Sharon Astyk, author of the useful energy crisis weblog ‘Casaubon’s Book’, asks the following question:
What if your sense of impending doom places you at a distance from the rest of the world, and makes it feel empty? The difficulty here is that people do respond to your sense – even unspoken – that their works are shallow or empty – even if they are. At its root, community building works best when people feel liked and respected, as though they and their concerns matter to you. It is very difficult, then, to begin from the sense that everything others value is false – if there is a fundamentally insurmountable problem in community building, this may be it.
The Tragic Sense and the Need for Connection, 27 July 2010
I ran up hard against this in a conversation with my classmate Martin today. He is what might be called a green techno-optimist, inspired by a vision of the future in which our energy problems are solved by technology-in his case, solar power.
We circled the usual suspects. Martin advancing all sorts of wonderful ideas, from plastering the Sahara with solar panels, to working even harder on the science fiction project of nuclear fusion. Me trotting out the elementary reasons why none of it can possibly work. With growing irritation, we reached bedrock: “You have to believe that we will fix this. The future is just too horrible if we don’t. What have we got to lose?”.
The answer to that helps an understanding of the value of being the doomster, and of persevering. We have got a lot to lose if we carry on with the magic thinking. A group of sailors trapped on a submarine with 6 hours of air left might have unpleasant solutions that can be arrived at within 6 hours, and better solutions that might need 24 hours.
We have the equivalent of 6 hours left – a known production rate, a known depletion rate, a known volume of additional production from known and plausible unknown conventional and unconventional sources. We will be 60% short of 20th Century “business as usual” volumes by 2030. Capitalism and the global economy will crash long before then.
We can’t do both – all available production is now fully employed keeping the lights on. To make any substantial contribution to the energy mix from other energy sources would require massive quantities of energy to build the infrastructure. Switching that volume of energy out of the economy will crash it.
So pursuing the 24 hour option (nuclear fusion/neoclassical growth) at the expense of the 6 hour option (strategic contraction, post industrial living standards consistent with the capacity of sustainable renewable energy solutions) means we will lose the 6 hour option. When the crash comes, we will be in a much worse position than we would have been if we had started the process of restructuring society to the harsh reallities of energy and resource constraints.
So where does that leave the doomster? Astyk asks how we can work on the vital task of community building, when our disposition isolates us from society ? We find the common ground, and work on that.