Breaking the Fossil Fuel Habit

What would it take?

From “The Great Simplification”

I think one of our problems as a species is we often don’t differentiate between mental pain — mental struggle, a kind of self-concocted agony — and physical suffering. We resist strenuous mental labor — thinking seems a kind of interior torment — even though, in fact, the pain of it resides in our imagination instead of our nerves. Of course, we can learn to accept and deal with even quite severe physical pain. If we master meditation, we can control our response to it, to a great degree.

Many people find mental struggle more difficult than physical pain. I suppose it reminds us of the terrors of high school math class — of feeling stupid, slow, embarrassed, incompetent. Also, most of our thinking settles into familiar tracks like the grooves on an old record, which go round and round over what we already know. There is comfort in this habituation. It is disturbing to be forced to alter the patterns or undergo a cognitive flip. We find it painful to change our ideology or underlying beliefs because they seem tangled up in our sense of who we are. Letting go of old beliefs feels like a small death.

I believe we can train ourselves to undergo extreme mental labor or intellectual strain without actually suffering from it, and even enjoying it. This requires learning to hold focus and attention in areas of ambiguity and murkiness, increasing cognitive flexibility. I find this to be something like a spiritual path. Personally, I have gone so far down this road that I can actually find pleasure in the pain and embarrassment of discovering I was wrong, reassessing, then redirecting. I don’t take it — or much of anything — personally.

I don’t think I am super-intelligent, but I can be dogmatically persistent in my thinking, focused on the gaps, wobbles, and uncertainties. This is, perhaps, an unusual trait. I think, as a society, we overvalue intelligence as a faculty separate from ethics or wisdom. This has now reached a crescendo with the deification of artificial intelligence, the Deus ex machina we have created to outsmart ourselves, perhaps turn us into machine-appendages or annihilate humanity and end history. Many tech-worshippers anticipate, with mingled euphoria and horror, an approaching Singularity: Total communion with their inorganic, hyper-rational, unfeeling God.

When I write about the pain of mental labor, I am not thinking about the narrow or circumscribed technical or aesthetic tasks that require applied mentation, which we all encounter in our jobs and daily lives (editing a film or an article, framing a legal case, diagnosing an illness, feeding a recalcitrant child, and so on). I am considering how we use our intelligence to reach a meta-level, macroscopic, or generalist analysis of our current planetary situation, considering the spectrum of future scenarios from the likely to the plausible to the very unlikely.

Of course, thinkers who become wildly successful in the mainstream tend to be ones who repeat and reinforce aspects of the already accepted ideology, instead of the ones who reveal a potentially threatening (to the ego structure) new pattern. I connect this with Rupert Sheldrake’s theory of morphogenetic fields and morphic resonance: Our physical world — as well as the mental or archetypal world — is held together by patterns, woven on the quantum loom, which become self-reinforcing over time. We tend toward an innate conservatism, a bias toward the already-existent, instead of the unformed or emergent which might destabilize, decenter, even unravel us and our society.

This is a long way around to discuss what Nate Hagens calls the “carbon pulse,” the climate emergency caused by our 200 year addiction to fossil fuel, as well as the slowly unfolding energy and materials crisis which, barring some miracle, will become inescapable — determining factors — during the next decades. Hagen will be part of Embracing Our Emergency, starting at the end of the month. I am looking forward to learning from him!

I recommend Hagens’ animated series, The Great Simplification. As I prepare for our upcoming seminar, I’ve been reviewing his podcast this week. Here is a recent interview he did with Bill McKibben, who will also be part of our upcoming course. From this interview, I learned that 40% of the ship traffic around the world is made up of boats carrying coal and oil to be burnt. I was particularly impressed (if that is the right word) by Hagens’ conversation with climate scientist Kevin Anderson, professor of Energy and Climate Change at the University of Manchester. I recommend you listen to it.

We are currently on track for 3 degrees Celsius warmer than pre-industrial levels by 2050. This will be — we all know — absolutely catastrophic for humans and most other forms of life on Earth. Yet global industrial civilization is not using the time we have and the resources still available to transform itself and prepare for what is coming. We are trapped in the current paradigm and in the inertia of our economic and political structures.

We keep living as if this system can continue, more or less as it is, for much longer. But that is a physical impossibility. We need to break free of our habitual patterns and the powerful undertow of indoctrination and the masterful mind control which operates through the media. We have been entrained  to believe there is no alternative to this current system except dystopia. This forces us to accept its horrific injustices and its failure to protect the integrity of the Earth as a home for our descendants.

Another issue that Hagens focuses on is the declining availability of fossil fuels. By most accounts, we reached peak oil in 2018. The issue is that oil and other fossil fuels become increasingly costly to extract, requiring greater inputs of energy. There are also concerns about the availability of many other material and mineral resources required for the continuity of industrial civilization. About industrial CO2 and warming, Anderson says:

There are no non-radical ways out of this. We have chosen to leave it so late: It has been a third of a century since the first IPCC report. We've deliberately failed over those 30 years. In fact, we didn't just fail: We've seen emissions rise by about 60%. 

The system is going to change either because we have the wherewithal and the intellect and the compassion to do it in some sort of organized  fashion, which will still be very problematic, but we actively try to do it in some way that  we can muddle through it. Or alternatively, we just carry on with the lies and the rhetoric and  we'll be hit by increasingly severe implications  of rising temperatures. That will mean a fundamental reshaping of the world anyway. But  it won't be done in any organized, compassionate way, it'll be sort of a hell-on-earth type, with everyone out for themselves, mass migration, collapse of agriculture systems, and the other systems.  

Is making such a radical shift even remotely possible or conceivable? I still stubbornly believe it is. This is why I am cohosting Embracing Our Emergency with Gaslands director Josh Fox — why I encourage you to join us for this five-week journey. We need a shared, unified field around where we are now in our evolution. We need to reckon with what’s possible for us and our communities, going forward.

Personally, when I hear someone like Anderson speaking the honest truth, I find my nervous system relaxes a little (at the same time, I admit I sometimes feel nausea at the vast scope of the distance between where we are and where we need to be, on every level, to deal with this). He is not entirely without hope that we can still make a significant transition, although he realizes this is very unlikely.

“There's a small opportunity for driving significant change,” Anderson told Hagens. “And I would tend to agree with you, I don't think it can be aligned with whatever capitalism is, the modern structure  of our economies.”

He thinks that experts like himself — who have also been beneficiaries of the system — tend to “sweeten the pill,” deluding not only other people but themselves about what’s necessary. What’s required, in order to avert total collapse, is “a fundamental reshaping of almost every facet of modern society.  And we don't describe it like that because we don't want it to be like that because we have done remarkably well out of the system.” One difficult is that a tiny fraction of the world’s population — the wealthy elite, the 1% or even the .1% — are responsible for most of the CO2. Anderson notes:

If the top 10% of global emitters… reduced their carbon footprint to the level of the average European, which is still very high, about six tons per person for carbon dioxide at the moment.  And the rest of the world, the other 90% of the world's population… made no changes to their current emissions, that would be a one-third cut in global CO2.  Now if this was a [declared] climate emergency, I  think you could do that almost overnight.

We actually are in a circumstance where we can continue to enjoy the next few (five? ten?) years of a system that is already, clearly, in decline and collapse — not only physically but also morally and spiritually — with a shared agreement that our children will have no future and we will most likely end in extinction or savagery. Or we can undertake the admittedly difficult task of reinventing and redesigning this civilization, right now, to reduce our immediate environmental burdens while we move to a lower-energy, de-growth future. This requires something like the “resource economy” described by the Venus Project, with some model of “equity” for those who will bear the brunt of it. This is part of what we will explore in our upcoming seminar: How to get there.

As a species, we are more interconnected than ever before. New ideas and possibilities can flow rapidly, even immediately, through the human super-organism at propitious moments. We might reach a tipping point where a subliminal awareness becomes something consciously understood, universally shared, and directed toward a new transformational project. There’s no reason not to try, in any case. What’s our alternative?