Nikiforuk - Back to The Future. No, Really. Party Like It's 1970.

 

What if we could go back to the 70s?

The early 70s. Global population stood around 3.5 billion (8 billion today).  The human ecological footprint had not quite exceeded our finite planet's carrying capacity. We didn't live as long. We didn't consume as much. Mankind was (quite unintentionally) living in balance with our biosphere, Spaceship Earth.

Andrew Nikiforuk writes that today's leaders have to stop the "Big Bold Lie." 

Thanks to bright green technologies, we can continuously grow the level of consumption on planet Earth and deliver a bloated North American lifestyle to all without inviting climate catastrophe or a general breakdown of natural ecosystems that support all living things.

That’s the big bold lie that politicians are telling themselves this week at yet another climate conference.

A number of brilliant energy critics from Vaclav Smil to William Rees have done the figuring, acknowledged the physical limits of things, and told us the truth. A truth that is not as uncomfortable as you might think.

It is this. We must contract the global economy, restructure technological society and restore what’s left of natural ecosystems if we want to live and breathe.

Readers of this blog will be familiar with these arguments.

Why do so many members of our political, academic and media classes insist on telling us that unproven technologies will refloat the globe’s sinking Titanic?

The reason is simple. Big green lies allow the political class to avoid talking about a radical restructuring of the technological society and an end to economic growth.

You might have heard of the term "overshoot" but how many of us connect the reality of overshoot with our everday life. If you were born after the mid-70s, your entire life has been spent in overshoot. What few realize is that overshoot, unless it is reversed, leads to only one outcome - civilizational collapse.

There is a way to slow, even possibly reverse our slide into collapse. Energy ecologist Vaclav Smil says it can be done.

A sensible society, he argues, would have taxed the hell out of big cars, big homes and frequent travellers decades ago, but there is a shortage of common sense and yes, it has something to do with supply chains.

Smil, a no bullshit guy, has repeatedly asked: What’s wrong with returning to the level of energy spending experienced in the 1950s and 1960s?

“I could design you the global system today without any horrible loss of standard of living all around the world,” he recently told David-Wallace Wells.

“Consuming 30, 40, 50 per cent less of everything that we are consuming, be it water, or steel, or energy. But we are not willing to go down that route. Technically, it doesn’t require any new inventions, nothing, and it will actually save us money in many ways.”

But people and politicians want more and not less. “They want to have their SUVs, and they want to have their raspberries in January. That’s the problem,” said Smil. They also don’t realize if we don’t manage a descent in energy spending, we will face a collapse of civilization.

Our Leaders. The Blind Leading the Blind.

Unfortunately, today’s leaders refuse to enable the conversation we need to have. That is because they reflect our society’s dominant technological bias. Most of us are now inmates of what a group of British geologists call the technosphere, or what the social critic Jacques Ellul described as “la technique” long ago.

It is a parasitic growth on the biosphere (the living world) that consumes fossil fuels to drive economic and human growth. All of that growth requires increasing levels of technological complexity that seeks to control every aspect of human life. But the cheap energy to power this complexity is now dwindling and creating a crisis the system can not register, let alone acknowledge.

The preservation of the technosphere at any cost explains why our politicians champion energy dead ends such as carbon capture, utilization and storage; direct air capture; dematerialization and hydrogen power.

We're Playing a Deadly Game We Cannot Win.

Ignore those alarmists that say contraction means you and I must live in cold caves. An economic retreat does not mean returning to the Dark Ages. As Hagens has observed, a 30-per-cent GDP drop in the United States would bring that nation back to a 1990s level of energy spending. A 50 per cent drop in GDP would bring the U.S. back to a 1973 level. Were those times so bad?

"It is likely that, in the not-too-distant future, the size, complexity and (literal) ‘burn rate’ of our civilization will be much reduced by forces other than human volition,” Hagens warns.

Anyone who has the miserable experience of downsizing will understand that a good deal of the stuff we acquire is crap. Nothing proves this more than discovering that nobody wants your stuff, not even for free, not even your kids. Suddenly you're left with the realization you paid good money for that stuff, you like it, but you've come to the point where you don't need it and, worse, don't want it.