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Possibly an odd thing for me to say here, but I would love to be wrong.
I would love for everything I am about to write in the days/months to come to be total crap. I’d love for someone to post a point of view which was well supported with both reason and evidence which showed that oil was not finite, or that it was not filling so many roles which we aren’t even looking for something else to fill, or that we are working on sensible, workable solutions for the peak oil situation. Hydrogen fuel-cells are not a replacement for oil, since there are no hydrogen lakes. Hydrogen is an energy carrier, not an energy source. As such it can’t replace oil. No one even bother suggesting nuclear, the argument there is too easy to bother with.
I would love for someone to show that we are not deforesting the planet. That, year on year, we are not losing anchient forests and jungle and rainforest. Anchient is the key modifier there. New growth is meaningless. A new growth forest contains only a fraction of the bio-diversity of an anchient forest. A new growth forest often only contains one species of tree also, which makes matters even worse.
If someone could come along and prove that we are not spewing so many greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere that there is no other inevitable result than widespread climate change that would be great. If you could even prove that Mark Lynas (Six Degrees: Our Future on a Hotter Planet) is wrong, that global climate change is not going to reach six degrees (or over) if we make it reach three degrees, or that if the global climate does reach six degrees that this would be inconsequential for non-human life on the planet then that would be something.
Maybe you would even be so good as to disprove the assertion that we are responsible for the destruction and extinction of over 200 species a day.
No, I would love to be wrong. I would love it if business as usual was an option. It would mean I was in the minority of crazies instead of being in the minority of sane people.
Broadly speaking I subscribe to Derrick Jensen’s 20 premises as laid out in his two volume book, Endgame.
The premises in order can be found here.
A somewhat naieve, and perfectly ‘normal’, commentary can be found here.
Why is this a normal and naieve commentary? Basically it does what so many people do when confronted by the fact that a system which is designed to grow (cultures based on agriculture, or ‘civilisation’) isn’t sustainable. It says “you can’t prove that” and “we could transform this system into a sustainable one”.
Economic models such as we use need growth. Without growth our version of economics, the civilised person’s economics, fails. This has been true ever since we developed the concept to describe what was happening within our agricultural societies. A system that needs growth isn’t sustainable.
If you read Endgame, which I highly recommend you do, he lays out a very workable definition of civilisation. Jensen defines civilisation as “a way of life characterised by the growth of cities.”[1] As he points out, civilisation is often directly linked to the appearence of cities. With this definition and with the subsequent definition of cities, it is impossible to argue that civilisation is redeemable. If you change the fundamental nature of either cities (impossible realistically at current densities, thus impossible without making them not be cities as we would have any chance of recognising) then civilisation might be redeemable, but by changing the nature of what a city is you stop it being a city and thus you’re no longer in a civilisation. You might be in a tribe or a small community, but you aren’t in a civilisation.
The end may not come in my life time. I think it will. However, this is an area I would love to be wrong about. I think what Ran Prieur says in this short clip is actually spot on. As a blob of people, we like disaster movies because they give us the escapism that we would do something if there was a massive disaster and our way of life were threatened. The truth is that we will sit in our air-conditioned, centrally-heated houses complaining about the cost of petrol[2] or gas[3] and demanding that the very ‘free market’ system we were lauding just a mere month or so ago should not charge us what it can for goods we have to buy[4]. If we wanted to control the cost of petrol, gas, whatever, we should have kept nationalised industries in those areas. We didn’t. We invited the devil of free market economics to supper and got pissed that he actually burnt us. I’m not suggesting that we re-nationalise those industries (well, I wouldn’t ‘nationalise’ them so much as ‘localise’ them), but I am questioning the sense of giving those areas to private, profit seeking companies and then being shocked and dismayed when those same companies turn out to be seeking profit for private individuals rather than the good of the community.
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[1] http://www.kewego.co.uk/video/iLyROoafYKjY.html
[2] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/7527679.stm
[3] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7533389.stm
[4] http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/7534421.stm
