What is to be done
Posted: 14 Mar 2006, 19:38
Hello from North West Ireland
The following was posted as the result of a question
asked on the Feasta yahoo discussion group.
I hope it is of interest.
What is to be done?
By Roger Adair
Mankind is condemned to bet on an uncertain future. The stakes have become phenomenally high: ?? Ecological understanding of the human predicament indicates that we live in times when the habit of responding to a problem by asking ?All right now what can we do about it?? must be replaced by a different query ?What must we avoid doing to keep from making a bad situation unnecessarily worse?
Our best bet - expect the worst.? William Catton Overshoot 1980
In a posting on the Feasta Energy Group Lucy Bingham McAndrew wrote:-
?I don't think people feel responsible for unsustainability and until they do, I don't see how or why they should change. I feel my own thinking slipping into apathy as pressure from an infrastructure that fails in any meaningful way to support my attempts to live a simpler, more sustainable existence, coerces me into choosing the easier, less sustainable option.
I remain confounded by the question, how do we change things??
Thanks Lucy I like deceptively simple questions especially those I wish I had thought of asking myself! I to am at times confounded by the question and think the answer is, in part, that people can and should only try to change those things that they realistically can, in the context of their situation.
If we accept that massive changes are going to be forced on us anyway, we as individuals can only prepare as best we can for ourselves, our families and our local communities. A useful part of this process would be trying to envision in some practical detail, how our society will have to function, and try and prosper, at a much, much lower material level, on say 20%, of current energy use.
This practical envisioning is something I believe groups like FEASTA need to urgently make an increasingly substantial contribution toward promoting. It will certainly not be addressed by the complacent vast majority of those we have elected to lead us or our present state institutions.
Accepting the magnitude of power-down and change that will be required is crucial but the factor, in all of this, that is most frequently denied.
Some of the things needed for this transition are beginning to be put in place. These are generally proceeding sluggishly in the wrong context and with wildly optimistic assumptions as to what scale they can ultimately be implemented at and what they can deliver. The main driver in development of many of these projects, e.g. wind farms, is what they can deliver to the promoters in terms of investment income in the context of ever increasing demand and price.
For example, E.ON Netz is one of the world?s largest private energy providers which owns over 40% of Germany?s wind generating capacity. In their "Wind Report 2004" they state that wind energy requires "shadow stations" of traditional energy on back-up reserve in case the wind forecast is wrong.
They state that reserve capacity needs to be 60% to 80% of the total wind capacity! So as more wind comes on line, it is all but certain that even more gas generation capacity will be required showing how currently renewable energy is used to supplement over-consumption.
The dominant paradigm is that these measures alone are sufficient to ensure that we pretty much can carry on as we are by slowly developing a range of profitable and sustainable technical fixes. The small successes being achieved, the potential of others and the ?feel good? gushing publicity and self congratulation surrounding them, are in fact very dangerous to our future well being. This is because they foster a comforting illusion that the underlying problem is being addressed adequately.
I am increasingly coming to the view that individuals and small groups cannot change things much generally other than, as far as they can, to alert others as to the seriousness of the situation and the magnitude of the survival measures that will be required. Until oil and gas supplies falter and the costs begin to really soar and everybody cannot help but become very aware of the problems, as a society we are unlikely to do anything very substantive.
By then, and that could be very soon, it may well be too late unless some clear vision already exists as to what has to be done when we are forced to do it by having no other options.
Boy are we really painting ourselves in a corner whilst simultaneously sawing off the branch we are sitting on and telling everybody what a great job we are doing!
The major thing we must avoid doing to make things worse is continuing to expect that some sort of silver bullet technical fix, increasing efficiency, wind power, energy plantations, wave energy, solar or whatever, can make up any substantial part of our current extravagant energy use accounted for by depleting oil and gas.
Only when we are agreed as to what is not to be done can we then meaningfully address the very pressing question of what inevitably will have to be done.
The following was posted as the result of a question
asked on the Feasta yahoo discussion group.
I hope it is of interest.
What is to be done?
By Roger Adair
Mankind is condemned to bet on an uncertain future. The stakes have become phenomenally high: ?? Ecological understanding of the human predicament indicates that we live in times when the habit of responding to a problem by asking ?All right now what can we do about it?? must be replaced by a different query ?What must we avoid doing to keep from making a bad situation unnecessarily worse?
Our best bet - expect the worst.? William Catton Overshoot 1980
In a posting on the Feasta Energy Group Lucy Bingham McAndrew wrote:-
?I don't think people feel responsible for unsustainability and until they do, I don't see how or why they should change. I feel my own thinking slipping into apathy as pressure from an infrastructure that fails in any meaningful way to support my attempts to live a simpler, more sustainable existence, coerces me into choosing the easier, less sustainable option.
I remain confounded by the question, how do we change things??
Thanks Lucy I like deceptively simple questions especially those I wish I had thought of asking myself! I to am at times confounded by the question and think the answer is, in part, that people can and should only try to change those things that they realistically can, in the context of their situation.
If we accept that massive changes are going to be forced on us anyway, we as individuals can only prepare as best we can for ourselves, our families and our local communities. A useful part of this process would be trying to envision in some practical detail, how our society will have to function, and try and prosper, at a much, much lower material level, on say 20%, of current energy use.
This practical envisioning is something I believe groups like FEASTA need to urgently make an increasingly substantial contribution toward promoting. It will certainly not be addressed by the complacent vast majority of those we have elected to lead us or our present state institutions.
Accepting the magnitude of power-down and change that will be required is crucial but the factor, in all of this, that is most frequently denied.
Some of the things needed for this transition are beginning to be put in place. These are generally proceeding sluggishly in the wrong context and with wildly optimistic assumptions as to what scale they can ultimately be implemented at and what they can deliver. The main driver in development of many of these projects, e.g. wind farms, is what they can deliver to the promoters in terms of investment income in the context of ever increasing demand and price.
For example, E.ON Netz is one of the world?s largest private energy providers which owns over 40% of Germany?s wind generating capacity. In their "Wind Report 2004" they state that wind energy requires "shadow stations" of traditional energy on back-up reserve in case the wind forecast is wrong.
They state that reserve capacity needs to be 60% to 80% of the total wind capacity! So as more wind comes on line, it is all but certain that even more gas generation capacity will be required showing how currently renewable energy is used to supplement over-consumption.
The dominant paradigm is that these measures alone are sufficient to ensure that we pretty much can carry on as we are by slowly developing a range of profitable and sustainable technical fixes. The small successes being achieved, the potential of others and the ?feel good? gushing publicity and self congratulation surrounding them, are in fact very dangerous to our future well being. This is because they foster a comforting illusion that the underlying problem is being addressed adequately.
I am increasingly coming to the view that individuals and small groups cannot change things much generally other than, as far as they can, to alert others as to the seriousness of the situation and the magnitude of the survival measures that will be required. Until oil and gas supplies falter and the costs begin to really soar and everybody cannot help but become very aware of the problems, as a society we are unlikely to do anything very substantive.
By then, and that could be very soon, it may well be too late unless some clear vision already exists as to what has to be done when we are forced to do it by having no other options.
Boy are we really painting ourselves in a corner whilst simultaneously sawing off the branch we are sitting on and telling everybody what a great job we are doing!
The major thing we must avoid doing to make things worse is continuing to expect that some sort of silver bullet technical fix, increasing efficiency, wind power, energy plantations, wave energy, solar or whatever, can make up any substantial part of our current extravagant energy use accounted for by depleting oil and gas.
Only when we are agreed as to what is not to be done can we then meaningfully address the very pressing question of what inevitably will have to be done.
