Beyond Peak Oil

Can we attain a magnificent, post-technological future?

Last week, In a series of posts, I reconsidered “peak oil” theorists such as James Howard Kunstler and John Michael Greer. While these thinkers appeared discredited when their most dire projections didn’t come to pass over the last decades, we have good reason to believe their basic propositions remain accurate. Essentially, according to Kunstler in Living in the Long Emergency, the energy companies discovered ways to extract unconventional sources of fossil fuels, through hydro-fracking and Tar Sands. While this extended the fossil fuel timeline and even allowed the US to become the world’s leading producer of hydrocarbons again, it did so temporarily, and at tremendous financial and ecological cost. Obviously, fossil fuel is a finite resource and we have exhausted the easily accessible forms of it.

Back in the 1960s, Buckminster Fuller already proposed that we needed to use fossil fuels sparingly — like the ignition to spark an engine that can then run on renewables. Unfortunately, society did not make a shift in this direction. Instead, we doubled-down on fossil fuels. It remains an open question whether it is even possible to make a comprehensive transition to renewable energy at this point. Some scientists, academics and foundations insist it is possible. For example, Mark Jacobson, Director of the Atmosphere and Energy Program at Stanford University, launched The Solutions Project, mapping out how the US could run entirely on renewables by 2050.

Other scientists and engineers (such as Vaclav Smil) argue that such a rapid transition away from fossil fuels is not possible. Unfortunately, fossil fuels remain in many ways the most efficient form of energy for many tasks. The global infrastructure for mining, transporting, and burning fossil fuels is enormous — it is, in fact, the basis for our global economy. Fossil fuels are necessary for the production of steel, plastics, fertilizer — the staples of modern life and industrial civilization. Billions of people across the world still want to reach the modern, carbon-intensive consumer lifestyle that Europe and America has enjoyed for decades, which we promoted relentlessly. Hence, China continues to build coal plants while India keeps importing Russian oil and gas, despite its genocidal invasion of Ukraine.

The sad, ironic reality of our situation is that the transition from a traditional way of life to a carbon-intensive consumerist lifestyle does not seem, on average, to make people happier or more satisfied. If anything, it is the opposite. As a young anthropologist in the 1970s, Helena Norbert Hodge witnessed the effects of modern Capitalism on the traditional culture of the Ladakh people in India, an Indo-Tibetan Buddhist society. She saw how a transactional, commodified economy dissolved the bonds holding together Ladakh society within a few decades. She described it like watching an acid corrode and eat through everything of value to that culture, breaking the bonds of social trust and the pride they felt in their ancient ways and spiritual traditions. The same process happens all around the world.

What still seems inconceivable from the perspective of our financial, political, and technocratic elites is that we could stop the global death-march toward a monological form of “progress” and “economic development” that directly conflicts with the life-support systems of the planet. The much-vaunted Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the UN still fall into this trap by insisting on high levels of annual GDP growth for “developing” countries. The problem is that the global financial system is debt-based. Countries and industries are compelled to constantly increase production to pay back interest on loans, satisfying creditors. Degrowth is, therefore, not an option.

As the political philosopher Antonio Negri has written, capital is, ultimately, a “social relation.” The overwhelming power of the financial elite is based on the invisible weave of conceptual, social agreements underlying our financial system. If it was to become obvious that the debts underlying the global financial system can never be repaid because future growth will never be able to fulfill the current debt-obligations, then the wealth of the financial elites would also be called into question, as would our current web of social and geopolitical arrangements in its entirety.