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Mother Pelican
A Journal of Solidarity and Sustainability

Vol. 18, No. 9, September 2022
Luis T. Gutiérrez, Editor
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Changing the Diagnosis and
Changing the Cure

Megan Seibert

This article is a slightly modified version of
Citizens’ Warning on Overshoot and Collapse
published by The REAL Green New Deal, December 2021

REPUBISHED WITH PERMISSION


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The REAL Green New Deal Project is setting forth a realistic alternative to the commonly accepted narrative about renewable energy and sustainability. That narrative – for which the Green New Deal has become emblematic – leads us to believe that the renewable energy future will look just like the fossil fueled present, but simply electrified and "decarbonized." We're pushing back against this dangerous myth.

We like to think about our unsustainability predicament in terms of a patient with a disease. No disease can be cured if it’s not accurately diagnosed and treated. But humanity now faces a double problem: the disease itself on top of a commonly accepted diagnosis and treatment that are wildly off base and actually making the disease worse.

CHANGING THE DIAGNOSIS

Climate change isn’t the problem overshoot is.

Overshoot means there are too many people consuming and polluting too much. We’re using bio-resources faster than the Earth can regenerate them and polluting beyond her assimilative capacity. In other words, we’re depleting the biophysical basis of our own existence and that of every other creature with whom we share the planet.

Climate change—a massive waste management problem—is one of many symptoms of overshoot. It exists alongside other symptoms like biodiversity loss, water scarcity, deforestation, ocean acidification, soil erosion, etc. This means we can’t address climate change in isolation—we have to treat the cancer causing it and all of its co-symptoms.

The so-called renewable energy technologies being sold as solutions to climate change aren’t renewable and will exacerbate overshoot.

Solar panels, high-tech wind turbines, hydrogen cells, nuclear, and large-scale hydropower:

  •        Are impossible to build and maintain without fossil energy.

  •        Require other non-renewable metals/minerals that have been vastly depleted and whose extraction entails significant ecological destruction and social injustices.

  •       Have short life spans, necessitating continual replacement in perpetuity and generating tons of waste (that cannot be waved away by the mythical wand of the industrial circular economy).

  •       Generate only electricity, leaving a massive, unaccounted for problem since only 19% of global energy consumption is in the form of electricity and no viable alternatives exist to electrify the other 81%.

  •       In many cases barely generate surplus energy beyond what it takes to build, distribute, and decommission them.

  •       Would require a build-out:

  •         Of the U.S. electricity grid 14 times greater than during the last half-century when fossil fuel use was pervasive and growing, involving a quadrupling of the U.S. 2019 annual construction of wind turbines and a tripling of its 2019 annual construction of solar PV every year for the next 15 years—only to repeat the process indefinitely because of their short life spans.

  •          Globally of wind turbines and solar PV equivalent to 1.2 times the world's 2020 cumulative stock every year for the next nine years—just to replace 50% of current fossil fuel use by 2030.

    “Decoupling” is impossible and “net zero” is a sham.

    The idea behind “decoupling” is that we can have economic and material growth that doesn’t negatively impact the environment as long as that growth relies on “green” energy and technology. This denies that the human enterprise, like all other organisms, is embedded within the ecosphere. Decoupling ourselves from Nature isn’t even theoretically possible.

    “Net zero” would 1) allow for some continued use of fossil fuels so long as carbon emissions are captured and buried (carbon capture and storage), 2) suck carbon directly out of the air (direct air capture), and 3) use afforestation, reforestation, and soil regeneration to sequester carbon. The problem with net zero is that it:

  •       Relies on unproven, yet-to-be-scaled technologies that capture only a fraction of what’s needed and that can be manufactured only through fossil fuel-based, techno-industrial processes.

  •       Involves the injection of toxic substances into the Earth.

  •       Belies the point that ecosystem restoration is needed to heal our planet, not just sequester carbon.

  •       Ignores the need to stop using fossil energy 1) in preparation for its eventual depletion since it will soon become too financially and energetically costly to extract and use, and 2) to avoid the continued ecological impacts of extracting, transporting, and processing it.

    CHANGING THE CURE

    The only response to overshoot (our core problem) is a planned contraction of the human enterprise. This would entail:

    Dramatically reducing the size of the global population—using the perfectly fair and humane tools at our disposal, such as equal rights for women, education, financial incentives, and free, universal access to contraception and abortion—to the roughly one billion people or less that can thrive sustainably in material comfort on an already much-damaged planet.

    A non-fossil energy regime simply cannot support anywhere close to today’s population size of eight billion. Failure to painlessly control our own reproduction will ensure a painful crash imposed by Nature.

    Dramatically reducing energy/material consumption and eliminating the financial growth and consolidation imperatives that drive it through steps such as:

  •       Bans, rations, and phase-outs.

  •       Internalizing the externalized costs of goods that remain in production through pollution taxes and quotas that limit natural resource extraction—balanced by limits on executive-to-employee pay ratios and a guaranteed basic income to help shoulder increased prices.

  •       Eliminating interest-bearing debt and holding debt jubilees.

    Getting real about what actually constitutes renewable energy—with our present knowledge, this is biomass (e.g., wood, bamboo, hemp), simple wind and water-generated mechanical power, passive solar, and muscle power—and recognizing that it can’t power anything close to life as we know it today.

    There are simply no replacements for fossil fuels, the one-off inheritance of abundant energy that has enabled the Industrial Revolution. Many people have mistakenly come to perceive the last 200 years as normal when in fact it’s the single most anomalous blip in human history. Modern techno-industrial civilization will cease to exist when we stop using fossil fuels.

    Phasing out fossil energy while radically restructuring society in line with the new energy and healing imperatives, involving:

  •       Setting aside roughly half for Nature while starting to restore ecosystems.

  •       De-commissioning as much fossil-based infrastructure as possible while retrofitting and re-building human settlements within their supportive ecosystems to function with genuinely renewable energy and materials.

  •        Resettlements from dense urban areas and vulnerable coastlines.

  •       A shift to agroecology.

  •       Decentralization/re-localization, re-learning essential skills, a return to community, harmony with Nature, and expansion of mind and spirit.

    Some people think humanity is fatally doomed, while others see only a positive shift towards an elevated way of being. But it’s our contention that each perspective misses the other half of the whole. In their focus on darkness and despair, the ‘doomer’ crowd fails to see that oftentimes that which isn’t in the best and highest has to die so that something better can be re-born in its place. And in their focus on the upsides of an expanding consciousness, the ‘spiritual’ crowd often fails to see that an inevitable period of ugly biophysical collapse will likely play out as the new is being ushered in.

    We bring together both Yin and Yang to present a realistic – pleasant and unpleasant, light and dark – forecast of what we think is on the horizon. Our work seeks to integrate both aspects of this forecast, offering prescriptions for what might be done to navigate an intelligent biophysical contraction of the human enterprise while engaging with diverse aspects of a heart-based, expanded way of ushering in a New Earth.


    ABOUT THE AUTHOR

    Megan Seibert is Executive Director of The REAL Green New Deal Project. She is a systems thinker who started REALgnd in response to the overwhelmingly short-sighted rhetoric about energy and sustainability, filling a need for sober analysis and bold truth-telling. She has an M.S. in Systems Science/Environmental Management from Portland State University and an international studies B.S. with core STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) from the U.S. Air Force Academy.


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