The Energy Grid Blog is managed and written entirely by Seed editors and expert guest bloggers. Read more about them This week's question is one of finding fault. What brought us to the current confluence of crises? Was it a failure of the political, or the technological?
Unlike the beltway pundits and the political scoundrels they defend, who use the phrase "blame game" to mockingly to retreat from accepting responsibility for, well anything, I don't think blame is just a game. Insanity is sometimes defined as trying the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Well, if you never bother to revisit your mistakes and find out what you did wrong, you might as well be insane because your behavior will not be much better. You can not correct things you don't know are mistakes. We can call that "practical insanity", not really insane, but what's the difference?
So let's play the blame game, but let's be dead serious about it.
Humanity's current crises is a failure of politics.
Gee, that wasn't as hard as I thought it would be! How can it be that simple? Well the first thing is choosing the right definition of politics. "Politics is the process by which groups of people make decisions." Clearly no individual has it in their power to combust vast oil reserves, destroy global ecosystems and drink rivers dry. As a group, no sweat. I am not limiting the term politics to those stuffed shirts bidding their time in the halls of power. This way, I can assimilate all the arguments out there about how it is not politicians, it is social decay. Or it is not politicians, it is the vested interests that control them. Or it's the media, or greed, gluttony, sloth and pride.
They are all right, and they are all part of the process by which we humans have made the decisions that have brought us to the brink. It is very important to know this if we truly want to step back from it.
Okay, but couldn't technology save us? I don't think so, because as James wrote, an unlisted answer to our original multiple choice question is consumption. Over consumption is at the root of our energy problems and our environmental problems. So if dilithium crystals were found under the thawing ice caps all it would do is hasten our ultimate unraveling.
I am reminded of an unlooked for lesson in civil engineering I received from an acquaintance a while ago. Vancouver's Lion's Gate Bridge is the major thoroughfare for traffic between downtown and the North Shore, and it is a traffic nightmare. Talks of expansion have come and gone, and I was wondering out loud to a civil engineer why the city does not plan better for the growth that will surely come, and with it the increased traffic. His answer was basically that no matter how wide a bridge the city put up, the population on the North Shore would expand to that new limit and that the current congestion was actually the major factor slowing its growth. I think an analogy can be made with energy and economic expansion. If energy did somehow remain as cheap and abundant as it has been over the 20th century, ie energy crisis solved, our current global society would not survive the 21st.
Unless we can muster a new kind of political process or at least inject some "practical sanity", the environment needs us to have an energy crises.
(Image by Coby Beck, all rights reserved)
Politics
Technology
Comments
"Unless we can muster a new kind of political process or at least inject some "practical sanity", the environment needs us to have an energy crises."
Your last two paragraphs almost sum the problem up, but you're not bold enough. We use up everything that we can use up, because that's what every species on the planet does. The difference with humans is that we have the capability to take pretty much whatever we want; other humans are our only competitors. It takes a conscious decision to NOT behave like that, and to make it for a large population REQUIRES such a decision be made by the few and enforced on the many.
Everyone will say "I want a solution to the energy crisis," but what they really mean is "I want as large a volume of the means of survival and reproduction as possible, and others can go without to solve the energy crisis." We see this in Australia at the moment; people supported an emissions trading at the last federal election, but reacted negatively when they were told it would cost them up to $1000 per year on their household costs.
I'm all for pushing ahead with ETS-type systems if possible, and to try to make them work. But they're a stop-gap, just like fission power. Ultimately, we need to move straight to the 'sustainable cap' of energy production--that is, efficient solar and associated renewables--and to move there in such a way that it is economically advantageous to conserve fossil fuel reserves for other purposes. In reality, oil is infinitely more valuable for the production of hydrocarbon-based chemicals (medicine, plastic, fertilizer, etc) than it is for energy; but the lack of a cheap energy alternative warps the economics away from what is practical in this regard. I don't doubt my children's children will be incredulous when I tell them that we used to BURN the stuff.
Returning to the main point, and keeping in mind that increases in efficiency per unit population will just be made up for by complementary population increase, it's ultimately a technological solution we need. And a political rearguard action to carry us there. So: cleaner coal (if CCS turns out to work), more gas instead of coal, fission, possibly fusion in the future, more efficient use of energy, and proper economic accounting for costs to get us there. And in the end (hopefully), reasonably cheap and efficient solar.
And let's be honest: if the technological solution is slow, the world's going to change. We should be getting ready for that in the meantime, at the same time as we try to slow the process down and work feverishly to 'step over' the problem technologically.
Posted by: Nils Ross | May 22, 2009 4:04 AM
"proper economic accounting for costs to get us there." This is the single biggest driver that the political system has ignored in addressing the issue. Behavior can and will change when the dollar price for something - a service, an energy source, a transportation mode - reflect the real impacts of that thing in human economic realms and the the ecosystems in which we sit.
Posted by: Philip H. | May 22, 2009 9:02 AM
That's just the problem Phil. People support an ETS that makes other people pay for the problem; they don't support one that makes everyone pay for the problem. The POINT of an ETS is to make polluting actions more expensive and thereby encourage a change of behaviour. Politicians gloss over this, and when people realise it, they complain.
Posted by: Nils Ross | May 23, 2009 1:11 AM
Thanks for this. I agree with Nils Ross as well. I study history and increasingly I feel the empire paradigm is exemplified by but not limited to the Brits in the 1900s, of conquering by privileging some over others. "manifest destiny" which I learned in school is problematic. I remember going off McCain when he said he was sustained bya the knowledge that we're better than those others. This mindset is so deeply ingrained in how we approach life that nothing short of a cataclysm like Europe's 2 world wars can shake us out of it.
I participate in DotEarth and am fascinated (in an appalling way) by a regular shill from Australia. How can you, I wonder.
No amount of weird weather seems to get anywhere; we seem to have had a tropical storm in Florida in late May. But does anyone at all mention it?
A friend in Brazil is my sole source for the weather phenomenon still under way there that has killed dozens and made nearly 400,000 homeless. They're poor, so no news.
The catastrophe has to be in our own backyards to gain traction.
Posted by: Susan | May 25, 2009 3:50 PM
Well, speaking of dilithium crystals, I think you all may find this interesting.
Go to: www.thetransporterroom.com
Posted by: Michael | June 2, 2009 10:16 AM
next crises will be much bigger...I think so
Posted by: opony triangle | June 3, 2009 4:54 AM
We thank Michael for the information provided and energygrid do I need to examine this issue a bit mor
Posted by: Tatil | June 10, 2009 7:11 PM