The material in this post is taken from the end of Chapter 1 of the book Faith in a Changing Climate.
More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness; the other to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly. (Woody Allen, attr.)
The final chapter of this book is missing. Actually, it has not been written, and I do not intend to write it.
The world is awash in books, web sites, government mandates and reports that describe the dilemmas we face, particularly climate change. These documents are generally organized as follows.
The climate crisis is real, the consequences could be catastrophic, and we have very little time to respond.
We, by which is meant governments and large organizations, need to radically transform the energy infrastructure of society. This all needs to be done within just a few years. A target year of 2050 is frequently mentioned, as in Net Zero by 2050.
Therefore, we need to find a new source of energy that has all the marvelous qualities of crude oil (specifically, high energy density and molecular building blocks) but that does not create environmental problems — particularly global warming.
The first Industrial Revolution started 300 years ago, but we have just 25 years to develop and implement a second revolution and to develop a brand-new infrastructure. We need to do this without simultaneously creating massive greenhouse gas emissions from the manufacture of the immense amounts of steel and concrete that are needed to build solar farms, wind turbines and nuclear power plants.
We also need to invent, commercialize and implement new technologies for removing and then storing the enormous quantities of greenhouse gases that we have already emitted ― once more in just 25 years.
Exponential economic growth can continue in this new system, even though solar and wind are low energy density, and common sense tells us that infinite growth on a finite planet is unrealistic.
Finally, and most critically, virtually all of the programs for addressing our dilemmas incorporate an unstated assumption that we can solve the climate crisis while maintaining, or even improving, our current material standard of living.
The emphasized text in the final bullet point is crucial. No politician or industrial leader can call for sacrifice. These leaders pin all of their hopes on endless economic growth. Most people, including many of those in the climate change community, happily go along with the statements and assumptions just listed. But those who recognize that climate change is just one component in a highly complex system come to realize that there are no easy solutions ― indeed, there are no solutions, just responses. Hence, ending books, reports and web pages with a happy chapter is disingenuous to the point of dishonesty.
The works of William Catton, one of the early leaders in describing the predicaments we face, illustrate the decision not have a happy chapter. His first book, written in the early 1980s, was entitled Overshoot (Catton W. R., 1982). In it he argued that our problems are not to do with specific issues such as climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, wealth inequality, or political gridlock. Rather, the fundamental issue is our inability to understand and accept the impact that humanity is having upon the world’s ecosystems. He stated that we have overshot our resource base, hence the title of his book. He concluded that our only choice is to live modestly. Few people listened then; few people listen now.
Catton’s final book, published in the year 2009, was Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse (Catton W. R., 2009). In that book, he dispensed with the happy chapter; instead it simply gave us the grim prognosis that society is on an unstoppable trajectory to significant die-off. He said that humans have become so numerous, so ravenous and so short-sighted that in the 21st century we will go through a bottleneck that will involve a radical and fast reduction in the world’s population.
Other writers have a similar message. In the post Farewell . . . For Now Michael Krieger says, ‘After watching the first half of 2020 play out, I’ve finally seen enough’ (Krieger, 2020). He said that he intended to stop writing about society’s problems, and to focus instead on practical matters, such as growing his own food.
We see a similar message from Colin Campbell at the blog ‘Cassandra’s Legacy’. (Campbell was a founding member of ASPO ― the Association for the Study of Peak Oil). In a post The End of an Age: The Failure of Catastrophism, written in the year 2020, he said,
The "peak oil movement" was started by a group of retired geologists around the end of the 1990s. You could call us "catastrophists," but catastrophe was not what we were aiming for. We were not revolutionaries, we never thought to storm the Bastille, to give power to the people, or to create a proletarian paradise. We were scientists, we just wanted society to get rid of fossil fuels as soon as possible, although we did think that the final result would have been a more just and peaceful society.
But how to reach this goal? Of course, we understood that humankind is nothing homogeneous, but we saw no reason why the people in power shouldn't have listened to our message. After all, it was in their best interest to keep the economy alive. So, the plan was to diffuse the message of resource depletion as a scientific message, not a political one. We did our best to produce models, to make studies, to convene meetings, to publish scientific papers . . .
It was an utter failure. We might have expected it, but we were politically naive.
Yet another writer on these topics was George Mobus. Writing in the year 2021 in the post Happy Summer Solstice, Goodbye and Thanks for All the Fish he said,
I honestly did not expect to be a witness to the end of civilization when I started blogging those many years ago. Though I thought I could clearly see where the trends (energy, climate, social) were heading and tried to lay out the arguments for why we needed to change our ways, I thought that the really bad outcomes would post-date my life. I grieved for my children, of course. But never really thought I would be witness to the end game itself.
Now I’m not so sure. In fact I think that recent developments in climate science, energy science, and political science make it clear that we have entered the end game already . . . We will not be able to save civilization as we know it by any kind of technological magic . . .
I’m calling the game over. I just cannot see a solution that has humanity going on in any kind of lifestyle that we have grown accustomed to in the 21st century.
My advice is head for the hills . . . And, good luck.
In a 2021 comment at the reddit Collapse site ‘Tex’ said,
I'm firmly convinced that humanity can't and won't change course. The immediate-term benefits of mass consumption of fossil fuels and other resources are too appealing, it would be both political and military suicide for any country to try to meaningfully reduce these things until forced to by circumstances . . .
At most we'll see some more of what we're already seeing: laughable token measures (replacing coal electric plants with natgas, bans on plastic shopping bags) and subsidy grifting by billionaires (EV's, solar panels, biofuels) among developed nations while developing nations like China and India continue to hoover up every dirty resource they can, basically letting rich countries outsource their pollution to them in exchange for a share of the resulting wealth. No one with any real power anywhere will ever try to strike at the root of the problem with ideas like population stabilization or controlled de-industrialization or de-globalization. Every powerful and wealthy person on the planet will fight against these things with every resource at their disposal.
I do believe that political and business leaders are to some extent aware of these problems; it's not a question of getting them to suddenly wake up and realize that nothing grows forever and fossil fuels will certainly run out one day, it's that there are no solutions to these problems that are both effective and palatable. So they serve out their terms, offer the aforementioned fake solutions, and wish their successors luck.
A fundamental reason for this lack of progress is that a completely new way of thinking is required, and that we will all need to make large sacrifices in our standard of living. We have to accept that non-stop economic growth will come to an end, either voluntarily or otherwise. Those who are well off will have to accept a much more modest standard of living. People in poorer countries will also have to accept that they are not going to attain a high-consumption lifestyle that they see in western countries now. There is a need for leadership, but that leadership will have to take us through the bottleneck that Catton talks about. Maybe that leadership can come from the church.
Yet another writer who has adopted the same approach is Paul Chefurka, whose Ladder of Awareness was described earlier in this chapter. He no longer contributes to the public discussion ― his last post at his web site was in the year 2013.
When people first become aware of Age of Limits issues, they tend to see the problems as being mostly to do with science and technology. But, as they learn more about the intractable nature of the issues that we face, they become aware that the basic problem is to do with human behavior and morality. The following quotation from Gus Speth of the Club of Rome is representative of this understanding.
I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.
Speth’s insight that environmental problems are fundamentally moral and spiritual problems lies at the heart of this book.
Does the response of these experts mean that we give up hope? Certainly, there seems to be little chance of growing, or even maintaining material prosperity. Therefore, any hope has to be to do with spiritual prosperity.
