Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXL
You Keep Using That Word ‘Sustainability’; I Do Not Think It Means What You Think It Means.
Today’s Contemplation is my comment upon a statement posted on one of the Degrowth Facebook Groups I frequent. (NOTE: I have been put on ‘post approval’ for this site so there is no guarantee my responding comment — in the form of a link to this post — there will occur)
The statement:
My comment:
While the idea of being self-sustaining is paramount to any mitigation of the consequences of leaving global energy-averaging systems behind, whether directly in fossil fuels (FFs) or the myriad of products wholly or partially dependent upon them, a couple of quick thoughts come to mind in this rather facile declaration. I say ‘facile’ because it seems to me that what constitutes a post-oil/post-collapse scenario in this statement fully and completely misinterprets/misdiagnoses what this will probably look like given the scale and scope of our fossil fuel dependency.
First, this appears to be a typical hyper-focus upon carbon emissions that ignores all the other symptom predicaments of our overarching ecological overshoot predicament; thus, reducing/eliminating carbon emissions solely does little to nothing about all the other consequences of overshoot — e.g., biodiversity loss, resource depletion, population overshoot, sink overloading, etc. — and are leading to a much, much lower natural carrying capacity on this planet for humanity, if not extinction.
Second, while great in theory, does this consider (and it doesn’t appear to) all the inputs into what might replace/supplant FFs, particularly as an energy source? If one is considering solar/wind/nuclear, for example, then there are significant FF inputs to say little about their continued dependence upon finite resources that likely need to be imported and the accompanying ecological destruction via mining, processing, reclamation, etc. that are necessary for supposed non-fossil fuel-based products. And then there’s the unsustainability of these in a post-carbon world.
Third, probably 99%+ of human communities are ill-prepared to a life without FF inputs, from a lack of local food production and potable water supplies to shelter needs and all the products that use FFs as feedstock for their production — such as pharmaceuticals and countless industrial products that sustain humanity in its current iteration — and the movement of these around the globe.
Ultimately, it would seem that any permanent and total move away from FFs depends upon significant reductions in human growth/expansion/industry/economies/population far beyond what most imagine. And it’s not just the dominant sectors of an economy that are dependent upon systems that contribute to the ecological overshoot symptom of an overloaded atmospheric sink, it’s ALL sectors of our financialised economy at present — especially the insidious nature of our debt-/credit-based fiat currency system and all the debt that exists supporting our current lifestyles, particularly in so-called ‘advanced’ economies. Everything in our complex, global society uses FFs; and lots of it. Most importantly, it is the production and distribution of food and potable water that currently requires significant FFs.
Before any elimination of FFs, it would seem to me that any/all communities need to be self-sufficient in the basics first and foremost since, at this moment, FFs support/sustain these. In fact, perhaps 95%+ of our complex societies need to be degrown drastically — not sustained, but significantly reduced and/or eliminated completely. Any growth-orientation (that will require quickly diminishing resources, especially fossil-fuel based energy) needs to be hyper-focused on the first tier of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs; that is, our physiological needs of food and water. Once a community can be localised in this manner, only then would it seem possible to move towards the total elimination of FFs. And I see few if any communities self-sufficient in the way they need to be; and certainly not any nation state.
But also before we eliminate FFs, we need to contemplate what will become of all those dangerous complexities we’ve constructed that require ongoing management (and are dependent upon FFs) to ensure some level of safety from their use. For example: nuclear power plants and their radioactive wastes; chemical production and storage facilities and their toxic products; biosafety labs and their dangerous pathogens. A lot of FFs should be directed towards the safe decommissioning of these and many other products of a fossil fuel age that will eventually degrade and whose failure could create widespread, negative issues for local inhabitants — think of large dams here.
Fossil fuels, are, whether we wish it or not, the fundamental resource we cannot currently do without. They feed and sustain a complex system and a huge number of complex subsystems that humans cannot only not do without, but help to manage many of our most dangerous complexities. Anyone who believes complex societies can simply abandon FFs in a heartbeat and then continue on relatively unscathed are in complete denial about their fundamental importance in maintaining our complexities. This is why we will continue to extract them and go to war over them. It’s not simply a result of profit-oriented Big Oil; it’s a complex array of life-sustaining systems — intertwined and fragile to their very core.
Until and unless, it would seem, communities — including nation states — can be entirely self-sufficient in a true sense of that concept, then it is impossible to abandon FFs. And this is why the depletion of FFs, a symptom predicament of ecological overshoot, has only outcomes that might at best be mitigated marginally in pockets around the world. It is not a problem with a solution, and the notion that we can simply abandon them is extremely facile in nature and perhaps the epitome of denial/bargaining to reduce cognitive dissonance.
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers). Encouraging others to read my work is also much appreciated.