Energy Descent & Campus Life - part one

A proposal for organizing and action (in a nut shell)

                    Photo:  Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies

Type the phrase “energy descent” (in quotes) into a typical internet search engine, then click on “news” (which search should include commentary and editorials), and you’ll discover only paltry indication that it’s a term or concept which has “gone mainstream”. It’s a phrase which receives scant attention by the commentariat. We rarely hear of energy descent, and yet it is likely to be among the most crucially important concepts and phrases in the English language—or any other.

At least half of the reason energy descent is a phrase which ought to be used a lot more often is that energy descent is necessary — even central — to any plausible pathway toward meaningful or adequate climate mitigation. This makes it a crucial environmental and ecological concern. And the reason, I think, we hear so little of it in relation to environmental / ecological concerns was aptly stated in an editorial by George Monbiot today:

Most of the media, most of the time, either ignore our environmental crisis, downplay it or deny it. The reason is not difficult to discern. Most of the media are owned by corporations or billionaires, who have a financial interest in sustaining business as usual.

But energy descent is of almost equal concern, and equally useful as a term and concept, because meeting our most basic human needs in the future will also require a proactive reduction in energy dependence — at least in the form of the sort of energy we presently use to meet these basic needs. These are needs as basic as food and shelter, and heating for our homes, and transportation, etc.

The concerns which require the pervasive use of the term ‘energy descent’ come to us from two directions at once. One is that 84% of the techno-energy (technological energy) we use each day is fossil fuel sourced. And fossil fuels are rapidly depleting, and cannot possibly last in financially affordable terms for a lot longer. Even as I write this, the world is undergoing yet another major energy crisis, a crisis which is likely to be as serious as the energy crisis of the 1970s (or perhaps worse). The other direction from which the phrase ‘energy descent’ gains its saliency is from the direction of the climate crisis, and other ecological harms, resulting from fossil fuel extraction. Our present energy crisis is at once a social, political, economic, ecological and environmental crisis. Our world—the whole world—is in peril in numerous ways because our present material culture and economy, as designed, require far greater energy inputs than we can afford, whether economically or ecologically.

Some years ago I typed “energy descent” into a search engine and found, to my bewilderment, that the first article to appear (from Wikipedia) mentioned only involuntary energy descent. It made no mention of voluntary energy descent, and obliquely suggested that we live in a wholly deterministic universe, in which energy consumption could only be curtailed by energy unavailability (depletion). So I learned how to edit Wikipedia, registered to do so, and almost completely re-wrote that article. Ever since, one of the world’s most commonly referenced sources for understanding basic terms has defined energy descent as “a process whereby a society either voluntarily or involuntarily reduces its total energy consumption.” I went on to add that

The phrase "energy descent" has also become increasingly associated with the voluntary and deliberate choice of a society to reduce energy consumption in response to the global climate crisis.[1] The basic premise of energy descent in this latter context is that a simple replacement of fossil fuels with renewable and cleaner energy sources won't be feasible in the time frame required by an effective response to the global climate crisis. That is, those who call for a voluntary energy descent doubt that clean and renewable energy sources can simply replace the total quantity of energy currently in use while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.

This has been among my proudest contributions to world literature, insofar as this short article qualifies as world literature.

In the other article of mine which I posted in The R-Word today, I said,

Politicians are not telling us this.  Governments are not telling us this. The mainstream media is not telling us this.  And they won't.  Not anytime soon. What they are telling us is that we can have our cake and eat it too.  In fact, we're being told we can grow our cake by 2-3% per year, and that this cake growing is the reason for human existence. It's what makes life good. It's what matters most. 

But if I am correct in saying that the knowledge of energy descent I’ve presented here is true, and it almost certainly is, then there is a very profound problem — economic, ecological, social, political — which needs to be addressed. And the media, politicians and educational institutions (etc.) are not addressing it. Not really. Not hardly at all. It’s a taboo even to mention it!

That problem is that we’re continuing to operate a whole culture and economy (‘civilization’) on a now fully obsolete premise: that energy is cheap and abundant—, and shall go on being cheap and abundant. And by ‘cheap’ I mean whole cost accounting: ecological as much as economic (social and political, etc.). It is now neither. Not even close. And yet we’ve a whole culture literally designed and built around this now fully obsolete premise. And we’re being told—falsely—that all we need to do is trust the ‘invisible hand’ of capital and technology to fix this for us. No problem. Nothing to see here. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

The situation is, to me, really that strange! Really that perplexing, astounding, bewildering…. We’re being asked to take up a passive, consumerist attitude toward a truly fundamental factor in how the future appears for us. We’re being asked to believe in a set of falsities, to take them at face value.

This is, at core, an educational crisis. It’s a cultural crisis in the form of a political, economic (etc.) crisis. But for my purposes here, let me say it is mainly a crisis of education. And while I don’t believe that ‘education’ is simply a matter of schooling (campuses), a lot of what passes for education is ostensibly happening upon campuses.

So I want us to take up a play book, so to speak, from the mid to late 1960s, in which students and faculty in universities and colleges would say things like,

“There's a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious—makes you so sick at heart—that you can't take part. You can't even passively take part. And you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.”

― Mario Savio

We cannot be free so long as we’re not educated, in the most reverential aspect of that term. Education is nothing without facts, without truth, without wisdom, without honesty and integrity.

It’s time for us to make it (this mass ignorance) stop. It’s time to bring our truth to the campus.

Mario Savio | Bodies Upon The Gears - YouTube

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To be continued in part 2.