What a timely topic…
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“The commonly held understanding of hell remains trapped within the apocalyptic imagination, that is, it is the result of a violent separation between the good and the evil worked by a vengeful God. It seems to me that if hell is understood thus we have quite simply not understood the Christian faith.” (James Alison)
In his 1960 novel 'A Canticle for Liebowitz' the American author Walter Miller explores a form of monastic life in the centuries following a nuclear holocaust – a holocaust which is blamed upon scientists, with a resultant 'Simplification' casting all scientific knowledge as to blame and to be rejected. The monks spend their time seeking to preserve whatever fragments of knowledge can be found, and various monks have adventures before a civilisation once more emerges that can take up the threads of that preserved knowledge once more. In all probability this novel lies behind Alasdair MacIntyre's conception in After Virtue, referred to in Chapter Three. The conclusion to After Virtue has become famous:
“It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages. Nonetheless certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead – often not recognizing fully what they were doing — was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St Benedict.”
The principal problem of our time is not peak oil, nor exponential growth in a finite environment, or any other environmental or ecological issue – those are the presenting symptoms. Rather, our central problem is a blindness to wisdom – the fact that our culture has become asophic. This spiritual impoverishment underlies all the other problems that we experience, and makes them worse. It is now too late to preserve our existing industrial civilisation in anything like the form that we have become accustomed to. Many of those alive today will live through a collapse of our culture. A radical simplification and impoverishment of our material lives is inevitable, and may be rapid. Yet there is still a very great deal that can be done – for there is a very great deal of value that can be preserved, if we take the right steps now. It is our Christian duty to turn aside from shoring up the existing Imperium and concentrate on constructing local communities which can sustain civility and the intellectual and moral life through the collapse of our culture.
Such steps can only be taken from a position rooted in a specific wisdom tradition. It may be possible that other traditions than Christianity have the resources needed to pass on the fruits of our technological and scientific civilisation into our future. What we can be certain of, however, is that Christianity has already shown that it has the capacity to do so, as it has done so before. The task that falls to the church in our present context, therefore, is not simply to seek to become better and more faithful Christians – that is our eternal task, and shall never change. Our present task is to put in place the communities and resources that can ensure that we preserve the possibility of a better life for generations yet to come.
I believe that this has two aspects, one is fairly straightforward but the second is both more difficult and more important. The first aspect is to prepare for, and start to live within, an environment where energy and other resources are scarce and expensive. Much work has been done within the environmental movement to establish what this means, and to my mind the Transition Town process shows what must be done. The second aspect, however, is spiritual. Self-interest is not a sustainable resource when it comes to preserving a civilisation. It is indefinitely sustainable when it comes to supporting an ongoing human population – after all, the human species has survived through many traumas already and compared to an Ice Age our present resource crisis is very small beer. Naked biological desire and hunger will be sufficient to ensure that there is a human population into the future. What is more at stake, however, is the character of the civilisation that such a human population will adopt. We need to learn how to understand 'the end of the world' from a truly Christian point of view. To do that, we need to begin by exploring the nature of apocalypse.
Hi mate,
20 years ago I shared all the same concerns you probably have today about renewables. EROEI, cost to Overbuild to offset intermittency, how to build renewables without oil, etc. I became a nuclear advocate as a result.
To my utter surprise I found myself embracing renewables a while back. One day I was asking my pro-nuclear buddies online about some claims from the renewable camp, and found my nuclear mates to be responding to caricatures of what the peer-reviewed renewable papers were actually saying. Their attacks were falling short, and the renewable plans for Australia were being promoted by a recipient of the Queen Elizabeth prize for Engineering no less! (It's the equivalent of a Nobel prize for engineers.)
All my old objections eventually melted away. Solar used to require 3 TIMES the silicon - all that highly processed, very high embodied energy. Now it's so efficient to make it returns vastly more. Any conspiracy theory paper around this ignores the sheer economics: all that extra energy cost in the manufacturing processes proposed by the critic would HAVE to show up in the price, especially with today's super-high electricity prices. But it doesn't. Solar is incredibly cheap - so cheap we can Overbuild it to offset intermittency.
SUNSHINE BELT: the seasonal issue is over-hyped as 3/4 of us live in the “Sunshine Belt” (from the equator out to the 35th parallels.) So most of the human race live where winter isn’t really a thing.
SUPER-GRIDS to the SUNSHINE BELT: Now that HVDC only loses 1.6% per 1000 km - you could have solar power at the equator hypothetically running a base at the North Pole 10,000 km away and only lose 16% of your power. So regional super-grids are now popular with renewables ISP designers. (Integrated Systems Planners.) That is - the UK could get power from the EU and the EU power from the Sunshine Belt with today's super-grid technologies. No where on the planet needs to think winter spells the end of reliable power.
SODIUM BATTERIES are getting cheaper and cheaper - and can be made from sea-salt, agriwaste, and aluminium. (Indeed, aluminium can replace 90% of the functions of copper if copper ever runs low - and aluminium is 1200 times more abundant than copper. Indeed - it's 8% of the earth's crust - iron ore is only 5% so there's more potential aluminium than iron ore!)
Our grids only need a few hours of battery anyway. If one region wants days of storage - then the world has about 100 TIMES the potential OFF river pumped hydro sites it could need. Off river is faster and cheaper to build. (Professor Blaker's Atlas - that Queen Elizabeth prize recipient I was talking about.) https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/global/
Then there's the sheer speed of this! Most climate activists do not realise what is happening - and Greta has no business speaking the way she does. From my POV - we won decades ago when Germany first started to subsidise renewables. From that moment on, today was almost inevitable as the scaling ramped up and the prices crashed down. Once China came on board, the result was unavoidable. Check these stats! With the rise of EV’s, oil demand will peak and start to decline by 2028.
https://www.iea.org/news/growth-in-global-oil-demand-is-set-to-slow-significantly-by-2028
In a world hungry for energy, last year only 50 GW of coal was built. 350 GW of solar was built - over 7 TIMES the amount of new coal. Solar used to double every 4 years - now it is every 3! “If this growth rate continues, there will be more solar installed in 2031 than all other electricity generation technologies put together.”
https://re100.eng.anu.edu.au/2024/04/24/fastest-energy-change-article/
It could be 2 to 3 times FASTER than the IPCC’s Paris goals by 2030! https://pv-magazine-usa.com/2023/12/25/all-i-want-for-christmas-is-one-terawatt-of-solar-deployed-annually/
Not only that - as we “Electrify Everything” in transport and mining and smelting and industrial heat, everything will be so much more efficient they get the SAME WORK DONE with 60% LESS energy. Burning stuff like cave-men is just that inefficient. A modern all-electric civilisation will run on 40% of today's thermal systems like oil and coal and gas. Now that will be a LOT more electricity and electric infrastructure. But don't fall for the argument that we currently mine 5 cubic km of oil, and need to replace the THERMAL value of all that energy with an equal or greater amount of wind and solar. That's false accounting. What we want is an equal amount of forward motion in vehicles - and solar panels on an Australian rooftop or wind towers off a UK shore straight into EV's is vastly more efficient than burning oil in a car and only having 12% of it turn into forward motion. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/electrification-energy-efficiency
Here is my counter to Dark Mountain. What do we do about societal norms and culture in a Bright Green future? What if we DO have all the energy we want, global development needs are met, and even the population stabilises and starts to decline after 2050 due to economic pressures of the developed lifestyle - not any ecological collapse. What if we meet all human needs and still have nature thriving because we're getting all the protein we need from seaweed farms producing protein powder 'flour' that can go in everything from bread to dairy - or even a mix of Precision Fermentation feeding us all. What if we're almost living in a post-scarcity economy - yet people are still alienated and lonely due to a car based suburban lifestyle? What should we be telling our culture then?
It's the social ramifications of car-dependent suburbia - indeed - the mental health ramifications that make me really cranky! Yes - I believe climate change is real - but so are the solutions. Yes - anything could happen to civilisation - whether due to modern threats like global nuclear apocalypse or some weaponised super-virus. We are mortal - and our empires appear prone to collapse periodically as well. This has always been true since we started agriculture and building cities. The ancient Mesopotamian farmer feared the Assyrians might rampage across their farms, salt their earth, take their women and children and leave them to bleed out into their own soil. We have modern equivalents of this. It might happen. By accident even. Then again - it might not.
But I just do not accept that this is inevitable - not based on 'peak energy' stories being sold today. 20 years ago the technical and economic realities were vastly different - and drove me a little manic. But today such scepticism of the potential for renewable grids to work sound like 9/11 Troofers to my ears. So what then? Are we left in the hands of modern developers that want to spit out cookie-cutter suburbs like we see in "Neighbours"? If there's no collapse - are we doomed to wall to wall suburbia with the plasticisation of our lives, like some kind of corporate neoliberal 3 ringed binder philosophy taking over every compartment of family and cultural life 'for the good of the consumer' rather than treating us as adult citizens? What do we think about all this? Is there a better way to live?
It's one reason I'm still passionate about recapturing a more walking-distance town plan of the Ecocity or New urbanist movement. Even though I'm convinced the earth's endowment of mineral abundance is so vast we could build the modern world's 1.4 billion cars a few times over. 95% of our driving is within city limits - even lower energy density sodium batteries would do. BYD offer those in their "Dolphin Mini" which I predict will overtake the Corolla as the world's most popular family car. Soon!
The Christian in me wails at the alienation of all this though. What is technically possible is not necessarily desirable. As Jeff Goldblum (as Ian Malcolm) so famously said in Jurassic Park - "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." So what if we can build billions of cars? Should we? Should we design a lifestyle around them that alienates us from each other, drives the poor to the edges of vast suburban sprawl, and creates an even more individualistic self-centred mindset than the modernism since the industrial revolution? For if I do not have to walk past 'those people' on my way to the Metro, but can just drive past them and up into my individual driveway - will I ever meet 'those people'? Those other, inconvenient, awkward types that stretch my social capacities and make me remember there are actually others out there? People with needs and quirks and different views to mine? Let alone what just driving everywhere does to our sense of place, of belong to a community. That's why I still say - REZONE! Let's ask our governments to consider how we might rezone around a local town square. And if these things do not even exist where we are - how can we rezone a master plan that enables them to emerge from the natural attrition rate as older homes are demolished? https://eclipsenow.wordpress.com/rezone/
That's just ONE area of discussion.
The other? IF civilisation doesn't collapse but morphs into a Bright Green population decline past 2050 - what does post-growth economics look like in a world where the population could decline from 9 or 10 billion back to 8, 7, or 6 billion by 2100? https://earth4all.life/news/press-release-global-population-could-peak-below-9-billion-in-2050s/
How can we inhabit the virtual places of our lives online in a more meaningful, truly connected way without damaging our mental health or political processes? I'm thinking of "Social Dilemma" on Netflix and the role of social media in our lives. Let alone the intoxicating powers of AI - and the dangers of that as well.
Complicated times to live purposefully!
Several years ago I wrote a novel, “Metanoia : a short history of the 21st Century” (available on lulu.com), which has proved quite prescient, so far. My epidemic happened in 2020 (novel written in the 2000s) and actually killed people, unlike the scamdemic. Whether the coming decline is gradual or sudden, it will provoke precisely what you are calling for - small, self sufficient communities that have the spiritual and material resources to survive the deluge. In that sense it may be a good thing, an evolutionary forcing, freed from the suffocating burden of a sclerotic and corrupted “empire” of materialism, relativism and nihilism.