Faith In A Changing Climate. Chapter 1, Part 6. The Missing Happy Chapter
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 sixth part of Chapter 1 is provided below.
The first five sections are:
Oil the Magic Fuel and Green Energy, and
A New World.
The Missing Happy Chapter
The final chapter of this book is missing. Actually, it has not been written, and I do not intend to write it.
The world is awash in books, web sites, government mandates and detailed reports that describe our climate change dilemma. They generally are organized in the following manner.
The climate crisis is real, the consequences could be catastrophic, and we have very little time to take action.
We, by which is meant governments and other large organizations, need to radically transform the energy infrastructure of society. This needs to be done within just a few years. (A target year of 2050 is frequently used.)
Therefore, we need to find a new source of energy that has all the wonderful qualities of crude oil but that does not create environmental problems — particularly global warming.
We also need to invent, commercialize and implement new technologies for removing and then storing huge quantities of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere very, very quickly. If we are to achieve Net Zero by 2050 then we have just 25 years to go.
The cost of action will be formidable, and it is far from clear where the funding, and material and human resources are going to come from. Nevertheless, we can solve the climate crisis while maintaining our current standard of living.
The emphasized text in the final bullet point is crucial. Most of the responses make the unspoken assumption that we can maintain our current, energy profligate way of living. It is this assumption that needs to be challenged.
The works of William Catton illustrate the decision not have a happy chapter. His first book, written in the early 1980s, was entitled Overshoot (Catton W. R., 1982). In it he argued that our problems are not to do with issues such as climate change, peak oil, overpopulation, wealth inequality, or political gridlock per se. Rather, the fundamental issue is our inability to understand and accept the impact that humanity is having upon the world’s ecosystems. We have overshot our resource base.
He concluded that our only choice is to live modestly. No one listened.
In his final book, Bottleneck: Humanity's Impending Impasse (Catton W. R., 2009), Catton dispensed with the happy chapter; instead it simply gave us the grim prognosis that society is on an unstoppable trajectory to significant die-off. He said that humans have become so numerous, ravenous and short-sighted that in the 21st century we will go through a bottleneck that will involve a radical and fast reduction in the world’s population.
Catton is not the only person who writes in this vein. In his post Farewell . . . For Now Michael Krieger says, ‘After watching the first half of 2020 play out, I’ve finally seen enough.’ (Krieger, 2020). He intends to stop writing about society’s problems, and to focus instead on practical matters, such as growing his own food.
We see a similar message from Colin Campbell at the blog Cassandra’s Legacy. Campbell was a founder of ASPO (Association for the Study of Peak Oil). In the post, The End of an Age: The Failure of Catastrophism (Campbell, 2020) he writes,
The "peak oil movement" was started by a group of retired geologists around the end of the 1990s. You could call us "catastrophists," but catastrophe was not what we were aiming for. We were not revolutionaries, we never thought to storm the Bastille, to give power to the people, or to create a proletarian paradise. We were scientists, we just wanted society to get rid of fossil fuels as soon as possible, although we did think that the final result would have been a more just and peaceful society.
But how to reach this goal? Of course, we understood that humankind is nothing homogeneous, but we saw no reason why the people in power shouldn't have listened to our message. After all, it was in their best interest to keep the economy alive. So, the plan was to diffuse the message of resource depletion as a scientific message, not a political one. We did our best to produce models, to make studies, to convene meetings, to publish scientific papers . . .
It was an utter failure. We might have expected it, but we were politically naive.
Yet another writer on these topics was George Mobus. In Happy Summer Solstice, Goodbye and Thanks for All the Fish (Mobus, 2021) he said,
I honestly did not expect to be a witness to the end of civilization when I started blogging those many years ago. Though I thought I could clearly see where the trends (energy, climate, social) were heading and tried to lay out the arguments for why we needed to change our ways, I thought that the really bad outcomes would post-date my life. I grieved for my children, of course. But never really thought I would be witness to the end game itself.
Now I’m not so sure. In fact I think that recent developments in climate science, energy science, and political science make it clear that we have entered the end game already . . . We will not be able to save civilization as we know it by any kind of technological magic . . .
I’m calling the game over. I just cannot see a solution that has humanity going on in any kind of lifestyle that we have grown accustomed to in the 21st century.
My advice is head for the hills . . . And, good luck.
Probably the most prominent example of failing to heed warnings has been the response to the 1972 Limits to Growth report (Meadows, 1972). The base case for that report, which is discussed in the next chapter, made surprisingly accurate forecasts as to what the future may hold. Yet those forecasts were attacked or ignored.
A fundamental reason for this lack of progress is that a completely new way of thinking is required, and that we will all need to make major sacrifices in our standard of living. We have to accept that non-stop economic growth will come to an end, either voluntarily or otherwise. Those who are well off will have to accept a much more modest standard of living. People in poorer countries will also have to accept that they are not going to attain a high-consumption lifestyle that they see in western countries now. There is a need for leadership, but that leadership will have to take us through the bottleneck that Catton talks about. Maybe that leadership will come from the church.
A final reason for not writing a ‘Happy Chapter’ is to do with the amount of time available to make the needed changes to our industrial infrastructure. It took 300 years to build our current industrial infrastructure that is based on hydrocarbon fuels (coal, oil and gas). Yet the proponents of change call for an equally radical transformation to take place in less than 30 years. We are expected to make a complete switch to alternative energies (principally wind and solar) in that short amount of time. Moreover, that transition will require will require the use of massive amounts of fossil fuel inputs. Such a transition is not realistic.
If the eminent writers that we have just quoted have abandoned false hope and decided not to write a final chapter, then I will follow their lead. However, although there seems to be little hope of maintaining the level of material prosperity to which we have become accustomed, there may be hope for better spiritual prosperity.
And yet there are the Hebrew Bible prophets. They wanted to give up, but they persevered. One of those prophets was Jeremiah, who leads off Chapter 3. Like many of the Hebrew prophets he foresaw the destruction of the tribes of Israel and their exile to Babylon. Nevertheless, he kept preaching that the Hebrew people should return to God and follow His commandments. Even though it seemed as if no one was listening, and he himself earned the nickname ‘the weeping prophet’, he persisted in his ministry. He kept the faith.
Isaiah had a similar message.
The voice of one crying in the wilderness
Organization of This Book
When writing a book you should have a real question you don’t know the answer to, and then you should be reading and writing and studying like mad to see if you can grapple with the problem and come to some solution. You should walk the reader through your process of thinking so that they can come to a conclusion (not necessarily yours) and at least track what you’re doing.
Jordan Peterson
The book is organized into the following ten chapters.
Chapter 1 Noah’s Ark
Chapter 2 An Opportunity for Leadership
Summarizes the background and goals for this book.
Chapter 3 A Journey
This chapter describes my personal journey into an understanding of climate change and other Age of Limits issues
Chapter 4 The 300-Year Party
Provides an overview of the extraordinary events of the last 300 years — a period that is often called the Industrial Revolution, but which would probably be better called the Fossil Fuel Revolution. This one-time event is coming to an end. It is this situation that provides an opportunity for the church to provide leadership.
Chapter 5 The City of Man
Early in the 5th century CE, Augustine of Hippo wrote his classic book, City of God. He argued that all human organizations — Cities of Men — eventually fail. Only the City of God is permanent. In this chapter we consider how today’s society, which depends utterly on the availability of fossil fuel energy, is coming to an end.
Chapter 6 Exile
Many people in today’s church feel a sense of exile, rather like the Hebrew people who had to leave their homes and their Temple, and live in Babylon. They did not want to go, they did not know what lay ahead of them, and there was no assurance of a happy ending.
Chapter 7 Green Technology to the Rescue
Technology has advanced the human condition in so many ways that it is natural for us to think that such progress will continue; we treat climate change and related issues as being problems that have a solution. The catch is that all technological developments depend on the availability of fossil fuel energy, and on our ability to dispose of our waste products, including greenhouse gases. However, we are running out of affordable fossil fuel energy, and we are running out of places to dump our pollution, particularly our greenhouse gases. There is no long-term green technology solution.
Chapter 8 Toward a New Theology
Many people of faith are working hard on environmental projects such as installing solar panels or recycling plastic waste. In this chapter we suggest that we need an intellectual framework, a theology, to provide a structure for this work.
Chapter 9 The Once and Future Church
The church has transformed itself many times in response to changing conditions. It needs to do so again. Some thoughts as to what the church of the future may look like are presented in this chapter.
Chapter 10 Three Guidelines
The final chapter summarizes the three guidelines that are developed in the previous chapters.
Each chapter generally starts as follows.
A summary of the information provided in that chapter.
A parable or story.
A person’s name. We can often draw inspiration and guidance from other people who have faced equally momentous challenges. Their actions can help us frame a useful response. The persons we have chosen for each chapter are:
Chapter 1. Noah,
Chapter 2. Isaiah,
Chapter 3. Jeremiah,
Chapter 4. Thomas Newcomen,
Chapter 5. Augustine of Hippo,
Chapter 6. John Shelby Spong,
Chapter 7. Al Gore,
Chapter 8. Francis of Assisi,
Chapter 9. Benedict of Nursia, and
Chapter 10. John of Patmos.