Pointedstick wrote:
If I could paraphrase, MT, it seems as if you buy into Catton's general thesis, even if maybe some of his individual arguments aren't perfect, while I reject it, as evidenced by those individual arguments not holding water to me.
All of the visual aids you introduced are pretty interesting, and they tell us a variety of stories, for sure. It's undeniable that fossil fuels are limited and that their exploitation has propelled human population and technology forward very quickly. But here's my general belief: as sources of those resources become scarce, their rising price and falling availability will automatically force a switch to solar and wind, principally, and others where appropriate (hydro, geothermal, biomass, etc). To me, this is self-evident: in every market, once prices rise, alternatives become more attractive and themselves develop to be better and cheaper as more people commit to them.
Can you explain to me why you don't think this will happen with energy, if I've understood you correctly? I don't understand why energy would be an exception to this general pattern.
Throughout human history, there has been this tension between the way God or the gods are projected out of the human mind as a kind of idealized and immortal version of ourselves, and the wink and nod most people feel deep down about the nature of God or the gods and how they can't
really be that much better than us because we invented them after all.
Whether God or the gods are real or just projections of our own idealized version of ourselves, however, Mother Nature is real, and she does things that are truly beyond our comprehension and humble us in ways that God probably wouldn't think to do.
For example, Mother Nature has given us our organic form. God may have helped, but that's speculative. We know, however, that Mother Nature had a hand in it because we are part of an ecosystem and we can easily see where we originally fit into the food chain and how our organic form compares to other animals and the rest of our ecosystem.
Mother Nature gave us a special gift in the form of fossil fuel deposits. Our raw intelligence, combined with such a versatile form of energy, allowed us to easily think of ourselves as more godlike than ever. Look at all that we did with the cheap energy we discovered!!! We went to the freakin' moon...several times. We drove a car on the moon!!! If that's not godlike I don't know what is.
Against that backdrop, someone starts saying that maybe the fossil fuels won't last forever, and maybe some alternative plan should be developed. Most people just scoff at the person who doesn't understand how awesome humans have become, but finally the scientists say "Okay, fine, you want us to show that we could have done all of this without fossil fuels? Fine. We'll show you. We're going to make a shitload of windmills, solar panels, hydroelectric dams, nuclear power plants, magic batteries, and ultracapacitors, but once we do you've got to sit down and STFU, okay?"
So the scientists got to work on their renewable energy/non-fossil fuel energy plans, and in some cases they did some really neat work. What everyone came to notice over time, though, was that all of the scientists' energy creations had the vague appearance of a prosthetic device used to replace a missing human appendage. None of the scientists' creations came remotely close to matching the elegance and versatility of the original appendage supplied by Mother Nature. People came to think of fossil fuels as the hands of industrial humanity, and each attempt by the scientists to create a replacement hand seemed more macabre than the effort before it. In time, of course, it became painfully obvious that the mind of humanity could not create a source of energy remotely resembling fossil fuels, but their pride kept them from admitting defeat and revising their cultural, religious, economic and financial beliefs, and that was probably what made it the worst for them.
Imagine Icarus receiving a call from the tower informing him that the wax on his wings was melting when he had plenty of time to turn back and think of a better plan. Rather than turning back, though, his last transmission to the tower was: "Icarus to tower. Got your message. Melting wax no problem. Will come up with solution en route before it endangers the mission." That's hubris, and it's hubris even if Icarus didn't think of it as hubris.
I think that between our modern religious beliefs which include a God who is concerned about the behavior and fate of every single person, and our modern secular beliefs in technology as a potential savior for any predicament humanity may find itself in, we have turned into a species with a remarkably high and unrealistic opinion of itself and its place in the universe. It's exactly the state of mind one tends to see right before a major "humility event."
There is something akin to a cultural membrane that covers us all. It's very tough, and its translucence only allows ideas to enter that are more or less coherent within a certain predefined conception of who we are and what our place is in the world. Most of the time, this covering is protective, and it's almost never outright destructive because, after all, it evolved as a survival aid. Sometimes, though, it blinds us to long term risks to our own survival that the existence of the membrane allowed to develop in the first place.
I think that Catton's analysis is just an attempt to see through that cultural membrane and clearly see what is on the other side of it. What I think there is to be seen isn't so much death and destruction and an end to a way of life, but more the basic lesson that we are not God or gods, nor are we even on par with Mother Nature. We are weekend guests in a hotel that has been there for centuries, and we somehow got the idea that we owned the place and could improve upon it any time we wanted to. The real cognitive dissonance comes in trying to shake off that delusion and accept that, yes, we are a special life form. We are very very smart, and we like to tinker, but we are relatively new on the scene in geological time, and one of the very first things we did with our allotment of fossil fuel fairy dust was to build weapons stockpiles for the purpose of killing each other that, if used, would also make much of the world uninhabitable for any life for potentially hundreds or thousands of years.
However special the species that does those things may be, it also sounds like a species with an inflated opinion of its own long term survival prospects. Simply internalizing this concept and developing a healthy skepticism to accompany our optimism about technology would go a long way toward improving our species.
One of the most interesting manifestations of the hubris I am describing above is the belief that artificial intelligence is a serious threat to human survival. I'm sure that most people don't think of this as a religious belief, but if you swap out "The Big Supercomputer" for "God", you will find that the concerns over artificial intelligence basically track the ancient tendency of humanity to worry about whether it meets the approval of a higher power (even if deep down it knows that it created the higher power at some point in its past), and whether falling short of that approval might lead to our destruction. It's a really fascinating thing to see people be seriously concerned about, even as most of the same people scoff at the primitiveness of traditional religious beliefs. That's Cargoism--the belief that technology will always deliver a solution, but also worrying that technology might become prescient and somehow find us lacking...and stop delivering that precious technological cargo.
