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Cracks in the Fossil Fuel Regime

Author: Douglass Carmichael Issue: 2024-12-18

Cracks in the Fossil Fuel Regime

by Douglass Carmichael

Cracks in the Fossil Fuel Regime

In earlier posts, I argued that the nation-state was too small to take on what I am now calling The Fossil Fuel Regime. The fall of the Assad regime provides a model of what might happen quickly.

Imagine a shortage of food. There must be a truck, fuel, a driver, food to haul, customers with money (or guns), and open roads. In times of pending trouble, some workers - and a few is enough - won’t show up for work, because they are making a decision to stay home to protect their families. (It is interesting how often commentators do not take into account any mobility in the workforce.) The infrastructure and supply chains are fragile.

From Kurt Vonnegut:

Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.This is enough to stay awake, compassionate, interested, and alive till the very end. It can even be another crack in the fossil fuel regime because it undercuts consumerism.

The Bashar regime in Syria seemed stable but has now fallen. The fossil fuel regime - to call it by its more descriptive name - also is much more fragile than we think. I am now thinking the cracks will begin to appear in the fossil fuel regime in 2025. Things like glacial melt and seawater rise, species loss, and chaotic price increases. Slow hints of social violence. These will become the fracture lines that undoing the fossil fuel regime in 2026.

Now? How to pass the time?

About 2003 I was in a conversation with a Silicon Valley exec. He said, “Doug, would you rather we continue as we are for 15 more years and collapse then or try and change now and collapse now?” I responded with “Staying in a leaky canoe when there is no alternative is not crazy.” I think these both describe where we still are 20 years later.

People tend to assume that those on the front line of an organization are better informed about real conditions because they are in contact with people in the real world. I think that the chaos of the front line and the need for operational details prevents serious thinking. Perhaps we have to go behind the front line, to those somewhat protected from the daily chaos and the need for immediate tactical decisions that they are already in the process of working through.

Private property prevents the system from changing

Land and buildings in most communities were in the deep past owned by the community. In many parts of the world, there was a move toward the ownership of everything from the community to the king. Some of the arguments in favor of monarchy saw monarchy as preferable because, since the king owned everything, he felt some responsibility to develop and maintain everything, a systems view lost in a private property regime.

It is helpful to understand where the words came from - their social history. Property comes from proper: what is proper in society to show a person’s rank. In many societies wearing the wrong clothes could lead to the death penalty. We still have language like, “Are you dressed properly for the party?”

Private is trickier. It comes from the Latin privatus, meaning to remove from the public realm. The implication in the use was that the object went dead because it lost its place in the flow of life in the community. Understanding that private and property are subject to changes in history suggests that maybe we could do the same.

Private property disrupts this whole system by giving ownership to some people and not others. Buildings and land were no longer seen as the responsibility of authority but of owners who of course managed it for their own benefit. Take for example manufacturing. Chemicals have been systematically disposed of in nearby nature: streams and air.

Each owner wants to hold on to what they have, and this makes change almost impossible. Change is experienced as a threat to ownership by most owners. With ownership, community is divided up into pieces like a jigsaw puzzle. The community is divided up into incommensurate pieces where each piece has a place but lacks the fluidity to fit anywhere else in the puzzle. Is there a form of ownership society that does not impose such constraints on the future?

Changing the culture of ownership of private property is necessary because the ownership system is opposed to the changes that we need. The only alternative would be if there is a form of ownership society that does not impose such constraints on the future. I have tentatively concluded that property, which is a form of social status identification, cannot change unless social stratification is based on something other than land and things. The logic here is that property and ownership are structures that prevent change, and while changing them might seem like unnecessarily large change, not changing them means we all die, which is an unnecessarily larger change.

(toward an alternative: When will you return? When you love each other I will be there.)

How to think about inevitable collapse, given the unrecoverability from key tipping points

I have taken myself to the edge where it’s necessary to discuss the size of the population and the death of many people. I find this very difficult. In the background is the idea that death for many, perhaps more than half, is inevitable as climate temperature rises. Either nature or policy may be the cause.

How to cope with this? I have found myself reading books and watching videos on archaeology. The fact is that many older civilizations did die. All of the people. The main causes seem to have been climate, war between classes with different interests, and disease. The key point for us is that these deaths happened as societies were abandoned, and much thought went into planning migrations and the evacuation of whole cities. We do not know the history very well, but it is this history which contains an attitude of resignation that we can learn from. Ancient civilizations, such as the Mayan, the Syrian, the Egyptian, and American were huge and sophisticated. Their people are our brothers and sisters in inevitable collapse.

But perhaps more importantly, populations went through a slow process of decay and disintegration which included the collapse of governing institutions. In philosophy, there is a tradition which says that the key issue is to learn how to die.

Understanding individual death is not helpful enough in understanding the threats to our own civilization, threats that are now coming due, and the daily news reflects the cracks and cancers many people today are having to live with and think about how societies grow and crumble.

Earth system management

Let’s say we are given the task of managing the world system. We must cope with those who think the needed cuts can be replaced by “clean energy” without adding up the cost of making clean energy - usually now electricity - which requires a complex infrastructure made with digging, pumping, materials prep, manufacturing, and distribution. Plus administrative costs of the bureaucracy, from recruitment to retirement and security costs.

Let’s start with food: world agreement on food would have to think through who it is taken from, to whom it is given, and the logistics of moving it from one place to another. I notice many assume that with a little extra cash they could buy what they use now. (I am trying to write with extreme logic and short prose.)

Meanwhile, at COP29 the conversation is divided between:

These support corporations and financial institutions. What is missing is common sense about what the money could be spent on since spent money means financing activity which always takes energy.

There are efforts struggling for a new consensus: using chemicals for geoengineering, basically putting stuff in the air to prevent sunlight from hitting the earth. Cutting sunlight means less agriculture and geoengineering means shifting to an engineered environment, probably owned by the oil companies.

Cut fossil fuel use: The dilemma

The idea of managing the world system is so radical that no one seems willing to touch it. It is not enough to propose cuts; we need specifics on where to cut. But worse, we must also say what we should do with the cut in fossil fuel use, because if unspecified it will just go back into the world supply and be sold to a different customer, with no reduction in use. Hence global management.

The horns of the problem: Toward action: planet management

I have been waiting for the air to clear a little bit post-elections, so it’s possible to see the emergence of a coherent story that’s worth discussing. The proceedings at COP29 are providing the opportunity.

The COPs are often regarded as the single most important discussion about climate but the problem is this year, as last, the emerging story there is to finance Green growth, especially in the poorer countries. Financing Green growth sounds good, but in practice, it means money to corporations to industrialize the global south, especially in agriculture. It means replacing the current culture of survivability in low-tech solutions, from huts to sticks, with costly wealth concentration using new tech managed as a system by AI.

The background is the deeper problem that we do not know how to stop burning fossil fuels, and instead are distracted by the project of Green growth. Green growth is always paying money to develop infrastructure for burning coal or gas to generate electricity. Remember, clean energy means electricity, but that electricity has to be generated by turbines, panels, geothermal, nuclear, and wave action. All of these require highly engineered infrastructure for digging, pumping, transporting, manufacturing, and distribution.

Money spent can only be spent on moving stuff or bits around from one place to another and this requires lots of energy. The idea of green energy as giving us a clean green economy is a fraud and we are witnessing the acceptance of that story by all the major institutions. What is going on here? People sensing the logic of climate recognize that we can keep going in the short term sort of as we are and let things collapse in somewhere between five and 20 years (I think it’s shorter) and we can continue to live well in that period and then accept our fate of the collapse of civilization. The only alternative is to try and change now and screw everything up.

The core problem is that if we cut Energy use anywhere that Energy will move to another part of the system for sale and use. It does not disappear from the system, but rather emerges in some other part of it. This is a really intriguing problem.

My own view is that we need to think about managing the planet, which is a much broader task than managing our portfolios. I hope to be exploring that space of planet management in the posts to follow.

Email me with thoughts at doug@dougcarmichael.com

Read my book, Gardenworld Politics: The Hope and the Issues - Responding to Climate Collapse

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