Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
Arthur Rothstein Family on relief living in shanty at city dump, Herrin, Illinois 1939
My buddy VK sent me a link yesterday to a limits to growth piece by Nafeez Ahmed, executive director of the Institute for Policy Research & Development, in the Guardian, The Global Transition Tipping Point Has Arrived – Vive La Révolution, in which the author says almost all of the right things, but unfortunately gets a lot wrong as well.
What Nafeez gets wrong, a lot of people do, in alternative energy circles and beyond, like for instance someone he quotes extensively, my old – former – pen-pal Chris Nelder, with whom he has in common that both come far too close for my comfort to replacing one wave of techno-happiness with another. And I don’t think that all that’s wrong with us is that we’ve picked the wrong flavor of techno-happy. Nafeez:
… what we are seeing are escalating, interconnected symptoms of the unsustainability of the global system in its current form. While the available evidence suggests that business-as-usual is likely to guarantee worst-case scenarios, simultaneously humanity faces an unprecedented opportunity to create a civilisational form that is in harmony with our environment, and ourselves. [..]
… our current trajectory is unsustainable because our demand for ecological resources and services is increasingly going beyond what the planet is able to provide. This ‘overshoot’ is already responsible for a range of overlapping crises – the financial crash, the food crisis, intensifying civil unrest to name just a few – and is likely to worsen without meaningful action.
Told you: almost all of the right things. There’s more of that.
… what we are facing is something far more complex than an ‘end-is-nigh’ scenario: not the end of the world, but the end of the old industrial paradigm of endless growth premised on practically endless oil, that is increasingly breaching its own biophysical limits; and the emergence of an emerging paradigm of civilisation based on a vision of a global commons for all.
Sounds good and uplifting, doesn’t it? Empowering even. But you have to remain vigilant, perhaps especially when things sound good. What my unbelieving brain comes up with right away is this:
The essential question that neither he nor anyone else answers is that you can of course say that, in his words:
“humanity faces an unprecedented opportunity to create a civilisational form that is in harmony with our environment, and ourselves”
… but saying it doesn’t make it true. If you assume that people want such a civilizational form, then first answer this question: why don’t they already have it? For one thing, certainly such a form, like everything else, is easier to set up in times of plenty then times of misery.
If you can’t answer the question why so far people have not opted for such a form, and instead chose the unsustainable one we have now, how are you going to know that we are capable of turning around on a dime and “creating” a form that is “in harmony with our environment, and ourselves”?
Or to put it differently: if you had to choose between the option that we’ll “create a civilisational form that is in harmony with our environment, and ourselves” versus the option that we’ll burn on through until we hit the wall at 1000 miles an hour, which one would you put your money on given human history as we know it?
When we had all the natural resources at our disposal that would have made it a – comparative – piece of cake to set up “a civilisational form that is in harmony with our environment, and ourselves”, we did no such thing, in fact we did the exact opposite. But now that those resources are dwindling, and building that civilizational form will be more difficult, we would, all of a sudden? Why? Only because we have no other choices left, we would choose to live “in harmony with our environment, and ourselves”?
Can we do it? Obviously, in theory. But that theory has been valid all along, and look where we are. So when you ask: will we do it, there is reasonable doubt based on past experience. Because the “unprecedented opportunity” isn’t really all that unprecedented, is it? In reality the opportunity has been available to us every single day for the past 100 years or so, and we opted against it, and the only thing that’s different is that at this point in time, it’s not so much an opportunity as it is a force majeure.
And you don’t get away from those questions by evoking extreme fatalism, as Nafeez does, and suggesting you’d have to pick either that or the “unprecedented opportunity” line:
Of course, there are those who go so far as to argue that humanity is heading for extinction by 2030, and that it’s too late to do anything about it. But as other scientists have pointed out, while the number of positive-feedbacks that could go into ‘runaway’ on a business-as-usual scenario appears overwhelming, whether they have yet is at best unclear from the numbers – and at worst, we find that proponents of fatalism are actually systematically misrepresenting and obfuscating the science to justify hopelessness.
I find that awfully weak as an argument, and it easily slides into what I can see only as religious overtones, something much better avoided when you want to focus on science:
Faced with the overwhelming scale of the multiplicity of global challenges we now face, a sense of disempowerment is understandable. However, as I’ve argued before, it is unnecessary and self-defeating.
Nafeez goes on to quote Chris (Nelder):
As Nelder writes in his latest column, we find ourselves at a potentially exciting crossroads: the literal death throes of the fossil fuel industry, amidst the inexorable, sporadic rise of a new renewable energy system. Renewable sceptics are simply wrong, obsessed with the slow, centralised economic dynamics of fossil fuels rather than understanding the unique, distributed dynamics of the new.
That’s quite a thing to say, “Renewable skeptics are simply wrong”. It would have been helpful if the author had explained who he means to include in that. But I’ll partly take the bait. I think it’s important to note that renewables are not fit to run a (centralized) grid on. And I know that Chris sees lots of opportunities in decentralized systems, but we’re very far away from building those in relevant quantities, and there are numerous obstacles strewn across the way.
Just to name two: there’s the – awfully tenacious – centralized political power a centralized grid provides for, and then there’s the plunging economic system that will prevent any meaningful investment into yet-to-be-built infrastructure. And even with all his well-meaning enthusiasm for technological progress in grid infrastructure, Nelder two years ago concluded this in Why Baseload Power is Doomed:
Renewables should be able to meet at least 20% of electricity demand without disrupting the grid just about anywhere in the world with good grid planning and management.
20% is nice, but it’s hardly a revolution. And if you read Chris’s work, you find that even that requires for instance a lot of technological input (which Chris sees as a good thing) in the form of constant – live – monitoring of grid systems, based on a lot of computer power etc. That’s where my trepidations about switching one tech happy wave for the other come in. I suggest that we need to seriously consider the option that it’s technology that has gotten us into this mess, and there’s either no guarantee or no way technology will lift us out of it. Nafeez continues:
In the new paradigm, neither money nor credit will be tied to the generation of debt. Banks will be community-owned institutions fully accountable to their depositors; and whirlwind speculation on financial fictions will be replaced by equitable investment schemes in which banks share risks with their customers, and divide returns fairly. The new currency will not be a form of debt-money, but, if anything, will be linked more closely to real-world assets.
All the right and lofty words, for sure, but how did we get there from here? What exactly is that new paradigm, and the new ethos? It sounds good, but what does it mean? Is it just me, or does this all sound like a nice dream, not unlike anything you and I could have just as easily have proposed – since we all have more or less the same dream anyway -, while there’s a huge missing gap, as in how do we shift from paradigm one to two?
It’s easy pickings: hardly anybody in their right mind these days wants centralized fossils, or industrial monoculture food, but everyone has it. And painting rosy pictures of how things could be is not going to change that. Nafeez’ and Chris’s idea that we are about to enter some new ear and things will be great is cute and all, but leaves too many questions. And even if we could make the move into some new paradigm, something I see little proof of, we would still have to get there, and neither explains what that process of moving would look like.
And I also think that what the techno happy 2.0 crowd wants for us to hang on to growth, but in a “new” way, and I think that’s fundamentally wrong.
Re-defining the meaning of economic growth to focus less on materially-focused GDP, and more on the capacity to deliver values such as health, education, well-being, longevity, political and cultural freedom.
Apparently growth is a hard one to distance oneself from, and it’s easier to conjure up ideas of one energy source replacing the other. Nowhere in what either Nafeez nor Chris write do I see anything that is not aimed at keeping up energy supply levels, and economic growth is there to stay as well. Whereas I think we need to limit our energy use by 90% or so, and growth is an idea that needs to die, be buried, and never spoken of again. When you start on about “re-defining the meaning of economic growth”, you’ve already lost me.
I think that maybe we need to stop thinking in global terms about everything we want to do for our own neck of the woods, and that even the anti-globalization movement should perhaps stop being global in its quest. Not everything scales up well, and much of it doesn’t scale up at all. If we manage to do something well, and make it happen, and it works where we are, we don’t need to strive to export it to all corners of the world. Think small, and keep thinking that way. It’s hard enough to make things work in your own backyard.
