Yves here. I hate having to criticize this piece by Tom Neuburger that makes some valid points about Republican messaging. But the way the headline relates to the text drives me nuts.
Neuburger starts his post with an long quote from a New York Times article about how jurisdictions that depend on income from fossil fuel activities are fighting divestiture campaigns. For instance, West Virginia, whose fortunes are still tied in a big way to the coal industry, has its state Treasurer firing BlackRock as an asset manager because BlackRock has decided to be in the forefront of ESG (environment, social, governance) investing. That means at least giving lip service to dumping dirty energy plays.
The key section of the extract:
Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
“We’re an energy state, and energy accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue for us,” said Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer. “All of our jobs come from coal and gas. I mean, this is who we are. This is part of our way of life here in the state. And they’re telling us that these industries are bad.”
Tell me, where is the lie?
Yes, the Republicans are the party of the coal, oil, and gas industries. However, the fact that the time for making deep cuts in greenhouse gas emissions was years ago does not make the point these aggrieved officials are making any less true: there are communities, even states, whose incomes depend heavily on these activities. And no one on Team Dem has proposed what to do about these lost livelihoods, save maybe “Learn to code.”
In fact, one can make the case that the Democrat climate change lies are as serious as the Republicans’. The Republicans amplify the fact that dealing with climate change will mean sacrifice….and they try to depict it as part of a scheme to increase social control or some other nefarious ends. But the Democrats act as if all we need to do is convert to green energy sources, and we can carry on with our energy profligacy. As we’ve said repeatedly, that’s wildly false. If we are to have any hope of preventing the most extreme climate change outcomes, we must start radical energy conservation now. But no official will say that because that means….gah…sacrifice!
The fact that Democrats won’t say the US needs to cut back on international supply chains (ocean shipping is really nasty), our bloated, energy-hogging military, and air travel, particularly private jets (for starters), says that all they care about is the pork they can deliver to various green energy interests.
By Tom Neuburger. Originally published at God’s Spies
Burning the whole house down (source)
“We have an existential threat here. We have to fight back.”
—Riley Moore, Republican West Virginia state treasurer
The New York Times recently published a climate-related piece that’s notable for several reasons. The first reason is the content:
How an Organized Republican Effort Punishes Companies for Climate Action
[Republican] Legislators and their allies are running an aggressive campaign that uses public money and the law to pressure businesses they say are pushing “woke” causes.
In West Virginia, the state treasurer has pulled money from BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager, because the Wall Street firm has flagged climate change as an economic risk.
In Texas, a new law bars the state’s retirement and investment funds from doing business with companies that the state comptroller says are boycotting fossil fuels. Conservative lawmakers in 15 other states are promoting similar legislation.
And officials in Utah and Idaho have assailed a major ratings agency for considering environmental risks and other factors, in addition to the balance sheet, when assessing states’ creditworthiness.
Across the country, Republican lawmakers and their allies have launched a campaign to try to rein in what they see as activist companies trying to reduce the greenhouse gases that are dangerously heating the planet.
“We’re an energy state, and energy accounts for hundreds of millions of dollars of tax revenue for us,” said Riley Moore, the West Virginia state treasurer. “All of our jobs come from coal and gas. I mean, this is who we are. This is part of our way of life here in the state. And they’re telling us that these industries are bad.”
“We have an existential threat here,” Mr. Moore said. “We have to fight back.”
The article goes on to detail the efforts that many corporations, despite some bending to Republican pressure, are nonetheless making to improve our climate future. Those efforts are mainly verbal, but still, verbal is better than absolute silence. Some would say it’s a start. For example, Larry Fink of BlackRock recently wrote this to his investors:
“Every company and every industry will be transformed by the transition to a net-zero world,” Mr. Fink wrote. “The question is, will you lead, or will you be led?”
So according to the article, it’s up in the air if the Republican plan will work to move corporate America back to the oil-and-gas affirming camp. But they’re trying, and that’s worth noticing.
The War Against the Woke
The next thing that’s interesting in the article is the grounds on which Republicans are making their case — liberal “wokeness.”
There are arguments on both the left and right about whether the “wokeness” of mainstream liberals is good or just crowd-following, or worse, careerism. Consider this early criticism of Robin DiAngelo’s best-selling book, White Fragility by writer Matt Taibbi:
Taibbi sees good in the book, but also a lot of wrongheadedness. (For this criticism, by the way, and for other sins Taibbi’s been banned from mainstream liberal media. He’s definitely not flying with the flock on subjects like these.)
There is a lot of right in being “woke,” along with some that’s wrong. “Wokeness” implies a state of thoughtfulness, of waking up to truths one’s been asleep to. But as a catchphrase, a banner one must mindlessly follow, the concept’s been degraded beyond recognition, even by many of its adherents.
Which is where Republicans come in. They always manage to take whatever’s ambiguous in left-wing/liberal thinking and re-frame at its unambiguously at its worst. Critical race theory is an excellent example; they’ve distorted its meaning beyond all recognition.
In the climate case, they’ve taken the worst elements of “wokeness” and crafted a strategy to paint all effort to do good as cynical liberal posturing. Because there are cases of cynical liberal posturing, which mainstream liberals seem determined to defend, the strategy works, as it always does when libs dig in their thoughtlessly defensive heels. (I hope you can appreciate how thoughtless defense of thoughtfulness can lead to trouble.)
Here’s the pro-fossil fuel version the woke alarm, as quoted in the Timesarticle: “These big banks are virtue signaling because they are woke,” wrote Gary Howell, a WV state rep who wants to blacklist companies that have divested from fossil fuel. And that’s the whole campaign. Defend coal, oil and gas because “woke America” wants to take it away.
It’s just another flavor of the lie that was told to your fathers and mothers way back in the previous century, a lie that today is 50 years old and counting. “Those anti-American hippies want to take away your right to eat what you want,” a campaign that defends the corporate crap-food industry, newly under assault from consumers who prefer the counter-culture’s health food alternative. “They’re taking away your Frosted Flakes and giving you granola.”
Some version of that story’s been told for most people’s lives. To boil it down further, “Liberals want to take away your stuff.” As an attack, it seems to work each time. Partly because it’s true for several good reasons. Your right to own a bazooka, poison the air, sell poison as food, eat poison as food — these aren’t really a right a government should grant. And partly because it’s true for bad reasons as well — liberal defense of attacks on free speech by giant tech monopolies come to quickly to mind.
The solution to this one? You can’t stop people from lying who lie for a living. Even Republican operatives have to eat.
But you can stop handing them truths to hook their lies onto. That may not solve the whole problem, but it solves the part of the problem that Democrats control.
The Existential Threat
The third thing this article tells us is that the fossil fuel industry is serious about defending itself. Climate change is an existential threat to human life on the planet, and addressing it is an existential threat to that industry.
Let’s face it. The answer to the question, “What’s the cost of not addressing climate change?” is “All the wealth in the world.” When humans are hunter-gatherers again, world GDP falls to a very small number. Or to zero if we’re extinct.
And the answer to the question, “What would happen to the fossil fuel industry if climate change were adequately addressed?” is “The business wouldn’t exist.”
Every corporate asset owned by Exxon, if related to its climate-killing work, would lose all value if the rich who run the world were serious about addressing the problem. And they know it.
“We have an existential threat here,” said West Virginia treasurer Riley Moore. He’s right. The industry, which should be dead today, is threatened with a well deserved extinction. And yet it lives. You’ll know your climate-saving efforts are effective when Exxon, BP and Total start losing asset value — and not before.
Has that happened yet? Here’s ExxonMobil’s stock valuation since 2006, well before Barack Obama took power:
See any kind of change worth crowing about?
Is It Propaganda If Liberals Do It Too?
The final point I want to make in this multi-part exploration is about the New York Times itself and President Joe Biden.
The article is written as if Republicans were the only ones responsible for killing the climate. And to drive home that point, the editors drop in a little promo box of related pieces, prominently placed near the start of the one we’re examining. Note the unrelenting praise for President Biden and his climate efforts.
All of which makes the article insincere, since if the Times cared about the climate, it would also feature Biden’s own climate crimes as well. Crimes such as the ones detailed here:
- May, 2022 — “Biden Is Breaking His Climate Promises. What Are the Consequences?”
- July, 2021 — “Industry Calls the Climate Shots in the Biden Administration”
The second link contains a list of climate misdeeds that goes back to the start of the Biden administration. Instead, not a peep from the Times author (or his editor) on the actual climate problem, the one that says “our guy’s” in power and bad things are happening.
It’s a complex world when articles like these can do so many things at once, some deadly accurate and important, and others just, gotta say it, propagandistic. I think if the liberal-left were a bit more principled, if they misled less often, the dangerous creatures toiling on the right would have less meat to feed the steaming mob that they themselves mislead.
But I think I said that already, higher up in this piece, and I don’t think saying it again will change a thing.
There are relatively few enough people involved in the actual physical work of the mining of coal that we the taxpayers or the MMT-issuers or whatever could pay them all a current coal-mining wage and benefits plus full coal-mining retirement to do something else right where they already live at without them having to even move out of the houses they currently live in.
For example, the strip miners who currently operate the heavy machinery and etc. used to do strip mining and mountaintop removal mining could be paid just as much to operate machinery to prepare the abandoned mine-lands for planting tough durable pioneer-species of trees and shrubs on. That would be valuable real re-greening type work to be done in the exact places where the mining was done to begin with. If it paid the same and benefited the same and gave the same retirement as coal itself would, and if the strip-miners could feel just as proud and respected to be paid and benefited just as much to do mine-land repair as to do mining itself, then they could perhaps be peeled away from the owners and shareholders and etc. who make up the command levels of the Axis of Coal Mining.
And that would severely deplete the Axis of Coal Mining’s power.
Would the Trillbillies consider that a concept that could be worked with or built out from?
As a Canuck, I have often thought that, from the oil sands workers’ perspective that there must be years of work in cleaning up that mess. However, I lived in Elliot Lake ON when the uranium mines shut down, there was some work for a very few miners in the decommissioning work. The town never really fully recovered. It has become a bit of a northern Ontario retirement town and developed its tourism industry but there is poverty and crime as in most former one industry places. Municipal workers, teachers and healthcare workers are the ‘rich’ in that town. Strip mines and tars sands could be different with the amount and longevity of clean up work, I don’t really know.
I agree that the very rich could lose a big percentage of their luxuries and not be any worse off, but there is another layer between the ‘owners’ and the workers who have much to lose. Those of us who are invested in the fossil fuel industry via our retirement investments. I am not a wealthy person and if our retirement investments suffered from fossil fuel divestment, I would not complain. Somebody has to do something and some of us have to lose but I am guessing that many shareholders have too much to lose or at least think that they do.
Broadacre surface-destruction mining is so broad-area destructive that I suspect there would be jobs re-habbing and re-biologizing the destroyed surface for all the people who were paid to destroy it to begin with. Certainly the abandoned strip-mines I have seen in Appalachia ( specifically in Anderson County, Tennessee) would seem to offer scope for re-employment in scablands-regreening.
I used to live in Fort McMurray and they actually do significant reclamation work on the former mine sites including raising Wood Buffalo on some reclaimed land.
Here is a little PR they have done. I have not seen it myself but you get a sense for the scope of the project.
https://syncrude.ca/2021/07/08/the-beauty-beneath-the-fen/
Mark Blyth has been on about this for a while — the only viable political solution to implement a climate crisis driven transition is to take all of those employed in the fossil-fuel-industrial-complex and “stuff their mouths with gold” (my words, not his) in order to sunset it.
Right now that solution isn’t on the table because corporate Dems (and their paymasters) are simultaneously in thrall to “the deficit myth” and despise fly-over country and its denizens. They would rather have the whole thing burn down around their ears before they’ll give “those people” anything …
” Those people” need their own political party-movement. If they could create it even with all the stresses and timesucks currently dominating their lives, they would need a very powerful and ruthless Intelligence-CounterIntelligence Bureau to prevent so much as even one single Democrat or Republican infiltrating their party-movement to subvert and pollute it from within.
I say MMT is requirement #1 for an Effective Climate Movement, yet my experience with those alarmed about climate is that they could not be less interested. It’s “virtue signaling” squared to propose solutions that could never work, IMHO.
Really off topic, but perhaps of general interest:
https://stevekirsch.substack.com/p/ceo-of-large-spanish-pharma-company?s=r
COVID
Larry fink can lead by getting rid of all his vacation houses, private jets, helicopters, limos, sport car collection, and super yachts. I mean, climate change is real and people must sacrifice if they want to save the Earth right?
He can but he won’t. Can we figure out how to shrink the economy from the top down so as to do it for him?
Economics is parasitic on physics. All economic activity is directly correlated to energy consumption, which sets the outward boundary on economic production/activity. Modern economies are entirely dependent on fossil fuels, not only as energy inputs but for stuff like fertilizers for food production. Modern democracies producing high levels of social stability and peaceful transfers of power have correlated with periods of economic growth which was widely distributed to the population.
There are two ways to reduce carbon consumption: find a substitute for fossil fuels, or stop using them and suffer an economic and ultimately, political collapse, followed by famine and plague. No fertilizer, you will have no way of feeding people, and people will starve and those that don’t will be malnourished and subject to disease. Any political body that attempted to address carbon reduction by significantly reducing the use of fossil fuels would bring about conditions which would likely cause its own demise. Its not politically realistic, and if it occurs, it would be the result of catastrophe like a nuclear war or complete collapse of global trade routes. It would address a future catastrophe by bringing about a present catastrophe.
The only realistic substitute that is reliable and technologically viable is nuclear power. It is precisely the “liberal-left” that are the most categorically anti-nuclear, which tells you everything you need to know: “green politics” is a marketing campaign for wishful thinking liberal arts graduates who are mathematically illiterate. These are not serious people, they don’t offer serious solutions, its just a way of patting themselves on the back because they “care” whatever that means. You simply have to look at Germany and France in terms of carbon emissions and the cost of energy.
Renewables are not a serious substitute for fossil fuels. They are intermittent, and they have to use natural gas or other fossil fuels as a back up as a result. They may slightly reduce fossil fuel use, but they are a complement. Further, when you consider growing population and economic growth in the developing world, it is highly likely that whatever reduction you get from renewables, it will be dwarfed by increased energy consumption. Renewables are incredibly inefficient in terms of land use, and the “left-liberal” voters are the best NIMBY’s when it comes to their neighborhoods, so politically, I don’t see how you are going to get approvals on renewable projects. The only way renewables could significantly displace fossil fuels is if there were technological improvements in batteries, which means we are looking 20 or 30 years out. Not to mention, batteries are inefficient, you lose energy in charging a batteries, and the energy stored in a battery decays over time, so the energy produced via renewables is even more inefficient than comparable sources. You create a lot of carbon in mining for metals used in batteries, and you have no plan for what to do with the toxic waste from obsolescent solar panels and batteries.
In the US, there is a push for electric cars, which have become some kind of glam fashion statement for rich people, who not doubt deserve a tax break from the Biden administration even if virtue is its own reward. However, the American electrical grid is approaching capacity, and electric cars are projected to add 30% additional demand to the grid, which it simply cannot handle. Further, even if everyone gets an electric car, they are only as green as the source of the electricity. Encouraging electric cars makes no sense when you lack an electrical grid that can support widespread adoption of electrical cars, and which will ultimately only be feed by coal plants because you have no other feasible source of power.
“Environmentalism” in American politics is solely about virtue signaling and purity. No one has a serious proposal for transitioning from fossil fuels, and proposals like investing in new reactor designs and focusing on cheap safe nuclear power and improving the American electrical grid are much more likely to get traction in the GOP than the Democrats. You aren’t going to get anywhere unless you approach the environment as an engineering and economic problem, rather than a fundamental criterion of political, religious and national purity. This is why the GOP is better as far as running with a viable, realistic proposal to address carbon in contrast to their counterparts concerned with purity of essence, who merely need tax brakes for Tesla owners or some other performative or symbolic gesture that proves that the pure ones are in charge. And yes, “wokeness” is a problem, because its a fundamentalist pseudo-religion that solves problems by engaging in collective performative rituals, e.g. theurgical magic, and silencing those offering real analysis and solutions.
This inspires many naive questions from me. Here are some, not making work for others, if folks feel free to chime in, that’d be great but I am really just outlining my own lack of knowledge.
Is fertilizer really that necessary? Or has big-ag made it so? Can we tackle big-ag and fossil fuels at the same time? I live in Canada and do my best to eat seasonally and locally but I certainly rely on imported food too. Olive oil, coffee, chocolate, fruit and veggies in the winter.
If necessary, is fertilizer a by-product of oil/gas production or can we produce it for its own sake while lowering and eventually stopping oil and gas production for energy?
With regard to nuclear power, don’t we still have a problem with storage of expended uranium? I am unaware of a viable solution there. If nuclear is a clean energy product for now, what legacy are we leaving for those in the future? Are we just kicking the can down the road by going big on nuclear?
Last I agree that solving the climate crisis will take engineering and economic creativity – I worry that we’ve lost or maybe never had the capacity for that kind of thinking.
CanCyn:
Great questions. Here’s a few answers I think are mainly correct.
a. Do we need fertilizer? Yes. We have bred plants to produce enormous amounts of food, and that takes _lots_ of nutrients. Those nutrients have to be delivered by us to that plant, as we’ve bred the plants to make a lot of food, and not to forage for themselves. Foraging for your own nutrients takes big root systems, and that diverts the plant’s energy away from food production and into roots, which we (generally) don’t eat. Carrots are an exception to this rule.
The Green Revolution (big increases in yield) is actually the “More Fertilizer” Revolution. Fertilizer is mainly Nitrogen, Phosphorus and Potassium (NPK). N is obtained from the atmosphere using a highly energy consumptive chemical process. We mine P and K just like we do iron ore and copper; it’s in “deposits” of high concentration. We dig it up, distribute it onto our fields. A lot of that fertilizer leaches out before the plants can uptake it, and therefore does not good.
Then we feed the food (containing that N, P and K) to animals (poor input-to-output ratio, BTW) which we eat, or we eat it directly as plant matter, and then we poop it out, and it goes into our sewer system (our rivers and estuaries) and eventually into the sea. Once and done. That “once and done” is the core problem to solve. You may not have conceived of your lovely rivers and estuaries as “sewers” but that is what they currently are. Repeat: that once-and-done phenomena is a massive, and yet fixable problem.
b. Do nukes have issues. Yes. You identified some of them. Some of those big nuke problems may also be fixable via different nuke system design. Do some reading on “new nuke designs” and acquaint yourself with those alternatives.
c. Have we “lost our creativity”? We have clearly allowed our creativity to atrophy, but it’s not lost unless we give up / continue to behave as passive consumers. If we do some cultural re-pointing (change incentive systems), then that creativity can be re-engaged. To reinforce that concept: the most underutilized resource on the planet is the space between our ears.
One of the reasons for the loss of creativity / passivation of humans is the myth of Moses: there’s some great person out there who will be and do what we can’t or won’t be or do for ourselves.
We think that if we complain enough, we can call forth that Moses. Is that working for us?
My working definition of a “leader” is someone that figures out what needs to get done, and does it. If we all became ourselves into that sort of leader, things would be very, very different. One key difference is that we wouldn’t need no stinkin’ “leaders” anymore. By my lights, that would be a good thing, as our current crop of so-called leaders are positively toxic.
As for fertilizer it can come from all kinds of manure produced by cows, horses, pigs, chickens, human beings, and all other living animals that create feces. The new problem is collecting it, making it safe to put on soil and distributing it to the fields that need to be made fertile. It can be done but it requires a lot of time and expertise to produce and distribute (i.e., labour intensive). Perhaps this fertilizer would not be able to provide “industrial strength results” because of the way it is produced, but it would be better for the soil than chemical fertilizer. It can be done. There only needs to be the will to do so.
JEHR:
Yes. There are plenty of point-sources for the collection of fertilizer; the most obvious is the exit-point (effluent) of your local “water treatment plant”.
As you point out, there are issues (pathogens, bad-smelling gas, and most of all, significant social status-loss due to association with poo).
If we co-locate water treatment plants with large ag tracts, we’d be able to route the treatment plant effluent thru large porous soil sponges into which the roots of perennial wood, fiber, or animal food plants can penetrate. The nutrients would be locked up in the living plant matter, to be harvested periodically. So long as humans don’t directly eat the foodstuffs (pathogen pathway back to humans), it would be safe.
And not smelly.
And very economical. And extraordinarily productive. The residual effluent from the ag plots can then be safely vented into rivers and streams, with only a minor increase in nutrient-load on the stream, which would actually be beneficial to stream health. Those nutrients would grow _some_ (not a lot) of algae, which is foundational input for water-based food webs, and that foundation would support (among others) fish, shell fish, birds, etc.
Co-locating intensively-managed ag plots near water treatment plants may be feasible; it would certainly be operationally economical (e.g. sustainably profitable) once the land was acquired and the relatively simple operational systems were installed.
Additionally, those waste-water plants are energy sources (methane and heat), both of which could be used for adjacent industrial processes or greenhouses. Note that the greenhouses – if they produced food for humans – could not use the water-treatment plant effluent as nutrient, because that violates the non-pathogen-propagation rule.
With the proper processing, that waste stream could readily evolve into a very desirable business, that yielded great social benefit.
Managing the poo may never be cool – maybe that’s asking too much – but managing and using the 2nd-tier derivative products….well, isn’t that kinda what organic farmers do for a living? And _that_ is cool. It can be done.
But Tom! What about in the winter, when the plants won’t grow, and therefore can’t absorb nutrients from the effluent stream?
Locate special-purpose greenhouses on-site of the water treatment plant. Those GHs grow algae. Great masses of it.
Algae are plants, and they absorb a lot of nutrients, including CO2. Use the heat from the water treatment plant to keep the algae tanks at optimum temp.
Once a tank of algae matures, drain out the water into a just-starting-up tank, scrape out the algae and dry it out (all automated), crumble up the algae, put it into re-purposed coal hopper cars, and send those cars out to Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Kansas, Wisconsin, etc. for spreading on the fields.
Closed loop. Gotta love those closed-loop, economical, runs-forever systems.
Nitrogen fertilizer is made with a great deal of fossil fuels. There are more efficient processes known, and more may be invented, but they have not yet been demonstrated at industrial scale.
Do we need it? Maybe not if the permaculture/regenerative agriculture advocates are right. We could also engineer or breed crops that fix their own nitrogen, another work in progress.
Nuclear’s problems are political (or ‘religious’) rather than technical. Some of the political problems may have technical workarounds. The ‘religious’ ones not so much. It would kick the can down the road, which is only bad if we pretend it has solved the problem rather than just bought us time to solve it.
If the only problem with nuclear power is political or religious, why won’t private insurers cover them? Why, in every case, is the state or local government – i.e. the taxpayer – uniquely obliged to provide insurance coverage?
We might also consider the fact that building nuclear power plants is hugely expensive (currently all the nukes being built in the west face massive cost overruns) and involves enormous amounts of power generation, concrete, and fossil fuels. The same with decommissioning the plants. And that there is still no agreement on what to do with the steadily accumulating toxic waste products. And that Chernobyl and Fukushima remain unfixed, running sores on the face of the planet.
Perhaps you should watch the Netflix documentary about the meltdown at Three Mile Island in 1979. Nuclear power will never be safe in profit making environs. The government cannot be trusted to properly oversee a profit oriented nuclear power industry. I would not wish to live anywhere near a nuclear power plant, and many millions of Americans feel the same. And for very good reasons.
The insurance, expense, waste, location and profit problems are all political.
Private companies should not be building or operating nuclear reactors.
The two meltdowns were (ultimately) technical design failures which are preventable with better design.
If you want civilisation you need energy, all of which must be gathered from the environment somehow. There are no completely clean, safe and virtuous options. Choose your poison.
Deep Conservation could be the other half of the approach. The less energy we need to use, the less poison we have to endure.
There are all kinds of approaches to Deep Conservation. And a whole lot of little bits can add up to a whole lot, if there are enough little bits.
Perhaps the threads to posts like this one might be places where commenters can offer any idea, source, book, link, paper, pamphlet, group, etc. with tangible things to offer towards the goal of using less energy at every level independent of eachother ( in case one or another level is not actionable-upon at any one point in space or time).
DW, and others:
Please keep advocating for the evolutionary construction of a repository of alt-lifestyles, income streams, technique, culture and rest of the know-how we’re going to need to make the leap to economic and ecological viability.
We need some sort of go-to place that contains a cafeteria of how-tos and who-withs so we can get out of first gear (grumbling and fear-mongering) and into 2nd (the doing).
That repository needs to (gradually, over time) contain something in it for everyone, no matter where they are on the commitment-capability continuum.
When you decide where and how, please let me know so I can help build, use, and promote it.
What you describe sounds like a massive-enough effort that the blogger-sitemaster trying to do it would have to be paid enough to be able to do it right, and hire enough people to help him/her do it right.
As I think about this, I will begin by thinking about the simpler steps and things which a non-paid blogger could perhaps do, and about the kinds of information/sources which non-paid blog-readers and blog-commenters might hope to find there or bring there.
It will probably have to emerge in steps-at-a-time in the few years left to us before the elites take the internet away from us and shut it all the way down.
How big does a scale have to be before we call it “industrial scale” ? Is a single 5,000 acre farm big enough to call “industrial scale”? If it is, then Gabe Brown has already spent years demonstrating the long-term eco-viability and profitability of creating plant-animal systems which suck down the sky-nitrogen over his property and bio-fix it into the plant-animal-soil biosystems inside his property lines.
Here is a NOmazon source for his book on the subject. https://bookstore.acresusa.com/products/dirt-to-soil
Garry Zimmer runs a 1,000 acre Certified Organic farm in Wisconsin called Otter Creek Farm. He has been doing it also, sucking down his own sky nitrogen and bio-fixing it into the systems within his own property lines. Here is a NOmazon link to Gary Zimmer and to a couple of books he has written on the subject.
https://onfarm.acresusa.com/thefarm/
The profitable bio-fixation of sky nitrogen is a problem which has already been solved within the confines of the private enterprise system. Let Darwin take those farmers who are still too proud to even begin learning how to make the transition to these abundantly proven and un-arguable-against by-now-established systems.
Now . . . . availability of various minerals is a more difficult problem. As a mere layman, my “input” can only be very limited.
KD: There are parts of this post that I need to be repeated often. Most environmentalists are not yet able to offer up “serious solutions” and are “virtue signaling”. That part is spot-on, and needs further amplification. Complaining _does not_ solve problems.
The next parts about “No one has a serious proposal for transitioning from fossil fuels” is not true. We have plenty of “serious proposals”; what we lack is “serious commitment”.
People are, as yet, not willing to “sacrifice” in order to save their own planet. Immediate benefit trumps long-term welfare. It’s a human weakness, and until the 2×4 of reality really connects with the collective human forehead, nothing is going to happen. Our human weakness – short-term focus – is really working against us at the moment.
Your piece – in parts – reads like a “here’s why we can’t do it” punch-list. That is an example of a very unhelpful behavior exhibited by Greens and Progressives community (of which I am a member).
One objection / issue does _not_ a good idea kill. Good ideas don’t stop being good because we’ve given up on them (after a non-serious try).
Change takes tenacity, it takes effort, it takes failure and recovery and try-again determination to do, and it’s expensive and risky. That’s why it isn’t happening.
It’s hard.
But some of us are doing it anyway. Some of us are doing the lifestyle changes, the innovation, the sacrifices and so forth. It’s do-able, and it’s being done, just not at the proper degree of participation. Yet.
What remains is for the rest of the gang to quit bitching, blame-shifting, dithering and otherwise not-doing all the many thousands of things each of us can do to solve this big problem we all face.
And nukes might be a good tool in the toolbox. And since you can “do the math”, you know it’s not – by any means – the whole solution. It’s going to take a lot more than nuke-sub-for-coalNgas to get out of this mess.
Most of the “tools in the box” are lifestyle changes and adaptation (innovation, imagination, design work, building and perfecting of prototypes, emotional tenacity to overcome mistakes, etc.) type tools. The adaptation tools are not well-represented in our collective human toolbox at the moment.
I think you were perfectly correct to hold us Green/Progressive types accountable for not being “serious”.
Now take it to the next level: identify _why_ there’s no “serious”, and, in fairness, acknowledge the fact that “serious” isn’t happening from any other political quarter either, R or D or _your fav political slant_here.
Yves and others here have used the term “radical conservation”. I’ve found it useful to conduct thought experiments about this to imagine all the various follow-on effects of potential radical conservation strategies. My two favorites right now are “no passenger air travel” and “grossly limit advertising” and then try to figure out all of the effects.
No passenger air travel equals the death of smaller commercial airports and all the support services, no private plane manufacturers, severely reduced support services for large aircraft, severely reduced international and long haul tourism…if you can’t drive, take a train or ship you aren’t going, many island tourist destinations would lose most of their income (how would they survive?) the hotel, rental car, all tourism support industries would take a huge hit, a contraction in all international sports, no more reporters flying to the latest hot spots so they would have to use local reporting…basically think travel like in the 1920s.
It is an interesting and sort of fun to do until you think of all the lives that would be impacted.
That is a very helpful thought experiment.
Now, let’s do another thought experiment, and this one is _not_ hypothetical. Think of all those flyover towns that are now virtually dead because ag become so enormously labor-efficient, and factories which supported factory towns were shut down when the factory was moved overseas.
That was enormously devastating to much of middle-America.
But it happened, and we’re still reeling from that blow. Will you assert that the adverse impact of those two developments is less than the one you posited re: loss of airline travel?
What if, instead of ignoring the effect of these well-known, thoroughly discussed forces, we’d done a good job of providing alternative lifestyles and industries which absorbed the displaced?
What then?
These massive economic (systematic elimination of labor from the production equation, hyper-consumptive waste) and environmental (extinctions, contaminations, weather anomalies) forces are not going to spare anyone, and they’re not reversible once they really get going.
Yes: disruption is going to happen, and people are going to be impacted. I think that is a certainty.
What I advocate is that we adapt early and often, and don’t wait for the boat to sink before we look for life-rafts.
I don’t disagree. I really enjoy reading “Retrotopia” by John Michael Greer which imagines a near future where a small country in the broken up United States has made a transition to a lower energy future. Of course, they had the advantage? Of having most of their infrastructure and cultural norms destroyed in a civil war.
I often force these thought experiments into discussions with others on all sorts of issues as it makes people think more deeply and systemically. I would think that our politicians would do this sort of thing. They could see the future issues associated with any policy and work to ameliorate the problems that are a result in order to get stuff done. Sometimes I think that they are not doing that kind of process on purpose in order to force failure.
Laura:
OK, I’m tuning into what you’re doing with these last few posts. Great technique.
Also, your point about the “the advantage of having most of their infrastructure and cultural norms destroyed in a civil war”…I think that’s quite insightful.
Culture and investment in existing physical plant can be a real boat-anchor if adapting quickly is required. It confers a great deal of inertia, and it’s clear that our Western societies are suffering from a lot of inertia at the moment. I’m glad you’re drawing attn to that.
On to this point you made about “thinking systemically” and doing “thought experiments” in political settings “I would think that our politicians would do this sort of thing”.
My observations, personal and from-afar is that would be a dangerous, unwanted and openly resented thing for a politician to do. Have you noticed how little most people enjoy thinking? How resentful, defensive, etc. they become when asked to do so? To step outside themselves and maybe empathize with another’s situation?
It takes a lot of effort and confidence in oneself to really think, and to integrate one’s thinking into one’s behavior, to see your own fallacies. That’s scary and uncomfortable. *
Thinking will lead you out of the comfortable lap of conformity, away from the approbation of your peers, and right straight into a heap of trouble if you’re not careful.
:)
Unless you hang around places like NC. Then it’s OK.
=====
* Of course you know all that already; you’re offering encouragement to overcome those obstacles.
As part of your thought experiment go back in time before fossil fuels were available, before there were automobiles, and airplanes, and ocean going freighters. How did people live? How did they thrive? We’ve boxed ourselves in with fossil fuel dependent lifestyles that simply cannot be maintained for centuries or millenia. We must transition to a much simpler way of living. This means, among other things, mass tourism becoming a thing of the past. This means expansive lifestyles – big houses, big cars, mass consumption becoming a thing of the past. Yes, peoples lives will be impacted. Greatly. As they must be impacted.
It is very difficult to imagine living as some people did in the 1940s when there was no electricity, no indoor toilet or water facilities, not so many cars or trains for transportation except to deliver necessary goods like food. You learn to raise enough vegetables to last a year even if you have very cold winters and have to create storage for them. That would be where I would start and then I would slowly cut out all the unnecessary things that human beings can do without: for example, multiple clothes, shoes, phones, vacations, hair stylists, etc. I’m sure each person’s list of things to do without would be different but altogether these ideas would give everyone a place from which to start to learn to live without “things.” We have to learn to live without some of the unnecessary things we think we can’t do without!! Sorry to say. Start there and continue up the” creation ladder” to the top (where the billionaires live!)
No passenger air travel means no eco-tourism. That means that various high-biodiversity habitats which currently “pay for themselves” by supporting inflow of tourist money will no longer “pay for themselves”. At that point, they will be destroyed for parts and pieces which can be sold for money.
Unless . . . . ship and train travel can be expanded to replace the forbidden air passenger travel so that ecotourists can still reach the eco-tourist habitats which will all be destroyed if no more eco-tourist money comes in to hold that destruction at bay.
Clarification on batteries. Lithium batteries have a very low self discharge rate, usually measured about 1% month
Lithium battery round trip efficiency ( fully charged, discharged, recharged) is about 90-95%. That’s higher than about any other storage tech.
And no, I don’t think that LFP or NMC are the batteries of the future due to excessively high environmental mining costs.
But the others you say are spot on. I think of the Dems and climate is just like what they have done with abortion. Basically f?$^ all.
I love how the Dems say we tried or some BS.
I think it might actually be the republicans who decide that nuclear is the future and make it happen.
Oh as to high radioactive waste, in the US it’s enough to fill an Olympic swimming pool 30’ deep. That’s it!
Perhaps much of the public’s fear of nuclear waste has been engendered by long term US government actions (and coverup) at government nuclear sites (Hanford, WA for example, which is still in costly forever cleanup mode).
It is difficult to regain trust when one has proven untrustworthy, but the power of propaganda in the USA may make this possible..
The Repubs might promote nuclear (fusion will be ready in 30 years, as always), knowing that the Democrats will not allow it in areas that will affect high end Democratic and Republican real estate.
Radical conservation, re-use and lifestyle changes are not on the political agenda for either party.
And if a new age of nuclear energy were to dawn, how long would it be before ITS “clean” surplus energy was consumed by increased population and increased lifestyle consumption?
Proponamts of nuclear power need to visit Ukraine and spend several months touring the area of destruction brought upon by the disaster there. If that is not enough, they shoud try the exclusion zone around the Dai Ichi power plant in Fukushima. Enjoy!
So your anti-nuclear stance is based on one serious accident in a Soviet facility built in the 1950’s and one natural disaster that impacted a Japanese facility built in the early 1970’s that resulted in 1 confirmed death from exposure to radiation? Even the latter facility was built a decade before the internet was invented and I think it’s fair to suppose that the technology has improved a little since then! More people have probably been killed by lint fires in their dryers, or by bees, or hippos, or probably by eating toast!
There have been many near-misses with nukes, and there remains the disposal issue with current designs.
For those that are willing to overlook the very significant risks of nuke plant operations, I say “locate it next to your house”.
That dismissive rhetoric seems to dissipate once the prospect of bearing the risk is brought home.
If you ask people to list the 4 worst nuclear accidents, 99% can’t finish the list, so I wonder if the near-miss thing is a bit of an urban myth too. Technology has also come a long way, so a facility built today should be safer than the old ones by an order of magnitude. I remember reading years ago about experimental flat bed reactors, where the enriched uranium is mixed with the wonder material graphene and made into softball size balls. You stack a few together until you reach critical mass and there’s your reactor. The beauty of the technology was that the graphene slows the reaction as the temperature rises, which limits the maximum temperature to a level below that required to melt the containment unit or the concrete pad or the ground on which it sits. In other words, a meltdown could not occur in any circumstances. Disposal of the spent balls was also pretty straightforward – drop them down a decent hole, tip in some concrete so kids don’t dig them up and bring them to school for “show and tell” and that’s it. No contamination of groundwater, even if hit by an earthquake. I don’t know what happened to this technology, but assume it was just put on the back burner when nuclear got too hard because of the environmental lobby. The solution is to properly quantify the risk, rather than listen to all the scaremongering.
I agree that there is scaremongering. People are fearful of the unknown, especially if they’ve seen graphic horror stories about it. TMI, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and the near-miss of FirstEnergy’s Davis Besse plant.
Here’s a little more detail for those interested in nuke safety issues. This comes from that bastion of Green-Progressive Fearmongers over at Ohio State University.
So when you assert that “people can’t finish the list”, I retort : a lot of people can’t tell you where Iran is, or Kazakhstan, or identify the third element of the periodic chart.
That fact doesn’t refute the existence of Iran, or Kazakhstan, or lithium.
Let’s see some pilot plants of these new nuke plant designs. I accept and endorse the idea that humans can learn from their mistakes, that designs can improve, that knowledge about physics and materials and construction technique are all in-motion, and moving forward smartly (among some of us).
So, I’m not standing in your way. Build one, somewhere relatively safe, test it thoroughly. Document and publicize fully the results of the tests.
And keep the bean-counters away from the operational systems so they’re not tempted to cheat. (See Besse Davis, or Boeing 737, or BP Deepwater Horizon and their captive friends over at Dept. of the Interior).
I don’t think the Iran/Kazakhstan/Lithium analogy quite holds up, but your conclusion about testing, trialing, documenting and publicizing certainly seems reasonable to me. The problem with nuclear is also the long lead time, so even if it gets off the ground in a material way it will only be able to do heavy lifting in the medium to longer term and the crisis is now.
You seem to forget that a single nuclear accident can impact millions of people. At Three Mile Island a meltdown of the nuclear core was averted by 30 minutes. Had the meltdown occurred a large swath of the east coast of the United States would have been rendered uninhabitable for decades. One accident is one too many. The risk is simply too high, particularly in the United States with its captured regulatory agencies and fetish for profits above all else.
“Had the meltdown occurred a large swath of the east coast of the United States would have been rendered uninhabitable for decades.”
Completely untrue.
How about nucs in remote locations and DC transmission. Also, i find it ridiculous the number of people who have not explored he area within 100 miles of home, but have been offshore.
I use a similar line: You want nuclear power? Fine, just as soon as you agree to having the spent fuel rods buried in your home’s backyard.
As for simpler living, I originally considered moving to West Virginia but realized I’d have to research every mountaintop removal project, every location of mine tailings, every waterway that has been polluted, and every town that has been condemned. So I went to Pennsylvania instead.
Its a very serious threat when you consider how many nuclear plants it would take to replace the grid globally, 10,000+ plants
Do you think that will increase the frequency of accidents? I do. There are currently only 440 power nuclear power plants globally.
The military decision to go into Chernobyl borders on pychopathically stupid. Neither Russia nor Ukraine gained militarily from that decision. A lot of young people who didn’t die the usual war deaths died or are dying from radiation poisoning. Wonder why? On the fertilizer front, I have composted for decades. I wish I could get rid of some of what I have no use for. My fertilizing amounts are useful for small gardens. No, I’m not making coin off it.
Your comment is exactly why it is so worrisome to face the prospect of peak oil. There is no viable solution to implement if peak oil is something we are either currently experiencing or will be in the next few decades. If it is not for another 50+ years then the alternative I guess is environmental issues really will come to roost in a bad way. Any viable solution to the power generation problem, lets say nuclear, still requires in todays power terms the construction of 10,000+ nuclear plans of a GW capacity. In the united states it takes us almost 10 years to build one of those facilities and is never even close to on budget. The problem here has also only gotten worse because we have lost a knowledge in that field, in fact we only have 1/3 the amount of engineers who can design these facilities of what we had several decades ago.
All that aside also still doesn’t solve the issue of energy in transportation, fertilizer in ag industry nor for oil as a feedstock in industrial and chemical processes.
So essentially there are two parts to the whole issue. Can we actually come up with a viable “clean” energy alternative to replace oil and scale it up in time before either environmental issues destroy us or we run out of oil? I don’t think so. Many serious members of the green party who understand the issue are not actually environmentalists, but people who think we have an unsolvable problem therefore we should just seek to manage the downfall of our society rather than fight against it. I am not so optimistic, I think regardless of whatever environmental issues lie ahead we will suck every last drop of oil out of the ground that we can and burn every last bit of coal because the alternative requires a backwardation of our society technologically.
Respectfully, continued fossil fuel use means that the climate goes upside down in a decade or two (meaning we push through 1.5 deg C best case and under business as usual, 3.0 deg C).
However, it is far from clear that anything can replace fossil fuels. Under the Limits to Growth modeling (which is tracking to our current reality over the past 4 decades), we experience resource fall off somewhere between 2030 and 2050. When the resources, and this includes oil, become uneconomic to extract, the entire global social economic system will sharply contract (even collapse), to a level around 1900 (referring to LTG again).
Nuclear is one of those minerals that will be in decline, and the fossil fuels required to extract/process/transport it will bring the entire model into question. Perhaps fusion…
Speaking mainly from the physics point of view, the task of replacing the 100 Billion Barrels of oil/year with (fill in the blank) are necessary (climate) and politically i (the entire fossil fuel economy cannot be transitioned without incredible pain).
Which brings us to renewables. If a miracle is needed politically, then miracles are also needed in either next generation nuclear, fusion, and/or renewable tech (batteries) plus massive conservation. The politics of this are simple: it’s a war mobilization paradigm. The enemy is implacable physics (climate, energy). The solution is “everything we have”, a maximum effort of tech and finance, but mainly one of changing social culture. Conservation must become a first principle. Mining Bitcoin would be impossible under this kind of conservation. Local economics and manufacture would replace global supply chains with their massive energy footprints. The cloud withers. The world gets slower, more local, and is no longer dominated by consumption and its extractive finance. I will not waste anyone’s time by going over all that.
I do not see how this happens.
I would say that implacable physics ( climate, energy) is not the enemy. Implacable physics, etc. is the neutral terrain, the battlespace, etc. The enemy is the coal, gas and oil industry and all the people who guide it and support it and believe in it. They are the ones who will continue obstructing every effort to downscale, degrow and de-fossilize the country at the national level.
Without an unconditional victory against the Forces of Fossil, those community-loads of people living in areas without a fossil fuel mining industry within their borders will have to try turning their regions into sealed-off detached survival economies shrunken down enough and up-efficientised enough to reduce their support to the fossil fuel economy all the way to zero. And hope that deprivation of money and support is enough to force the fossil fuel regions into long-term degrowth mode as well.
Once again, Yves’ preface to Neuberger’s post seems to me to be spot-on. Thank you, Yves.
I’m more inclined to believe that these big banks are virtue signaling because it’s a convenient way for them to front-run the investment opportunities in the energy transition.
I see it as just another instance of attempted state capture by our corporate oligarchy. Most here will agree we should do something about carbon emissions, but why is it important that we do it on Larry Fink’s terms? Who is holding up the microscope to his agenda? He just makes these decrees from on high and gets ringing endorsements from so-called liberal journalists that portray him as a champion of climate change?
The fact that ExxonMobil is rated as ‘ESG-friendly’ yet Tesla is not tells you everything you need to know about how seriously you should take ESG and the so-called efforts of our financial class to do something about climate change. This is just another filter to make sure companies follow rules of their masters at the large asset managers that own 20% or more of nearly every major company in the US.
Also, the lazy analysis of Exxon’s flat stock price is amateurish. Anyone who invests in energy knows dividends are a major incentive for holding energy stocks. Let’s see the chart with the dividend payout over the same time period.
What Conservatives Understand About Global Warming — and Liberals Don’t
“The reason there is such widespread denial of the reality of climate change with power brokers in the Republican Party, and certainly within very right-wing, free market think tanks, is they understand if the science is true, then the political or economic project they hope to advance, which is a radically deregulated market, must come to a screeching halt.
Climate change is true. So it does mean we need to intervene very seriously in the market. It does mean we need to regulate corporations in a way governments have been unwilling to do for the last 40 years. We have to place severe limits on further expansion of the fossil fuel frontier if we’re serious about this. It means we can’t develop new fossil fuel reserves and we have to manage a transition away from fossil fuels with existing production.
This requires managing the economy, it requires planning, it requires major investments in energy, public investments, major investments in public transit. These things go against all of the economic trends of the past 40 years where we’ve been defunding the public sphere on so many fronts.
I think conservatives understand this, and therefore choose to deny reality. Whereas one of the things we see on the liberal side is, instead of denying the science, they deny the implications of the science. I would put the New York Times columnist Paul Krugman in this category, where he’s written so many columns about how easy it is to deal with climate change. We can do it and we’ll barely notice. I think people should understand it is a much more fundamental challenge than that.
For decades, there was a huge emphasis on these just small consumer changes we can make. It created a kind of dissonance where you present people with information about an existential threat and then say, “Well, change your light bulb,” or, “Drive a hybrid.” You don’t talk at all about public policy. And if you do, it’s a very tiny carbon tax and that’s going to do it.
Then I think there are some liberals who do understand the implications of climate change and the depth of change it requires from us. But because they believe humans are incapable of this kind of change, or at this stage in human evolution, I suppose, they think we’re basically doomed. I think contemporary centrist liberalism does not have the tools to deal with a crisis of this magnitude that requires this level of market intervention. And I worry it can lead to a kind of a nihilism around climate change.”
That was very well done, Stick’em. Wish I could have said it so well.
So, the question comes “how do you elicit a different set of behaviors from a psychological base that is weak on the “change” skill?”
Let’s start framing the problem where it _actually_ is, and then maybe we can make some progress.
Yes, very much so. Note that this mirrors the section in the OP subtitled “Existential Threat”, where he – rightly – points out that the Fossil Fuel Industry is in a duel to the death with Human Civilization. (IMO, AGW is unlikely to lead to extinction of Homo Sapiens, but it is likely to end “civilization as we know it”).
“We have an existential threat here,” Mr. Moore said. “We have to fight back.”
Yeah, Riley Moore you’re half right; the threat comes from Global Heating.
When we imagine a vacation we see ourselves on a beautiful beach lounging in the sun. We never think about the pain-in-the-neck organizing and effort it will take to get there. Nor the possibility that the beach will be polluted and crowded and probably stink, and the weather will be bad. Politics is likewise a variety of daydreaming. Discussing all the hard choices to achieve a goal, especially an existential one, isn’t very comforting. A better place to start is at the grassroots of the problem. Why do we need oil? Because we have impossible dreams – we want big, heavy, expensive, far-away fabulous things. We really need to start there. Let’s debunk our own nonsense before it kills us. Limit the use of oil to providing the most essential things, like food, clean air and water, good health care, etc. “Innovation” has always been about something bigger and better. Now it needs to be about ways to live within a sustainable energy budget. Sources of energy need to be conserved to achieve a transition. And all of them from oil to nuclear must be nationalized in order to make it work. So, the biggest blasphemy of all is this reality – capitalism cannot achieve our future. Making a profit from energy is antithetical to survival.
The 2d sentence in the quoted paragraph from Riley Moore (West Virginia state treasurer) reads: ““All of our jobs come from coal and gas.”
That is a lie.
Visit this West Virginia site:
https://datausa.io/profile/geo/west-virginia
Scroll down to “Employment by industry sector” and choose “Monthly Employees”
A rough count indicates well over 120,000 jobs in West Virginia… of which 8,000 are in “mining, logging and construction”
Not all of those 8,000 are related to coal and gas. And, take whatever generous ancillary/multiplier — as in coal/gas “related” — that you like.
Riley Moore’s statement is a lie.
As frustrating as Dem lies/misleading climate change statements may be does not make what Riley Moore states any less of a lie.
“…the Republicans are the party of the coal, oil, and gas industries.”
Gavin Newsome (along with the 25 Dem Senators and 75 Dem Reps who voted for final passage of H.R. 6 Energy Act of 2005 https://www.congress.gov/bill/109th-congress/house-bill/6/all-actions?q=%7B“roll-call-vote”%3A”all”%7D&r=1&s=7&overview=closed
-and their protoges and successors who wouldn’t push the Green New Deal) on line two saying, “Hold my beer.”
There are a lot of words in this article but most of it can be broken down into two succinct sentences:
“Liberals, stop lying, cheating and trying to control people’s thoughts so much. People really hate you for that.”
But it would be hard to make an article out of that.
We all want a free lunch. Most people don’t want to work in the garden to produce it. And almost nobody wants to stay around after lunch to clean the dishes and compost the garbage.
Eventually limited supply of fuel to burn and air to burn it with will solve the supply side problem. The demand side? A lot of “solutions” to reduce the demand have been proposed by people like Mr. Hitler and Mr. Singer. Supply-and-demand charts with a “new equilibrium” are not pretty to think about… so we don’t.
The best short-term solution to a long-term problem? Ignore it. Maybe it will go away. Sometimes technology provides the solution. The horse dung problem on the streets of New York was solved by the electric trolley and the auto. Let’s pray that Hegel’s “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” has at least one more rotation to go.
Mr. Hitler was not interested in reducing demand. He was interested in reducing demand from Jews and Slavs so that he could replace that demand by increasing demand from Germans.
Thanks Tom et al for the responses. Great conversations here. Much to consider. Have to agree with Susan the Other that capitalism and profiteering off of energy are a large part of the problem. Nationalize the energy companies, limit energy use. And yet, even if we somehow managed to do this, would it provide us the reprieve we need? I am afraid I am not so hopeful about humanity’s future. In the end I think that too many are not interested in conservation, never mind radical conservation. I know many people who have gone back to traveling, shopping, dining, even with the threat of COVID, tired of the disruption to their lives. People won’t live more simply until they are forced to do so whether by war or natural disaster. And then many won’t live because they have no clue how to survive the elements and food scarcity. The last storm that blew through my neck of the woods in Ontario has left people with out power for over a week and some are facing more weeks as the tree fall and damage will take that long to clean up. We were only without power for 14 hours or so and are lucky to be able to afford a back up generator, which we have just purchased and are awaiting installation. It will get us through a temporary problem but since it requires natural gas, it won’t serve us well for a long term crisis. I don’t think many people want to think about what is coming our way. The imagineering suggested above is scoffed at as science fiction. The denial is too strong for the kind of action required.
Perhaps one could get some people to ” live more simply” if one could credibly show those people how “living more simply” can be weaponised against the fossil fuel community. ” Hate-based initiatives. A Thousand Points of Hate. With a head full of plans and a heart full of hate, we can make things happen.” That sort of thing.
I remember the Oil Crisis days. I remember the 55 mile per hour speed limit. Many Texans thought it was very funny to put on their cars a bumper sticker saying:
” Drive 65. Freeze a Yankee”. The proper response would have been ” Drive 55. Starve a Texan”. We need that approach now. Maybe for you in Canada the saying could be . . .” Drive 55. Starve a Texalbertan” Or an Albertexan. Or whatever the miners and sellers of Alberta Tar Dreck are called.
Here is a video about a very big tractor pulling very big tillage tools in a very big field in Montana. I don’t think ” we” or anyone are going to “change” this system by any policy or agitation or anything else. I think the best us can do for now is to patronize the tiny little parallel lower-fossil higher-biology systems which exist to grow specialty chem-free food for people willing and able to pay. If the mainstream system erodes or decays or slow-crashes on its own so totally that its practitioners feel driven to look elsewhere for answers, perhaps the community of “parallel practitioners” which us have keep surviving in business will be able to offer some answers if asked.
Meanwhile , here is that video.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uFKsy3Nhx9o