Energy Blindness

Meet Nate Hagens

Video: Energy Blindness | Frankly #03 - YouTube

Nate Hagens is one of the more interesting voices in the idea space which explores energy, economy and ecology in relation to one another — which is also my field, though all of us who explore this field have differing ways of doing so.

Nate’s voice is quite an important and valuable one in this arena. He’s brilliant! And yet I believe (and also deeply hope) that he’s wrong about one crucial thing. He has said many times that he believes it is so unlikely that humankind would or could adopt voluntary energy descent that this notion of voluntary energy descent ought not to be taken very seriously. He doesn’t come right out and say it precisely this way, or not very often, but it’s pretty clear to me that Nate basically sees us humans as living in a deterministic relationship to energy, such that we’ll necessarily choose (as a collective) perpetual economic / energy growth … until we can’t. That is, for Nate (as it appears to me), it seems that the only kind of energy descent that matters in a practical way is involuntary energy descent, which he would say is inevitable.

This is a — perhaps the — major difference between Nate’s thought and mine. I believe we all ought to take the possibility of voluntary energy descent as not only important, but crucially important. And there are two reasons for this.

1. Proactive efforts toward voluntary energy descent can (in my view) profoundly smooth and ease our experience of the downslope of inevitable (involuntary) energy descent. Energy descent is inevitable, regardless. And so it would be better to build in resiliency on the downslope by very significantly reducing technological energy dependency voluntarily, beginning now. It makes no sense to me to wait until we’re forced — involuntarily — to change our relationship to techno-energy as well as to fossil fuels. I also believe it is recklessly dangerous to be forced involuntarily rather than proactively prepared for a low carbon and much less energy intensive future economy. It’s dangerous in terms of climate and ecology, but also socially. For example: food. Our food systems must change now if we’re going to eat later.

2. In a word: climate. The less fossil fuels we burn the lower our greenhouse gas emissions will be. And that’s reason enough for us to choose voluntary energy descent — and to take it very seriously. Those who believe we can simply replace fossil fuels with renewables, while reducing emissions in the near term, are — in my opinion — clueless about how renewable energy devices and infrastructure are dependent upon massive fossil fuel inputs at each step of their production and use. It is my view that this simple replacement concept is simply false, because to build out that infrastructure, and those devices, would result in a giant pulse of increased fossil energy use in the near term. So my point is that energy descent is inevitable — and therefore not to do so proactively and intelligently would be a grave error.

   All that said, Nate Hagens is a valuable and important voice in the domain of energy / ecology / economy (integrated understanding). Let’s hope he’s wrong about whether voluntary energy descent can happen! I think it can. But clearly it will almost require a miracle to have it happen. Let’s be that miracle.
   
   Here’s Nate’s excellent podcast: The Great Simplification with Nate Hagens