Response to Robert Jensen query on intellectual and emotional
reactions to collapse
22 June 2010
hi
I am sure you will get many reports of a path of intellectual and
emotional reactions similar to mine.
I am an American currently running a small neuroimaging center for
the UCL and Birkbeck psychology and language sciences departments
in London (I was previously at the UCSD Cognitive Science department
for 20 years). However, I was originally educated in geology.
I first got interested in energy in high school in the late 60's
and early 70's, after narrowly avoiding being drafted for Vietnam
(the war ended 5 months after I got my low-enough-to-be-drafted
lottery number). After graduating with an undergraduate geology
degree in 1978, however, I turned to neuroscience and temporarily
forgot about energy depletion as energy prices collapsed.
I became aware of the issue again just after 9/11 in the run up to
the Afghan and Iraq wars. By 2002, I realized the full gravity of
the situation. I also started reading more about water, fish,
climate, and about how money and the Fed work (I had studied many
things in college but I had always studiously avoided economics).
My initial reaction to rediscovering peak energy was a tremendously
urgent feeling that I had to get the word out that industrial
civilization was at serious risk of collapse in a few decades. For
over a decade, I have kept an ungainly 'blog' of (extreme left)
rants on war and economics and energy here
Some of the earlier entries reflect that urgency. In Feb 2003,
just before the Iraq war started, I gave a public speech
against the war at a San Diego demonstration, focussing on peak
oil.
This is probably what got me into the always-check-this-guy line
at the airport for a few years (I'm off the list now, perhaps because
of my proven ineffectiveness :-{ ).
I prepared an hour-long graph-filled peak oil/energy talk and gave
it to my department (Cognitive Science) at UCSD in 2004. I did
weekly updates on the online talk slides
for 4 years.
The talk was interesting enough to the CIA that for a few years,
they had a web bot downloading a copy of it every night at 11:30
PM (I didn't change it *that* often and it wasn't *that* interesting
guys...).
I also talked a great deal about this to friends and relatives, who
for the most part tired of hearing about it.
But after the initial shock of my rediscovery of limits to growth
gradually wore off, my emotional tone began to change toward
misanthropy. I suppose this is also a typical vice of increasing
age (I'm now 55).
It began to become clear that the only way that the terrible
catastrophes on the way could have been softened would have been
for everyone on the planet to have dropped business as usual 10 or
20 years ago, and to have started retooling all of society while
there was still a reasonable surplus of high EROEI (energy return
on energy investment) fossil fuel left to power the *energetically*
costly conversion process of reengineering energy production,
housing, cities, suburbs, farming, fishing, and transport.
That didn't happen. And having lived through the period, it would
have been completely impossible to motivate in the first or third
world.
But just as important, it is *even more* unlikely that this will
begin to happen now. This is because growing energy scarcity will
cut into our flexibility as people scramble to prop up floundering
systems.
The recent discussion of BP is an excellent example of the kind
magical thinking that has convinced me that nothing can be done.
People are rightly upset that the BP monster cut many corners in a
gamble to save money, and that it is now successfully working with
its lawyers to socialize the costs of that gamble-gone-bad while
retaining all of the filthy lucre from previous successful bets.
Though the failed BP well was more difficult than average, there
are hundreds of equally difficult wells in the Gulf that have been
drilled and produced without major disaster, which rightfully makes
us all even more angry about what BP did. In fact there are even
more difficult wells out there currently in safe operation with,
for example, resevoir pressures of 20,000 pounds per square --
versus the 'mere' 13,000 pounds per square inch (that is 6 tons per
square inch!) that is blowing oil and methane past the partially
closed blow-out preventer in the BP well disaster.
But along with that justifiable outrage, I have seen hardly any
trace of realization that the main reason this oil/gas well was
hard to drill was that the easier shallow water oil already has
10,000 straws/wells empyting it into our gas tanks. The easier
stuff always goes first. People don't want to see oiled pelicans
and dolphins; but they won't budge in reducing energy usage or even
think about reengineering industrial civilization to avoid collapse.
They want to stop deep water drilling but they still childishly
want the same amount of oil. They would never getting out of their
car onto a bike (unless the bike was in the fitness center). They
are traumatized by 1 barrel of oil leaking out every few seconds
in the Gulf, but they don't give a thought to the 1,000 barrels of
oil used by the world *every second* of every day (1 cubic mile per
year), with the US alone using 250 barrels of oil per second.
And people have long forgotten that one barrel of oil equals one
year of hard physical labor (invited oildrum post).
But the kicker is that even for someone like me who has spent many
more hours than the average person memorizing endless facts about
energy depletion, that knowledge is still not powerful enough
to radically change *my* behaviour. When my wife and I moved to
London, we of course got rid of our car. We walk and ride public
transport and I use my bicycle rain or shine. However, I still
fly to conferences, and back to the States to see relatives and to
do research. My net energy savings have not been substantial.
No politician *or* revolutionary can seriously propose de-growth a
strategy and then gather enough popular support to implement it.
People can write about it in a theoretical way, but it has virtually
no effect on most people's behaviour.
I really think the *only* historically proven mechanism with the
power to stop most people from overrunning their resources is
constraints on food production. It is true that humans are a lot
smarter than animals, mostly because of
language.
But this has allowed humans to construct an environment that is so
much more complex than any animal society, that they have ended up
putting themselves in a similar situation to a herd of deer on an
island about to overrun their browse.
The deer can't help themselves. They can't understand their
predicament. We people are similar: we can't help ourselves and
our predicament is truly beyond our individual comprehension.
There are more new third world babies than 'western' babies,
which scares rich westerners, who forget that each new western
baby uses as much additional energy as 20 third world babies.
Even a Second Life avatar in the first world uses more energy than
a real-life Brazilian. Both westerners and Brazilians will continue
to reproduce.
Given that people live a long time, it will take the death rates
of WWI, WWII, and the 'Spanish flu' put together, every year, for
50 years to put a significant dent in our numbers.
It's likely to be a rough ride. I have no confidence my pension
will be there in 10 or 20 years from now when I really need it. I
talk to my wife about all this. Given that I don't have any plan
for how to fix any of it, she justifiably tells me to give it a
rest.
I think she has a point.
cheers,
marty sereno