The solution delusion - part two
Our obsession with environmental solutions presupposes control we do not have.
Last week I wrote about accepting that some things don’t have solutions. That quite a few very important things might be out of control.
Here’s the kicker: we never had control.
This should be abundantly clear to everyone. We had no more control over our profligate destruction than a heroin addict has over the impact of their habit on their bank balance and relatives. But just like them it suits us to block this painful truth out.
In years’ past I travelled the globe with NGOs. I watched humanity encroach on every wild place on Earth. I read about the declaration of the Anthropocene era. I remember thinking: “Well, we are managing the whole place now. We had better do a good job of it.”
I was wrong. Making a mess is not control. It’s the opposite. It means we are spectacularly out of control.
The bottom line is that industrialised civilisation is not sustainable at anything like its current scale. It cannot be zero carbon. It won't be carbon zero. It isn't carbon neutral. We can't wish these facts away with the fantastic terms we throw around like confetti to hide the monster at the reception.
Let’s take another obvious fact. It’s another one the mainstream environmental movement seems to be ignoring. Industrialised civilisation will cease to function without fossil fuels. It can only run on fossil fuels. It only runs because of fossil fuels. It was designed and built on, by and for fossil fuels. Fossil fuels have allowed it to reach the heady heights, level of scale and complexity it now operates at. In many ways our current industrial civilisation IS fossil fuels.
‘Transitioning’ away from fossil fuels is transitioning away from industrial civilisation. It might be good to talk honestly about what we’re actually planning to transition to. Until then we're going to fight over whose society collapses first. We'll spend our lives scrabbling around in a moral sinkhole trying to sustain the unsustainable.
I’ve stood in board shorts outside an oil conference covered in molasses to look like an oil spill victim. I've been ordered by the courts to do comedy for old people in recompense for illegally attempting to disrupt the proceedings. I may even have crewed a rigid inflatable into the path of a moving oil rig to put climbers and a banner on it, depending on who’s asking. In other words, I’ve worked pretty hard to try to believe that what I have just said is not so, but it is.
This once in several million years release of energy has enabled humanity to balloon to our wildly overblown population. It’s the fertiliser that allows so many of us to eat. It’s the plastics that allow us to share stuff around the globe. It’s the pharmaceuticals that stop Covid being the Black Death. It's what powers the infrastructure that connects it all up and holds it all together.
We do not have access to any other energy source as abundant, portable and flexible. Nothing we have can take the place of fossil fuels and make all that stuff work.
The closest thing we have is nuclear power. But fossil fuels are also required to construct and maintain the power plants, the grid and all the other infrastructure that goes with it. Nuclear power plants take much longer to make than the pace at which we're supposed to be retiring the fossil fuels that they would replace. Then there's the crippling financial costs. The radioactive waste that nobody knows what to do with. The possibility of nuclear explosions destroying whole areas of someone’s country every time there’s a tsunami, earthquake or war. And in a world of rising seas and growing storms, nuclear power stations are built by the sea to use it as coolant...
The French government just announced four more nuclear plants. Expect more of this. Nations will point to the ‘low carbon’ nuclear power coming soon when they miss their greenhouse gas emissions targets by a country mile.
Desperate people mention nuclear fusion. But commercial scale prototypes aren’t expected for at least another 20 years. And they’ve been expected in the next 20 years for at least 30 years already. So far they are roughly as efficient as powering your car by setting fire to cars. They need absurd amounts of energy to levitate ridiculously hot plasma. They currently break within seconds of being activated. What could possibly go wrong?
Fusion will probably get pointed to as well, as ‘coming soon’ by various nations, while they definitely do not shut down their industrial economies, or even slow them down, to tackle climate change.
What we euphemistically call “renewable energy” systems also require fossil fuels to make. They generate relatively miniscule amounts of power that is difficult to manage. They come with a host of their own environmental impacts.
Hydropower, for example, involves blocking rivers and flooding entire valleys. If that’s good for the environment then presumably drowning is good for kittens. Even the beloved solar panels require fossil fuels and land to sit on. They also currently use materials that children tend to mine out of hellholes in war-torn countries. Geothermal power still needs infrastructure, and still generates greenhouse gas emissions.
They are what we call “more sustainable”. But they’re not solutions. In the same way that there is no such thing as a free lunch.
This leads us to a vitally important point. We’ve been suckered into believing the way we generate or channel energy is the problem. The actual problem has been the abundance of access the human ape has to energy, regardless of its form.
Humanity’s access to energy fuels the inherent unsustainability of industrial civilisation. Unless there is a fundamental change in what it is to be human, new forms of energy, whether “renewable” or not, will just fuel more degradation of the planet’s life support systems.
Some systems might be less damaging than others per unit of energy output. But so far we’ve just been adding them on top of our other sources. We continue to use more energy year on year. We use the energy to extract more natural materials. We pay foreign companies to enslave people to make those materials into dolls that fart when you press a button. We hasten the destruction of all life on Earth.
So when we back new forms of energy as solutions, that’s what we’re backing. We’re continuing and reinforcing one of the defining myths of our society. It’s the same myth that is driving a lot of the unsustainability in the first place. The myth of continuous progress.
The ingrained belief that somebody somewhere will come up with “solutions” (because don’t we always?) is one of the main sources of our complacency. This forestalls the radical action required to even begin to address our situation.
Promoting or even suggesting solutions that are impossible promotes wishful thinking. This, in turn, creates the worst kind of opportunism to exploit that wishful thinking. This can direct enormous effort and resources to the wrong places. A lot of this energy is wasted. It is diverted from important mitigation measures or other ways of dealing with the issues that may actually be useful.
Falsely stating solutions enables many to offload responsibility or action onto others. It prompts thoughts like: “Oh, the smart people will solve that for us,” (offloading to ‘experts’) or “somebody will come up with something at some point” (offloading to the future). At the moment neither is likely. Prompting these thoughts negates the required action now, from everyone.
This also undermines people’s trust in us. It makes it harder to influence people towards genuinely useful action. Much of our audience may well already sense or know that these issues do not have solutions in this way.
This solution delusion also contributes to burnout among people working in the environmental movement. A new generation enters the fray. They’re keen to create these elusive ‘solutions’. Meanwhile, a lot of talented and knowledgeable people leave the environmental movement in dismay at its seeming inability to grasp and effect reality. Another generation falls away or retires to drink themselves to death or do quite a bit of yoga. They’re all too aware of how illusory these solutions really are.
Roger Hallam is the co-founder of Extinction Rebellion. He suggests this, rather than the “doomsayers” explains the demoralisation of young people. As he says: “One of the main reasons why youth are so demoralised about their future is that older people lie to them, and young people know this.”
It’s not just the young. People of all ages know when they are being lied to and when they are not being told the whole truth.
Wouldn’t it be better to work more closely with reality? Wouldn’t this create more effective opportunities to prepare people for what is to come?
There’s an arrogance to the very concept of solutions in the face of what we are facing. There’s a time to admit when we have broken something we don’t know how to fix. That time was a very long time ago. Admitting it now is a precursor to avoiding many actions that are likely to make the situation worse. We’re acting like a kid tinkering with his Dad’s motorbike and when he realises he has made a mistake he goes on tinkering in an inept attempt to fix it all, rather than just downing tools and owning up.
There’s a time and place when “I don’t know” is the correct answer. We're facing problems largely caused by stupid actions. Ceasing stupid actions is a more powerful strategy than just doing whatever we think is clever. A lot of us are just blurting out random answers we already know are likely to be wrong, in the hope one might be right by chance.
Grabbing at ideas and calling them ‘solutions’ isn’t a vision of the future. It’s a futile attempt to deny the present. It’s a last ditch effort to prevent the inevitable future that is flowing from it. It looks like the bargaining stage of grief.
We’re Dr. Faustus. We're trying to bargain with Mephistopheles for what remains of our souls. But the time has come to pay up for our sins.
“O I'll leap up to my God! Electric vehicles! Organic food! Fairtrade! Giant things to collect plastic! Who pulls me down? Physics…reality…?”
Let’s have a quick look at the international response to climate change. Since at least the Rio Earth Summit of 1992, the nations of the world have made progressively more binding and dramatic commitments. Meanwhile global greenhouse gas emissions from energy production alone have risen by 48%.
Would you take me seriously if my alcohol intake had increased by 48% since 1992, while I promised every year to cut down?
There is another point to this. These days James Howard Kunstler is an anti-vax Trump apologist. He thinks black Americans need more lessons in English grammar. But he wasn’t always a fool. He was the author of the well-regarded End of Suburbia. It’s a devastating study of the unsustainability of the modern car-orientated suburbia. He toured the book around the US. He was frequently accosted at the end of his talk. People would ask: “Where are the solutions?”
He considered this. He reviewed what he had said. He realised his book and talks contained all sorts of positive steps people could take. They involved a return to ‘main street, small town’ living. They were about buying and working locally. He encouraged people to live more simply within more modest means.
What he realised was that people were ignoring them. Because they were not the solutions they wanted.
What people want is the solutions that allow us to stay absurdly rich and live unsustainably. It’s hard to satisfy this need for solutions. Most of the industrialised world’s politicians spend their entire careers attempting it. But such solutions don’t exist.
It’s like an alcoholic asking for a solution to their problem that does not involve giving up alcohol.
I experience the fall-out from this on a daily basis. Working in environmental communications I'm always told to tell people “what they can do”. It’s become obligatory for every piece and every issue raised.
In many ways this is understandable. NGOs are in the business of engagement and behaviour change. They want people to know things, do things and give the NGOs money so this can continue. But we’ve ended up with the idea that you can’t tell people about any problem unless you can immediately offer them a solution, that also doesn't trouble them too much.
This is absurd.
We can’t “solve” these issues with individual actions or lifestyle changes. We’ve run a 20+ year experiment on that all over the industrialised world, and the results are in your newsfeeds.
This has a knock on effect in almost every piece of environmental communication. Editors and commissioners demand ‘to do lists’ or ‘listicles’. They want “X easy steps to becoming more sustainable”. Page after page, website after website, filled with elaborate procrastinations.
These miniscule changes, we are always told, will add up to massive shifts in the way that we live. Meanwhile, our entire economy is geared to invent ever more elaborate superfluities. They festoon every house in ridiculously overpowered technology. Greenhouse gas emissions keep rising. The world’s oceans, landscapes and animals choke to death around us. The real tasks of transforming our society are kicked ever further down the road, into the utopian or dystopian futures of our daydreams.
Our childish society has been presented with the largest plate of Brussel sprouts in history.
It is pushing them around the plate until the Apocalypse, hoping they will disappear.
You could sum it up with your words:
"What people want is the solutions that allow us to stay absurdly rich and live unsustainably."
The end does not justify the means, but humanity has preferred to ignore it and manufacture an ethic 'tailored' to its ambition. The cruelest thing is that the other creatures on the planet must also pay for our ambition and immorality. That is inexcusable.
Thank you for your work. Being told the truth should always be appreciated.