Today’s Contemplation: Collapse Cometh CXXII
Story-Telling To Avoid The Reality Of Peak Oil
April 17, 2023 (original posting date)
Story-Telling To Avoid The Reality Of Peak Oil
A rather brief Contemplation prompted once again by the latest post of The Honest Sorcerer, who looks at the future of humanity’s electrical power grid and its unsustainability.
Your post reminded me immediately of a quote by electrical engineer Richard Duncan in a 2001 paper he authored and that I read shortly after falling into the rabbit’s hole of Peak Oil Theory back in 2010:
Although all primary sources of energy are important, the Olduvai theory identifies electricity as the quintessential end-use energy of Industrial Civilization…[A]ccording to the Olduvai schematic, world energy production per capita will decrease…[then] there will be a rash of permanent electrical blackouts worldwide. Consequently the vital…functions — communication, computation, and control — will be lost.
…Mother Nature then solves for us the (apparently) insuperable problem of the Tragedy of the Unmanaged Commons, which the human race seems either incapable or unwilling to solve for itself.
Governments have lost respect. World organizations are ineffective. Neo-tribalism is rampant. The population is over [seven] billion and counting. Global warming and emerging diseases are headlines. The reliability of the electrical power networks is failing. And the instant the power goes out, you are back in the Dark Ages.
Richard Duncan, 2001
World Energy Production, Population Growth, and the Road to Olduvai Gorge
Humanity would be wise to plan for this eventuality of a permanent loss of our electrical power grid in the not-too-distant-future. Alas, we do not seem to be capable of living up to our taxonomic nomenclature as ‘wise humans’. Instead, we should recognise our species as simius fabulator (storyteller ape), simius fabulans (the ape telling stories), or maybe simius amafabulas (story-loving ape).
Rather than face harsh and anxiety-provoking thoughts/ideas, we craft comforting narratives to aid us in denying reality. This denial of reality has led us down a rather treacherous evolutionary path that would appear to put not only our own existence at risk, but that of all remaining other species as well.
Rather than recognise that in the development of our large, complex societies the inequitable access to resources has led to power and wealth structures dominated by a ruling caste of simius fabulators that have spread myths that serve to justify their positions atop these structures — and in a positive feedback way, they and their families/supporters remain atop them as long as they can extract/generate increasing amounts of wealth and power; thus their main motivation to cheerlead perpetual growth through particular narratives. And in our tendency to defer to/obey those in positions of power/authority, we are more likely to believe what these people say than anyone else or any evidence to the contrary — particularly if they can spin the tales in ways that make all the other story-loving apes believe their actions/decisions benefit everyone, not just them.
Rather than confront the self-evident fact that existence upon a finite planet has limits and surpassing those limits leads to overshoot requiring a reversion-to-the-mean as some future point, we create stories to rationalise our habits and proclivities to ignore all these uncomfortable facts. We tell ourselves that our intelligence and technological prowess can solve anything that challenges our wants/desires/wishes/goals.
Rather than meet head on the inevitable decline of our energetic conveniences and dependencies, and attempt to relocalise all of our important survival needs and/or decommission the dangerous complexities we’ve constructed, we are doubling down our efforts to sustain/expand these finite resource-based technologies while marketing them as solutions to a predicament we might at best be capable of mitigating marginally in some regions.
The harsh reality of growth limits and ecological overshoot may never be recognised by most for simius amafabulas is eager to believe the stories that end with some as-yet-to-be-hatched miracle technology saving the day and everyone living happily ever after…
If you’ve made it to the end of this contemplation and have got something out of my writing, please consider ordering the trilogy of my ‘fictional’ novel series, Olduvai (PDF files; only $9.99 Canadian), via my website or the link below — the ‘profits’ of which help me to keep my internet presence alive and first book available in print (and is available via various online retailers).
Attempting a new payment system as I am contemplating shutting down my site in the future (given the ever-increasing costs to keep it running).
If you are interested in purchasing any of the 3 books individually or the trilogy, please try the link below indicating which book(s) you are purchasing.
Costs (Canadian dollars):
Book 1: $2.99
Book 2: $3.89
Book 3: $3.89
Trilogy: $9.99
Feel free to throw in a ‘tip’ on top of the base cost if you wish; perhaps by paying in U.S. dollars instead of Canadian. Every few cents/dollars helps…
https://paypal.me/olduvaitrilogy?country.x=CA&locale.x=en_US
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You can also find a variety of resources, particularly my summary notes for a handful of texts, especially Catton’s Overshoot and Tainter’s Collapse: see here.
It Bears Repeating: Best Of…Volume 1
A compilation of writers focused on the nexus of limits to growth, energy, and ecological overshoot.
With a Foreword and Afterword by Michael Dowd, authors include: Max Wilbert; Tim Watkins; Mike Stasse; Dr. Bill Rees; Dr. Tim Morgan; Rob Mielcarski; Dr. Simon Michaux; Erik Michaels; Just Collapse’s Tristan Sykes & Dr. Kate Booth; Kevin Hester; Alice Friedemann; David Casey; and, Steve Bull.
The document is not a guided narrative towards a singular or overarching message; except, perhaps, that we are in a predicament of our own making with a far more chaotic future ahead of us than most imagine–and most certainly than what mainstream media/politics would have us believe.
Click here to access the document as a PDF file, free to download.