join with others who are paying attention: let’s save as much of humanity and the natural world as we can.
— Richard Heinberg
Senior Fellow, Post Carbon Institute
Introduction: Where We Went Wrong
RICHARD DOUTHWAITE
This book grew out of a conference in 2009 called the “New Emergency.” What emergency was that? Most people didn’t think that there was an emergency then and they don’t think there is one now. They know that the world is facing a lot of problems at present but they probably would not elevate any of them even to the status of a crisis, still less an emergency. The world has always had problems, they think, and it always will. Very few of them think that there’s anything going on at present that requires Ireland to mobilize all its resources in the way that it did in response to the Old Emergency, the Second World War.
However, once you recognize that most of the worst problems the world faces have a common cause and that time is running out to solve them, you have an emergency. That’s my position. I believe that the “development” path that the world has followed for the past three centuries has led to a dead end and that immediate action is required if humanity is to have any chance of getting on to a more sustainable path. Every day lost makes a satisfactory future less likely for billions of people, both born and yet-to-be-born, because our options are trickling away with our lifeblood, natural resources.
That’s the emergency. We need to apply a tourniquet immediately to give us time to take more drastic action. But who is conscious of this? How many people really grasp the severity of the climate crisis? Or the fact that the production of conventional oil has almost certainly peaked and the amount of energy that is going to be available for the world to use is going to shrink rapidly? Or that energy and water shortages are going to curtail the world’s food supply? What proportion of the general public is really worried about the rate at which species are being lost?
True, everyone knows that several countries have problems with debts or with their banking systems (or, like Ireland, with both), and that they, or people they know, are losing their jobs because of them, but they might not elevate these problems to the status of a crisis unless they live in Greece. They think that, in Ireland’s case, these financial problems began when the housing bubble burst and that the burst was somehow linked to the credit crunch that began when worthless securities generated by the sub-prime mortgage fiasco in the US triggered what was, for a time, an international banking crisis. There’s been almost no recognition that resource depletion was the underlying cause of that international banking crisis and there probably won’t be for as long as the conventional wisdom is that the world economy is looking up and the crisis itself has come to an end.
Even at its height, the financial crisis was only an emergency for those responsible for handling it. A country faces an emergency if an enemy is mobilizing on its border to invade, or if its people are dying in thousands from a plague. A family faces an emergency if its house is on fire or if one of its members has been hit by a car and needs to be rushed to hospital. An emergency is a period in which everything else is ignored in favor of immediate action.
From time to time, the chronic problems that face the world erupt and cause a minor emergency such as that on the evening in September 2008 when the Irish banks told the government they might be unable to open the following day. When something like that happens, people stay up late, the eruption is dealt with and then life goes on until the next eruption occurs. Few of us think that anything radical has to be done. We assure each other that minor tinkering, like holding an inquiry, beefing up the regulatory system and limiting bankers’ bonuses, will be enough to allow us to carry on living pretty much as we do now for the foreseeable future.
We are ignoring these eruptions in the way the inhabitants of Pompeii ignored the earthquakes which preceded the volcanic blast that destroyed them in 79 AD and which had been doing considerable damage for at least the previous sixteen years. Some of the earthquake-damaged houses were actually under repair at the time Vesuvius erupted, with piles of plaster and tools lying where the workers had left them. Rather than moving out, the Pompeiians wanted to carry on with life as usual. They had every reason to do so. The whole Bay of Naples area was booming and the holiday villas of the rich provided a lot of work. Interestingly, those who dropped everything and fled immediately when ash and pumice started raining down probably survived. However, many thought their best chance was to take shelter. They died when the avalanche of hot ash, pumice, rock fragments and volcanic gas began.
The common cause of all our crises today is our use of fossil fuel. Just as addictive drugs alter the metabolism of the human body in ways that create dependency and make it difficult to give them up, fossil fuels have profoundly altered the metabolism of economies and societies. As a result, the systems of production and distribution we have now, and the types of relationship we have with other people, including those within our own families, will be changed out of all recognition as the energy drug is withdrawn. The withdrawal period will be particularly painful in countries that fail to ensure that they have a decent supply of renewable energy methadone available to them. Cold turkey will mean that many people die. Thinking of Pompeii, if we leave it too late before we rush toward a new type of civilization, we will have to leave behind all our hi-tech, high-energy tools, and we may not survive without them.
Here are some of the ways in which fossil energy use has perverted our economies and our lives.
1. It has transformed manufacturing methods by displacing human labor.
2. It has transformed agricultural methods, replacing human labor, animal power and sunlight.
3. It has enabled the world population to grow to a level that may well be unsupportable without its use.
4. It has devalued human labor and led to widespread unemployment.
5. It has made the economy reliant on economic growth to avoid collapse.
6. It has enabled extremes of wealth and poverty to develop.
7. It has led to the development of industrial capitalism.
8. It has produced profits that had to be recycled. This led to the growth of the banking system and debt-based money.
9. By fueling powered transport, it has destroyed self-reliant local economies and the nature of local relationships.
Once fossil energy began to be used, these perversions were inevitable. About seven years ago, I wrote the concluding essay for Before the Wells Run Dry, a book about future energy supplies which emerged from a previous Feasta conference called Ireland’s Transition to Renewable Energy. That conference was the forerunner for a lot of the thinking in Feasta that laid the foundations for the New Emergency event so I’m going to draw rather liberally on what I wrote in 2003. The essay asked where humanity had gone wrong. When did we take a path which, because “one path leads to another” in Robert Frost’s phrase, inexorably led us to becoming totally dependent on a grotesquely unsustainable energy system?
I argued that the wrong turn was taken in England in the 16th Century as the population began to recover from the Black Death. The increased numbers — a rise from 1.6 million to 5.5 million in less than 200 years — naturally put greater pressure on resources and caused communities to have problems living within the limits imposed by their local environments. In 1631, Edmund Howes described how this had forced them to start to burn coal:
Within man’s memory it was held impossible to have any want of wood in England. But...such hath been the great expence of timber of navigation, with infinite increase of building houses, with great expence
