Today, I'd like to re-visit the conversation I had yesterday with the oil and gas representatives.
Interestingly enough, it started with us quickly coming to
agreement that climate change was a real threat and that its negative impacts
were already been felt around the world and very close to home. They were
bright people; they understood the chemistry of carbon and greenhouse gases in
the atmosphere well enough. A delightful surprise for sure, but when I
suggested that humanity needed to kick its global addiction to fossil fuels, a
huge disconnect was revealed.
We have no choice, they argued. Renewable energy for the
world’s needs is still long way off. Not true, I thought to myself, before replying
that I held to the view that we always have choice. This is the one thing that
can not be taken away from us, as Victor Frankl makes abundantly clear in his
classic “Man’s Search for Meaning” based on his experiences in a Jewish prison
of war camp during Second World War.
We need to immediately start making choices that enable us to stop the
“substance abuse” with oil and gas, I countered. That stopped them momentarily.
Then a woman across from me spoke up, defending natural gas
as a much cleaner fuel than oil or coal, and the extractive practice of
hydraulic fracturing (or “fracking) for obtaining it. Cleaner but still not
clean, I replied. They all agreed. But she persisted, arguing that only
consumers can bring about a change in the marketplace and that producers only
provide what consumers want. I’ve heard this one many times. While I agree our
decisions about what to buy and not to buy have a significant impact on what
products make their way onto store shelves, the producers also have a significant
responsibility for what they make and how it is made and consumed. What if
full cost accounting were adopted, I asked them. Would that not bring about
significant changes in production and consumption? They nodded their heads in
agreement.
Let’s take a hard look at the environmental and social costs
associated with the oilsands and the pipelines, I encouraged them. The
pollution of soil, water, and air or the negative impacts on local aboriginal
communities are not factored into the calculations of profits and loss. Nor are
the ecological services provided freely by the planet, such as an abundant
fresh water supply. If these “externalities”, as economists like to call them,
were taken into account, I very much doubt that we could afford the tarsands and
the pipelines. They would simply be too expensive and we would be forced to
ramp up alternative energy sources much quicker.
While they were willing to partially concede the point, one
of them emphasized that this would be terrible for the economy. I couldn’t
believe what I heard. Did they agree that global economy was contracting? In
many places, yes, but not in China, India or Brazil they asserted. But not for
much longer, I replied, before asking: what is no longer a given factor in
production? Silence. An adequate supply of cheap fossil fuel. We’ve picked off
almost all of the “low hanging fruit” in terms of oil and gas reserves, now
we’re down to pouring vast amounts of money into extracting diminishing pockets
that are very expensive to access, refine, and distribute. Like junkies, we’re
so addicted to getting the next fix, that we’re willing to sell whatever we
have or can steal from others so we can buy the substances needed to keep us
high -- principally oil, gas and coal. They didn’t like the repeated reference
to addiction, but conceded the point.
The entire global economy is dependent on the constant
supply of cheap energy, I continued. As the supply runs out, production becomes
more expensive as does consumption. This has been the trend over the past three
decades or so. Pretty much the only reason economic growth was sustained over
this period was because of credit and debt transactions. Unfortunately the
global economy built on state and individual debt was not prepared for the
sudden financial collapse that rocked
Wall Street in the winter of 2008/09 triggered essentially by greed. Countries such as Iceland, Ireland,
Spain, Italy, and Greece were maxed out on their lines of credit and saw their
economies topple as the resulting tsunami swept swiftly through the tightly
networked financial markets around the world. This was the proximate cause of
the great global economic contraction; however, the ultimate cause was and
remains the shortage of cheap and abundant fossil fuel. As a result, I concluded,
we’re likely to see on-going contractions with state economies for quite some
time yet.
As we finished up our meals, we all came back to agreeing
that the situation was, indeed, very dire and made all the more so by the sheer
complexity of the inextricably linked economic, social and ecological problems, with no easy answers to be seen anywhere.
Footnote: I must acknowledge the book "Fleeing Vesuvius: Overcoming the Risks of Economic and Environmental Collapse" edited by Richard Douthwaite and Gillian Fallon for heavily influencing my thinking on the inter-connected nature of the economic-ecological crisis. Many of ideas I shared with the oil and gas representatives above and here with you the reader were borrowed from this book.
