It is common for people who are concerned about looming catastrophes like climate change and peak oil to appeal to the humanity of those doing the damage. They think that, if only they could have a word with people like former U.S. President Bush or current Canadian Prime Minister Harper, climate action obstructors both, they could get through with an appeal about caring for their own children. This is highly unlikely, and more importantly, is a waste of precious time.

It is not that these people do not care about their children, but that they have a different morality than you and I. We like to think that, deep down, everyone is just like us. This is a dangerous delusion, and it should be clear to anyone who observes human behaviour even briefly. There are some obvious examples, including psychopaths who murder others for reasons we don’t understand, like Jeffrey Dahmer who murdered and ate young men, or Clifford Olsen who was a serial child murderer, or the freaks who go into a school and start shooting. These people are not like us, they clearly have a different morality, and it matters little whether it is due to nature or nurture: Either way, we must protect ourselves from their dangerous behaviour first, psychoanalyse them later.

There are less obvious examples; the documentary The Corporation has pointed out that corporations behave like sociopaths; they have no social conscience. Their CEOs are responsible for and profit greatly from this behaviour, so I think it is fair to call them antisocial to such an extent that they are a danger to the rest of us.

In fact, I think it is a fair argument to say that most people who seek power are not like you and me. Power comes not only through politics, but also through climbing the corporate ladder, accumulating vast wealth, aligning yourself with powerful people, or murdering others. People who lust for power operate from a predator morality, in which might makes right. In practice, this means that whatever they can get away with is morally acceptable.

Most people concerned about climate change or social justice simply reject this. They want to believe that these people, who are doing clearly immoral acts, can be reasoned with, that their innate humanity can be appealed to. This is delusional. These people are ignoring the psychopath’s behaviour and projecting their own values upon him.

The same thing occurs in reverse. The neocons and lunatic right are famous for projecting their values on the rest of us. Because they lie, they assume we must, too. Because they seek power, we must be, too. In fact, they see life as a battle for supremacy, and they don’t intend to lose. That is why they see global warming as a “socialist scheme“, an attempt to impose world government – an attempt to do what they are trying to do, which is establish a New World Order with them on top.

Because they see life as a struggle for power, they care for their children in ways that reflect this. They try to make lots of money and attain high-status positions, and encourage their children to do the same. They also don’t want the rest of us following that path because it means more competition, so that’s why school funding gets cut, welfare gets cut, and so on.

And the reason they do not care about climate change is because it contradicts their base value system in many ways. They are not interested in cooperation, which they see as weakness. To power-seekers, there is a clear hierarchy based on power, and one’s power is based on one’s political, economic, or military might. Cooperation, on the other hand, is a group of more-or-less equals working toward a common purpose. No power-seeker is going to do this for someone lower in the food chain.

I believe the differences in behaviour and morality are explained by how we seek security. Security is the greatest human need: None of us wants to die; we all want to live well for as long as possible. That is only possible with security of food and person, freedom from health issues, and so on. Some of these we can do more about that others.

Serial killers are, in their twisted way, seeking some control over their life by destroying others. Power-seekers look for security by dominating others – and this is a time-proven method of achieving security. You will live longer and better if you’re the top dog. Cooperators create security through stable communities, fair laws, and so on.

Attempts to appeal to the humanity of a high-level denier are a waste of time that we do not have. People who seek security through power…believe that security is obtained through achieving power, through being the Alpha wolf. When someone they see as a sheep attempts to persuade them of the joys of cooperation and being a good citizen, they do what wolves do with sheep.

I don’t mean the Paris Hiltons of the world, but her daddy and his cronies – the CEOs, executives, and politicians – the rich and powerful. These people are the modern aristocracy. They have the most to gain in the short-term from the status quo, from maintaining that the current course is the ideal, and by claiming that only their compass is capable of pointing True North. Further, they have the money and connections to insulate themselves from the consequences of their actions, up to a point. They are thus strongly motivated to believe what they want to believe and to ignore reality.

The common man is not so isolated from consequences and has less motivation to believe that the rich know best, so those at the top must employ ‘think tanks’ to tell the little people what to think. Not surprisingly, what think tanks spout frequently coincides with what the rich want everyone to think.

John Kenneth Galbraith, the famous economist, noted the tendency of executives to be most psychologically committed to the rightness of the corporate vision – they have to be in order to attain their position. For example, if you accept that human-caused climate change is a problem, you’re very unlikely to become Chief Executive Officer of an oil or coal or auto company. The opposite is true:

• Example #1: Bob Lutz is the product development chief and Vice Chairman at General Motors. Mr. Lutz recently called global warming a “total crock of sh*t,” but then went on to claim that his views had no bearing on GM’s commitment to build environmentally friendly vehicles. Uh huh.
• Example #2: Rex Tillerson is the CEO of ExxonMobil. Mr. Tillerson argues that “the science of climate change is far from settled and that his company views it as its “corporate social responsibility” to continue to supply the world with fossil fuels.” Fuels that, according to scientists, are destroying the world. Interesting view of “social responsibility.”
• Example #3: Don Blankenship is the CEO of Massey Energy, a coal company engaged in mountaintop removal mining and violator of the Clean Water Act no fewer than 12,000 times. Mr. Blankenship recently tweeted that “Some fear that we are entering a new Ice Age. We must demand that more coal be burned to save the Earth from global cooling.”

Presumably these executives do listen to their own scientists when it comes to issues like engine designs, efficacy of oil extraction rates, and so on. They are not opposed to science in general, simply to science that reveals that their business model is flawed, or that their prestige, power, and money results from doing harmful things. They have a psychological blind spot – a fatal flaw.

The idiocy of the modern aristocracy is not immediately fatal for those at the top. You may have noticed that they are not suffering much, so may question just how dangerous it is to be stupid and rich. The sad reality is that their flaw is fatal for us. In a prime example of this dangerously gross idiocy:

• Fatih Birol, chief economist of the International Energy Agency and formerly an OPEC employee, admits that their projections of remaining oil supply are based on wishful thinking. The IEA, which every government in the world relies upon for oil forecasts, had never actually measured how much oil remained until 2008.

The fantastic stupidity of this is mind-boggling to average people. Perhaps if one is paid hundreds of thousands per year, jets around the world on a plush expense account, and looks good in a $1,000 suit, one can find a way to make sense of the senseless. That Mr. Birol gets all this while being so incredibly dumb is a sure sign that idiocracy has arrived in the aristocracy. That Mr. Birol has multiple degrees means nothing; very intelligent people frequently do very stupid things. Because oil is so vital to our civilisation, Mr. Birol’s foolishness is going to cost us very dearly. Heck of a job, Birol.

And that is the true tragedy of allowing morans at the top. They are leading us all to destruction.

There is no shortage of evidence that we have the technology we need to ‘green’ our energy supply. From Pacala and Socolow’s Stabilization Wedges to 100 Miles of Mirrors, we have what we need to drastically cut carbon emissions and get off oil. The cost of acting now is vastly less than acting later – an ounce of prevention is still worth a pound of cure – and there could even be a huge net savings. The United States, for example, would no longer need a military ‘presence’ in the Middle East. So why aren’t we taking serious steps in that direction?

Why aren’t we moving? The answers, I believe, are denial and vested interests.

Vested Interests Protect Their Own Interests

Let’s start with the obvious: vested interests. U.S. oil, coal, and auto companies have spent a ton of money ‘influencing’ politicians to ensure that subsidies, tax breaks, and favourable legislation continue to protect their businesses. Favourable legislation includes spending on roads rather than electric trains, for example.

In addition, those same vested interests have given many millions to marketing firms thinly disguised as ‘think tanks’ to promote the theory that the market will solve all problems, and that to interfere with its workings is dangerous and even immoral. Dangerous, because interference will introduce distortions in prices so that actors in the market – buyers and sellers at all levels – will be acting on false information. (This ignores the rather obvious fact that the vested interests have been working very hard to bend the market in their favour in various ways for decades.)

And immoral, because the market has been put on a pedestal. That is, these ‘think tanks’ have been promoting the idea that the market is infallible and to tamper with it is to disrupt something sacred and pure. This is why more objective observers call such market worshippers Market Fundamentalists. Perhaps it should be more properly termed the Market.

It should be quite obvious to even a casual observer that the ‘Market’ is far from perfect. Perhaps they missed all the recent bubbles, the current recession, climate change, the huge executive bonuses for CEOs of companies on welfare? This brings us to the second, much larger problem.

Denial: Ignorance is Bliss…for now

In order to continue to pretend that the magical market will solve all problems, people must come up with all kinds of often insane justifications and must ignore – even attack – contrary evidence. The ‘think tanks’ do plenty of both, and they in turn feed the media and many individuals. Given the sorry state of the mainstream media, much of the time it simply regurgitates whatever press release or trumped-up justification for the market failure-de-jour that the think tanks send, and willing Americans, Canadians, and others lap it up because it fits with what they want to hear.

In order to pretend that everything is rosy, it is necessary to overlook inconvenient facts. For example, yesterday I wrote an article stating we should limit immigration to a level that stabilises the population in the United States and Canada. I have been roundly attacked for this by people who completely ignore facts they don’t want to know.

Some called me a racist, although I did mention in the article that my wife and many friends are Colombian. I guess I’m not doing racism right. Others just called me crazy. Maybe, but I can be crazy and right. The most serious problem, though, is that nobody addressed the main issue: Sooner or later, population growth must stop. Rather than face up to this reality, most people simply choose to ignore it and/or attack the messenger.

The same pattern is repeated with peak oil, the idea that, sooner or later, the oil must run out. Many people simply ignore that reality and pretend that either it never will, or at least not now. Any evidence that the oil is running out now, or that we should prepare for such an event, is ignored or attacked. Climate change has been turned into a political circus by shills – the think tanks and paid marketers for oil and coal companies – despite the rather obvious and growing evidence that yes, humans can and are affecting the climate.

Stop the Insanity

To deny reality is foolish, even insane, yet that is what the majority of our society does, including many so-called ‘leaders.’ Some of these people are highly intelligent, but they are sorely lacking in wisdom. Ignorance may be bliss for a time but reality’s a cold, hard bitch. When the oil starts to run short and prices spike – that’s a bit late to start thinking about converting an economy and civilisation that is totally, utterly built on cheap oil.

When the climate is changing – irreversibly and for the worse for humans – that’s a bit late to stop what’s causing the change. When population turns into overpopulation, it’s too late to think about reducing it; Mother Nature will take care of it, though.

It has been said that humans respond to crisis well, but not to long-term threats. This is one of the reasons we were able to retool our economies so quickly for World War II (after years of denying the evidence of Nazi Germany’s military build-up and Hitler’s stated plans), but seem paralysed in the face of creeping threats like peak oil, climate change, and overpopulation.

Of course, many more people might realise that these things are crises if they were not being told otherwise by the media and leaders, who are saying that because that’s what they’re being paid to say. Ain’t the Market grand?

A Crisis is a Terrible Thing to Waste

Savvy people have used crises in the past – for better or for worse. The Bush administration jumped all over the terrorist attack of 9/11 to launch two wars, enrich their friends, and eliminate many Constitutional rights. Bush and Obama  used the economic meltdown to enrich their bankster cronies. Franklin Delano Roosevelt used the Great Depression to bring in numerous social reforms that exist – and are cherished by millions – to this day.

Today, we face multiple crises, any of which could be absolutely devastating: peak oil appears to be first in line, with climate change, overpopulation, and resource drawdown not far behind.

What is it going to take before we realise that these crises are just that, and respond accordingly?

Do you ever feel like you’re the only sane person in an insane world? I don’t want to believe that climate change and peak oil and peak fish and ocean acidification and various other looming catastrophes are coming. Who does? That would be psychopathic. At the same time, ignoring real-world evidence and shouting down scientists seems rather…crazy.

It’s easy to start questioning your sanity when so many act as if nothing is wrong. Here I am, fighting to get action on peak oil and climate change, and there goes Joe the Plumber, commuting to work in his brand new Hummer with a Support the Troops bumper sticker. And it’s not just people who could, possibly, be excused for not knowing any better. The Canadian Conservative Party, U.S. Republicans, and Libertarians everywhere – all loudly turning a blind eye to reality.

Is this not crazy? I have asked for contrary evidence from credible sources, and all I get are:

• Variations on “You’re crazy”; people calling me paranoid, sex-deprived, too stupid to even talk to, and so on
• Sources that are clearly not credible; look, if some guy is not a climate scientist, receives funding from oil companies, has a history of being funded by corporations and pushing their view against that of the vast majority of scientists and accumulated evidence, HE IS NOT CREDIBLE

I suppose people are desperate to believe what they want to believe. Perhaps many of them think that by shooting the messenger, the message he carries also dies. I wish it were true.

How do you keep your sanity in a world where so many lie to themselves and others? One fellow sent me a list of supposed climate scientists who deny that climate change is happening, or agree that it is but say it’s not dangerous, or agree that it is happening and is dangerous but we can’t do anything about it anyway so let’s make as much money and whoop-it-up while we can; I can’t remember. There are so many such lists and so many conflicting claims. The problem that I have found with them is that they are bullshit. When I pointed out to the man who sent me his particular list that, on the very first page were numerous people with zero qualifications in climate science (some management consultants, a couple of engineers, economists, retired stock promoters and so forth), he immediately shot back with “Well, what about all the other people on the list?”

This is intellectual dishonesty. Look, if you are relying on a list of supposed credible sources, it is your job to validate your sources, not mine. When I see a list where it is instantly obvious that many on it are not credible, don’t expect me to go through the entire list. I’m throwing the whole thing out.

Peak oil denial is even more incredible. Obviously the oil will run out someday; there was a fixed supply to start with. To deny that is to confirm your foolishness: “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.”

Given the massive dependence of our entire economy on oil, it seems rather dumb not to plan for it running out – or even to make the slightest attempt to determine when it will. That’s like piling your family in the car and driving off into the wilderness without ever once checking the gas gauge. I would call that a really stupid thing to do. Crazy. Nuts. Idiotic. Irresponsible. Yet that is exactly what highly paid people whose job it is to check the gas gauge have been doing.

So who’s the crazy person here? Am I loony because I only listen to credentialed, peer-reviewed climate scientists? Is it nuts to ignore people paid by oil companies, who just happen to be pushing views that maximise short-term profits for oil companies, and who have a documented history of doing the same thing for tobacco and other industries? Who’s the kook? Me, who insists on credible sources, on actual data, on common sense, or the people who say the oil is not going to run out now because it’s just not. Why? Because. It’s like talking to a three-year-old. In a thousand-dollar suit.

If a sane person were locked in an airtight room, one of his first thoughts would surely be, “How long will the air last?” The answer to that question determines your response. Do you have minutes, hours, days? If one of these peak oil or climate denier twits was locked in that airtight room, I suppose he would sit passively, secure in the knowledge that the air fairy would provide.

For non-twits

There are several very good websites and books that provide credible information on peak oil and climate change. Here are some websites:

Peak Oil:

• The Oil Drum
• Energy Bulletin
• Association for the Study of Peak Oil (ASPO) International

Climate Change:

• RealClimate: Climate Science from Climate Scientists
• Grist
• The Guardian’s Environment section

And some books:

Our society runs on cheap and readily available energy just as our bodies require oxygen. And, just as any restriction in our supply of oxygen causes us immediate and serious harm, so will any crimp in the supply of energy rapidly drop our civilisation to its knees. That energy has allowed us to do fantastic things. In fact, we have been “high” on energy since the Industrial Revolution, but the party is winding down. We must change how we think about energy – now.

Substitute “energy” for “love” in the song by Sweet and you ruin the rhythm but get a fairly accurate idea of how important energy is:

Love is like oxygen
You get too much you get too high
Not enough and you’re gonna die
Love gets you high

Why is energy considered so critically important to our civilisation? Simply, there is no civilization-as-we-know-it without the energy we use in its current forms and proportions, mainly fossil fuels, nuclear, and hydroelectric. Any significant change in any of those energy sources and our civilisation would be severely shocked. We have built our society upon cheap and reliable energy.

Civilisation is built on a ready supply of energy; cut the supply and civilisation nosedives. Reduce the supply or increase the price, and civilisation takes a step back. Given that our current energy supplies are in jeopardy, we need to rethink – and rapidly redo – our energy security

Oil Substitutes or Get Off Oil?

To get an idea of our dependence upon oil and related products, consider this: Everything in the United States and Canada is transported by gas or diesel, excluding the occasional bike messenger. Our industrial farming system requires oil or natural gas-based fertilisers and pesticides. Our entire economy is based upon the ability to transport raw materials and finished products from one side of the world to the other cheaply – using oil-fueled transportation. We live in a global economy and think nothing of clothing from China and apples from New Zealand. Now imagine that oil was either no longer available or prohibitively expensive. In theory, we simply go back to manufacturing things and growing food closer to home. In practice, it’s not that easy.

Given our societies’ extreme dependence upon, and therefore vulnerability to the supply of, oil and natural gas, we should be moving rapidly to do one or both of:

• Develop and implement oil substitutes
• Reduce the amount of oil needed

Oil Substitutes

In reality, it is not so simple to swap out oil for something else. Technophiles suggest we will simply transition to different energy sources, from biofuels to electricity. However, consider this:

In 2002 a panel of top U.S. energy experts, writing in the journal  Science, noted that current global power use is 12 trillion watt-hours per year, with 85 percent of it coming from fossil fuels. The panel concluded that replacing those fossil fuels with biomass energy would require planting as much additional land as is already planted on the entire planet.

In other words, there is not enough land to grow all our fuel. Brazil is busy razing the rainforest to grow their fuel, which seems likely to lead to a very bad outcome for all of us, given that the tropical rainforests have been called the “lungs of the planet.” And the more land we plant to feed our cars instead of ourselves drives food prices up; the government of Haiti fell for this reason, there were riots in Mexico, and there was talk of food protectionism in various countries. This is all quite recent.

So, we convert to electric everything, right? And use solar, wind power, nuclear, and whatever else we can scrounge up to run it. Easy. Well, is it? How many electric transport trucks have you seen lately? And while electric trains are common in other countries, the U.S. and Canada have none, our rail systems are severely degraded, and most areas are now designed to be supplied by trucks on roads; there are no rails.

Don’t even think about electric cars for everyone; the energy required to replace the entire U.S. fleet would be staggering, and material for batteries would rapidly be in short supply.

In the potential conversion of the world’s road fleet from oil-based fuel to electric or PHEV type transport, it is not the amount of lithium in total that is likely to be the problem but the rate of recovery of it. To match the present 60 million number of new cars on the roads each year, this would need to be expanded by fifty-fold, a considerable undertaking in mining and production which is probably impossible. Electric cars are likely to become a rich-man’s luxury, while the level of transportation per se inevitably and vastly declines.
– World Lithium Supplies and Electric Vehicles

Keep in mind that I have only discussed the energy needs of transportation. How many homes are heated by oil or natural gas? All industrial farming is completely reliant upon oil and gas for everything from tractor fuel to pesticides and fertilizers, most of which are petroleum-based. And what about manufacturing?

The Waste-based Economy

We waste colossal amounts of energy. For example, 10 calories of energy are required to produce 1 calorie of food; imagine increasing the price of that energy – or shortages of it; no energy: no food. 95% of the energy used by a car is for moving the car; only 5% is to move the occupant. Our houses and buildings leak energy.

There is great room for improvement – we could reverse things and steadily become more efficient. Substituting oil comes with many complications and unexpected consequences – and costs. Reducing the amount of energy we use, on the contrary, saves energy, money, and resources. The United Kingdom and France have mandated net-zero houses by 2016 and 2020, respectively; these are houses that use no external energy over the course of a year. Reducing energy used by buildings is critical, because:

…there are hundreds of coal-fired power plants currently on the drawing boards in the US. Seventy-six percent (76%) of the energy produced by these plants will go to operate buildings.
– Architecture2030.org

Through simple changes to building codes, net energy use could be cut to zero for all new buildings.

Transportation is more difficult, because we’ve spent the last 50+ years building roads and organising our living arrangements around them. We have neglected or even deliberately destroyed rail, which is much more efficient than trucking or flying products and people around, in favour of roads. Rail can also be electrified, handy when oil prices increase. We should rebuild the railways and mandate that all intercity freight go by rail. That takes all the trucks off the highways – and we should stop subsidising the U.S. interstate freeways and Trans-Canada Highway. That puts people back on trains for short-to-medium distance passenger trips.

Food could certainly be grown more locally and organically. The best ways to accomplish this are to stop subsidising agriculture and to protect farmers with trade barriers. Yes, protectionism for food. Being dependent for one’s food supply on another nation, and on cheap energy to get it to you, is foolish anyway. Free trade should be for luxuries, not the necessities of life. The 3,000-mile Caesar salad would be no more, but it’s a goner anyway as oil prices rise.

Waste Not, Want Not

Transitioning to a green economy, in which there is no such thing as waste…eliminates waste, including wasted energy. For example, manufacturers in Germany must take back used appliances. The result is that they now design for this, so they can recover the materials and reuse them in new appliances.

There are many ways we can conserve, some easy and some not so, but all are worthwhile. However, there are still some difficulties to be overcome:

• Conservation is opposed by people who currently hold great power over our governments – the fossil fuel and auto lobbies
• We are behind the curve: Building windmills, hydrogen-powered tractors and so forth currently requires energy from coal, oil, and natural gas; we have not yet built solar-powered steel mills
• Canada could use its vast hydro and oil reserves to retool – if the US lets us. More likely the Americans will insist that “free” trade and other agreements entitle them to our oil (the ‘national interests’ of the US may be summed up as “Whatever we need, wherever it may be found, and however it can be taken with maximum profit”)

We could wait for the market to retool to a green economy, but there is no such thing as a free market. Powerful vested interests have been making sure of that for decades. The fast solution is for the government to mandate this retooling, but the market fundamentalists and vested interests will do their best to ensure this doesn’t happen until it is too late.

If we let that happen, energy prices will surely increase, oil and natural gas shortages are very likely, and the difficulty in sustaining civilisation will rise sharply.

Imagine yourself locked in an airtight box; the oxygen is running out and you are starting to gasp for breath. There is a window in the box and you can see an oxygen bottle outside, but to move there requires oxygen; without it your body will shut down and you will die. So do you gulp in as much air as you can, break out of the box, and go for the oxygen? Or do you stay where you are and hope for a miracle?

This latter describes our current energy policy. The energy is running dangerously low. We’re stuck in a box, with a fat-cat oil CEO blocking the only exit. Do you wait until you have even less energy before trying to break out of the box? Or do you remove him as an obstacle now? Your choice; your life and our civilisation depend upon making the right one.

On our current course, a collapse is, barring a miracle, inevitable, and many would say that it could come at any time. Indeed, some have pointed to the recent U.S. and global economic fiasco as a sign that the collapse has begun. Others point out that, just prior to the economic meltdown, oil prices had spiked to USD 147/barrel, roughly double what they are now – and that prices now are much higher than they have been for decades. This could be a sign that “peak oil” has arrived and that the future will hold many more, and more extreme, oil price spikes.

In an interview with long-time environmentalist/green energy/green solutions guy Guy Dauncey this past Tuesday, I raised some of these concerns and he replied “bollocks,” or words to that effect. Regular readers will know that I lean toward a collapse being considerably more likely than not, and that I suggest preparing for it. Part of the reason for my prediction is reality – oil really is running out, climate change is really happening – and part is political: our ‘leaders’ are going in the wrong direction, heavily influenced by their corporate sponsors. (Politicians should wear Nascar-style jackets, covered with the logos of major contributors.)

Guy Dauncey is absolutely, relentlessly optimistic that we can make the transition to a post-oil, carbon neutral world – and quickly. As he spends much of his time researching solutions, and as I have read some of his books and attended some of his lectures, I believe him when he says we can do it. But Dauncey goes further – he also says we can build the political will in time to makes this transition, and this is difficult to support based on recent evidence.

Both Dauncey and I refer to the mobilisation for World War II that occurred within months. Most peak oil scholars suggest we need to start any transition twenty years prior to the time of peak oil, which could well be upon us now. This puts Dauncey at odds with some well-respected folks who have done a great deal of research of their own in the field. But could he be right?

We did convert the economy very rapidly in World War II. Auto factories were turning out tanks and planes very quickly; in fact, no new automobiles were produced in the United States during the war at all after a point, and the price of used vehicles shot up. Could we do the same today? The peak oil folks generally say ‘No,’ because we need cheap oil to fuel the conversion. We don’t have enough solar and wind plants powering automakers, for example. (I would not be surprised if the percentage of electricity that GM gets from ‘green’ sources is near-zero.)

Pre-war, there was very little political will for this retooling, this transition to a wartime economy – until there was. In England, Churchill called for years for a response to Hitler’s arms build-up and was roundly ridiculed. The British had come through a horrendous war in recent memory and didn’t even want to consider that another might be necessary, and various vested interests were more than happy to fuel this dis-enthusiasm.

Today, we also have very little political will for facing up to the predicaments of climate change and the end of oil, for greening the economy and going carbon-neutral, for ‘getting off oil.’ We also have a very well-funded denier movement, thanks to the vested interests of the oil, coal, auto, and assorted other industries. These industries fund climate denial in order to keep the general public – you and me – confused and hesitant to take decisive action. At the same time, they contribute heavily to key politicians. In both cases and in different ways, they are undermining political will (and democracy).

Dauncey asserts that we, as a society, have changed attitudes and political will very rapidly in the past and will do so again once enough people become sufficiently aware of the dangers of climate change, and once politicians are sufficiently educated about climate change and peak oil. Both of these he seeks to do through various means, including his books, public lectures, and consulting with government. Most peak oil people would say it will be too little, too late.

I’ve done plenty of research on the topics of peak oil, climate change, and politics – including running as a Green Party of Canada candidate. (I am no longer affiliated with any political party.) I do agree that political will can change very rapidly; if the populace believes we face a crisis, things will change very quickly. That’s why the oil and coal and auto CEOs have poured so much money into discrediting scientists, denying climate change, and pooh-poohing the thought that the oil might run out someday soon. They know damn well that if people knew the truth of the situation, the deniers and their CEOs could find themselves on the wrong side of a tar-and-feathering very quickly. And, of course, their business model and profits and prestige would be adversely affected.

Dauncey also pointed out that other countries are aware of these dangers and are taking great strides in the right direction. He mentioned China as a green leader, which is correct, despite their recent sabotage of the Copenhagen talks. Of course, there are entire continents where concepts like peak oil and climate change are not being addressed in any significant way, including North America. By ‘significant,’ I mean carbon and methane emissions are going down and oil dependency is being rapidly reduced. Even China, as Dauncey acknowledges, is leading in green energy while at the same time building one coal-fired generating plant per week.

I do not dispute that the solutions exist. If in doubt, read Guy’s recent book, The Climate Challenge: 101 Solutions to Global Warming (The Solutions Series), or Paul Hawken’s Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution. You will find practical solutions galore. Many of them exist now and only need to be ramped up.

The key questions are:

1. Can the solutions be implemented in time, or is it too late?
2. Will the solutions be implemented in time?

Like Guy Dauncey, I have also said that a WWII level of mobilisation could get us where we need to be. It would mean revamping the economy, retooling industries, and a lot fewer single-occupant vehicles commuting in from the suburbs. It would mean less land for meat and more for food fed directly to humans. A great deal of sunk investment in coal plants and suburbs would have to be abandoned. (I.e. The value of houses in the suburbs would drop to zero.) Government intervention would be required; the private sector alone will not move quickly enough. However, it could be done.

Now, will it be done? It is often very hard to see beyond how things are now to how quickly they could change. If the public realises we face a crisis, change will be demanded. Even bought-and-paid-for politicians will be hard-pressed to resist, and will be replaced if necessary. However, as I have pointed out elsewhere, it will take several terms to flush out the turds in the political toilet, and time is working against us. In addition, while I agree with Dauncey that many Americans and Canadians would support greening the economy, they are far from accepting the end of suburbia, giving up their SUVs, or even eating a bit less meat. Very far.

What would change this, quickly? An oil price spike that lasts, essentially making commuting unaffordable. People did buy more fuel-efficient cars after the 1970s oil scare – but they still bought cars. They did not demand the return of public transit. Most likely, people would first demand more subsidies for gasoline, and in this they would be encouraged by a well-funded marketing campaign orchestrated by the oil companies. People rarely insist that subsidies be eliminated on things they want. As gas prices shoot up, they may also demand inquiries into price-fixing and other time-wasting measures. An interesting anecdote that reflects the unreality of this worldview; during the 2008 oil, and therefore gasoline, price spike, I remember an elderly gentleman driving away from a gas station without paying the full amount because gas “shouldn’t cost this much.”

[As an aside, denial came up indirectly in the interview. Guy Dauncey has noticed that the most vociferous opponents of climate change and peak oil are Libertarians. So have I. We have both noticed how quickly these people revert to an economic appeal or insult – as if either is in any way relevant when facing a crisis like climate change or peak oil. In Dauncey's view, Libertarians are immature and unwilling to face reality.]

If we are in peak oil, and it does look quite likely, then more oil price spikes and a steady upward trend in prices seems likely. Peak oil people would say these spikes will crash the economy, much like the current recession, making a transition off oil difficult. Further, the U.S. government is paralysed by a corrupt Congress and an ineffectual, though well-spoken, President. Obama’s suggestions of cutting subsidies to oil companies are countered by Republican cries of “Drill baby, drill,” funded by, or course, oil companies. Coal companies are also pushing to maintain the status quo, and the ‘leadership’ of General Motors, if one generously calls it that, is stuck in the 1950s. (I define leadership Biblically: “Without vision, the people shall perish.” In this case, vision means seeing reality clearly and charting an appropriate course. Wishful thinking is not leadership, nor is imposing one’s fantasies on everyone else.)

Guy Dauncey disagrees with the economy-wrecking-oil-price-spike theory. He points out that there is vastly more energy available than humans currently use, but we don’t tap it. Wind, solar, geothermal, tidal, and so on could provide our current needs many times over. Dauncey believes that oil prices will increase – how can they not, when we demand more and the supply has topped out – but gradually enough that the market can react to produce alternatives. He also has, it should be noted, a different definition of civilisation than most Canadians and Americans, a definition that includes extensive car-pooling and bicycling, eating much less meat, and a major reorganisation of the economy. He also believes that these oil price increases will contribute to the political will needed to green the economy, and will make people willing to carpool, cycle, etc.

Relentlessly optimistic Guy Dauncey may be right; peak oil theorists who see a rapid and permanent economic collapse may be right. Time will tell. Either way, a major transition is in store. Ideally, we would embrace this transition and plan for it, but we are not. Rather, we are proceeding as if everything will continue as it has for the last 50 years or so, but of course this is impossible. The oil really is running out, the climate really is changing, etc. At some point reality will become sufficiently obvious to enough people that they will demand change – or change will just happen. If oil prices quadruple, most commuting will simply stop, for example. If crops can no longer be grown in the Midwest, then no amount of marketing or wishful thinking will change that.

Whether the political will for change is achieved before it is “too late” is currently debatable. In a few years, the question will be moot and the answer pre-ordained, because we will have passed various climate and energy tipping points. Guy Dauncey is doing what he can to create the political will and educate politicians so that the transition to a green economy – and therefore a sustainable way of living – happens “in time.” So am I, and so are many others. The CEOs of the oil, coal, and American auto companies are doing their best to ensure their business model does not change and their profits and prestige remain unchallenged. Which force wins out will depend partly on circumstances and partly on each side’s ability to persuade the general public of the reality and urgency – or the nonreality and nonurgency – of the situation. And, of course, which side wins determines our future, and your children’s future, and whether your children will even have children.

Resources for this post

Guy Dauncey has done a number of worthy things; has published a number of books, one of which are listed below. He founded the Victoria Car-Share Co-op and the BCSEA (British Columbia Sustainable Energy Association), and remains the President of the latter. He runs the EarthFuture site and publishes EcoNews monthly. He gives lectures on green energy and advises the BC government on same. He has been doing this for decades, and knows his stuff.

The first book listed (from left-to-right), The Climate Challenge, is a “complete rewrite” of an earlier book by Guy Dauncey, Stormy Weather: 101 Solutions to Global Climate Change, which I have in my library. If you’re going to read one, get the latest one.  The second book by Greer (The Archdruid Report) suggests peak oil will cause a “long descent,” with periods of stability alternating with periods of crisis, each lasting one or a few decades. He does think some form of civilisation will remain, although many of the things we consider important now will disappear. So will some number of the population.

The third book by Kunstler suggests that peak oil will cause a rapid collapse in the United States, and is persuasive. Kunstler also expects a population decline, the end of globalisation, and so on. The fourth book is by peak oil expert Heinberg and, like the others, suggests we face dangers from many directions, including resource shortages,  overpopulation, a clueless ruling class and unaware populace.

[Disclaimer: I've said before and repeat here: Predicting when a major event like a collapse will happen is for mugs. One can look at current trends and extrapolate, but one cannot know how humans will respond to changing circumstances. That said, one can make educated guesses.]

We face ‘converging catastrophes,’ driven by pollution and resource depletion, and made worse by overpopulation. The two most visible and clearly dangerous are climate change and peak oil.

The Climate Change Social Tipping Point

At current rates of sea-level rise, tens of millions of people will be displaced within 25 years. If you think all those people, and the countries they live in, are going to go quietly into the night…well, would you?

Current projections suggest a sea level rise of at least one metre this century is now likely. A one-metre rise will displace at least 56 million people, and possibly double that.

From Bangladesh to the Maldives, from Vietnam to Pakistan to Alexandria to Venice, millions upon millions of people will be driven from their homes and livelihoods. And where are they to go? Into ever-more crowded areas of their own – and neighbouring – countries. Rising sea levels will produce a tide of climate refugees that will make the chaos in Darfur look mild.

Many of those refugees, and the people whose lands they attempt to crowd into, are going to be angry. Combine that with nothing left to lose, and we have a recipe for human-caused Armageddon .

The embattled governments will be driven to extreme actions to try and maintain control, and one proven method is to distract the people with an external enemy. Now, Bangladesh isn’t about to attack the world’s largest contributor to climate change to date, the United States. However, they might consider charging climate deniers like Rex Tillerson, CEO of ExxonMobil, which continues to this day to fund climate denial – to bankroll, in effect, the dispossession and death of millions – with crimes against humanity and demand reparations.

That might be interpreted as an indirect attack on the United States and one the G77 would consider as a last resort, I’m sure. However, faced with insurrection, what choice will they have but to take extreme measures?

Long before the sea rises one metre by 2100, many millions will have been displaced and many hundreds of millions will see their future clearly – they will lose everything: Their land and farms, their businesses, their livelihoods – virtually everything of any value. This is almost certain to be a social tipping point; when sufficient people realise that climate change is real and will affect them quite adversely.

The Peak Oil Tipping Point

Even if we avoid mass violence caused by rising seas, spreading deserts, water shortages, and other effects of climate change, there is still the very real problem of peak oil. Put simply, a limited supply of oil existed on the earth and we appear to be at or very near the point at which half of it has been extracted. That means the supply of oil will henceforth begin to decline and the cheapest-to-extract oil is gone. Given how massively dependent our entire economy is upon oil, this is not good.

The effects of peak oil could well hit much sooner than those due to climate change. At the moment, most oil-producing countries are pumping about as fast as they can. Any increase in demand or decrease in supply will cause a price spike. Remember the 70s? There were long, long lines to get rationed gas in the United States. The U.S. has become far more dependent upon oil since then, as have many other countries.

Because oil is in virtually everything, any increase in price or decrease in supply is potentially devastating. Most agricultural fertilisers and pesticides are petroleum-based, and of course tractors and trucks run on diesel. If the price of oil goes up, it has a ripple effect through all these points and many more, and the price of the end product – your food – goes up significantly.

The price of commuting also goes up, and given the number of Americans who live in suburbs only accessible by car, that is a real problem. Heating bills will go up. The price of plastic will increase, and plastic is in everything. The cost of transportation will rise, making importing and exporting more costly. This would hit big exporters like China hard.

Predictions on the effects of peak oil range from immediate collapse to a long decline. It depends how it happens and how we react. A sudden collapse in oil supply, say from terrorists bombing the Saudi oil fields or another hurricane wiping out much of U.S. refining capability, would have a serious and immediate impact on the U.S. economy. The U.S. does maintain the Strategic Petroleum Reserve (SPR) – which contains a 34-day supply of oil. Thirty four days.

We could mobilise the economy and redirect all resources to converting to solar, wind, and other power sources, as well as drastically cutting energy use through conservation. A little insulation would go a long way. Suburbs could be abandoned and reverted to fields, while the former inhabitants move to more densely populated, walkable areas. However, this kind of mobilisation likely won’t be politically acceptable until ‘things’ are quite bad, and by then it may be too late because the remaining supply of oil is so limited and expensive. And honestly, the U.S. government is so corrupt at this point that they will probably screw up any mobilisation.

How Long Have We Got?

I give us a maximum of 25 years before riots begin, and probably wars. Within 25 years, sufficient millions will have been dispossessed or drowned by sea level rise alone – not considering other impacts of climate change like stronger storm surges, desertification, the spread of malaria-carrying mosquitoes, and so on and on – that everyone else will know the bell tolls for them, too. And in 25 years, the price of oil is going to be much, much higher. Food prices will go up, especially for meat, suburbs will become uninhabitable, and there will be a lot of newly poor people looking for someone to blame.

The world will become a more hostile place. No longer will Americans slap Canadian flags on their luggage when touring the world, because all developed countries will be reviled. Canada, the United States, and the United Kingdom will be especially loathed, as we are the countries that have spewed the most greenhouse gases, that continue to do so, and that refuse to change because we are too greedy.

Another very likely outcome of climate change will be the end of American-style capitalism and a rise in religious fundamentalism, as people return to values that recognize greed as a sin, not as a virtue. Rightly or wrongly, there is likely to be a backlash.

You have, at best, 25 years to see the world, to experience different cultures, to remember the world as it is and could have been. After that, if you have a home, it will be safest to spend the remainder of your days there.

Originally published as a shorter article on Celsias.com as You Have 25 Years. It did not mention peak oil.

Some people have a problem with me having Amazon links to books on my site. Not many, but a vocal few who seem to think the free lunch exists and they are entitled to it. Here’s the way it works: If someone clicks on one of the Amazon links AND makes a subsequent purchase from Amazon, I get a commission. I don’t see the problem with that; if you don’t like it, don’t buy from Amazon through me. The content is still yours to enjoy, free.

Now, having established that I do make money writing about climate change, peak oil, going green, and so forth, some question my objectivity. But think about it; I could have chosen to write about anything. I could be writing that global warming is NOT occurring; that would seem a more lucrative field. People get grants from major oil and coal companies and their organizations to do just that. And they have ads, sell items – and have Amazon links on their sites. I haven’t heard of any green writers getting grants from corporations, or governments, or anyone. (Feel free to donate to the cause.)

So, in other words, I – for some reason – picked a less lucrative field to write about. Why on earth would I do that? And why have I been writing in this same field for free, from comments on Reddit, to posts on newgreeneconomy.com and ning.newgreeneconomy.com and greenparty.ca and Celsias – ever since sometime around 2005? That time, not coincidentally, is when I decided to investigate global warming for myself and started researching to determine the truth of the matter, including the actual scientific papers in some cases. Why would I do all this unless I believe in what I’m doing?

And what should I be doing, anyway? Working a job by day and doing all this, ad and revenue-free, just to prove my objectivity?

A Big Green Lever

I am seriously looking for the lever to move the world to go green fast. I think it is critical. I especially want to save my family and country, and I love the incredible beauty of the natural world – that we barely understand a fraction of and yet we destroy so carelessly. Given our oil-dependent path, there will be a collapse; the only question is when. Similarly, climate change is occurring now and, unchecked and continuing on this course, will wipe out civilisation and most of humanity and other species. This is not in question by scientists at all. The only question is when we will pass a tipping point where it becomes inevitable, and when things will get really bad after that.

That’s why I write this site: It’s part of my modest attempt to save the world, to save us from ourselves. To help us grow up as a species. So that we live responsibly and sustainably. So that we waste not and want not.

It does not make enough to support me, nor is that the plan*, but growth has been very rapid. (Thanks especially to redditors for helping me tighten my arguments.) There are a lot of people out there who, well, who aren’t stupid. They – we – can see what’s coming. We may argue about the degree or the timing or the best course of action – but we can see the writing on the wall. There are a hell of a lot of dumbasses, too, and people who are smart but just refuse to look at reality because they’re blinded by their religion or ideology or the size of their bank account, and these smart fools make a lot of noise.

At the same time, the rapid growth and repeat visitors for this site tell me three things:

• There are a lot of people out there who do accept that we face great dangers, or who fear that we do and want to educate themselves about it
• The articles are resonating with many people
• It may be possible to fashion a movement to green the economy quickly to prevent much of the damage; barring that, it is possible that as people’s awareness and concern increases, they will form small, more self-reliant communities by choice, in order to provide maximum security for themselves and their families in the event of any difficulties. I do predict that cooperatives could take off – that’s a subject for another article.

And really, I’ve just tapped the surface. Certain ‘early-adopters’ have picked up on this site – much of my traffic comes from Reddit, where decent moderation from peers and moderators tends to keep the retards from taking over. Stumbleupon has also been significant. At the moment my articles get low traffic from Digg and other similar sites. But, if something is popular on Reddit, it will be popular on Digg and these other sites. At some point, one or more of the popular submitters on Digg and the other sites will find and like my articles and submit them. That will triple or more my traffic.

I say this not to masturbate in public, but to point out that there are a hell of a lot more people out there who are worried about climate change and peak oil and what to do about it than you may think. It sometimes doesn’t seem that way when all you encounter are people clearly detached from reality, who deny climate change, who think the oil will last forever, who just don’t want to hear about problems because it disrupts their comfortable world. There are a heck of a lot of us. We don’t agree on all things, but we do agree on the important things; serious problems are coming and we should be facing up to them.

Knowledge is Personal Power

Finally, many years ago when I did some training for a living, I attended some speakers’s seminars. One speaker in particular said something that has always stuck with me. He said that many speakers are reluctant to sell merchandise. They are afraid that it commercialises them, that people won’t think they’re objective somehow. But in reality, the retention rate from a speech or lecture is very low: maybe 10%. If you believe in what you’re doing, you should be getting information into people’s hands and minds and hearts. You should be sending them home with useful materials that will cement what you told them, that will confirm it from other sources, and that will lead to further exploration – and ideally, action!

I am trying to help you. A collapse is certain, barring a miracle, if we continue on our current path. It may be too late anyway, because we have put off too long converting from oil to other sources of energy. The books I link here are to help you protect yourself and your family. You don’t have to buy them; get them from the library or a local bookstore if you prefer. But in the event of collapse, you can bet the gardening and self-sufficiency books will disappear pretty quickly from libraries and bookstores. And you won’t be able to count on the Internet or your Kindle.

I am trying to help people. If someone thinks I’m full of it, that’s his or her perogative. But don’t expect me – or any of the millions of us who do get it – to think such people are being anything but foolish. Because the difference between us and you is that we accept reality where you live in a world that ignores inconvenient truths.

* I added a clarification about income from the site. If this site is a useful resource for people, then presumably I will make some money from it; how much is impossible to predict and not to be counted upon. I do have other irons in the fire, including a compressed earth block business, and I still do some consulting.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you can’t avoid hearing predictions of doom and gloom. Climate change, “peak oil,” fisheries collapse, economic meltdown, ocean acidification, ocean dead zones, spreading deserts, water wars…the list seems endless. If even a fraction of the forecast catastrophes come true, it’s going to be a challenging future – especially if you are unprepared.

I have put the three things you should be doing now up top, and the justification following, because many of you are well aware of the challenges we face.

Be Prepared

It is all-too-likely that one or more of these catastrophes will occur. When is anybody’s guess, but the odds seem high that it will be within the lifetime of anyone under 50. Given that, every sensible person should be doing three things:

1. Educate yourself on the “Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century” as they have been called, and do what you can to prevent them. This means getting politically active – carefully. As our democracies have declined, so has protection for basic rights. You don’t want to get yourself labelled a terrorist.

2. Build as much potential for self-reliance into your life as possible.

• A house that remains habitable without cheap and reliable external power
• A yard suitable for growing some vegetables
• Real books in case TV and the Internet become less reliable, especially ones on saving seeds, growing crops, and other do-it-yourself pioneer stuff
• Stock up on items of importance that may become hard to obtain, like medicine for diabetics or condoms

Necessities like shelter (including heat in cold climates) and food are most important, of course.

3. Join up with likeminded people in a community capable of self-reliance for necessities. It is exponentially more difficult to make it on your own. Share the labour and reduce the work required to live well. It is also very risky to go solo. Imagine that the deer eat half your crop. (Or hungry neighbours who didn’t bother to prepare.) Or you break a leg.

It’s also much more pleasant to live in a community. We are social animals; you can only play solitaire so many times before you’ll start wishing there were some other people around to talk with, to swap with, and just to be with.

Why Prepare for the Worst?

There are a lot of people predicting that our current civilisation is unsustainable – including me, of course – meaning a contraction is coming. And, unfortunately, not all these people can safely be dismissed as nutters. You could easily and justifiably ignore me, for example…except that I am basing my predictions on the work of some very well-qualified people. I say the things I do is because of what these experts say.

Let’s take concerns about climate change, for example. Some people dismiss the climate scientists, but that seems rather arrogant and foolish – especially for people who have no climate science credentials themselves. I would never claim to know more about what’s going on with climate than the scientists working in the field, but almost all the people publicly denigrating the climate scientists are bloggers and opinion columnists; they don’t know what they’re talking about and don’t have the sense to listen to the people who do. Many are paid by oil, coal, and auto interests.

Others write off the Peak Oil crowd, but based on what? Obviously the oil will run out someday, and the smart thing to do would be to prepare for that. We are not preparing, so perhaps peak oil will occur far in the future? That was the position of everyone except the peak oil crowd until recently, when the highly influential International Energy Association recently admitted they had based their predictions of future supply on bullshit and wishful thinking. Suddenly, the peak oil crowd was revealed to be more grounded in reality than the MBAs pretending the oil would last forever.

Or ocean acidification, a by-product of all that carbon we’re pumping into the atmosphere that the fossil fuel companies prefer to refer to as “life.” (From their ad: Some call it pollution, we call it life.) Do you really want to believe coal executives and the PR companies they pay over scientists? Seems dopey to do that. And risky, when the ocean scientists are saying acidification is wiping out vital marine life.

And how about pollution? Ocean dead zones? The collapse of the ocean fisheries? To dismiss these things as ‘scaremongering’ is to say science is garbage and something, God perhaps, will save us. Again, not a wise position.

Finally, there is the financial crisis we are still attempting to emerge from. It was very recently that some rather highly placed people were terrified about a worldwide economic depression. People like former President Bush, who was so concerned that he said, while dumping hundreds of billions into the economy, “I have abandoned free market principles to save the free market system.” Nothing has changed to prevent another economic meltdown. If anything, we have set the stage for the next financial/economic collapse: no laws were changed and we bailed out the people who caused the last one – and paid themselves obscene bonuses in the process.

What that means, of course, is that our democracies have become sufficiently corrupted that they no longer represent – or protect – we the people, but once again answer first to a wealthy elite. And the rich have a very poor record of doing the right or even wise thing when it comes to survival.

If You Cannot Prepare

Reality just is. Meaning, if you are not prepared and disaster strikes, it won’t matter at all that you wanted to prepare but couldn’t afford to, or were only partway there. Or that you’re a senior, or a single parent, in a wheelchair, diabetic, or whatever. You’re in for a hard time and your prospects are not good. This is one reason I stress joining a community. Everyone has something of value to offer and in return gains support from the community.

Dmitri Orlov discusses the collapse of the Soviet Union and how a similar meltdown would likely affect the United States (and therefore Canada). People living in high-rises had to walk up dozens of flights of stairs. With groceries. And small children. To apartments with no heat, occasional electricity, and often no water.

Most Canadian and American houses are literally garbage. The current design life of a house is about 70 years, after which it is intended to be bulldozed into a dump and another disposable house put in its place. This may serve the building industry, but it sure won’t work in difficult times. This also means that millions of houses will start falling apart in years to come, and if you are in one of them…at least the Soviet apartment blocks were built to last.

Cob house

The reality is that most of us will not be prepared for a collapse. The vast majority will not see it coming, and many of us who are working toward security won’t be there yet for various reasons. So there will be a lot of hungry, cold, angry people, at least for a time. They will be a severe threat to anyone who did prepare, simply because there will be so many of them.

In the end, you can only do what you have time to do. Life is short, and you can’t spend all of it worried about what might happen when. Life is always a balance between preparing for the future and living in the present; too much of the former and life passes you by. Too much of the latter and your life may be shorter and your future quite unpleasant.

All you can do is your best.

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Resources in this article

We have many intelligent people in the highest positions of power. Some are less intelligent, but are quite cunning fellows. You cannot achieve the highest positions without a large dollop of one or both of these attributes. What is lacking almost entirely in the people at the top is wisdom. We need to fix that.

Wisdom is the ability to recognize and accept truth. Ignoring or denying reality, clearly, makes you unwise. Most of us have had the experience of being told by another: “I wouldn’t do that if I were you.” And we did it anyway. And lived to regret it. Some people don’t have the chance to regret their mistake, because it turned out to be fatal; see: Darwin Awards.

Sometimes we repeat whatever it was that caused the warning and subsequent regret – and regretted it again. Some of us are slow learners. (I’ll admit to having been one at times, although I’m much quicker on the uptake now. After numerous repeated and very costly blunders, I finally “wised up” and made the decision to listen to wiser people and to make reality my touchstone, rather than wishful thinking.)

Unwise: Ignoring the Lessons of History

One of the values of history is that we can learn from the mistakes of others. Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed is an examination of prior civilisations that collapsed, and why. That we are repeating many of the same mistakes is a sign of our lack of wisdom – and is rather alarming.

Diamond detected some common patterns that led to the the downfall of those who went before, despite building remarkably advanced societies in some cases. One common theme is detachment from reality, especially among those at the top. The Easter Islanders provide the clearest example, cutting down every tree on their island in order to roll those giant stone heads to their display location. The trees were also used to make canoes that permitted deep sea fishing, and were their only means of visiting other islands – or escape. Nobody had the wisdom or courage to ensure that no more trees were cut than regrew each year. Presumably the Easter Islanders put their ultimate faith in the god(s) represented by heads, rather than in their own effort.

Joseph Tainter, in his influential The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) also found that prior civilisations never really considered sustainability – planting as many trees as were cut, maintaining a stable population, and so on – particularly important…and paid the ultimate price. Our current leaders are no different: Endless growth is the goal of every politician and CEO. [The Chinese leadership may be the only exception, at least with population if not with energy and other resource use, with their "one child" policy.]

This pattern is repeated over-and-over by different civilisations – and we are making the same mistakes. The previous cultures did not have the advantage of knowing what befell other civilisations; we do. This is unwise.

Wishful Thinking

In our case, we have chosen certain beliefs over reality, and any one of them could be our undoing:

• Belief: We cannot alter the planet such that it no longer supports us. Climate change, pollution, deforestation, desertification, over-fishing….
• Belief: Oil will never run out, or if it does, we will come up with substitutes in time to carry on the project of our civilisation.
• Belief: There is no such thing as overpopulation.

The first is rapidly being proven incorrect. We are altering the earth and we are starting to see the consequences now. Were we paying attention to history, the evidence is plain that some prior civilisations did themselves in through altering their local environment in such a way that it no longer supported them. Usually this is combined with populations expanding to the limits of the local environment. Disaster strikes when either that environment collapses, say through deforestation followed by soil washing down from now-denuded hills and burying fertile valley farmland, or when the climate changes. If population expands to the limits of what can be grown in a good year…and then there is a drought…some people are going to have to die.

This often results in a collapse of that civilisation. People generally don’t die quietly or watch their children starve to death. They lose faith in the leaders and systems that brought them to this point, and internal fighting breaks out.

Our civilisation is literally built on readily available energy in the form of oil. Reduce the supply of oil, or even simply increase its price significantly, and down we go. James Howard Kunstler has described this well in The Long Emergency: Surviving the End of Oil, Climate Change, and Other Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century. Yes, we can substitute other fuels, but that takes time – and we aren’t moving quickly at all in this area while demand continues to increase. It is not hard to imagine more oil wars coming. Gwynne Dyer interviewed Pentagon officials for his recent book Climate Wars: The Fight for Survival as the World Overheats, and the prognosis is not promising.

The Wisdom Deficit at the Top

We are an intelligent species, but we are not very wise. Worse, we don’t have the sense to at least choose the wisest among us as leaders. In many cases, we prefer people who tell us what we want to hear, true or not.

Climate deniers are a example: they are often very intelligent people – and also very unwise. They reject science in favour of what ‘feels right’ and what supports the status quo. Some deniers are paid by people with a vested interest in the status quo, but what kind of fool rejects science and reality in favour of lies and money? Deniers are like the Mayan priests who made sacrifices to the fertility god for a good harvest. The sacrifices did not prevent drought, and nor will all the money and press releases in the world prevent climate change.

If you have not lost faith in the leaders and systems that govern us, you should. They are paid to maintain the status quo, not to protect us.

Intelligence is no guarantee of wisdom. Neither is education, or even experience, if you don’t learn from your mistakes or those of others. And when the top dogs are not wise people, the whole society is in danger. We must replace these intelligent fools with people who value truth and who accept reality – no matter how inconvenient it may be. We still have some time to do this before a collapse, but time is running very short.

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Resources referenced in this post