My anomalous position as a writer and speaker on the future
of industrial society who holds down a day job as an archdruid has its share of
drawbacks, no question, but it also has significant advantages. One of the most important of those is that I
don’t have to worry about maintaining a reputation as a serious public figure.
That may not sound like an advantage, but believe me, it is one.
Most of the other leading figures in the peak oil scene have
at least some claim to respectability, and that pins them down in subtle and
no-so-subtle ways. Like it or not, they have to know that being right about
peak oil means that they might just pick up the phone one of these days and
field an invitation to testify before a Senate subcommittee or a worried panel
of long-range planners from the Pentagon. The possibility of being yanked out
of their current role as social critics and being called on to tell a failing
industrial society how it can save itself has got to hover in front of them in
the night now and then. Such reflections tend to inspire a craving for
consensus, or at least for neatly labeled positions within the accepted
parameters of the peak oil scene.
I can only assume that’s what lies behind the tempest in an
oil barrel that’s rocked the peak oil end of the blogosphere in recent weeks,
following the publication of an essay by Permaculture guru David Holmgren
titled Crash on
Demand. Holmgren’s piece was quite a sensible one, suggesting that
we’re past the point that a smooth transition to green tech is possible and
that some kind of Plan B is therefore needed. It included some passages,
though, suggesting that the best way to deal with the future immediately ahead
might be to trigger a global financial crash.
If just ten per cent of the world’s population stopped using fossil
fuels, he noted, that might be enough to bring the whole system down all at
once.
That proposal got a flurry of responses, but only a
few—Dmitry
Orlov’s, predictably, was one of those few—noted the chasm that yawns
between Holmgren’s modest proposal and the world we actually inhabit. It’s all very well to talk about ten per cent
of the population withdrawing from the global economy, but the fact of the
matter is that it’ll be a cold day in Beelzebub’s back yard before even ten per
cent of self-proclaimed green activists actively embrace such a project ,to the
extent of making more than the most modest changes in their own livestyles—and
let’s not even talk about how likely it is that anybody at all outside the
culturally isolated fringe scene that contains today’s green subcultures will
even hear of Holmgren’s call to arms.
Mind you, David Holmgren is a very smart man, and I’m quite
sure he’s well aware of all this. An essay by David MacLeod pointed out that the steps Holmgren’s proposed
to bring down industrial society are what he’s been encouraging people to do
all along. It occurs to me that he may
simply have decided to try another way to get people to do what we all know we
need to do anyway: give up the hopelessly unsustainable lifestyles currently
provided us by the contemporary industrial system, downsize our desires as well
as our carbon footprints, and somehow learn to get by on the kind of energy and
resource basis that most other human beings throughout history have considered
normal.
Still, a nod is as good as a wink to a blind horse; as far
as I can tell, Holmgren’s essay hasn’t inspired any sudden rush on the part of
permaculturists and peak oil activists to ditch their Priuses in the hopes of
sticking it to the Man. Instead, it veered off into debates about whether and
how “we” (meaning, apparently, the writers and readers of peak oil blogs) could
in fact crash the global economy. There
was a flurry of talk about how violence shouldn’t be considered, and that in
turn triggered a surge of people babbling earnestly about how we need not to
rule out the use of violence against the system.
It’s probably necessary to say a few words about that here.
Effective violence of any kind is a skill, a difficult and demanding one, and
effective political violence against an established government is among the
most difficult and demanding kinds. I’m sorry if this offends anybody’s sense
of entitlement, but it’s not simply a matter of throwing a tantrum so loud that
Daddy has to listen to you, you know. To
force a government to do your bidding by means of violence, you have to be more
competent at violence than the government is, and the notion that the
middle-class intellectuals who do most of the talking in the peak oil scene can
outdo the US government in the use of violence would be hilarious if the likely
consequences of that delusion weren’t so ghastly. This is not a game for
dabblers; people get thrown into prison for decades, dumped into unmarked graves,
or vaporized by missiles launched from drones for trying to do what the people
in these discussions were chattering about so blandly.
For that matter, I have to wonder how many of the people who
were so free with their online talk about violence against the system stopped
to remember that every word of those conversations is now in an NSA data file,
along with the names and identifying details of everybody involved. The
radicals I knew in my younger days had a catchphrase that’s apposite here: “The
only people that go around publicly advocating political violence are idiots
and agents provocateurs. Which one are you?”
Meanwhile, in that distant realm we call the real world, the
hastily patched walls of peak oil denial are once again cracking under the
strain of hard reality. The Royal Society—yes, that Royal
Society—has just published a volume
of its Philosophical Transactions devoted to peak oil; they take it
seriously. Word has also slipped into
the media that in December, a select group of American and British military,
business, and political figures held
a conference on peak oil; they also take it seriously.
Meanwhile, air is leaking out of the fracking bubble as
firms lose money, the foreign investors whose wallets have been the main target
of the operation are backing away, and the cheerleading of the media is
sounding more and more like the attempts to boost housing prices around the
beginning of 2008. The latest data point? Longtime peak oil researcher Jean
Laherrere, who (let us not forget) successfully predicted the 2005 peak in
conventional oil production well in advance, used the same modeling techniques
to predict
future production from the Bakken Shale. His call? A production peak
in the fall of this year, with steep declines after that. He’s the latest to
join the chorus of warnings that the fracking bubble is merely one more
overblown financial scam moving inexorably toward a massive bust.
Of course we’ve been here before. Every few years, the mass
media starts to talk about peak oil, proponents of business as usual look
nervous, and those in the peak oil scene who are inexperienced enough not to
remember the last few cycles of the same process start talking about the
prospects of imminent victory. (Yes, I made that mistake a while back; I think
we all have.) Then the walls of denial get patched up again, the mass media
scurries back to some comforting fairy tale about ethanol, wind power,
biodiesel, fracking or what have you; the proponents of business as usual go
back to their normal blustering, and peak oil activists who got
overenthusiastic about predictions of imminent triumph end up with egg on their
faces. That’s standard for any social movement trying to bring about an
unwelcome but necessary change in society. Each time around the cycle, more
people get the message, and a movement smart enough to capitalize on the waves
of media interest can grow until it starts having a significant influence on
society as a whole.
That final step can arrive on various time scales; a
successful movement for change can see its viewpoint filter gradually into the
collective conversation, or there can be a sudden break, after which the
movement can still be denounced but can no longer be ignored. Glance back
through the last few centuries and it’s easy to find examples of either kind,
not to mention every point between those two ends of the spectrum. I’m far from
sure if there’s a way to tell how peak oil activism will play out, but my hunch
is that it may be closer to the sudden-break end of the spectrum than
otherwise. What lies behind that hunch isn’t anything so sturdy as a headline
or a new study; rather, it’s something subtle—a shift in tone in the
denunciations that The Archdruid Report fields each week.
I don’t know if other bloggers share this experience, but
I’ve found that internet trolls are a remarkably subtle gauge of the mass
imagination. There are some trolls who only show up when a post of mine is
about to go viral, and others whose tirades reliably forecast the new themes of
peak oil denial three or four months in advance. When some bit of high-tech
vaporware is about to be ballyhooed as the miracle that’s going to save us all,
or some apocalyptic fantasy is about to become the new reason why it’s okay to
keep your middle class lifestyle since we’re all going to die soon anyway, I
usually hear about it first from trolls who can’t wait to let me know just how
wrong I am. It’s an interesting fringe benefit of a blogger’s job, and it’s
alerted me more than once to trends worth watching.
It so happens that in recent weeks, some of the criticisms
I’ve fielded have struck a distinctly new note. I still get the classic
cornucopians who insist I’m babbling pessimistic nonsense and of course we’ll
all be just fine, just as I still get the apocalypse fanboys who insist that
I’m ignoring the fact that the doom du jour is sure to annihilate us all, but
I’m now seeing a third position—that of course it’s a crisis and we can’t just
go on the way we’ve been living, a lot of things will have to change, but if we
do X and Y and Z, we can keep some of the benefits of industrial society going,
and I’m being too pessimistic when I suggest that no, we can’t. Maybe everyone
else in the peak oil scene has been getting these all along, but they’re new to
my comments page, and they have a tone that sets them apart from the others.
To be precise, it sounds like bargaining.
I don’t imagine that anyone in the peak oil scene has missed
the discussions of Elisabeth KΓΌbler-Ross’ five stages of coming to terms
with impending death—denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance—and
their application to the not dissimilar experience of facing up to the death of
the industrial age. Many of us can look back on our own transits through the five
stages, and I’ve long since lost track of the times I’ve heard people at a peak
oil event roll their eyes and mutter the name of one of the stages to whomever
is sitting next to them. For the most part, though, it’s been a matter of
individuals going through their own confrontations with the death of progress
at their own pace.
Maybe this is still what’s happening, but I wonder. For a
very long time, even among peak oil activists, the prevailing mood was still
one of denial—we can solve this, whether the solution consists of solar panels,
thorium reactors, revitalized communities, permacultured forest gardens,
supposedly imminent great turnings of one sort or another, or what have you.
After the 2008-2009 crash, that shifted to a mood of anger, and furious
denunciations of “the 1%” and an assortment of more familiar supervillains
became much more common on peak oil forums than they had been. The rise of
apocalypse fandom has arguably been driven by this same stage of anger—suicidal
fantasies very often get their force from unresolved rage turned inwards, after
all, and it’s likely that the habit of projecting daydreams of mass
extermination onto the future is rooted in the same murky emotional soil.
If that’s indeed what’s been happening, then bargaining is
the next stage. If so, this is good
news, because unlike the two stages before it or the one that follows, the
stage of bargaining can have practical benefits. If a dying person hits that
stage and decides to give up habits that make her condition worse, for example,
the result may be an improved quality of life during her final months; if the
bargain includes making big donations to charity, the patient may not benefit
much from it but the charity and the people it helps certainly will. People
under the stress of impending death try to strike bargains that range all the
way from the inspiring to the absurd, though, and whether something
constructive comes out of it depends on whether the bargain involves choices
that will actually do some good.
If this stage is like the ones the peak oil scene seems to
have transited so far, we can expect to see a flurry of earnest blog posts and
comments over the next few years seeking reassurance in a manner peculiar to
the internet—that is, by proclaiming something as absolute fact, then looking
around nervously to see if anyone else agrees. This time, instead of
proclaiming that this or that or the other is sure to save us, or out to get
us, or certain to kill us all, they’ll be insisting that this or that or the other
will be an acceptable sacrifice to the gods of petroleum depletion and climate
change, sufficient to persuade those otherwise implacable powers to leave us
untouched. The writers will be looking for applause and approval, and if that I
think their offering might do some good, I’m willing to meet them halfway. In
fact, I’ll even suggest things that I’m sure to applaud, so they don’t even
have to guess.
First is conservation. That’s the missing
piece in most proposals for dealing with peak oil. The chasm into which so many
well-intentioned projects have tumbled over the last decade is that nothing
available to us can support the raw extravagance of energy and resource
consumption we’re used to, once cheap abundant fossil fuels aren’t there any more,
so—ahem—we have to use less.
Too much talk about using less in recent years, though, has been limited
to urging energy and resource abstinence as a badge of moral purity, and—well,
let’s just say that abstinence education did about as much good there as it
does in any other context.
The things that played the largest role in hammering down US
energy consumption in the 1970s energy crisis were unromantic but effective
techniques such as insulation, weatherstripping, and the like, all of which allow
a smaller amount of energy to do the work previously done by more. Similar initiatives were tried out in
business and industry, with good results; expanding public transit and
passenger rail did the same thing in a different context, and so on. All of these are essential parts of any
serious response to the end of cheap energy.
If your proposed bargain makes conservation the core of your response to
fossil fuel and resource depletion, in other words, you’ll face no criticism
from me.
Second is decentralization. One of the things that makes potential
failures in today’s large-scale industrial infrastructures so threatening is
that so many people are dependent on single systems. Too many recent green-energy
projects have tried to head further down the same dangerous slope, making whole
continents dependent on a handful of pipelines, power grids, or what have you.
In an age of declining energy and resource availability, coupled with a rising
tide of crises, the way to ensure resilience and stability is to decentralize
intead: to make each locality able to meet as many of its own needs as
possible, so that troubles in one area don’t automatically propagate to others,
and an area that suffers a systems failure can receive help from nearby places
where everything still works.
Here again, this involves proven techniques, and extends
across a very broad range of human needs. Policies that encourage local victory
gardens, truck farms, and other food production became standard practice in the
great wars of the 20th century precisely because they took some of the strain
off overburdened economies and
food-distribution systems. Home production of goods and services for home use
has long played a similar role. For that matter, transferring electrical power
and other utilities and the less urgent functions of government to regional and
local bodies instead of doing them on the national level will have parallel
benefits in an age of retrenchment and crisis. Put decentralization into your
bargain, and I’ll applaud enthusiastically.
Third is rehumanization. That’s an
unfamiliar word for a concept that will soon be central to meaningful economic
policy throughout the developed world. Industrial societies are currently beset
with two massive problems: high energy
costs, on the one hand, and high unemployment on the other. Both problems can
be solved at a single stroke by replacing energy-hungry machines with human
workers. Rehumanizing the economy—hiring people to do jobs rather than
installing machines to do them—requires removing and reversing a galaxy of
perverse incentives favoring automation at the expense of employment, and this
will need to be done while maintaining wages and benefits at levels that won’t
push additional costs onto government or the community.
The benefits here aren’t limited to mere energy cost
savings. Every economic activity that can be done by human beings rather than
machinery is freed from the constant risk of being whipsawed by energy prices,
held hostage by resource nationalism, and battered in dozens of other ways by
the consequences of energy and resource depletion. That applies to paid
employment, but it also applies to the production of goods and services in the
household economy, which has also been curtailed by perverse incentives, and
needs to be revived and supported by sensible new policies. A rehumanized
economy is a resilient economy for another reason, too: the most effective way to maximize economic
stability is to provide ample employment at adequate wages for the workforce,
whose paychecks fund the purchases that keep the economy going. Make
rehumanization an important part of your plan to save the world and I won’t be
the only one cheering.
Those are my proposals, then: conservation,
decentralization, rehumanization. Those
readers who are looking for applause for their efforts at collective bargaining
with the forces driving industrial society toward its destiny now know how to
get it here. I’d like to ask you to step out of the room for the next
paragraph, though, as I have a few things to say to those who aren’t at the
bargaining stage just now.
(Are they gone?
Good. Now listen closely while I
whisper: none of the things
I’ve just suggested will save industrial civilization. You know that,
of course, and so do I. That said, any
steps in the direction of conservation, decentralization, and rehumanization
that get taken will make the descent less disruptive and increase the chances
that communities, localities, and whole regions may be able to escape the worst
impacts of the industrial system’s unraveling. That’s worth doing, and if it
takes their panicked efforts to bargain with an implacable fate to get those
things under way, I’m good with that.
Got it? Okay, we can call them back into the room.)
