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Page added on March 5, 2015
Peak Meaninglessness
Last week’s discussion of externalities—costs of doing business that get dumped onto the economy, the community, or the environment, so that those doing the dumping can make a bigger profit—is, I’m glad to say, not the first time this issue has been raised recently. The long silence that closed around such things three decades ago is finally cracking; they’re being mentioned again, and not just by archdruids. One of my readers—tip of the archdruidical hat to Jay McInerney—noted an article in Grist a while back that pointed out the awkward fact that none of the twenty biggest industries in today’s world could break even, much less make a profit, if they had to pay for the damage they do to the environment.
Now of course the conventional wisdom these days interprets that statement to mean that it’s unfair to make those industries pay for the costs they impose on the rest of us—after all, they have a God-given right to profit at everyone else’s expense, right? That’s certainly the attitude of fracking firms in North Dakota, who recently proposed that they ought to be exempted from the state’s rules on dumping radioactive waste, because following the rules would cost them too much money. That the costs externalized by the fracking industry will sooner or later be paid by others, as radionuclides in fracking waste work their way up the food chain and start producing cancer clusters, is of course not something anyone in the industry or the media is interested in discussing.
Watch this sort of thing, and you can see the chasm opening up under the foundations of industrial society. Externalized costs don’t just go away; one way or another, they’re going to be paid, and costs that don’t appear on a company’s balance sheet still affect the economy. That’s the argument of The Limits to Growth, still the most accurate (and thus inevitably the most reviled) of the studies that tried unavailingly to turn industrial society away from its suicidal path: on a finite planet, once an inflection point is passed, the costs of economic growth rise faster than growth does, and sooner or later force the global economy to its knees.
The tricks of accounting that let corporations pretend that their externalized costs vanish into thin air don’t change that bleak prognosis. Quite the contrary, the pretense that externalities don’t matter just makes it harder for a society in crisis to recognize the actual source of its troubles. I’ve come to think that that’s the unmentioned context behind a dispute currently roiling those unhallowed regions where economists lurk in the shrubbery: the debate over secular stagnation.
Secular stagnation? That’s the concept, unmentionable until recently, that the global economy could stumble into a rut of slow, no, or negative growth, and stay there for years. There are still plenty of economists who insist that this can’t happen, which is rather funny, really, when you consider that this has basically been the state of the global economy since 2009. (My back-of-the-envelope calculations suggest, in fact, that if you subtract the hallucinatory paper wealth manufactured by derivatives and similar forms of financial gamesmanship from the world’s GDP, the production of nonfinancial goods and services worldwide has actually been declining since before the 2008 housing crash.)
Even among those who admit that what’s happening can indeed happen, there’s no consensus as to how or why such a thing could occur. On the off chance that any mainstream economists are lurking in the shrubbery in the even more unhallowed regions where archdruids utter unspeakable heresies, and green wizards clink mugs of homebrewed beer together and bay at the moon, I have a suggestion to offer: the most important cause of secular stagnation is the increasing impact of externalities on the economy. The dishonest macroeconomic bookkeeping that leads economists to think that externalized costs go away because they’re not entered into anyone’s ledger books doesn’t actually make them disappear; instead, they become an unrecognized burden on the economy as a whole, an unfelt headwind blowing with hurricane force in the face of economic growth.
Thus there’s a profound irony in the insistence by North Dakota fracking firms that they ought to be allowed to externalize even more of their costs in order to maintain their profit margin. If I’m right, the buildup of externalized costs is what’s causing the ongoing slowdown in economic activity worldwide that’s driving down commodity prices, forcing interest rates in many countries to zero or below, and resurrecting the specter of deflationary depression. The fracking firms in question thus want to respond to the collapse in oil prices—a result of secular stagnation—by doing even more of what’s causing secular stagnation. To say that this isn’t likely to end well is to understate the case considerably.
In the real world, of course, mainstream economists don’t listen to suggestions from archdruids, and fracking firms, like every other business concern these days, can be expected to put their short-term cash flow ahead of the survival of their industry, or for that matter of industrial civilization as a whole. Thus I propose to step aside from the subject of economic externalities for a moment—though I’ll be returning to it at intervals as we proceed with this sequence of posts—in order to discuss a subtler and less crassly financial form of the same phenomenon.
That form came in for discussion in the same post two weeks ago that brought the issue of externalities into this blog’s ongoing conversation. Quite a few readers commented about the many ways in which things labeled “more advanced,” “more progressive,” and the like were actually less satisfactory and less effective at meeting human needs than the allegedly more primitive technologies they replaced. Some of those comments focused, and quite sensibly, on the concrete examples, but others pondered the ways that today’s technology fails systematically at meeting certain human needs, and reflected on the underlying causes for that failure. One of my readers—tip of the archdruidical hat here to Ruben—gave an elegant frame for that discussion by suggesting that the peak of technological complexity in our time may also be described as peak meaninglessness.
I’d like to take the time to unpack that phrase. In the most general sense, technologies can be divided into two broad classes, which we can respectively call tools and prosthetics. The difference is a matter of function. A tool expands human potential, giving people the ability to do things they couldn’t otherwise do. A prosthetic, on the other hand, replaces human potential, doing something that under normal circumstances, people can do just as well for themselves. Most discussions of technology these days focus on tools, but the vast majority of technologies that shape the lives of people in a modern industrial society are not tools but prosthetics.
Prosthetics have a definite value, to be sure. Consider an artificial limb, the sort of thing on which the concept of technology-as-prosthetic is modeled. If you’ve lost a leg in an accident, say, an artificial leg is well worth having; it replaces a part of ordinary human potential that you don’t happen to have any more, and enables you to do things that other people can do with their own leg. Imagine, though, that some clever marketer were to convince people to have their legs cut off so that they could be fitted for artificial legs. Imagine, furthermore, that the advertising for artificial legs became so pervasive, and so successful, that nearly everybody became convinced that human legs were hopelessly old-fashioned and ugly, and rushed out to get their legs amputated so they could walk around on artificial legs.
Then, of course, the manufacturers of artificial arms got into the same sort of marketing, followed by the makers of sex toys. Before long you’d have a society in which most people were gelded quadruple amputees fitted with artificial limbs and rubber genitals, who spent all their time talking about the wonderful things they could do with their prostheses. Only in the darkest hours of the night, when the TV was turned off, might some of them wonder why it was that a certain had-to-define numbness had crept into all their interactions with other people and the rest of the world.
In a very real sense, that’s the way modern industrial society has reshaped and deformed human life for its more privileged inmates. Take any human activity, however humble or profound, and some clever marketer has found a way to insert a piece of technology in between the person and the activity. You can’t simply bake bread—a simple, homely, pleasant activity that people have done themselves for thousands of years using their hands and a few simple handmade tools; no, you have to have a bread machine, into which you dump a prepackaged mix and some liquid, push a button, and stand there being bored while it does the work for you, if you don’t farm out the task entirely to a bakery and get the half-stale industrially extruded product that passes for bread these days.
Now of course the bread machine manufacturers and the bakeries pitch their products to the clueless masses by insisting that nobody has time to bake their own bread any more. Ivan Illich pointed out in Energy and Equity a long time ago the logical fallacy here, which is that using a bread machine or buying from a bakery is only faster if you don’t count the time you have to spend earning the money needed to pay for it, power it, provide it with overpriced prepackaged mixes, repair it, clean it, etc., etc., etc. Illich’s discussion focused on automobiles; he pointed out that if you take the distance traveled by the average American auto in a year, and divide that by the total amount of time spent earning the money to pay for the auto, fuel, maintenance, insurance, etc., plus all the other time eaten up by tending to the auto in various ways, the average American car goes about 3.5 miles an hour: about the same pace, that is, that an ordinary human being can walk.
If this seems somehow reminiscent of last week’s discussion of externalities, dear reader, it should. The claim that technology saves time and labor only seems to make sense if you ignore a whole series of externalities—in this case, the time you have to put into earning the money to pay for the technology and into coping with whatever requirements, maintenance needs, and side effects the technology has. Have you ever noticed that the more “time-saving technologies” you bring into your life, the less free time you have? This is why—and it’s also why the average medieval peasant worked shorter hours, had more days off, and kept a larger fraction of the value of his labor than you do.
Something else is being externalized by prosthetic technology, though, and it’s that additional factor that gives Ruben’s phrase “peak meaninglessness” its punch. What are you doing, really, when you use a bread machine? You’re not baking bread; the machine is doing that. You’re dumping a prepackaged mix and some water into a machine, closing the lid, pushing a button, and going away to do something else. Fair enough—but what is this “something else” that you’re doing? In today’s industrial societies, odds are you’re going to go use another piece of prosthetic technology, which means that once again, you’re not actually doing anything. A machine is doing something for you. You can push that button and walk away, but again, what are you going to do with your time? Use another machine?
The machines that industrial society uses to give this infinite regress somewhere to stop—televisions, video games, and computers hooked up to the internet—simply take the same process to its ultimate extreme. Whatever you think you’re doing when you’re sitting in front of one of these things, what you’re actually doing is staring at little colored pictures on a glass screen and pushing some buttons. All things considered, this is a profoundly boring activity, which is why the little colored pictures jump around all the time; that’s to keep your nervous system so far off balance that you don’t notice just how tedious it is to spend hours at a time staring at little colored pictures on a screen.
I can’t help but laugh when people insist that the internet is an information-rich environment. It’s quite the opposite, actually: all you get from it is the very narrow trickle of verbal, visual, and auditory information that can squeeze through the digital bottleneck and turn into little colored pictures on a glass screen. The best way to experience this is to engage in a media fast—a period in which you deliberately cut yourself off from all electronic media for a week or more, preferably in a quiet natural environment. If you do that, you’ll find that it can take two or three days, or even more, before your numbed and dazzled nervous system recovers far enough that you can begin to tap in to the ocean of sensory information and sensual delight that surrounds you at every moment. It’s only then, furthermore, that you can start to think your own thoughts and dream your own dreams, instead of just rehashing whatever the little colored pictures tell you.
A movement of radical French philosophers back in the 1960s, the Situationists, argued that modern industrial society is basically a scheme to convince people to hand over their own human capabilities to the industrial machine, so that imitations of those capabilities can be sold back to them at premium prices. It was a useful analysis then, and it’s even more useful now, when the gap between realities and representations has become even more drastic than it was back then. These days, as often as not, what gets sold to people isn’t even an imitation of some human capability, but an abstract representation of it, an arbitrary marker with only the most symbolic connection to what it represents.
This is one of the reasons why I think it’s deeply mistaken to claim that Americans are materialistic. Americans are arguably the least materialistic people in the world; no actual materialist—no one who had the least appreciation for actual physical matter and its sensory and sensuous qualities—could stand the vile plastic tackiness of America’s built environment and consumer economy for a fraction of a second. Americans don’t care in the least about matter; they’re happy to buy even the most ugly, uncomfortable, shoddily made and absurdly overpriced consumer products you care to imagine, so long as they’ve been convinced that having those products symbolizes some abstract quality they want, such as happiness, freedom, sexual pleasure, or what have you.
Then they wonder, in the darkest hours of the night, why all the things that are supposed to make them happy and satisfied somehow never manage to do anything of the kind. Of course there’s a reason for that, too, which is that happy and satisfied people don’t keep on frantically buying products in a quest for happiness and satisfaction. Still, the little colored pictures keep showing them images of people who are happy and satisfied because they guzzle the right brand of tasteless fizzy sugar water, and pay for the right brand of shoddily made half-disposable clothing, and keep watching the little colored pictures: that last above all else. “Tune in tomorrow” is the most important product that every media outlet sells, and they push it every minute of every day on every stop and key.
That is to say, between my fantasy of voluntary amputees eagerly handing over the cash for the latest models of prosthetic limbs, and the reality of life in a modern industrial society, the difference is simply in the less permanent nature of the alterations imposed on people here and now. It’s easier to talk people into amputating their imaginations than it is to convince them to amputate their limbs, but it’s also a good deal easier to reverse the surgery.
What gives this even more importance than it would otherwise have, in turn, is that all this is happening in a society that’s hopelessly out of touch with the realities that support its existence, and that relies on bookkeeping tricks of the sort discussed toward the beginning of this essay to maintain the fantasy that it’s headed somewhere other than history’s well-used compost bin. The externalization of the mind and the imagination plays just as important a role in maintaining that fantasy as the externalization of costs—and the cold mechanical heart of the externalization of the mind and imagination is mediation, the insertion of technological prosthetics into the space between the individual and the world. We’ll talk more about that in next week’s post.
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In other news, I’m delighted to report the publication of a new book of mine that may be of particular interest to readers of this blog: Collapse Now and Avoid the Rush: The Best of the Archdruid Report, which is just out from Founders House Publishing. As the title suggests, it’s an anthology of twenty-five of the most popular weekly posts from this blog, including such favorites as “Knowing Only One Story,” “An Elegy for the Age of Space,” “The Next Ten Billion Years,” and “The Time of the Seedbearers,” as well as the title essay and many more. These are the one-of-a-kind essays that haven’t appeared in my books; if you’re looking for something to hand to the spouse or friend or twelve-year-old kid who wants to know why you keep visiting this sight every Wednesday night, or simply want this blog’s best essays in a more permanent form, this is the book. It’s available in print and e-book formats and can be ordered here.
20 Comments on "Peak Meaninglessness"
penury on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 11:23 am
I believe that this article contains much truth that should be read and understood by people. However, this article requires more thought than most people care to expend and besides it takes more than 40 characters to transmit. I personally will need to re=visit it several times to really think thru all the items within.
J-Gav on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 11:26 am
A point well taken. By and large, most people are quite happy to transform themselves into subservient vegetables, possessing none (or very few) of the skills actually necessary to ensuring their own survival.
I don’t exempt myself from this critique, even if I have made some efforts to reduce the gap somewhat.
marko on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 11:26 am
oh I have a new car it has five buttons for cd player , it is incredible. It is very modern not like previous car with cd player with four buttons
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAH
WE ARE MAD SPECIE
I didnt read the text, the title gave me an idea
Charlie Bucket on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 11:57 am
One of JMG’s best!
rockman on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 1:04 pm
Such articles about the externalized costs typically ignore the elephant in the room. Let’s just look at the environmental side those costs. Characterize them anyway you want…that’s not pertinent. The energy producers of oil, NG and coal produce an insignificant amount of GHG as they go about their business. The vast majority of GHG (and whatever associated damage one cares to assign to it) comes from the consumers of fossil fuels) is produced by the ff consumers…not the ff producers. And there’s not one person on this site that doesn’t fall into that category to some degree. The ff producers may garner some benefit from the production/consumption of ff but the vast majority of the benefit (be it measured monetarily or by any other metric) is society.
So if society is paying the majority of the externalized costs isn’t that proper since it is also garnering the majority of the benefit? Granted folks in undeveloped economies might be getting just a tiny share others, like in the US and the EU, are benefiting greatly from ff consumption. How many folks here who live up north are burning ff just as fast as possible to keep warm during this latest Arctic blast? Are any of you going to claim that you aren’t benefiting from ff extraction? And more specifically: benefiting great from ff consumption.
A simplistic but fitting analogy IMHO: you bought a house. The builder benefited from constructing it. But you benefit from living in it. But you have a lawn to mow, occasional painting and other repairs, ff to consume to keep it lighted and inhabitable, etc. IOW there are significant externalized costs to maintain that home. So should the builder be responsible for those costs? I doubt anyone here would consider that a reasonable arrangement. But you buy gasoline to fuel your vehicle to drive to work, bring the kids to soccer practice, go on vacation, etc. and feel that someone else should be reasonable for the externalized costs of YOUR ff consumption?
Such rants as this article often have the scent of someone trying to avoid the guilt of their own actions IMHO. ExxonMobil and the Chinese govt are creating climate change: that’s being done by everyone who burns fossil fuels. Which includes everyone reading this post.
dave thompson on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 1:22 pm
We in modern industrial civilization were all born into captivity. Capitalistic cost externalization and profit taking is a top down paradigm. Those at the very bottom get the least benefit. Those of us in the mid section get a bit more. The very top get the most. What is not to understand?
apneaman on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 1:33 pm
How does your argument apply to the gulf oil blow out? or pumping fracking waste water into know drinking water aqua firs? or paying hundreds of millions of dollars to PR firms and corrupted scientists to manufacture fake scientific controversies and thus confuse the public? Stop making excuses for criminals rockman. What illegal shit went down on the job that you looked the other way on? I could tell plenty of stories myself about stuff I saw and participated in. Your argument could be applied to the heroin, tobacco and alcohol dealer as well. The “other kids did it too” argument does not let anyone off the hook or make everyone have the same level of guilt/responsibility. The big oil boys even hired many of the same people big tobacco did. Personally I think we would have ended burning as much of it as we could afford to because there is no alternative to liquid fuels (transportation) that would allow us to remain fat N happy. Oh yes we privileged N.Americans are the most guilty on the planet, but we have an even guiltier class among us.
apneaman on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 1:39 pm
Oil Spill Cleanups are a Myth
http://www.americanrivers.org/blog/oil-spill-cleanups-are-a-myth/
J-Gav on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 2:20 pm
Rockman – “Such rants as this article often have the scent of trying to avoid the guilt of their own actions IMHO.”
Please note that the article was by the Archdruid, who almost never flies,doesn’t shave or get store-bought haircuts, sometimes takes a train and doesn’t drive. Also makes his own bread, soap and beer. And grows his own vegetables. Just how “guilty” do you think he feels?
You’re sounding more and more like an industry shill, man, and less and less like a detached, objective observer.
The real question of externalization is : who organized this system of exploitation? The ‘consumer’ or the industrial giants and their greedy shareholders? And for what purpose? They don’t give a shit if old people and homeless people freeze to death in Minnesota.
The people you present as our greatest benefactors are the same ones who will run and hide when a lot more people are freezing and you’ll be saying, duh … what?
Davy on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 3:40 pm
We really all are to blame and no one is to blame for BAU. BAU self-organized by billions of individual decisions over centuries. A very few people have made huge decisions but no one or no group has shaped this world we have today. It is man’s natural self-conscious exceptionalism of his large brain’s instinct for complexity and technology that has lead us to BAU. Deadly competition amongst ourselves ensured technology and complexity would be the evolutionary nature of man winning out over the softer gentler of our human nature.
That said we are now entering a period of extreme unfairness and suffering. The degree of inequality between abject poverty and billionaires is unquestionable. It is extreme and wrong by any definition. We are in a consumption and population overshoot that is a twin dilemma. The rich cannot just blame overpopulation for this global problem it is as much overconsumption.
It is inevitable knowing the nature of human civilization for extreme inequality. It has happened in so many other civilizations but never to the extent we see today. It is appearing more self-evident that man was never meant to be a civilized being. All civilizations end badly for man and the environment. Man was especially never meant to be a global civilized being as we now see the earth ecosystem destroyed. The consequences are all around us that this is the wrong evolution of humans. We are entering a bottleneck does that not answer the question of who or what man should or should not be? Yes.
Reality is telling us we belong as small bands or groups of families and tribes within a stable natural ecosystem not as cities, nations, and a global people creating their own ecosystem. We do not scale at that level and that is the key issues. The rich are wrong today being so rich but this is a relativistic moral statement that is based on what? What can we base any morality on anymore? Life is nothing but grey anymore with little if any ethical foundations. We can’t even respect the essence of life how can we have ethical discussions? Our global civilization has turned life inside out and upside down where anything goes. Human technology and complexity is creating its own destruction.
I personally think our meaning must originate in nature. Mother Nature must be our starting point for meaning. If we look at meaning per Mother Nature than it is obvious we are wrong as a species and wrong as a society to have created so much inequality and overconsumption.
Yet, as individuals which one of us willed to be born and willed into wealth or poverty? Did any one of us make that decision? No. That decision was made for us at that basic starting level. That’s where that ends and choice changes the question. In that respect of choice and in the respect that the human species has self-organized into what we are makes blame ambiguous. It is a classic dualistic existential dilemma of a species with large brain that is an evolutionary dead end. I know that was some word salad from a less than a big brain but it shows the dualism at the core of being human that is a product of a brain too large.
James Tipper on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 4:18 pm
Although for all the talk on inequality most of the “created wealth” of these billionaires is simple moving of numbers around. Very few actually create, most just shift hands, sometimes very smartly. Although in a real peak-oil scenario with the stock market crashing (which the vast majority of these wealthy have) the stocks would be as worthless as the money, billionaires could go to millionaires to broke in a matter of years.
We do need some balance with nature but unfortunately that will only happen when oil starts to vanish. As long as we increase production, increase consumption, increase this and that, increase bad laws, and have a burgeoning state and corporate environment then imagine people to be further apart. Men and women in Western countries are an amazing example, 100 years ago both had nothing, both were so close to one another. Then the big bad 1960’s-1970’s came in and ruined the family and caring for children became a thing of the past. People became interested in sexual pleasure (especially men) because that was our only option, marriage and children became suicide. I won’t lie that the massive increase in consumption and goods is a big cause of it. Now the goal after you get divorced is for the state to take as much of your money and funnel it to women (who do more shopping and consumption) as fast as unfairly as possible.
That is just one of numerous examples of how fucked we are, how fucked the younger generation is, how fucked the older generation is, and how fucked the planet has become. The only real way to become free is to first disconnect as much as possible, read more, exercise, talk to new people, and try to have meaningful relationships. This plastic world is bullshit and it’s coming to an end, probably for the better in the long run.
Makati1 on Thu, 5th Mar 2015 5:47 pm
“A man convinced against his will
Is of the same opinion still” Dale Carnegie
Especially if his income/self-image is connected to his not understanding.
We are trapped in the system we made, and it is killing us. Too many are not willing to change voluntarily so we will be forced to, by dying. Simple, isn’t it?
Natural laws/Mother Nature will do it their/her way. We are no more important to them/her than the lowest bacteria or virus. The next ecosystem is already being prepared and we are not going to be part of it, it seems.
That is why I am concerned for my grand kids and my great grand kids. They may be the last generations to live on this planet. If you call bare subsistence in a poisoned world “living”.
rockman on Fri, 6th Mar 2015 7:10 am
Apneaman – “How does your argument apply to the gulf oil blow out?” Easily: the US govt (and thus all its citizens) have received 100’s of $billions in royalty payments and leases bonuses over the years from drilling in the GOM. And 99.9% of all the oil/NG produced offshore has been used by every citizen to make their lives productive and comfortable. And then there’s coal: the govt IS letting companies mine 500,000 acres of the coal owned by US CITIZENS and shipping much of it overseas to countries like China which do very little to prevent damaging pollution from its consumption. Some here try to spin that the energy industries benefit more than the rest of the public: let them explain how their lives would be little effected if energy producing activities were shut down. Go ahead….add up the split of the benefits…make a fool of yourself. LOL. And here’s a thought: since the US tax payers have benefited to the tune of $TRILLIONS from offshore oil/NG production (much, much more then BP has) maybe it would be fitting for the citizens to split the damage judgment costs.
Do you (or anyone else here) deny the benefit you’ve received from offshore oil production? Go ahead and try…it will only prove my point about the collective guilt aversion many in this country carry. And speaking of guilt: do I have to remind you about the grossly disproportion oil consumption of US consumers compared to every other person on the planet?
The BP blowout was a tragedy. A careless and preventable accident IMHO. But the people and businesses alone the Gulf Coast that had to deal with the mess have also received $TRILLIONS in benefit from offshore drilling. The offshore oil/NG rights that are owned by the US govt and thus owned by every citizen. So now explain after the terrible mess BP recklessly caused why the govt, with the full support of the majority of its citizens, still allows drilling offshore? Including wells in the Macondo area? Explain why the govt of PA, with the support of most of its citizens, still permits frac’ng? NY banned it. OTOH the good folks of NY are doing all they can to expedite the construction of pipelines to carry frac’d NG from PA to its consumers. I haven’t seen one report of anyone in NY demanding that frac’ng be banned in PA. But I’m sure many will sit around at brunch this Sunday and talk about how horrible frac’ng is and how thankful they are their governor has banned it. Apparently guilt aversion is just as strong in NY as it is here. LOL.
So go on folks: keep blaming the energy industries for supplying you with the fossil fuels you DEMAND. It only strengthens my argument about the guilt driven hypocrisy of so many folks.
rockman on Fri, 6th Mar 2015 7:37 am
J-gav: You disappoint me, buddy. You’re sounding like a shill for the US consumers who, in addition to producing a grossly disproportionate amount of GHG per capita, also collectively benefit so much more than the energy industries from the consumption of fossil fuel. “The real question of externalization is: who organized this system of exploitation?” Another easy answer: the fossil fuel consumers. Without their insistence with being supplied with fossil fuel there would be no ExxonMobil et al.
You’ve always been a reasonable sort IMHO. Just drop your shields and admit that you, along with all the other fossil fuel consumers, are not only the major beneficiaries but also the primary enablers of fossil fuel production.
As far as the Archdruid goes he may use less fossil fuels then most but he still BURNS SOME OIL AND NG. I mean that train he takes isn’t solar powered, is it? LOL. He’s also lives in a country which allows him to live the life style he chooses. A country where his rights are defended by the military. A military run by the Dept of Defense…the single largest consumer of fossil fuel on the planet.
Don’t you think he should be feeling a tad guilty? Or do you think he deludes himself into thinking he isn’t a part of the problem?
Yes easy for each person here to say that they don’t INDIVIDUALLY cause that much environmental damage. But you do acknowledge you are part of a collective that is directly responsible for producing more GHG than any the energy industry collective, don’t you? And that same collective benefits many times more what the energy industry collective does, don’t you?
Or is the guilt aversion in you so strong it blinds you to the reality of the situation. I know it’s a cliché but it fits: just a rapist defends himself by saying it’s the woman’s fault for making herself so appealing so many folks try to defend their fossil fuel consumption by saying it’s the industry’s fault by making life so appealing with hose energy sources.
So let’s see how many here are willing to testify to being a part of the problem. And, more important, collectively being the biggest part of the problem. Go ahead: they say confession is good for the soul. LOL.
Davy on Fri, 6th Mar 2015 7:43 am
Rock, you are making a great point. I often have arguments to the greenies, Asian supremacist, and American moralist. These people have an agenda that is flawed by the dualistic nature of the message. They have a message with criticism but continue to be a part of that message they criticizes.
Greenies and alternative energy wonks are my pet peeve. BTW I am a tree hugger. Greenies want a carbonless BAU. This is a cake and eat it situation. It is physically not possible per laws of thermodynamics. It discounts energy intensity and complexity in a globalism that delivers AltE. There is no decouple from fossil fuels for a BAU that is green. Complexity through technology is energy intensive. Greenies are stuck in an energy trap.
Asian supremacist like Mak preach how Asia through BAU is rising and the evil empire is dying. He is criticizing the empires activities and glorifying the same activities of Asia. You can’t complain about growth and glorify it. It is good or it is bad. The same bad activities of the evil empire are present in Asia.
The American moralist want to criticize until the criticism is focused back on them. Somehow their brand of morals and ethics is the right one per their definition. The US is the best example of this moral exceptionism hypocrisy. It goes to the heart of the American system and the cover for manipulation and corruption at its heart.
The Russophile here want to talk up Russia and claim Russia is a victim when Russia is acquiring territory and participating in a civil war. Russia is a mafia state run by a criminal dictator bent on regional domination like the once great USSR. How is that so different for the DC oligarchs and their quest for global domination? Russia is playing the same game by the same rules.
We live in a trap of dualism and a catch 22 of existentialism. Our linear minds want to detach into the abstract of the non-linear. This happens despite the fact we are part of what we are criticizing. We share blame for the blame we cast. There are no free lunches and cake is either eaten or not. We can’t have it both ways.
Unfortunately in the dialectic of argument the best arguments are these very methods of right and wrong and we verses them. They are effective and very human tools. What can be more effective than calling out good and evil?
In reality Nature could give a shit about exceptionalism, ethics, and human dualism of good and evil. We are our own worst enemies and the enemy is us. I am not above this hypocrisy. I am my own worst critic and enemy. Yet, I realize this is a defect of a large brain and human nature. Knowledge has brought us relativity and conflicting morality. There is nothing that can be done about human nature accept acknowledge sin and seek humility.
PeterEV on Fri, 6th Mar 2015 9:23 am
In summary, if we fart in the wind in the wilderness, there is no problem. If a bunch of us cram into one closet and fart, we suffer the consequences of that emitted brew.
The engineering solution to pollution has always been dilution. It can be that little is emitted or that the emissions are captured and sequestered or converted into another non polluting product. Our goal is to realize the impact that we are having, noting our collective responsibility for causing this pollution and then try to address and implement solutions.
For instance, I can buy a PV array and an electric car, but I recognize they are still made with ff. But overall, is this a big or little decrease, or a big or little increase in ff usage? If everyone bought the same, would that be enough to offset and decrease worldwide CO2/methane/etc. concentrations in the long term? If not, then we are fooling ourselves and another solution needs to be found or we suffer the consequences of living in a “closet” called earth with us continuing to fart around.
ghung on Fri, 6th Mar 2015 9:31 am
If we fart in the wind in the wilderness, and there’s no one there to smell it, it still stinks.
Bandits on Fri, 6th Mar 2015 11:35 am
Fossil energy, in particular oil, directly enabled the human population explosion of, in the vicinity of 5 billion souls over the last century and a bit. Demand for oil grew as the human population and their domestic herds grew to occupy every nice on earth.
The “oil industry” has been marketing its products since the first barrel was refined. The oil industry out competed and had alternative modes of transport abolished. Marketing of many, many consumer goods created and maintained by oil, continues without remorse to this day.
The entirety of modern civilization has become addicted and dependant on oil and its products. A situation that was the goal of the oil industries since Rockefeller.
Apneaman on Fri, 6th Mar 2015 12:41 pm
rockman you argument is just as lame as the first time around. Your just trying to rationalize away your own responsibility, which is more than average. How come you never addressed my point about the criminal negligence on the part on the industry? The gulf oil blow out only happened because of criminal negligence/ corner cutting. So all those families who have lost their lively hoods and are sick from all the corexit and oil should just be grateful they every got to drive a car or have natural gas sold to them? Stop your bitching folks and get on with it. Too bad the US does not use all that royalty money to provide the benefit of healthcare so they could get a break on the prescriptions they now have to take for the rest of their lives. Fuck em! They should have stayed in school and become a geologist or something else useful and well paying….it’s a just world and you get what you deserve eh? They should have chosen a different system to be born in. It’s funny how when you start looking into industrial “accidents” how many of them could have been prevented if not for greed. The other thing you never addressed was the “merchants of doubt”. They spend billions every year to lie and if you work for them you are a part of it. They also spend billions buying political favor, so it is not like people have a real choice in how or if resources get extracted or used. Everyone is born into this corrupted society and TPTB do everything they can to prevent any change. I doubt we would ever stop burning the shit, but we will never know because that option is/was never seriously allowed to be explored. So I understand that people feel trapped in a system. I feel it to, but let’s not pretend everything is fair a equal and was a free choice and everyone got to benefit anywhere near equally. That’s just more lying. Get some courage rockman. I for one have the utmost respect to those who can say they don’t know what to do or even don’t care, but to defend what we have done at this late hour is dishonest and shameful. It’s never to late to grow a pair.
High levels of benzene found in fracking waste water
http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-fracking-20150211-story.html#page=1
Waste Water from Oil Fracking Injected into Clean Aquifers
California Dept. of Conservation Deputy Director admits that errors were made
http://www.nbcbayarea.com/investigations/Waste-Water-from-Oil-Fracking-Injected-into-Clean-Aquifers-282733051.html
This is from two years ago, but it is even worse now considering the denier party has more power (not that the other guys are that much better)
88% of Congress On Gas Industry Payroll As Campaign Donations Hit Record Level
http://www.occupy.com/article/88-congress-gas-industry-payroll-campaign-donations-hit-record-level
“Merchants of Doubt”: Meet the sleazy spin doctors who will stop at nothing to obscure the truth
A must-see new documentary from the director of “Food, Inc.” exposes the dirty tricks of professional deceivers
http://www.salon.com/2015/03/06/merchants_of_doubt_meet_the_sleazy_spin_doctors_who_will_stop_at_nothing_to_obscure_the_truth/
Dredd on Fri, 6th Mar 2015 2:30 pm
Big Bad Jim Inhofe is now head of the Senate Peak Meaninglessness Committee (Inhofe’s One Man Troofiness Crusade).