I have the silver energy bullet, but it won’t work

If I told you I had access to a magic solution to the world’s energy needs and was willing to share it with everyone for free, would you be correct in thinking “great – that’s our problems solved”. You may think also that the economy would be free to grow again but you would be wrong.

The reason is that it’s not just energy we’re wasteful of, it’s water, lots of  minerals, phosphates and other drivers of food security.

I have discussed the problems of peak minerals and peak fish in previous posts. These are vital resources in our present economy and most deplete on timescales of less than a decade to several decades.

Phopspates have about 5 or 6 decades of  production left and this will limit our ability to grow food – we need to recycle phosphates.

Widespread pesticide use is threatening biodiversity and human and animal health. Indeed, some analysts point to weeds (botanists say there’s no such thing as weeds) getting more resilient as the stronger ones survive pesticide bombardment (much like bacteria have become resistant to anti-biotics). When weeds become more resilient, more pesticides get used, or new pesticides get created.

The source of our problems is our dislocation from nature. Most of us see nature as something to go to and visit when we need to “get away” as opposed to something we are totally interdependent on and it seems have weak enough understanding of. Even in dense cities, nature is everywhere if we chose to notice it.

It’s likely the silver (energy) bullet exists or a number of smaller silver bullets (combining as one big one).  But rather than solve the global crises, it is likely to accelerate them, we could easily return to a perception of no brakes on economic growth.

Anybody who understands the exponential function (first brought to our attention in secondary school mathematics class) will understand that growth is impossible with finite resources, therefore new paradigms – innovation growth, resilience growth and resource adaptation growth etc. leading to employment growth need to be found, but these cannot lead to GDP or GNP growth mindsets (which are destructive).

That means a new economic system based on understanding that all resources are finite is required.  Much debt will have to be forgiven and new value systems will have to be applied to all items. Governments are slow to change but they do adapt to what citizens want. So its up to the global citizens to “want” the right thing and participate to achieve it.  Once enough of us understand that previous standards of living are impossible to achieve but that a good quality of life is still possible.

The other obvious thing is that while local resilience helps, we’re all interdependent so helping people on the other side of the planet to be more resourceful and resilient is in all our interests (as opposed to scrambling for ever scarcer minerals and climate destroying fossil fuels).

I finish by saying I have know where the silver energy bullets live but I’m not passing them just yet on because they won’t work on their own. For that to happen you have to think about the consequences.  They depend on other silver bullets in soil fertility, water conservation, biodiversity protection and a whole range of other things. Failing to understand means failure, and learning to understand can mean a better world. To quote a rather famous book title, it’s “our choice”.

Advertisement