Courtesy of The Automatic Earth.
Howard Hollem Times Square and vicinity on D-Day June 6, 1944
When I see a headline like this one at Bloomberg today, World Needs Record Saudi Oil Supply as OPEC Convenes, there’s just one thought that pops into my head: what the world needs is for us to stop doing this thing we’re doing. Even apart from peak oil concerns, it’s obvious we’re going to run out at some point or another, and it doesn’t matter whether that’s tomorrow or at some other point in the future, though we do know it’s not going to take another 100 years, or even 50.
And nothing will ever take the place of oil; once those unique carbons are gone, that’s it, we’ll have to find a completely different way of running our societies, and if we’re not smart enough to prepare for that beforehand, we’ll be cats fighting in a sack and use the last scraps to kill off each other. And our legacy won’t be the Greek thinkers and Picasso and Dostoyevsky and Walt Whitman and Maria Callas, since there won’t be the means for our children anymore to share what makes man great between them. Our main legacy will instead be bloodshed, we will have gone the exact same path that any non-thinking or even primitive organism would have taken, who don’t have opera or philosophy or poetry to their name.
The reason a reporter chooses to say the world ‘needs’ all that oil may tell us a lot about ourselves, about where we are and where we’re going. The word ‘need’ is a choice we make, but that does not mean it reflects reality. ‘Want’ sounds far more applicable. We may ‘need’ the oil to continue on our chosen path, but that doesn’t mean the path is well-chosen. And we have the ability to think about different paths, and what each might mean for us, our children and our species going forward. The path we’re on is an obvious dead end, even if there are many amongst us who think they, and we, are so smart we can find our way out of any dead end predicament, including the loss of the carbons that have shaped our world for a 150 year long, even for mankind, fleeting moment in time.
There is no other energy source waiting in the wings to take over, and even if there were we can’t escape thermodynamics. Which we have understood – we can do that – and which spells out very clearly that there is a price attached to all use of energy, and the only thing sane and wise (don’t you want to be sane and wise?) to do is to use it sparingly, to only use what we need. And we don’t need to use all that oil, even if we might want to. Our economic system needs for us to use it, and in ever larger quantities, but we don’t need either the economic system nor the oil in order to survive. We have packed our homes with things we don’t need, produced with the energy and building blocks the oil provides. For our economic system to survive we’ll have to buy a whole lot more stuff we don’t need, because it’s based on more, on growth and more growth, till death do us part.
We can lead very wonderful and fulfilling lives without economic growth, people have done it for 100,000 years and more. What makes us special and worthwhile, the paintings, the songs, the words that evoke emotions and stir our hearts and souls, are not based on economic growth. We have invented many things that enhance the quality of our lives, but we haven’t conceived of the limits to use them with. It appears we are incapable of recognizing what makes our lives, our very existence, worth living. Most of us today seem to think it’s oil, or money, or cars or airco’s or processed food, but that’s not it. It may be a matter of taste, and it’s all really democratic, but we might still take Oscar Wilde to heart who said that everything popular is wrong. We might want to make scrutinizing ourselves, our behavior, our needs and demands, a major part of every school’s curriculum and every day on the job.
We know we can do it, that we can look at ourselves and say maybe so and so is not the way to go, maybe I should hold off on this or that, and many of us do just that – though not nearly enough-. But holding back, not using something when we have the opportunity to use it, is not our strength. Perhaps as individuals, and only at times, but certainly not as part of a group, even if there are specific groups dedicated to just that. In general, we will follow the leaders that promise us the optimal ways to use as much as we can, provided we purchase as many things we don’t need as we possibly can, and encourage us to venture into debt to do it.
What that ‘World Needs Record Saudi Oil Supply as OPEC Convenes’ headline tells us, and what many other things do as well, is that we need to make up our minds about where we want to go, because the clock is ticking. If we want poetry instead of warfare, and Puccini instead of fields filled with rotting corpses, then we still have the option to make those choices. To do that, though, we need to realize that we are drowning in things we don’t need, produced with oil we don’t need nearly as much of as we’re using, and that if we don’t snap out of whatever mindset it is that got us in this situation, we won’t even have the things we actually do need anymore. Because we will have used them up to stuff our lives and our homes with things we don’t need. It’s not even rocket science, is it?
So the next time you see someone claim the world needs more oil, or a pundit or politician tries to tell you we need economic growth, know for yourself that both claims are nonsensical bogus. We just about literally need these things like we need a hole in our heads. Or, since we haven’t run out of oil and credit yet, perhaps it would be more accurate to say a hole in our children’s heads. But do we really see those two options as different outcomes? Are holes in our kids’ heads less bad than our own? We can’t plead stupidity, because we know we are capable of understanding the consequences of our actions well enough to apply a precautionary principle to our lives and to be sufficiently careful about putting holes in our children’s heads.
Which begs the question, if we can’t plead stupidity, what else is there? How do we live with ourselves? Is it all the stuff we buy that manages to numb our brains and consciences? Do you ever stand in front of a mirror and ask yourself for a long enough time why you are where you are, why you think that having an X amount of money in the bank is a good thing for you, and at the same time ponder the damage the life you live does to the planet, to everything alive on it, to the people you share it with, and those who will come after you? Do you think economic growth is a good thing when you look around your home, your street, your town, and see all the things in there that you know very well you don’t need and neither do the others? How did you get here?
