Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXXIV

Steve Bull (https://olduvai.ca)
3 min readApr 21, 2023

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Mexico (1988). Photo by author.

Leveraging Non-Renewable, Renewable Energy-Harvesting Technologies to Expand Wealth-Extraction/-Generation

Today’s Contemplation is a bit more personal than most (all?) others I’ve written. I’ve felt a need to respond as ‘cordially’ as possible to one of the administrators of a Facebook Group I am a member of who has repeatedly, in my eyes, hounded me about my perspective on non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs).

Will, this is perhaps the last time I am going to respond to you directly because it seems obvious we are simply speaking past one another. You accusing me of deflecting, me accusing you of trolling/gaslighting.

My opinions/beliefs about our plight have not always been where they currently are, having very much believed a transition to non-renewable, renewable energy-harvesting technologies (NRREHTs; and what almost everyone refers to as ‘renewables’) was one very vital key in dealing with the realisation that fossil fuels were a finite resource having encountered significant diminishing returns. My continual learning has led me to somewhere quite different from that belief system I held over a decade ago.

I have my own guesses as to why you continue to hound me, but those are simply my personal beliefs — the most likely being that I have challenged a deeply held belief for you and you need to undermine my own to reduce your cognitive dissonance. But, whatever…

I, personally, am doing all that I am capable of at this time to ‘transition’ to a more sustainable living arrangement. Is there more I could do? Absolutely, I am no saint nor have I ever pretended to be. However, there are family circumstances that keep me from doing much more. And what those are are frankly none of your business — except that I will share that living where we do and the trappings it involves is and has been imperative to the well-being and medical attentions my autistic adult daughter has required for years, and continues to need. If these make me a hypocrite in your eyes, so be it. My daughter’s personal welfare is far, far more important than your opinion of me, and who I wouldn’t know from Adam if we passed each other on the street. Do, however, keep in mind when berating others for not meeting your expectations that context is everything.

I will continue to argue that we are in the predicament of ecological overshoot due to our leveraging of fossil fuels. There are no solutions to this, only outcomes that may at best be mitigated regionally by relocalising as much of our survival needs as possible. Could NRREHTs serve to aid in this? Sure, for a short period of time, for a small number of people — and if we ignore the ecological destruction it would entail and the furthering of overshoot it would result in; but, hey, I suppose when you’re falling from a plane without a parachute it truly doesn’t matter how far above the ground you are.

Further, given the planetary boundaries we have surpassed, or will soon broach, we would be forward-thinking in curtailing our industrial production of virtually everything — including NRREHTs — but if we’re going to use the dregs of our one-time cache of photosynthesis-derived energy stores on something, I’d sooner them go towards decommissioning all those dangerous complexities we’ve constructed and spread throughout the world than to the proliferation of NRREHTs; doing both at this point in time is probably beyond impossible. My guess, however, is we will do the latter since there is little to no wealth-extraction/-generation possible by doing the former.

If people don’t wish to agree with these perspectives because I don’t live off the grid in a cave surviving via only what I can garner from my immediate environment, so be it.

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.

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Steve Bull (https://olduvai.ca)
Steve Bull (https://olduvai.ca)

Written by Steve Bull (https://olduvai.ca)

A guy trying to make sense of a complex and seemingly insane world. Spend my days pondering our various predicaments while practising local food production...

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