[R-G] [BillTottenWeblog] The Power of the Nonrational

[Bill Totten]

by John Michael Greer

The Archdruid Report (October 08 2008)


For the release of a book on the end of industrial civilization, it was
certainly good timing. Over the last week or so, as my book The Long
Descent: A User's Guide to the End of the Industrial Age {1} hit the
bookstores, the wheels came off the global economy. As stock markets
crashed worldwide and governments panicked, I found myself wondering if
the marketing people at my publisher, New Society, had managed to pull
off the great-grandmother of all publicity stunts.

Now of course the crisis now under way has been building since the early
1980s, when politicians who had forgotten the lessons of the Great
Depression threw out the prudent regulatory firewalls that kept banks
from speculating with other people's money. Deregulation was the word du
jour, driven by a blind faith in markets that did its level best to
ignore the lessons of history, and each of the crises that followed -
the 1987 stock market crash, the currency implosions of the 1990s, the
dotcom bubble and bust at the turn of the millennium, and the orgy of
delusional finance that drove the global real estate bubble thereafter -
simply brought cries for more of the same deregulation that caused the
trouble in the first place.

For a quarter century, those who recalled Charles Mackay's Extraordinary
Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds (1995) and its many
successors, and pointed out that uncontrolled speculation always ends
the same dismal way, were told that they ought to shut up until they
learned something about economics. Sober warnings from distinguished
scholars were drowned out by a chorus of cheerleading, while less
prestigious voices were pushed out to the fringes of the blogosphere.
What is now painfully clear is that those marginalized voices were right
all along, and their warnings could have spared us a massive economic
disaster if the pundits and politicians who dismissed them had listened
instead.

All this raises a question that deserves more attention than it usually
receives: what makes a society accept or reject any given set of
warnings about the future? At the ASPO-USA peak oil conference last
month, a slightly more focused version of this question was much in the
air. Several of the speakers expressed their frustration at the way
warnings of global climate change have been picked up by the media and
turned into an international cause celebre, while warnings of the
imminence of peak oil are still being dismissed as a nonissue by most
people straight across the political and cultural spectrum.

It's a fascinating question, not least because there are at least two
serious problems with the case for global extinction via climate change
currently being splashed across the media. The first of these was
pointed up by several of the presenters at the ASPO conference: the
scenarios of drastic climate change being offered by the IPCC, the
government-supported panel of scientists responsible for the most widely
accepted predictions, assume that the world's production of petroleum,
coal, and natural gas can increase steadily through the year 2100.

That's a problematic assumption, to say the least. The world's peak
production of conventional petroleum happened in 2005; massive infusions
of tar sand products and biofuels have kept the numbers from falling
significantly since then, but with production at most of the world's oil
fields dropping steadily, the IPCC's assumptions of steady increase are
hard to support. Natural gas worldwide is expected to hit peak
production around 2030. Coal is more complex, because all coal is not
created equal; the most energy-intensive coal, anthracite, is all but
exhausted already, and most of what remains is low-quality "brown coal",
much of which will cost more energy to extract than it yields; by 2040
at the latest, the energy yield from coal production will have reached
its limit and begun an irrevocable decline. By 2100, our total
consumption of all fossil fuels put together will have fallen to a very
modest fraction of today's levels, simply because there won't be enough
left to produce.

Yet there's another difficulty with the scenarios of global ecological
collapse being offered by activists and the media just now: even if the
IPCC figures for production made sense, a six degrees Celsius increase
in the Earth's temperature over a century is well within the normal
range of variation for our planet. The latest Greenland ice cores show,
for example, that at the end of the last ice age, the Earth's average
temperature spiked up twelve degrees Celsius in fifty years or less
{12}; similar jolts up and down, some of them even more extreme, have
happened many other times in Earth's long history, and for most of the
last billion years, this planet has been much, much warmer than it is
now. Not that many millions of years ago, it bears remembering,
alligators lived on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, and tropical and
subtropical forests covered most of the planet.

This doesn't mean, mind you, that we can simply dump carbon dioxide into
the atmospere and ignore the consequences. What counts as normal
variation for the Earth is far more than a fragile industrial
civilization can cope with, and the prospect of drastic food shortages
driven by wild climatic swings, plus a fifty-foot rise in sea levels
drowning every coastal city on Earth, should be reason enough for second
thoughts. The point I hope to make, rather, is that extreme scenarios of
planetary extinction have been widely accepted in popular culture,
despite some very significant weaknesses, while the predictions of the
peak oil community - which have a much more solid basis in fact - have
been dismissed out of hand. Why?

That question cannot be answered without straying out of simple matters
of fact into the murky territory of beliefs and cultural narratives.
Many of the critics of these essays, and indeed some of the people who
have praised them, have dismissed this side of the conversation I've
tried to start as irrelevant to our predicament. The problem with this
sort of thinking is that it's only in the delusions of raving economists
that human beings make decisions on the basis of a purely rational
assessment of objectively known facts. In the real world, facts are
never objectively known, and reasoning is the willing slave of its
preconceptions; we project our beliefs onto the inkblot patterns of
experience, and so understanding those beliefs is essential if we're to
understand the forces driving today's choices - and thus making
tomorrow's hard facts.

Look at the beliefs underlying the idea of catastrophic global climate
change and you'll find, at their core, a story about human power. We
have become so powerful through our technological progress, according to
the narrative, that we are able to threaten our own survival and that of
the Earth itself. The only limits most climate change advocates seem to
be able to imagine are those they think we must place on ourselves; even
if climate change leads to our extinction, we will at least have the
glory of doing the deed ourselves. It's almost a parody of the old
atheist gibe: to prove our own omnipotence, we made a crisis so big not
even we can lift it out of our way.

Underlying the idea of peak oil, though, lies a different and far more
sobering view of things, because peak oil is not a story about human
power; it's a story about human limits. If the peak oil narrative is
correct, the power we claimed as our own was never really ours; we got
it by breaking into the earth's treasure of stored carbon and burning it
up in a few short centuries. Despite the cliches, we never conquered
nature; instead, we borrowed her assets and blew them in a
three-hundred-year orgy of lavish consumption. Now the bills are coming
due, the balance left in the account won't meet them, and the remaining
question is how much of what we bought with all that carbon will still
be ours when nature's foreclosure proceedings finish with us.

These differences matter, because the basic assumption of the climate
change narrative - the belief in human omnipotence - is a core article
of faith in contemporary industrial societies. It's so pervasive that
its effects are rarely noticed, but it undergirds an astonishing range
of popular attitudes and ideas. It's axiomatic in the industrial world
that anything unsatisfactory is a problem in need of a solution, and
equally axiomatic that a solution can be found for it. The suggestion
that some deeply unsatisfactory conditions may not be problems that can
be solved but, rather, are predicaments that must be lived with, is at
once unthinkable and offensive to a great many people these days.

Yet this is exactly what the peak oil narrative suggests. If the world's
conventional petroleum production peaked in 2005 and faces imminent
declines, as all the evidence suggests; if none of the proposed
replacements for petroleum can take up the slack, and many of them,
especially the other fossil fuels, are themselves closing in on their
own peaks and declines; if the technological revolutions and economic
boom of the last three centuries were a product of extravagant use of
these nonrenewable resources, not of such impressive intangibles as "the
human spirit", and will not outlast their material basis; if, in other
words, human life is subject to hard ecological limits - if these things
are true, the narrative of human omnipotence falls, and a popular and
passionately held conception of humanity's nature and destiny falls with it.

Now I have to confess that I find the narrative of human omnipotence,
and the secular mythology that has grown up around it, utterly
unconvincing. From the perspective of my own Druid faith, all that
rhetoric about humanity's conquest of nature is absurd; it's as though a
leaf were to daydream about conquering the tree that brought it into
being, presently sustains it, and will let it fall in due time; the
attitudes that lead us to picture ourselves as creation's overlords
strike me as nothing more than an extraordinary case of egomania. Still,
the fact remains that, in an age that has abandoned the traditional
forms of religion without uprooting the emotional needs that religions
meet, many people rely on these beliefs as a source of meaning and hope.

In turn, the peak oil movement's problems finding a hearing in the wider
discourse of our time has nothing to do with a shortage of solid facts
or compelling reasoning; it has both of these in abundance. Rather, I
have come to think, those difficulties are rooted in the movement's
failure, at least so far, to address these deeper, nonrational issues.
If the peak oil message is correct, then the Great God Progress is dead;
however misguided the faith of his votaries may turn out to be in
hindsight, it's a deeply held faith, and those who rely on it to give
their lives meaning and hope can be counted on to cling to it until and
unless some convincing alternative comes their way. That their clinging
may keep our civilization from finding useful responses to a crisis even
more challenging than today's financial debacle is simply one of the
ironies of our present situation.

Links:

{1} http://www.newsociety.com/bookid/4014

{2} http://www.physorg.com/news133107932.htm


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