An Inconvenient Apocalypse

I fall somewhere between The Grinch and Jesus on this map.

For Christmas, I thought I would review Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen’s An Inconvenient Apocalypse: Environmental Collapse, Climate Crisis, and the Fate of Humanity – on this most nakedly consumerist of holidays, in the midst of a massive “once in a generation” winter storm which most scientists attribute to anthropogenic climate change. I enjoyed An Inconvenient Apocalypse, agreed with most of it, but found it a bit repetitive and annoying. There was, to be honest, nothing much that was new for me. It repeats what has been said before in many books, such as James Howard Kunstler’s The Long Emergency or Thom Hartmann’s The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight. 

I made an effort to answer some of the questions Jensen and Jackson raise, but leave hanging, in my book, How Soon Is Now (for example, what are new stories that can “help us negotiate the unprecedented journey that humanity must make from a high-energy to a low-energy world?”). However, for people at different places in their learning-and-acceptance curve, this will be a useful read. An Inconvenient Apocalypse is accessible, reasonable, and straightforward.  

As I mentioned last time, I stopped writing intensively – and thinking obsessively – about the ecological emergency for a while, to maintain my sanity. I am now getting back on track, catching up with the latest literature and starting to look, again, at new projects seeking to address climate change, biodiversity loss, food systems, and so on. I start feeling guilty when I don’t research and write about what is truly a very dire situation ahead for all of us — I would say this is the main, essential topic we all should focus on at this point. In that sense, reading An Inconvenient Apocalypse was a valuable reminder for me. It helped me reprioritize. 

A Grinch/Santa Claus/Scrooge/Jesus mash up, brought to you by AI.

Jackson and Jensen’s thesis is that post-industrial civilization has far over-reached and is beginning its inevitable contraction. This can’t be stopped: “We suggest that there are no solutions, if by solutions we mean ways to support anything like the existing number of people at anything like the existing level of aggregate consumption.” We are deluded if we believe we can continue this resource-heavy, dense-energy-dependent, technologically advanced consumerist lifestyle; that it can spread to more of the eight billion people currently on Earth, that there are, as Clinton and Obama’s economic adviser Lawrence Summers memorably put it, “no limits to the carrying capacity of the Earth,” now or in the future. 

The basis of our delusion has been “techno-fundamentalism,” the belief we can technologically innovate our way out of resource-scarcity and systemic unsustainability. We have been sold a false myth of progress: That evolution moves in one, linear direction; we humans are at the apex of the pyramid of life and there is no going back to less, simpler, or more primitive. 

The process of over-exploiting the Earth’s carbon bounty started 10,000 years ago with the invention of agriculture. It has a followed a somewhat linear, if zigzag path, ever since. Jackson and Jenson write: “At the heart of the unsustainable nature of human economic activity is the carbon imperative, the drive to obtain the benefits that come from using dense energy. The dominant vehicle for that destructive extraction today is a rapacious transnational corporate capitalism and that system’s requirement of unlimited growth in the pursuit of profit. This is not the secret plan of a greedy cabal but rather the stated goal of the system.” They also note, accurately, “Transcending capitalism is a necessary but not sufficient condition for achieving just and sustainable human communities.

This perspective is mirrored in Bill McGuire’s Hothouse Earth, yet another new book on the crisis. McGuire writes: 

Our climate is being destroyed by unadulterated, free-market capitalism – an ideology that simply cannot be sustained on a small planet with limited resources. It is a system that has no interest in the greater good and that rewards inordinate capital and the few that have it, rather than the majority who don’t. It cares nothing for the environment or biodiversity and doesn’t give a fig about the fate of future generations. In fact, it is exactly the wrong economic system to have in place at a time of global crisis. The bankruptcy of the system is especially well upheld in the grossly asymmetric partitioning of carbon emissions between the rich elite and everyone else.

I find it useful to be reminded there are no solutions to the current ecological crisis except a radical downscaling of human activity and resource-use. This will either come from a consciously and humanely planned “degrowth” or it will happen through a chaotic process of destruction. Or perhaps we will see some combination of the two. But generally, a chaotic process of uncontrolled destruction seems to be what we are opting for, as we cling to the hope that some technological miracle will save us from ourselves.

Nuclear fusion is one example of this: Even though the technology remains decades away (if it is, indeed, feasible – there have been many false alarms), the prospect that we could master fusion and release essentially unlimited sources of energy with little ecological cost offers a powerful, addictive toke of “hopium.” This kind of news has the same numbing effect of watching a series of flashy, over-rehearsed TED talks: One gets the sense that the most intractable problems are being dealt with, and therefore one can get on with binge-watching Netflix or mining Bitcoin, or whatever distraction one finds most seductive. 

Jensen and Jackson somehow arrive at two billion as the maximum number of humans the Earth can support sustainably. If that is the case (it seems intuitively reasonable, perhaps even optimistic), then we are currently over the limit by 3X. So what is going to happen to all of those extra incarnated souls?