Nikiforuk and the Death Cult.

It had to be said.  

We're all going through a rough spell - soaring fuel and food costs, a mutating virus, a new and less stable Cold War, a steadily worsening and erratic climate, a breakdown of social cohesion and the rise of populism. What next?

We imagine there's a light at the end of the tunnel. Somehow, sometime we'll get back to normal. Our optimism is an article of faith.

The Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk warns don't count on it.

The experts mostly blame the pandemic, unsettled supply chains and great surges in demand. Don’t worry, the authorities tell us, all of this is temporary and transient.

At the same time political insurrectionists, who now proliferate like rodents in our whack-a-mole culture, have blamed everything from government deficits to carbon taxes for inflation. They do so even though inflation has appeared in jurisdictions with no deficits and no carbon taxes.

Pierre Poilievre, for instance, has famously accused the Bank of Canada for Canada’s 30-year high inflation rate. On Twitter the demagogue and wannabe prime minister claims that “money printing deficits” have “bid up the price of goods.”

...Whenever the price of diesel goes wild so too does the cost of our food, much of which travels far to our pantries. As the energy ecologist Vaclav Smil has calculated it takes the energy equivalents of five cups of diesel fuel (from fertilizers to herbicides to transportation) to put one kilogram of imported tomatoes on the table.

In fact we live in a wasteful civilization that thinks it is entirely acceptable to burn 10 calories of mostly fossil fuels to make one calorie of food, and all by employing fewer than one per cent of the population. Prior to the colonization of farming by fossil fuels, agriculture was local, small, low energy (employing human or animal muscle), inefficient and nutritious. Now it is global, big, high energy, efficient and tasteless.

The inflationary problem doesn’t stop with food. Most people, for example, still don’t understand that one barrel of oil does the equivalent work of 4.5 years of human labour.

As a consequence current oil consumption equals the employment of 500 billion fossil fuel “energy slaves” in our economy. This vast disruptive army has enabled the level of global consumption responsible for the relentless poisoning of oceans, the degradation of forests, the depletion of fisheries, the erosion of soils, the disruption of nutrient cycles and the destabilization of the climate.

...Crap made by high energy spending drives globalization. The average North American will consume 1.37 million kilograms [roughly 19 tonnes per year] of minerals, metals and fossil fuels over their lifetime. The list includes 23.4 tonnes of cement, 8.7 tonnes of iron ore, 60 grams of gold, 2.7 billion litres of petroleum; and seven tonnes of phosphate rock. None of this bounty could be harnessed without the expenditure of fossil fuels.

Here is where the long emergency has delivered us today. Extracting fossil fuels is increasingly difficult. So oil producers need high prices to extract harder-to-get deposits like bitumen, fracked gas and deep-sea oil — what experts call “extreme” resources. But consumers need cheap oil prices to buy goods and services. They yearn for bygone days when oil was cheap and plentiful. Welcome to today’s volatile oil economics. Oil producers and petrostates cheer prices of US$100 per barrel or more — but the same trend poses a threat to the family finances of ordinary consumers. The system is cannibalizing itself.

By any measure cheap oil paved the road for massive globalization. Not surprisingly, expensive oil will either put the whole show in reverse or invite variations on chaos. If we are to finally take heed of our long emergency, we must break free of today’s dominant narratives about not only inflation but economic growth and what we really need to live saner lives.

The Green Revolution, don't count on it.

Nikiforuk, in part two of his expose, argues that the renewable energy miracle has been dangerously oversold, including by the greens.

We are now trapped in what I have called “the poverty of two narratives” that pits the business-as-usual crowd against the green transitionists. This supposed debate avoids unpleasant realities such as rising global consumption and growing rates of energy use in a finite world. Moreover, both groups believe unlimited economic growth is the only answer to our multiplying emergencies.

Neither side recognizes that today’s inflation is but a harbinger of the unravelling of our complex, interdependent, globalized economy as fossil fuels become more expensive and in key ways irreplaceable by so-called renewables. Neither side wants to upset the people who fundamentally “don’t want to change anything” as British scientist James Lovelock observes.

...About 20 years ago a real energy transition actually occurred. That’s when the petroleum industry started, by geological necessity, to extract extreme and costly resources such as fracked oil, bitumen and deep-sea oil. As a consequence energy price volatility began to rock the globalization project. Extreme resources make ugly ecological footprints, require mountains of cash and deliver fewer energy returns.

...The techno-greens believe that civilization can substitute fossil fuels, which are densely packed with energy, with renewables, which are less energy dense — and do so without subsequent reductions in demand or changes in behaviour.

Power density can’t be taken for granted. It measures how much a particular form of energy can flow from a given unit area. Art Berman recently explained what a shift from high density to low density energy sources means. In basic English, “it takes two coal workers, 169 solar workers and 1,100 wind workers to equal the work of one natural gas worker.”

...No civilization, of course, has moved from high energy sources to lower ones without encountering big problems. Although “renewable energy promoters claim that we can replace our current energy needs without fossil fuels,” adds Berman, the truth is this: “The triumph of technology may allow that but it will do little to end the ongoing ecosystem disaster.”

James Lovelock's Third Way.

There is, of course, a third narrative which no one wants to discuss. Lovelock, who is famous for postulating the Gaia hypothesis for how Earth’s systems are regulated in synch, urged in 2005 that we embrace “a sustainable retreat.”

An economic retreat means shrinking fossil fuel spending by at least one third, which means the end of economic growth. (One recent study suggested high income states probably need to cut their resource use by 70 per cent.)

So what does shrinkage look like? It means returning to standards of living prevalent in the 1960s and 1950s. It means deglobalization. It means slow living instead of fast consumption. It means walking instead of flying. It means more people growing food on smaller plots. It means relocalizing life. It means making changes most of us are not yet willing to talk about, let alone make.

In 1972, analysts, including Donella and Dennis Meadows, asked what would happen if civilization continued growing without limits. The model warned that business as usual would lead to scarcity, disruptions and failing ecosystems sometime between 2010 and 2020. As resources become harder and more expensive to extract, civilization would start digging a hole for itself. A population crash would follow declines in agricultural production sometime around 2030.

An Australian research scientist, Graham Turner, revisited the data in 2014. He found that global trends closely aligned with the Limits to Growth model so compellingly that he suggested civilization was already unravelling. Turner offered this conclusion: “This suggests, from a rational risk-based perspective, that we have squandered the past decades, and that preparing for a collapsing global system could be even more important than trying to avoid collapse.”

...Now a widespread inertia prevents us from seizing control of our fate. We must do all we can to overcome that torpor. The implications are plain. Those communities that reject business as usual and cut their energy spending and all the materialist values that go with it, just might survive the long emergency and write a different ending to this story.

I've been writing about Lovelock's "sustainable retreat", steady-state economics and our climate woes for well over a decade. I went through a few of those early posts and found this NYT missive, from 2009.

“We created a way of raising standards of living that we can’t possibly pass on to our children,” said Joe Romm, a physicist and climate expert who writes the indispensable blog climateprogress.org. We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks — water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land — and not by generating renewable flows.

“You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior,” added Romm. “But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, ‘This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...’ Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy.”

Various polls show a general acceptance that the world our grandchildren will inherit will be considerably worse than what we have enjoyed. While there seems to be a consensus on that, it has never been accompanied by a broad willingness to do what we can for them in the meantime.

We're in it for ourselves and that extends into our governments. Especially in the prairie provinces, bitumen is akin to how many Americans fiercely defend their right to assault rifles.

Nikiforuk's analyses should be read in their entirety.  If he is right, and he usually is, we have some tough decisions to make and very little appetite for it.

As for the venerable James Lovelock, ten years ago he had a change of heart, even dismissing his books as 'alarmist.'  The centenarian obviously didn't want to be a Cassandra in 2012. He then absolved us of our sins, saying we didn't know any better so go out and party.

Where did Lovelock go wrong? He jumped the gun. He didn't foresee the climate changes that have arrived over the past decade. Secondly, he was addressing climate change in isolation, as a stand alone issue. He didn't recognize the looming climate crisis as an integral component of a larger and more vexing problem that includes overpopulation and over-consumption triggering resource shortages and exhaustion.

Comment Response:

Hi, Marie.  I don't envy you. The recalcitrants have already been influenced - friends and/or family. A lot of adults are fearful and tell your students what they, themselves want to believe.

In "Collapse," Jared Diamond warns that when civilizations collapse it usually happens at a zenith and that it comes on abruptly.  We may be nearing that point.  This time is different in that we have created a global economy that loosely anchors a global civilization.

It's time to revisit John Raulston Saul's 2005 book, "The Collapse of Globalism." He writes that western societies change economic models about every 30 years. Each is a belief-based construct. Back then he argued that globalism had already run its course and we were in an interregnum awaiting the "next great thing." Here we are, 2022, and that next great thing is nowhere to be found. We're still stuck with globalism and we don't know what else to do. The purpose of globalism is growth and we cannot get past that.

Lungta:

I didn't mean to overlook your fine comment.

Over the past two centuries mankind's knowledge has expanded enormously, enabling us to send men to the moon and rovers to Mars.

Somewhere along the line, however, wisdom became untethered from knowledge. We do things because we can with scant regard to whether we should. That's the path to self-harm, perhaps even mass extinction.

We have some options remaining. The best slipped through our fingers 30 years ago and probably cannot be reclaimed.  What troubles me is there is no interest in the options that do remain, especially sustainable retreat.  The voting public wouldn't stand for it.  That's a formula for chaos.