Faith In A Changing Climate. Chapter 1, Part 5. A New World
We have completed the manuscript of the book Faith In A Changing Climate. We are releasing sections of the book in a series of posts at this site. The fifth part of Chapter 1 is provided below.
The first four sections are:
Oil the Magic Fuel and Green Energy.
A New World
I used to think that top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change. I thought that thirty years of good science could address these problems. I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation. And we scientists don’t know how to do that.
Gus Speth / Canadian Association for the Club of Rome
We are entering a new and scary world. Climate change, resource depletion and biosphere destruction all pose existential threats to human civilization. Until recently most people either denied that these changes were taking place or they simply ignored what was happening. That situation is slowly changing; there is an increasing awareness that human actions are the cause of climate change and that the consequences are increasingly harmful.
There is still a widespread general assumption that new technology will allow us to maintain our energy-guzzling lifestyle and ensure endless economic growth — even though we live on a planet with finite resources and with limited space to dump our waste products. Yet that perception is starting to shift. Technology can slow down the rate of change and/or mitigate the impact. But technology cannot restore the climate to what it was a generation ago, technology cannot create oil from nowhere, nor can technology restore species that have become extinct. Slowly, we are coming to grips with the reality that, if we are to avoid catastrophe, it is we ourselves who will have to change. We will have to learn to live in equilibrium with the natural world. This does not mean that we become fatalistic. We should do everything we can to transition to a more sensible and just lifestyle. But hope needs to be realistic, otherwise it is ‘hopium’.
It appears as if many young people instinctively grasp the distinction between problems and predicaments, as can be seen by comparing statements from Al Gore (1948-) and Greta Thunberg (2003-). Gore, a Boomer who was the Vice President of the United States under Bill Clinton, is well known for his early leadership to do with climate change, particularly with his 2006 video An Inconvenient Truth. His response to this day continues to be that climate change is a problem that can be fixed. For example, in year 2020, on the 50th anniversary of Earth Day he said,
We have the solutions to solve the climate crisis.
We are going to win this.
All we have to do, he maintains, is to act quickly and energetically. Then we can successfully reverse the effects of global warming. He is wrong ― we could have achieved what he is talking about had we acted energetically, starting in the 1970s. But we have left it too late.
And enterprises of great pith and moment
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action
Hamlet
Greta Thunberg was born 55 years after Gore. She and many other young people are angry because Al Gore’s generation have created a devastating future which can no longer be avoided. She understands that climate change is a predicament, not a problem. Technology can help, but technology is not a solution. Thunberg recognizes that the fundamental challenge is social.
I’m telling you there is hope. I have seen it, but it does not come from the governments or corporations. It comes from the people.
The fact that there is no technological solution to climate change is difficult for us to wrap our heads around. The idea of never-ending progress is so ingrained.
There are many, many books, websites, and blog posts that describe our multiple predicaments. National governments and international bodies have issued a seemingly endless stream of reports and proclamations about climate change for decades. There have even been a few cautious sermons on the topic. Many of these publications and talks conclude with a general admonition that ‘they’ — or sometimes ‘we’ — should do something.
This begs the question as to who exactly ‘we’ or ‘they’ really are. It is generally assumed that national and international governments will lead our efforts. But, as Figure 1.1 showed, little has changed. There has been no effective leadership.
One of the difficulties is that there is a gap between those who set the goals, and those who are called on to actually implement them. It creates something that John Michael Greer calls crackpot realism in his discussion to do with the division of labor (Greer, The Terror of Deep Time, 2017)
Crackpot realism is one of the downsides of the division of labor. It emerges reliably whenever two conditions are in effect. The first condition is that the task of choosing goals for an activity is assigned to one group of people and the task of finding means to achieve those goals is left to a different group of people. The second condition is that the first group needs to be enough higher in social status than the second group that members of the first group need pay no attention to the concerns of the second group.
Consider, as an example, the plight of a team of engineers tasked with designing a flying car. People have been trying to do this for more than a century now, and the results are in: it’s a really dumb idea. It so happens that a great many of the engineering features that make a good car make a bad aircraft, and vice versa; for instance, an auto engine needs to be optimized for torque rather than speed, while an aircraft engine needs to be optimized for speed rather than torque. Thus every flying car ever built—and there have been plenty of them—performed just as poorly as a car as it did as a plane, and cost so much that for the same price you could buy a good car, a good airplane, and enough fuel to keep both of them running for a good long time.
Engineers know this. Still, if you’re an engineer and you’ve been hired by some clueless tech-industry godzillionaire who wants a flying car, you probably don’t have the option of telling your employer the truth about his pet project—that is, that no matter how much of his money he plows into the project, he’s going to get a clunker of a vehicle that won’t be any good at either of its two incompatible roles.
In our situation the person(s) in the first group may not necessarily be the bosses ― they could be the community at large. So, for example, people say that ‘we’ must convert our entire industrial infrastructure to solar and wind by say the year 2050. Scientists can show the benefits of such a task. It is up to the engineers and project managers to point out that there are not nearly enough resources, skilled people, money and (above all) time to complete such a task.
Maybe ‘We’ or ‘They’ are those in faith communities. But, if they are to provide leadership, then the people in that community need to understand the realities of what is being asked for. This leads to the first of our guidelines.
Understand Physical and Project Realities
Predicaments, Not Problems
Although the title of this book is ‘Faith in a Changing Climate’, the challenges that we face go well beyond just the climate. Other issues to consider include resource depletion, biosphere destruction, loss of topsoil and fresh water, and over-population (or possibly under-population). Each of these items constitutes a crisis in and of itself, and they are all difficult to understand. Moreover, they interact and affect one another in complex and difficult-to-understand ways.
These issues are not problems, they are predicaments. Problems have solutions, predicaments do not. When faced with a predicament we can respond and adapt, but we cannot make it go away. This understanding is crucial if we are to develop a realistic to response to the crises we face. It is also crucial if we are to develop a theology ‘that works’.
In Chapter 4 ― The 300-Year Party ― we will discuss our energy predicament in detail, for now we can take a quick look at what has changed, and why we are in such a pickle.
Over the course of the last 300 years we have burned through a one-time gift of stored energy. That energy has come from coal, oil and natural gas — sometimes referred to (rather inaccurately) as fossil fuels. The abundant energy that they provide is utterly foundational to our current way of living. We are like the lady in the parable — we received a wonderful inheritance, and spent that inheritance with no thought for the morrow.
None of the alternative, ‘green’ sources of energy provide the same unique combination of benefits as the fossil fuels ― particularly oil. This does not mean that we give up new energy sources such as solar and wind, but we need to recognize that they are not a direct substitution for the fossil fuels. They all have fundamental physical and thermodynamic limitations.
The burning of fossil fuels creates vast quantities of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2) that we have recklessly dumped into the atmosphere. (There are other greenhouse gases, but CO2 is the most important.) We have treated the atmosphere as an open sewer and, referring to Figure 1.1 once more, we continue to do so. The consequence of this thoughtless and reckless behavior is a series of ever-more dire climate events: droughts, floods, heat waves and wild fires.
The fossil fuels — particularly oil — provide the petrochemical building blocks of the ‘miracles’ of modern technology. Plastics, anesthetics, fertilizers and pesticides are just a few of the thousands of products that come from crude oil. Proposals such as the ‘Green New Deal’ that aim to eliminate our use of fossil fuels rarely consider how we would continue to make these products in a solar or wind-based economy.
Time is not on our side. In Chapter 5 we describe the Net Zero by 2050 goals. The year 2050 is just one generation away, and we are nowhere close to achieving the net zero goals. In fact, as we have already seen, we are steadily making the situation worse.
Scientists, Engineers and Project Managers
We frequently hear that we need to ‘listen to the scientists’. What is meant by this is that we need to fully understand the information and analyses that scientists provide when it comes to climate change and the other crises. This is true. But we also need to listen to engineers and project managers. It they who will tell us what can realistically be achieved in the short amount of time available to us. (Many organizations have selected the year 2050 as their target. By that year they plan/hope to have their greenhouse gas emissions cut to zero. This target is, to put it mildly, ambitious. As we see in Chapter 4 — The 300-Year Party — our current industrial base developed over a period of three centuries. We are now proposing to develop and implement a new industrial base in less than a tenth of that time.)