"Clinging to Fantasies"

Years ago when I stumbled across the Dark Mountain collective I was drawn to how it was a place for 'people tired of the lies society tells itself.'

Now with the fires beginning to singe our feet, the Tyee's Andrew Nikiforuk writes that we're doubling down on those lies.

Global elites are now offering ordinary people two salvation stories for our digital entertainment. 

Both delusional stories are being served on the Internet with bags of virtual popcorn. 

One is the so-called Green New Deal, and the other is Business As Usual, which comes in both liberal and autocratic formats.

Business as Usual - BAU

The BAU refrain is simple: trust the status quo and its armies of technocrats, because they’ll make things great again. 

The BAU crowd maintains that nothing is really wrong with our failing global economic Ponzi schemes or the broken air conditioning unit that controls the climate. 

According to the BAU crowd, there is only one route to greatness: we must deregulate and reduce taxes for the rich in order to promote growth and jobs. 

The BAU program also encourages citizens to attack its critics, climate migrants, scientists or anybody else who questions the insanity of its approach.

The Green New Deal - GND

Proponents of the GND claim they have a plan to transform the globe’s massive fossil fuel infrastructure into 100-per-cent renewables over the next decade. 

In just 10 years, they say, we can pivot (a favourite word for elites these days) to a greener and saner world than the one based on a century of fossil fuel reliance. 

The GND movement says it will drive carbon emissions down toward zero with the goal of thwarting rising seas, maverick storms, heat waves and ocean acidification. 

In the process, the GND aims to employ lots of people, end poverty, and perhaps racism too.

...If we divide the days of the year up based on total energy use, he writes, fossil fuels — oil, coal and natural gas — powered the globe for 321 days in 2018. (Fossil fuels provide more than 80 cent of the energy we consume.) 

Dams and nuclear power kept the lights on for 15 days. 

Renewables or repeatables (solar panels and wind turbines need to be replaced every 50 years or so) only energized the globe for about 29 days. And most of that energy came from biomass or wood burning. 

The GND wants to turn 29 days into 321 days of primary power — in a decade.

I'm pleased that Nikiforuk concurs with what I've been writing for many years. Climate change is not a stand-alone threat. It's not the disease. It is just a symptom of a far more lethal contagion that also incorporates other deadly symptoms - overpopulation, over-consumption and more. You can't fix any of them unless you fix them all.

BAU pretends that expensive fossil fuels like fracked oil or bitumen can replace cheap conventional stuff with no global economic contraction. They can’t. 

GND pretends that renewables can provide the same quality of energy as fossil fuels with no global upheaval. They can’t. 

Both ignore the limits imposed when 7.7 billion human beings are consuming the planet, and the dire consequences for biodiversity. Any way you look at it, overpopulation is part of the problem. But not in the BAU and GND worldviews. 

These two battling narratives also fail to take into account the fragility of the global financial system. It is now sustained by low — or negative — interest rates and a fossil fuel industry sustained by cheap credit.

Nikiforuk cites a University of Minnesota prof, Nate Hagens' theory of the great amoeba.

He says the world is in the grip of energy-consuming amoeba, or what some critics used to call the technological-industrial complex. 

The omnivorous blob, a sort of “unthinking, mindless, energy-hungry superorganism,” is autonomous. We are no longer in charge or driving this crazy bus. It has swallowed us. 

Every fossil fuel user belongs to the amoeba, just as a starling and its neighbours belong to a murmuration. 

Because almost every good and service (and solar panel) starts with a fossil fuel fire, the amoeba can’t really think of a world where power is not consumed vigorously and mindlessly. 

And without fossil fuels, the amoeba would shrink and die. 

Almost every so-called environmental problem, from deforestation to nitrogen imbalances to vanishing fisheries, is largely a product of the metabolism of the energy-consuming amoeba. 

Hagens thinks the world needs a non-partisan conversation about this reality, and about how to prepare for a 30-per-cent drop in energy consumption. 

He says civilization has three options: it can muddle on, bend or break.

BAU or GND, take your pick. Either way, we lose.

The BAU crowd thinks we can grow the amoeba, and all will be great again. 

The GND thinks we can green the amoeba and right all that is wrong. 

Listening to these two camps trying to clobber each other while denying reality brings to mind a delightful line from an equally absurd scene in the film Dr. Strangelove.

“Gentlemen! You can’t fight in here! This is the war room!” 

We’ve begun to experience collapse in all spheres of life. Collapse can be both slow and rapid. It is a series of unending emergencies. 

Instead of responding or preparing, we’re cheering on a fight between fantasies.

I have long argued that our best, perhaps only way out of this is to treat Earth, our one and only biosphere, as the sine qua non of our survival. We either choose to live in harmony with nature or we will impair nature in ways that extinguish ourselves.

The Earth has a natural and finite carrying capacity. It can only take so much. Mankind went beyond the environment's limits sometime in the early 1970s and we have relentlessly taken increasingly more ever since. We've grown in numbers, we've grown in appetites, we think nothing of demanding ever more, tying the anchor of perpetual exponential growth tightly around our own necks.

This is the only planet we have. Just this one. Yet we consume resources at a rate that would require 1.75 planet Earths to support.

We don't have options. There are no easy fixes. Either we go into what Lovelock called 'sustainable retreat' or we die off by our own hand. We have to depopulate this planet. The Earth, back in the 70s was able to support about 3 billion humans. Since then we've grown more populous, individually larger, longer lived, and far more voracious. The last analysis I saw concluded that the planet can now carry only about 2 billion humans.  We're closing in on 8 billion. Do the math.

Are you prepared to slash you consumption, your standard of living by a third, maybe half? I hope so because I know you're not prepared for Option B.