices are an important element in the fix we’re in, and that brings me circling back around to one of the themes I sketched out last week—the complex twilight of fossil fuel resources summed up in the phrase “peak oil.”

Let’s start with the basics. Petroleum is a nonrenewable resource. Yes, I’m aware that there’s a cornucopian fringe out there insisting, under the label “abiotic oil,” that the Earth is full of oil and any oil field drained of oil will promptly be replenished from further underground. Do you recall the 2008 oil spike, when old oil fields in Pennsylvania, California, and a hundred other places that had been capped decades ago were opened up again, since crude oil was worth upwards of $100 a barrel?  Not one of those fields had refilled, as the abiotic oil theory predicted.  There’s a good simple word for a theory that makes predictions that don’t pan out. That word is “wrong.”

Petroleum is a nonrenewable resource.  It provides around 40% of all energy used by human beings on this planet, including nearly all the energy for transportation. (Electric cars and trains have a negligible share worldwide.) It’s fairly rare in the Earth’s crust, all things considered, and it’s been extracted at a breakneck pace for more than a century. The rate of new discoveries has been far behind the rate of annual extraction for decades.  Do you see the problem there?

The obvious solution, if you happen to want to sustain an industrial society of the current sort, is to find some other energy source to replace petroleum. The other fossil fuels won’t cut it—they’re also being used at breakneck rates, and facing the same depletion problems as oil. More coal is being mined and burnt today, for example, than at the peak of the coal age a century and a quarter ago, and most of the coal that’s being burnt now is low-quality brown coal because all the good stuff got shoveled up and burnt decades ago.

That means that some new energy resource has to be discovered and deployed in a hurry. That’s why scientists have been hard at work on that project for well over fifty years now, and the one minor difficulty is that they haven’t found one yet.  More to the point, they’ve found any number of supposed replacements for petroleum, which have soaked up a great many investment dollars and then failed to perform as advertised. There are two primary reasons why all attempts at a substitute for petroleum have failed: scale and net energy.

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Similar difficulties show up with many other proposed replacements for any of the fossil fuels, because fossil fuels are far more concentrated than any other energy resource on this planet. You get petroleum when huge accumulations of dead sea life in anoxic conditions get squeezed and roasted deep inside the earth for millions of years, a process that soaks up vast amounts of energy that no human being has to pay for. That’s why to match the energy in a single gallon of gasoline, for example, you need around one ton of fully charged auto batteries. That’s one of the problems with renewables, by the way: they depend on the diffuse and intermittent flows of energy we get from the sun right now, instead of the highly concentrated resources the earth has stashed away in her sediments over the last half billion years or so.

Issues of scale, though, are only one set of challenges that have to be faced to replace petroleum. The second is net energy. It takes energy to extract, process, and transport energy, and to build the devices that use energy. Take the total energy in a resource and subtract the energy that has to be used for all these purposes, and what’s left is net energy. It’s exactly the same, conceptually, as net income: take your gross income and subtract your expenses, and you’ve got your net, which is the amount of money you can actually do something with.

You can have a huge gross income and still go broke.  All that’s necessary is that your expenses have to be just a little bit larger than your income. (Watch the tech industry over the next few years if you want to see that assertion proved in a very colorful manner.)  In exactly the same way, your gross energy doesn’t matter two farts in a Cat-5 hurricane if the energy inputs you need are too high. The poster child here is algal biodiesel, another supposed substitute for petroleum that boomed and went bust a decade ago. On paper, it looks great: you farm vast amounts of oil-rich pond scum, process it into diesel, and away you go. In practice, the net energy ranges well into negative numbers—in other words, it makes exactly as much sense as trying to get a profit by buying dollar bills for $1.50 each.

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The secret is that the net energy of nuclear power is very, very low. You have to process vast amounts of raw material to produce the fuel rods, and that takes energy; you have to build and maintain a huge and complex power plant, and that takes energy; you have to deal with the wastes, and that takes energy, and so on through a very long list of energy sinks. That’s another problem with renewables, by the way. Most renewable technologies yield very modest net energy, because so much energy has to go into gathering and concentrating the diffuse energy flows that power renewables. That’s why they require the same sort of constant subsidies as nuclear plants.

Keep track of the economic dimension, in fact, and you can filter out most of the nonsolutions to the accelerating depletion of conventional petroleum. Keeping track of the economic dimension, in turn, is something that cheerleaders for purported replacements for petroleum inevitably will not do. They love to talk about technical feasibility, and of course it’s quite true that you can come up with any number of technically feasible gimmicks to replace petroleum. The problem is that none of them can pay for themselves.

It’s usually about this point in a discussion of peak oil that somebody gets angry and starts yelling, “Look, there has to be some replacement for petroleum!” That’s an understandable belief. Unfortunately, it also happens to be dead wrong. No law of nature requires another cheap, abundant, highly concentrated energy source to pop up in time to save us from the consequences of wasting the one we had. Most people figure out fairly early in life that if you spend your entire paycheck on booze, no good fairy is going to come up with the rent money in time to keep your rump from landing on the street. The same rule applies to energy, but for complex reasons rooted in our collective psychology, this isn’t something that most people want to hear.

That brings us around to our current situation. Despite the crumbling economy, petroleum is running well above $100 a barrel these days, because—ahem—we’re running out:  not all at once, but slowly, one dry oil well at a time. The fracking frenzy that briefly boosted US oil production over the last decade is sputtering, because oil is a nonrenewable resource, and even if you don’t have to worry about the bottom line because the Fed is printing money hand over fist and funneling it to you, eventually you run out of shale deposits that can be fracked.

Again, this doesn’t mean that we’re going to run out suddenly. It means that oil production firms have to run faster and faster, invest more and more money and resources, and struggle harder and harder against geological reality to keep the market supplied with oil—and this means that an ever-growing share of economic output has to be funneled into the energy industry, leaving an ever-shrinking share for everything else.

That’s the future we’ve backed ourselves into. We’re running on empty, and the last gas station is somewhere back there in the blue distance.

I mentioned two weeks ago when I announced this sequence of posts that I was going to talk about what individuals, families, and community groups could do about all this. Fortunately, what to do about an energy crisis was explored in great detail half a century ago, during the oil crises of the 1970s, and before then in the severe shortages during the two world wars. The difficulty we face is very simple.  Energy—all forms of it—will become much more expensive than you expect, and everything made with energy—in other words, most goods and services, across the board—will also become much more expensive than you expect. Meanwhile jobs will become scarcer and economies will contract as energy costs bite deeper into every form of economic activity. That’s called stagflation: stagnation plus inflation. It’s what happens when the price of energy spikes, and it’s happening now.

So you have two straightforward tasks ahead of you, dear reader. The first is to use much less energy than you do right now. The second is to cut your expenditures on everything you can, to free up the money you’ll need to deal with soaring energy costs and price inflation generally.

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If you have the chance to pick up some do-it-yourself books from back in the day,  you’ll be better off still. The self-sufficiency books listed for sale in old issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and other resources of the same era?  Worth their weight in gold.  It also helps to know people who can teach you how to do things for yourself, and to put plenty of time and effort as soon as possible into applying that fine old country saying, “Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without.”  People thought they could afford to neglect that during the heyday of the fossil fuel era. Now we get to learn better.

Oh, and make sure to have backups for anything that depends on energy you don’t produce yourself. With its usual monumental stupidity, the US Congress is already talking about price controls, and those are among the best ways known to our species to turn price hikes into actual shortages. (The US isn’t self-sufficient in energy resources, not by a long shot, and nobody will be in a hurry to sell oil to us at artificially low prices, you know.) If price controls go through, expect gas stations to run out of fuel, diesel shortages to play merry hob with product delivery to stores, and rolling blackouts if the price controls get applied to natural gas. Fun times!

[arcticdementor]

Yes, I know that bullets are flying and bombs falling in Ukraine as I type these words. Plenty of people are catching the latest variants of Covid-19; curiously enough, people who got vaccinated for that virus are catching it at a much higher rate than those that didn’t get the jab, but we don’t have to talk about that now. Shortages of food, fertilizer, and a hundred other things are putting lives and livelihoods at risk, drought tightens its grip on the western half of North America, and equally unwelcome climate shifts hit other parts of the world. We live in interesting times and there’s no reason to think that they’ll get less interesting any time soon.

Under the circumstances, it may seem pointless to return to the theme I’ve developed in recent posts here and talk more about the care and feeding of the imagination. Appearances deceive, however, and rarely as much as here. It’s precisely because so many people these days have lost the ability to reflect on why they’re doing the things they’re doing that we lurch so reliably from one crisis to another.  Einstein’s famous dictum is relevant here:  we cannot solve our problems using the same kind of thinking that created them.  Nor, it might be added, does it help any to insist, in angry or plaintive tones, that the problems shouldn’t exist in the first place.

I was thinking of this a few days ago while reading comments on the Russo-Ukraine war on a British site. Most of the comments insisted heatedly that Vladimir Putin or the Russian people as a whole must be insane.  None of the people who wrote this were clinical psychologists; the basis for their diagnosis, if we can call it that, was simply that they didn’t want to think about the reasons for the war.  It’s an odd sort of logic. Politicians and pundits in the NATO countries make no secret of the fact that they want to see Russia disarmed, dismembered, and “integrated into the global economy”—that is, stripped to the bare walls to prop up the sclerotic economies of the Eurozone and line the pockets of Western oligarchs.  It really isn’t hard to see that Russians might reasonably object to that project, even to the extent of seizing the opportunity to fight a proxy war with NATO they think they have a good chance of winning.

…

If you want to understand why something is happening, insisting angrily that there can be no possible reason for it to happen is not a useful way to start. This is why the catastrophic failure of imagination among the Western world’s comfortable classes I’ve discussed in earlier posts has to be addressed if we are to have any hope of extracting ourselves from the present mess.  It’s because so many of the people tasked with making decisions in today’s world literally can’t imagine the possibility that they might be wrong, that people might reasonably disagree with them, and that events might not go the way they want, that they’ve blundered from one self-inflicted disaster to the next, without learning the obvious lessons of their failures or even noticing that there are lessons to be learned.

With this in mind, I want to circle back to the post three months ago in which I started talking about the role of imagination in the creation of the future. I noted then that the imagination is one mode of the basic human mental activity of figuration, the process we use to assemble a world out of the fragmentary messages of the senses. When we figurate based on what the senses are telling us right now, that’s called perception. When we figurate based on what the senses told us at some earlier time, that’s memory, and when we figurate by taking remembered sensations and putting them together in a new pattern, that’s imagination.

We all use imagination all the time, and by “we” here I don’t mean human beings alone. When your cat stands on top of you at five in the morning, exhaling fetid breath into your face and jabbing you with an improbably hard paw, her walnut-sized brain is working overtime imagining a full food dish. Every life form with a central nervous system seems to be able to do the same thing; it’s one of the things that distinguishes us from insects, with their diffuse neural net and their (to us) weirdly mechanical way of doing things. Parasitic wasps, for example, have hardwired instinctive routines for finding, stunning, and stashing away the insects on which they lay their eggs; interrupt the routine partway through, and all they can do is go back to the beginning and start over again. Vertebrates can adapt more flexibly, because they can picture the goal they’re seeking and use imagination to envision alternate routes to the same goal.

The people who insist that Putin and the large majority of Russians who support him can’t have a reason to refuse the future NATO has in mind for their country are using their imaginations, too. They’re just using them dysfunctionally. Instead of imagining themselves in the same situation—facing, let’s say, a hostile foreign alliance that wants to strip their nation of its independence and wealth, cratering their standards of living in the process—all they can imagine is that everyone in the world who isn’t clinically insane must share their values and support policies that benefit the well-to-do of a few Western countries at everyone else’s expense. That’s a spectacular leap of the imagination, and it lands them in a fantasy world as unique as anything Lewis Carroll could have envisioned. The only problem with this mighty creative effort is that they forget that most other people notice the difference between their fantasy world and the place the rest of us live.

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There’s a mordant twofold irony in the guiding lamp I intend to use here, though you have to know your way around German intellectual culture to really savor it. The German polymath Johann Wolfgang von Goethe explained how to avoid the downsides of the human imagination in a brilliant 1793 essay, “The Experiment as Mediator between Object and Subject.”  The first irony is that Goethe himself didn’t realize that he was talking about the imagination in this essay; he had no capacity for philosophical abstraction—his considerable genius was always rooted in concrete experience, and derived its strength and vividness from sensory details—and when poor Friedrich Schiller tried to point out to him just how much of a contribution his own imagination was making to his research, Goethe’s response wasn’t much more than a blank look. The second irony is that the followers of Rudolf Steiner, who have done more than anyone else to draw attention to this essay in recent times, consistently refuse to put it into practice when they’re dealing with the products of Steiner’s imagination.

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This last point is crucial. Nothing is easier than to devise some hypothesis and come up with an experiment that you think will prove it.  If the experiment turns out the way you want it, you can then claim that you’ve proved the hypothesis and go from there.  That’s the way science was too often done in Goethe’s time, and that’s the way it’s too often done today, which is why so much of science has become a brittle conventional wisdom of jerry-rigged hypotheses and ad hoc assumptions, waiting for the Copernican shove that will send the whole mess toppling into the dumpster of discarded ideas. The awkward fact few scientists let themselves think about is that any given set of experimental results can be used to “prove” an infinite number of competing hypotheses. Only a sufficiently large and varied body of initial data can place a check on the inveterate human tendency to interpret the inkblot patterns of existence in overfamiliar ways.

…

This, in turn, is what has to be done with the products of the imagination in order to keep them from leading you into stupidity. There are at least three ways to use Goethe’s method on the world of the imagination, and all three of them are crucial. The first of these is to make sure that you can imagine the world in more than one way. Here as elsewhere, starting from a hypothesis and looking for ways to test it guarantees that you’ll be chasing your own tail. Start by observing whatever it is you want to observe, and imagining it in as many ways as you can. Let’s say two countries have just gone to war. If you only let yourself imagine the causes and consequences of that event in one way, you’ve just commited mental suicide.  What might be motivating the two sides of the conflict?  What might be motivating your government and the media to spin the conflict in one particular way?  Let yourself explore the possibilities.

While you’re at it, you can add the second way, keeping in mind that your imagination is just as insistent on being fed regularly as the cat we discussed earlier. How do you feed your imagination?  By giving it fresh raw material to use in its figurations.  In the case of the two countries at war, you might start by finding out what’s been happening between them for the last decade or so. Have there been agreements between the countries?  Have they been kept, and if not, who broke them?  If there are ethnic groups with roots in one country living in the other, how have they been treated? Has one side been lobbing cannon fire across the border, unnoted by your country’s official media?  The two countries doubtless have allies; how have those behaved toward the other country?  All this is food for your imagination, and will help keep you from being suddenly prodded awake by something far more unwelcome than a hungry cat.

Of course you can also start looking for parallel events elsewhere in history, and this is where we pass to the third way.  Just as Goethe lined up plants side by side and learned to recognize the underlying patterns, you can line up wars side by side and do the same thing. Nothing is more common, or more self-defeating, than insisting that one and only one historical parallel can be applied to whatever events are under discussion. If your country’s media insists on always comparing the war in question to the German invasion of Poland in 1939, and references nothing else in all of human history, that has the same effect on your understanding as picking a hypothesis in advance and looking for an experiment to prove it.

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The imagination, again, is not self-correcting.  It falls all too easily into the rigor mortis that William Blake called “single vision,” in which the world is obsessively interpreted according to a single narrative and all other possibilities are ruled out in advance. It’s crucial to stretch beyond those suffocating limits, to recognize that there are many different ways to imagine the world, and that the ones we may not want to think about can still guide the actions of other people and reflect realities from which too many people these days are trying to hide.

That’s important at any point in history, but it’s especially important right now. It’s five o’clock in the morning of the long dark night of the soul, and the future is standing on top of us, exhaling its fetid breath into our faces, jabbing us with a very hard paw and making increasingly loud noises to wake us up. It’s not going to let us roll over and go back to sleep, either, because there’s much more than an empty food dish at stake.

[arcticdementor]

All things considered, this is a good time to start talking about the geopolitical big picture. As I type these words, the Russo-Ukrainian war is still under way.  The assault on Kyiv seems to have been put on hold so that the Russians could focus on clearing Ukrainian defenders from the Donbass region, while pitched battles rage in the south of the country, where Russian forces are pushing north along both banks of the Dnieper River.  After a month of hard fighting, Russia has seized close to thirty per cent of Ukraine’s territory and shows no signs of backing down, and sanctions from the US and its client states in Europe and the western Pacific have done nothing to dissuade the Russian government from its course.

Meanwhile blowback from those sanctions is becoming a massive economic fact worldwide, and it’s by no means certain that Russia has lost anything as a result. India, the fifth largest economy in the world, has just finished making arrangements to trade with Russia outside the SWIFT interbank system, settling deals in rupees and rubles rather than US dollars. China, the world’s second largest economy, already has such a system in place. Shortages of diesel fuel and half a dozen other Russian-sourced commodities are setting off economic crises in various corners of the world, while the specter of a global food shortage is becoming increasingly grave—Ukraine is the world’s #3 exporter of wheat, while Russia holds the top spot in that category and also supplies the world with much of its fertilizer. The US and Britain have both tapped their strategic petroleum reserves in an attempt to keep oil prices down, but it remains to be seen whether that will be more than a stopgap measure.

It’s common just now to see these events as a temporary roadbump on the route to a future of business as usual, or to blame them on the supposed personal villainy of Russia’ds President Vladimir Putin. Such evasions are as easy as they are hopelessly mistaken. They betray, among other things, a stunning ignorance of history, since this is hardly the first time that an era of economic globalization has shattered under the pressure of geopolitics. Several thoughtful writers have already noted the parallels between the present crisis and the collapse of Victorian economic globalization a century ago.

The comparison’s exact.  In 1913, as John Maynard Keynes pointed out in his deservedly famous work The Economic Consequences of the Peace, a wealthy Englishman eating breakfast with the Times open before him could buy and sell assets around the globe as freely as his equivalent in the United States in 2013. The pound sterling was the indispensible global currency in those days; the Victorian era’s worldwide telegraph network filled the role of the internet, sending orders to buy and sell across seas and continents at the speed of light.  Free-trade agreements far more inflexible than the current examples erased barriers to investment and exploitation.  The British army and navy, backed by state-of-the-art military technology, provided the backstop for it all. The only cloud on the horizon was the rising power of Germany, which wasn’t willing to settle for second-class status in a world run primarily for Britain’s convenience and profit.

Then 1914 came, a terrorist shot the heir to the Austrian throne, and one after another, most of the nations of Europe went to war.  Free trade couldn’t survive once geopolitics took center stage: every combatant nation had to slap on currency controls to keep desperately needed funds from fleeing to neutral countries, and neutral countries responded accordingly, while sanctions and countersanctions among the contending alliances shredded the trust that made global trade work.  By the time the war finally wound down in 1918, the global economy of the Victorian era was shattered beyond repair.  Attempts to restore some semblance of it in the 1920s helped set the stage for the global economic disaster of 1929.  Once the Great Depression hit, free trade was utterly discredited in the minds of most people, and fifty years passed before the United States set out to copy Britain’s imperial strategy for its own benefit, leading to our present situation.

Britain in 1913 was the world’s richest and most powerful country. Britain in 1918 was a half-shattered economic basket case, so close to bankruptcy that it was never able to pay off its First World War debts to the United States, and so strapped for ready cash that when Ireland rose in revolt against British rule, the British government crumpled and let go of its oldest and most thoroughly looted colony.  It took only four decades after 1914 for the rest of the British empire to come crashing down, reducing Britain from its previous status of global hyperpower to the ignominious role of US client state propped up mostly by money laundering operations in the City of London.  That’s what happens to nations that get too dependent on economic globalism.

Could something similar happen to the United States? Of course it could. Right now, according to credible estimates, the United States extracts something like US$1 trillion a year in unearned wealth by way of the dollar’s role as global reserve currency and medium of big-ticket trade. That’s what gives the US government the ability to throw around trillions of dollars it doesn’t have on international adventurism and domestic pork-barrel projects.  If that goes away—if the US government can no longer run up debt, and has to pay for its expenditures out of its own income—most of the facade of American prosperity will come crashing down, the colossal corporate-welfare programs that support big business in this country will run out of cash, and US global hegemony will be a thing of the past.

…

All this is worth watching, especially though not only for those of us who live in the United States. As I noted earlier, it’s beginning to see some discussion on the fringes, which is where you find straight talk about unwelcome realities these days. I’d like to take a step further back, however, and look at what’s happening in the cold light of a broader historical shift.

I mentioned the British Empire a few paragraphs back.  In 1500 the idea of a British Empire would have seemed absurd, had anyone imagined it at all.  In 1500 those people elsewhere who paid any attention to Europe at all thought of it as a bleak, damp, mountainous subcontinent stuck onto the western end of Asia, inhabited by a clutch of little nations mostly notable for their odd religious beliefs and their propensity for murderous internecine warfare. As it had been since ancient times, Europe was on the fringes of the civilized world: a belt of great imperial nations slicing across the southern end of Asia, through the Middle East, to West Africa.

…

The Chinese Empire, the Mughal Empire in India, the Persian Empire, the Ottoman Empire, and the Songhai Empire: those, and a few dozen smaller nations scattered around their flanks, from Japan in the far east to the Wolof kingdom in the far west, were the civilized world. Europe was on the periphery, and the smart money—if anyone had been placing bets—would probably have assumed that its quarrelsome little statelets would shortly be swallowed up by the burgeoning Ottoman Empire.  That nearly happened, too:  if European forces hadn’t won the naval battle of Lepanto in 1571 and withstood the two Ottoman sieges of Vienna in 1526 and 1683, chances are that much more of Europe, and quite possibly all of it, would have been conquered by the Turks.

One of the commonplaces of history, however, is that peoples on the periphery innovate while peoples in the core repeat the same motions. That’s what Europe did. Europeans didn’t invent gunpowder, cannons, or long-distance deepwater sailing vessels—the Chinese had all of those centuries before they trickled west to Europe—but once these technologies arrived, those bellicose European countries pushed them further than anyone else had yet gone. By 1500 tall ships capable of crossing oceans were putting out from every port on Europe’s Atlantic coast, armed with cannon superior to anything else afloat.

Trade was the first item on the agenda—trade with India and China, to get access to Asian luxury products without paying the exorbitant markups charged by Turkish and Arab middlemen—but the discovery of the Americas changed everything, especially after Old World diseases wiped out 95% of the New World’s native population and left the field wide open to European colonization and settlement. It took less than two centuries for Europe to impose a new economic structure on the planet, as European navies and merchant fleets monopolized international trade, and European colonies in the New World worked mostly by slaves imported from Africa turned out fantastically lucrative crops of tobacco and sugar for sale around the world. European armies followed in the wake of the merchant fleets, invading and seizing most of the planet in history’s most spectacular orgy of conquest.

The economic consequences of that era of slaughter and plunder are relevant for our present purpose. In 1600, India was the wealthiest nation on earth.  In 1900, it was one of the poorest. That didn’t happen by accident. It happened because the British Raj stripped India to the bare walls and sent the proceeds home.  The astounding wealth that financed Britain’s global military presence and littered London with so much monumental architecture came from the ruthless exploitation of India and dozens of other countries.  The same thing is true of most other European countries and capitals.  Most talk about the world’s undeveloped countries these days goes out of its way to avoid acknowledging that the Third World’s poverty was caused by European expropriation of every scrap of movable wealth that wasn’t nailed down.

It’s the aftermath that matters now.  In 1947 India forced a bankrupt and battered Britain to grant it independence. In 1949 China threw off a weak Nationalist government dependent on Western powers.  In 1979 Iran—that’s what Persia is called these days—got rid of an American puppet-shah. Turkey managed to maintain a precarious independence after the Ottoman Empire was dismembered by France and Britain in 1918, and is well on its way to recovering its historic dominance over the eastern Mediterranean. West Africa’s still a basket case, but that’s largely because French and US troops are keeping it that way. (The last thing anyone in NATO wanted, once the oil crisis of the 1970s hit, was another oil-rich region getting expansive ideas of its capacity for international influence, the way the nations of the Persian Gulf did.)

That is to say, the civilized world is recovering from the impact of Europe’s temporary rule.

…

And Europe? Sclerotic, fussy, entitled, clinging to the shabby dignity of an age of empire that’s fading in history’s rearview mirror, and weighed down by demographic contraction that’s been accelerating for a century, Europe is the past, not the future. William Butler Yeats saw it a century in advance:  “What discords will drive Europe into that artificial unity—only dry or drying sticks can be tied into a bundle—which is the decadence of every civilization?” The European Union fulfilled his prophecy to the letter, and is proceeding to finish up Yeats’ grand historical cycle by sinking into a final incoherence out of which, in time, something wholly new—and wholly unacceptable to the conventional wisdom of Europe-as-it-is—will be born.

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This, finally, is the wider context in which the Russo-Ukrainian war and its attendant economic convulsions need to be understood. The great question of early twenty-first century geopolitics was whether Russia, with its immense fossil fuel, mineral, and agricultural resources, would align with Europe or with rising Asia. It would have been quite easy for Europe and the United States to have brought Russia into a pan-European structure of alliances and economic relationships.  All that would have been required is a reasonable attention to Russian concerns about national security and a willingness to put long-term goals over short-term profiteering. European and American leaders turned out to be too inept to manage those simple steps, and as a result, the question has been settled:  Russia is turning east, throwing its resource base and its political support to China, India, and Iran.  That didn’t have to happen, but it’s too late to change it now.

And the United States?  We did what peripheral powers often do in ages of decline, when the imperial center begins to fold.  We grabbed the reins of empire in 1945, when Britain was too weak to hold them any longer, and tried to make the same gimmick work for us.  It didn’t work very well, all things considered.  Now we’ve backed ourselves into the same trap that caught Britain in 1914: lethally overcommitted to an unaffordable global empire, hopelessly dependent on a global economy that’s cracking at the seams, and unable to realize that the world has changed. The next few decades will be a rough road for us.

That said, it’s the European age that’s ending, not the American age. The American age hasn’t begun yet. The United States these days is a Third World country catapulted by a chapter of historical accidents into a temporary position as global hegemon. Its Europeanized elites, in the usual Third World fashion, are a small minority maintaining a tenuous temporary mastery over restless masses that don’t share its ideals and its interests, and are beginning to sense their potential power. America is still young, and pregnant with the future; centuries from now, long after the European veneer has been thrown off, she will give birth to something else wholly new, and it will inevitably be even more unacceptable—and indeed wholly incomprehensible—to the conventional wisdom of Europe-as-it-is.

But of course that conventional wisdom will no longer exist by then. If history follows its usual track, by the time the future high culture of eastern North America begins to emerge, the age of European global dominion will be a distant memory, and Europe itself will have spent many centuries in its pre-imperial condition: a fragmented, impoverished, bellicose region on the faraway fringe of the civilized world. Its peoples and cultures, for that matter, may not have much in common with those residing there now.  Nearly all the nations of Roman Europe went out of existence in the post-Roman era, swamped by mass migrations from elsewhere. At the beginning of the Common Era, the ancestors of today’s Spaniards lived in Ukraine and the ancestors of today’s Hungarians lived closer to China than to Hungary. In the same way, a millennium from now, many of the people who live in Europe may trace their ancestry to today’s Middle East or sub-Saharan Africa, and the historic nations of Europe will be forgotten, erased by tides of migration and conquest that establish new boundaries and new polities.