Peak Denial

When I was 11 or 12, I started worrying about what would happen if the world ran out of natural resources.  I can’t remember which I had in mind, but this was during World War II when availability of resources was talked about.  My father’s response was reassuring: we would invent some substitute, as we invented synthetic rubber during the war when natural rubber supplies were cut off.  Necessity is the mother of invention, as the phrase went.

I can imagine that I might have given my son the same answer -- but not my grandson.

One difference between now and when I was 11 or 12 is world population.  It was 2.4 billion then and 2.5 billion in 1950 when I entered college.  Today it’s seven billion, almost three times larger.

But in the same time period the world economy has grown almost ten times larger.  The Earth Policy Institute tells us that “consumption has begun to outstrip natural assets on a global scale."  Leaving aside non-regenerative assets like oil and fossil aquifers,

“demand has surpassed the earth’s regenerative capacity.  We are overharvesting forests, overplowing fields, overgrazing grasslands, overdrawing aquifers, overfishing oceans, and pumping far more carbon into the atmosphere than nature can absorb.”

Again leaving out oil, the demand for and growing scarcity of all important commodities in the last decade has led to a surge in prices that erased the benefits of a century of declining prices.  Investment guru Jeremy Grantham believes that rising prices are very probably here to stay, representing a “Paradigm Shift” that is “perhaps the most important economic event since the industrial Revolution.”

 

“We all need to develop resource plans,” he concludes, “particularly energy policies.  There is little time to waste.”

Tell  that to the US Congress, and what do you get?  Policies that encourage overplowing, overdrawing and the pumping of more carbon into the atmosphere than nature can absorb without warming the globe and acidifying its oceans.

By way of explanation (or excuse), Grantham suggests that humans are genetically ill-disposed to dealing with “long horizon issues and deferring gratification,” possibly because “we could not store food for over 99% of our species’ career and were totally concerned with staying alive this year and this week.”  He also thinks humans are “optimistic and overconfident,” traits which may have been important to our survival.  Especially Americans.

In Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed (Viking Penguin 2005), Jared Diamond’s examination of human societies that succumbed to environmental problems and others that survived them, the author said that in planning the book he assumed it would just be about environmental damage.  But later he realized he had to add other factors including the only one that proved significant in every society’s failure or success -- “the society’s responses to its environmental problems.” 

The environmental issues for these societies, chiefly deforestation and soil and water problems, were similar to those we face today.  Global warming, however, is a modern issue, derived from industrialization and the growth in human population that it made possible.  President Johnson was officially advised of it in 1965, but neither he nor any of his eight successors nor any Congress in the almost half-century since has taken action.

Global warming is a long horizon issue, of course, though not so distant that it won’t affect our grandchildren.  It also requires a global response involving other nations.  But we acted with other nations to control toxic chemicals (another modern environmental issue) creating a hole in the ozone layer.  The fault is not in our stars but in our politics.

Since fossil fuel emissions account for most of the increase in greenhouse gases that cause global warming, an obvious first response to reduce and eventually reverse this increase is to raise the price of fossil fuels by taxing them or capping their use, thereby making non-fossil energy more competitive.  But enough members of Congress are indebted to corporate interests that profit from fossil fuels or depend on them to block any such response.

Most of these members claim to doubt global warming.  But considering “the consensus scientific view” that global warming is occurring and that greenhouse gases emitted by human activities are the primary cause, their claim seems more like self-induced self-delusion -- a fig leaf we could call Peak Denial hiding their representation of the corporate interests held by the 1% rather than the interests of the 99% among their voters and the public good.

Global warming, left unchecked, will eventually create an environment that’s different from the one to which both we as a species and the food that we grow are genetically adapted.  How the world society responds to it may determine whether the society succeeds or fails.

Congress is consistently choosing to fail.  To make sure that society succeeds, we must choose a Congress that is not dependent on the 1%.