Price-less Energy - Part 1

"Energy and persistence conquer all things."

Benjamin Franklin

Introduction

The whole of decision-making worldwide is based on the unquestioned assumption of continuity. The belief that next year will be basically the same as last year, except hopefully a bit better, with more of whatever.

Even when contemplating disruptions or actively developing disruptive technologies, this is always taking place within a context of the ongoingness character of the world within which decision-makers believe they live in. Even perceived threats like climate change or the development of “AI” remain thought of mostly in a distant, rather foggy long-term and with a view to ensuring continuity of the fabric of “civilisation” whatever each decision-maker may mean by this word.

Yet, since the advent of the neolithic some 12,000 years ago, countless societies, cultures, empires and civilisations have arisen and mostly ended rather abruptly. Human history is marked by repeated, drastic discontinuities, breaks, breakdowns and collapses. In most instance when such breaks did happen, decision-makers of the time had no understanding of what was happening, no understanding that their decision-making was mostly causing or precipitating the breakdowns, and had no idea of how to possibly extricate themselves and their people from the disasters in the making. Our world is not immune to this. Research that has been accumulating since the 1960s has by now provided massive evidence that this is happening to our world, right now, at the global level.

The acute paradox of the present situation is that, on the one hand, this is the first time that a tiny minority of humans, transdisciplinary scientists, have managed to generate an in-depth understanding of the breakdown dynamic, its speed and timing, and the avenues available to extricate humankind from the disaster in the making and, on the other hand, decision-making nonetheless remains wholly ignorant of this vital accumulated knowledge, expertise and experience while nonetheless claiming superior knowledge in making seemingly rational decisions that, as in so many previous historical instances, precipitate further the global breakdown.

In what follows we focus on the core stumbling block that prevents decision-making from becoming conscious of the global breakdown of the industrial world already well in train and from addressing the resulting challenges effectively. We first briefly review core findings concerning the breakdown to then focus on the main stumbling block.

The Core Findings

The above is the backdrop for the work of the Fourth Transition Initiative (FTI). Its core findings and insights, based on the work of well over 10,000 scientists and engineers over some 60 years, are four-fold:

1. The show is over. 

   The whole globalised industrial world (GIW) has begun to plunge towards Dead State, i.e., the point when the total energy cost of getting energy, measured in Joules, comes to equate with the total energy obtained, also measured in Joules, and everything grinds to a halt. Energy here includes all forms, even so-called “renewables” and is computed strictly in energy units, fully outside economics. The matter is bound to become irretrievable in the near future (with ~2030 as a critical time horizon). That is, research demonstrates that the GIW has triple locked itself in a thermodynamic trap accelerating towards Dead State. Most of humankind is now in a “dead man walking” situation with no escape possible with the present technological mix and modes of thinking, deciding, doing and organising socially.

   
   

2. The chief causes for this situation are known. Over some 300 years, decision-makers built and developed the industrial world retaining their preindustrial theistic and dualistic mentality/psyche while making use of scientific outcomes produced outside such theisms, that is, outside beliefs in some invisible power expressed in myths, rituals and magical thinking that spelt out in rigid ways what was authorised or forbidden. From the outset of the industrialisation process onwards, decision-makers and associated thinkers, invented economics as the fundamental theism of the industrial world; the fantasy of a perpetual motion machine.1 They did so in full contradiction with thermodynamics, systems dynamics, the ecology of the whole of Life on Earth (Earth-Life), and some 3 million years of anthropological evolution. This 300 years process has now run its course. Humankind and the whole of Earth-Life now suffer the drastic consequences of idiotic (aka grossly ignorant) decision-making over this whole period, and has entered an abrupt phase of global civilisation breakdown.

   
   

3. Yet the accumulated research demonstrates that it is perfectly feasible to live 100% sustainably, in prosperous ways, 100% solar-based, in harmony with the whole of Earth-Life, i.e., without the danger of falling into Dead State.

   
   

4. Furthermore, this same accumulated research demonstrates that there is at least one way to exit the Dead State trap, pass beyond and achieve the above sustainable modes of living in prosperous ways. We do have the means to do so. However, this requires a profound change concerning how we think, decide, do and organise socially. This is a change that is perfectly achievable rapidly. In future parts of this post we will explain how and why it is necessary.

   
   

1 As demonstrated by Emeritus Prof of Economics, Serge Latouche, economics was invented during the decades that led to the first Industrial Revolution. Economics is the chief “constructed reality” that Prof Bill Rees talks about, wholly self-referential and wholly disconnected with what’s actually going on (Serge Latouche, 2005, L’Invention de L’Economie [The Invention of Economics and Economy], Albin Michel, Paris).