by Don Fitz

Child Labor in the Democratic Republic of Congo

“Accumulate, accumulate! That is Moses and the prophets!… Accumulation for the sake of accumulation, production for the sake of production: this was the historical mission of the bourgeoisie in the period of its domination …” Karl Marx, Capital, Vol 1, Ch 25

The world is threatened with environmental disaster and capitalists hope to make a killing off of it. Fossil fuel (FF) companies claim they are “environmentally friendly.” Other corporations promote nuclear energy, hydro-power (dams), and solar and wind power as the best energy alternatives.

Yet environmentalists have known for decades that reduction of useless and harmful energy is the “greenest” form of energy available. Over 50 years ago, the first Earth Day recognized this with the slogan “Reduce; Reuse; Recycle.” Today, corporate “environmentalism” chants “Recycle; Occasionally Reuse; and, Never Utter the Word ‘Reduce.’” Even mentioning the word “reduce” can be met with howls of derision that “Reduction means ‘austerity,’” as if any type of collective self-control would plunge the world into depths of suffering.

This can lead to a belief that supporting “alternative energy” (AltE) allows everyone on Earth to pursue a lifestyle of endless consumerism. It avoids the real problem, which is capitalism’s uncontrollable drive for economic growth.

Overproduction for What Purpose?

Acceptance of consumerism hides the twin issues that AltE creates its own disastrous outcomes and that lowering the amount of harmful production would actually improve the quality of life. Simply decreasing the amount of toxic poisons required for overproduction would cut down on cancers, brain damage, birth defects and immune system disorders.

No one would suffer from the massive toxins that would be eliminated by halting the manufacture of military armaments or disallowing the design of electrical devices to fall apart. Very few would be inconvenienced by discontinuing lines of luxury items which only the 1% can afford to purchase.

Food illustrates of how lowering production has nothing to do with worsening our lives. Relying on food produced by local communities instead of food controlled by international corporations would mean eliminating the processing of food until it loses most nutritional value. It would mean knowing many of the farmers who grow our food instead of transporting it over 2000 miles before it reaches those who eat it. It would cut out advertising hyper-sugarfied food to kids.

When I first began studying environmentalism over 30 years ago, I remember hearing that if a box of corn flakes costs $1, then 1¢ went to the farmer and $.99 went to the corporations responsible for processing the corn, packaging it, transporting the package and advertising it. Reduction does not mean “doing without” – it means getting rid of the crap.

Closely linked to food is health. My book on Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution points out that the island nation’s life expectancy is longer and infant mortality lower than that in the US while it spends less than 10% per person of what the US does. Reducing energy devoted to health care does not mean less or worse care. It means getting rid of the gargantuan unnecessary and expensive components which engulf health care in capitalist society.

Electric vehicles (EVs) embody collective environmental amnesia. Once upon a time, not too many decades ago, people wrote of walkable/bikeable communities and some even put their dreams to the test. Well … crush that dream. Since AltE has become a fad, the idea of redesigning urban space is being dumped so that every person can have at least one EV. Memory of environmental conservation has fallen into oblivion.

Not Getting Better All the Time

Despite the hype about AltE, capitalist use of energy is expanding, not contracting. We are constantly told to buy the latest electronic gadget – and the time period between successive versions of gadgets gets shorter and shorter. AltE exacerbates the crisis of capitalist energy by functioning as a lure to sidetrack people from remembering the centrality of conservation.

The Bitcoin Ponzi scheme reveals the expansion of energy in the service of uselessness. Jessica McKenzie describes a coal-burning power plant in Dresden, NY. The plant was shut down because the local community had no use for its energy. But Bitcoin needed energy to compute its complex algorithms. So, like Dracula, the coal plant rose from the dead, transformed into a gas burning plant.

What, exactly, are Democratic Party politicians like Joe Biden, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and even Bernie Sanders doing to put the breaks on this expansion of FFs in programs like the Green New Deal (GND)? Actually, nothing. As Noam Chomsky points out in his forward to Stan Cox’ The Green New Deal and Beyond, “… the GND does not challenge the fossil-fuel industry.” Congressional proposals leave out the most critical part of reducing FFs – limiting the total quantity that can be produced. Instead, they rely on the fantasy that increasing AltE will somehow cause a decrease in FF use. This is a myth that we know all too well: corporate politicians toss around empty phrases like “net zero” as they further proposals to add AltE to the energy mix in order to help expand energy production.

Are Problems with AltE “Minimal?”

Despite stated goals to “end” FFs production by such-and-such a date, the high heat they generate is essential for producing (1) silicon wafers for solar panels, (2) concrete and steel used in construction of windmills and dams, and (3) plastic coverings for industrial windmill blades. Every type of AltE requires FFs. Supporters of AltE often say that it is so much smaller as to pale by comparison to direct use of FFs.

Claiming that the amount of FFs used by AltE is trivial ignores both the quantities actually being used now and, most importantly, the uncontrollable urge of capitalism toward infinite growth. Hydro-power (dams) is currently the greatest source of AltE and is in line to expand most rapidly. Ben Gordesky describes research showing that “Canadian large-scale hydro projects have an ongoing carbon footprint that is approximately 40% that of electricity generated by burning natural gas. These emissions do not include the carbon footprint of dam construction.” This is not a trivial amount of FFs used by dams, especially since hydropower “is expected to grow by at least 45% by 2040.”

Estimates are that “Solar and wind have a carbon footprint of 4% to 8% of natural gas.” For the sake of simpler arithmetic, let’s say that hydro, wind and solar average 12.5% of the carbon footprint of FFs (even though is it probably much higher). Then, let’s say that healthy capitalism grows at least 3% annually (even though the phrase “healthy capitalism” is highly dubious), which means a doubling in size every 25 years. If AltE requires 12.5% of the equivalent FFs now, then,

• in 25 years it will require what is twice that, or 25% of current FF use;

• at 50 years, it again doubles (to four times its current size), requiring 50% of current FF use; and,

• at 75 years, the economy doubles (to eight times its current size), reaching 100% of current use.

To put it bluntly, reliance on AltE in no way eliminates FF usage – in only 75 years economic growth would return us to current FF levels.

But would we have to wait 75 years to see current levels of FF restored? For some parts of the economy, the answer is definitely “No.” As Stan Cox documents, “… the huge increase in mines, smelters, factories and transportation required for this transition [to EVs] would continue heightened CO2 levels long before any emission savings would be realized.”

It might be possible theoretically to concentrate energy to reach the extremely high temperatures necessary for production of wind turbines and silicon wafers for solar arrays. Relying on Cox’ calculations, expanding infrastructure to reach 100% AltE by 2030 “… would require a 33-fold increase in industrial expansion, far more than has ever been achieved anywhere and would result in complete ecological devastation. One little fact regarding this quantity of build-up is that 100% RE would require more land space than used for all food production and living areas in the 48 contiguous states.”

Time for Despair?

Is it time to throw up our hands in despair that the only route to preserve humanity is a return to hunter/gatherer existence? Not really. Focusing on local, community-based energy can create sufficient production for human needs.

Many underestimate the ability of low tech devices. When in high school during the 1960s, my science project was a solar oven that could cook via medium heat. When I returned from college a few years later, my mom intimated that my dad, an engineer, thought that a solar reflector device could not possibly generate much heat. So, one morning he used it as a greenhouse for his vegetable seedlings. When he returned later that day, the plants were fried.

Solar power does not require high-tech based on massive arrays. Few techniques are more powerful at reducing energy than a passive house design or use of passive solar for existing homes. It is even possible to run a website via low tech solar without destroying farmland for gargantuan solar arrays.

The story of wind power is somewhat different. Kris De Decker edits Low-Tech Magazine which spans a variety of ways to heat, cool and provide energy. An outstanding article covers the sharp contrast between ancient wind mills vs. modern industrial wind turbines:

“For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal… It’s only since the arrival of plastic composite blades in the 1980s that wind power has become the source of a toxic waste product that ends up in landfills. New wood production technology and design makes it possible to build larger wind turbines almost entirely out of wood again… This would make the manufacturing of wind turbines largely independent of fossil fuels and mined materials.”

A Global Struggle

The obsession of capitalism with expanding production is a social disease that infects every aspect of exploring, mining, transporting, using and disposing of energy infrastructure. For decades, this has been painfully obvious for FFs and nuclear power. Except for those who refuse to see, the opposition rippling through AltE is increasingly clear.

Just a very few examples of those challenging FFs includes Ogoni opposition to pumping oil out of Nigeria’s ground, clashes over pipelines at Standing Rock, rebutting Modi’s plan to open 41 coal plants in India and rejection of fracking in Pennsylvania. Dangers of nuclear power are reflected in demonstrations in Tokyo to remind us of Fukushima Daiichi and struggles by “Solidarity Action for the 21 Villages” in Faléa, Mali against uranium mining for French nukes. The new outbreak of conflicts over AltE is unfolding via disapproval of massive solar arrays in Klickitat County, WA; the fight against industrial wind turbine projects by the Broome Tioga Green Party, reactions by the Lenca people to the planned Agua Zarca dam in Honduras; efforts to stop Lithium Americas’ open-pit mine at Thacker Pass; and, widespread disapproval of child laborers dying in Democratic Republic of Congo cobalt mines.

In case you did not notice, the two key words common to all of these efforts is “Stop it!” A better life for all begins with rejecting the limitless growth of capitalism by developing technologies that minimize mining, processing, over-producing goods with short durations, and transporting products over long distances. Instead, we must develop locally-based products that have the least harmful effects.

One of the main problems with tunnel visioning on AltE is that how that approach accepts and perpetuates the ideology of greed, which insists that everyone in the US (and, of course, the world) must adopt the consumerist life-style of the upper middle class. Core to challenging capitalism would be making demands that capitalism cannot possibly fulfill but which rational people have no problem with. The demand to preserve our existence by reducing the overgrown production of capitalism is such a demand. When people say that we must not make a demand such as this, it is time to ask if they are putting the survival of capitalism ahead of the survival of humanity.

Everyone in the world believes in preserving what they hold sacred. For most of us, these include sacred places and beings, the inorganic world, creatures that sleep in water or on land, and human Life. For others, what they hold most sacred is corporate profits.

Don Fitz (fitzdon@aol.com) is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought. He was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor. His book on Cuban Health Care: The Ongoing Revolution has been available since June 2020.

What Is Energy Denial?

by Don Fitz

The fiftieth anniversary of the first Earth Day of 1970 will be in 2020. As environmentalism has gone mainstream during that half a century, it has forgotten its early focus and shifted toward green capitalism. Nowhere is this more apparent than abandonment of the slogan popular during the early Earth Days: “Reduce, Reuse, Recycle.”

The unspoken phrase of today’s Earth Day is “Recycle, Occasionally Reuse, and Never Utter the Word ‘Reduce.’” A quasi taboo on saying “reduce” permeates the lexicon of twenty-first century “environmentalism.” Confronting the planned obsolescence of everyday products rarely, if ever, appears as an ecological goal. The concept of possessing fewer objects and smaller homes has surrendered to the worship of ecogadgets. The idea of redesigning communities to make them compact so individual cars would not be necessary has been replaced by visions of universal electric cars. The saying “Live simply so that others can simply live” now draws empty stares from those who can only fantasize happiness via unlimited possession of “green” stuff.

Long forgotten are the modest lifestyles of Buddha, Jesus and Thoreau. When the word “conservation” is used, it is virtually always applied to preserving plants or animals and rarely to conserving energy. The very idea of re-imagining society so that people can have good lives as they use less energy has been consumed by visions of the infinite expansion of solar/wind power and the oxymoron, “100% clean energy.”

But… wait – aren't solar and wind power inherently clean? No, and that is the crux of the problem. Many thoroughly modern environmentalists have become so distraught with looming climate catastrophe that they turn a blind eye to other threats to the existence of life. Myopia of those who rightfully denounce “climate change denial” has led to a parallel unwillingness to recognize dangers built into other forms of energy production, a problem which can be called “clean energy danger denial.”

Obviously, fossil fuels must be replaced by other forms of energy. But those energy sources have such negative properties that using less energy should be the beginning point, the ending point and occupy every in-between point on the path to sane energy use. What follows are “The 15 Unstated Myths of Clean, Renewable Energy.” Many are so absurd that no one would utter them, yet they are ensconced within the assumption that massive production of solar and wind energy can be “clean.”

Myth 1. “Clean energy” is carbon neutral. The fallacious belief that “clean” energy does not emit greenhouse gases (GHGs) is best exemplified by nuclear power, which is often included in the list of alternative energy sources. It is, of course, true that very little GHGs are released during the operation of nukes. But it is highly disingenuous to ignore the use of fossil fuels in the construction (and ultimate decommissioning) of the power plant as well as the mining, milling, transport and eternal storage of nuclear material. To this must be added the fossil fuels used in the building of the array of machinery to make nukes possible and the disruption of aquatic ecosystems from the emptying of hot water.

Similarly, examination of the life cycle of producing other “carbon neutral ” energy reveals that they all require machinery which is heavily dependent on fossil fuels. Steel, cement and plastics are central to “renewable” energy and have heavy carbon footprints. One small example: The mass of an industrial wind turbine is 90% steel.

Myth 2. “Clean energy” is inexhaustible because the sun will always shine and the wind will always blow. This statement assumes that all that is needed for energy is sunshine and wind, which is totally false. Sunshine and wind do not equal solar power and wind power. The transformation into “renewable” energy requires minerals which are non-renewable and difficult to access.

Myth 3. “Clean energy” does not produce toxins. This is so far from the thoughts of “clean” energy apostles that it does not cross their minds to compare the level of toxins resulting from fossil fuel usage to toxins involved in the extraction and processing of lithium, cobalt, copper, silver, aluminum, cadmium, indium, gallium, selenium, tellurium, neodymium, and dysprosium. After all, any comparison of toxins associated with the production of clean energy to fossil fuels would be an open admission of the dirtiness of what is supposed to be “clean.”

Exposing the life-threatening emissions from burning fossil fuels should not lead us to ignore that “Processing one ton of rare earths produces 2,000 tons of toxic waste.” Similar to what happens with Myth 2, toxins may not be produced during the operation of solar and wind power but permeate other stages of their existence.

Myth 4. “Clean energy” does not deplete or contaminate drinkable water. This also does not seem to enter the minds of “clean” energy proponents who rarely, if ever, address water in their writings. Though water is usually thought of for agriculture and cooling in nuclear power plants, it is used in massive amounts for manufacturing and mining. The manufacture of a single auto requires 350,000 liters of water.

In 2015, the US used 4 billion gallons of water for mining and 70% of that comes from groundwater. Water is used for separating minerals from rocks, cooling machinery and dust control. Even industry apologists admit that “Increased reliance on low ore grades means that it is becoming necessary to extract a higher volume of ore to generate the same amount of refined product, which consumes more water.” Julia Adeney Thomas points out that “producing one ton of rare earth ore (in terms of rare earth oxides) produces 200 cubic meters of acidic wastewater.”

Myth 5. “Clean energy” does not require very much land usage. In fact, “clean” energy could well have more effect on land use than fossil fuels. According to Jasper Bernes, “To replace current US energy consumption with renewables, you’d need to devote at least 25-50 % of the US landmass to solar, wind, and biofuels.”

Something else is often omitted from contrasts between energy harvesting. Fossil fuel has a huge effect on land where it is extracted but relatively little land is used at the plants where the fuel is burned for energy. In contrast, solar/wind power requires both land where raw materials are mined plus the vast amount of land used for solar panels or wind “farms.”

Myth 6. “Clean energy” has no effect on plant and animal life. Contrary to the frequent belief that there is no life in the desert, the Mojave is teeming with plant and animal life whose habitat will be increasingly undermined as it is covered with solar collectors. It is unfortunate that so many who express concern for the destruction of coral reefs seem blissfully unaware of the annihilation of aquatic life wrought by deep sea mining of minerals for renewable energy components.

Wind harvesting can be a doomsday machine for forests. As Ozzie Zehner warns: “Many of the planet’s strongest winds rip across forested ridges. In order to transport 50-ton generator modules and 160-foot blades to these sites, wind developers cut new roads. They also clear strips of land … for power lines and transformers. These provide easy access to poachers as well as loggers, legal and illegal alike.”

As the most productive land for solar/wind extraction is used first, that requires the continuous expansion of the amount of land (or sea bed) taken as energy use increases. The estimate that 1 million species could be made extinct in upcoming decades will have to be up-counted to the extent that “clean” energy is mixed in with fossil fuels.

Myth 7. “Clean energy” production has no effect on human health. Throughout the centuries of capitalist expansion workers have struggled to protect their health and families have opposed the poisoning of their communities. This is not likely to change with an increase in “clean” energy. What will change is the particular toxins which compromise health.

Creating silicon wafers for solar cells “… releases large amounts of sodium hydroxide and potassium hydroxide. Crystalline-silicon solar cell processing involves the use or release of chemicals such as phosphine, arsenic, arsine, trichloroethane, phosphorous oxycholoride, ethyl vinyl acetate, silicon trioxide, stannic chloride, tantalum pentoxide, lead, hexavalent chromium, and numerous other chemical compounds.” The explosive gas silane is also used and more recent thin-film technologies employ toxic substances such as cadmium.

Wind technology is associate with its own problems. Caitlin Manning reports on windmill farms in the Trans Isthmus Corridor of Mexico: “which is majority Indigenous and dependent on agriculture and fishing. The concrete bases of the more than 1,600 wind turbines have severely disrupted the underground water flows … Despite promises that they could continue to farm their lands, fences and security guards protecting the turbines prevent farmers from moving freely. The turbines leak oil into the soil and sometimes ignite … many people have suffered mental problems from the incessant noise.”

Though the number of health problems documented for fossil fuels is vastly more than those for solar/wind, the latter have been used on an industrial scale for a much shorter time, making it harder for links to show up. The Precautionary Principle states that a dangerous process should be proven safe before use rather than waiting until after damage has been done. Will those who have correctly insisted that the Precautionary Principle be employed for fracking and other fossil fuel processes demand an equivalent level of investigation for “clean” energy or give it the same wink and nod that petrochemical magnates have enjoyed?

Myth 8. People are happy to have “clean energy” harvested or its components mined where they live. Swooping windmill blades can produce constant car-alarm-level noise of about 100 decibels, and, if they ice up, they can fling it off at 200 miles per hour. It is not surprising that indigenous people of Mexico are not alone in being less than thrilled about having them next door. Since solar panels and windmills can only be built where there is lots of sun or wind, their neighbors are often high-pressured into accepting them unwillingly.

Obviously, components can be mined only where they exist, leading to a non-ending list of opponents. Naveena Sadasivam gives a few examples from the very long list of communities confronting extraction for “clean” energy components: “Indigenous communities in Alaska have been fighting to prevent the mining of copper and gold at Pebble Mine in Bristol Bay, home to the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery and a crucial source of sustenance. The proposed mine … has been billed by proponents as necessary to meet the growing demand for copper, which is used in wind turbines, batteries, and solar panels. Similar stories are playing out in Norway, where the Sámi community is fighting a copper mine, and in Papua New Guinea, where a company is proposing mining the seabed for gold and copper.”

Myth 9. No one is ever killed due to disputes over energy extraction or harvesting. When Asad Rehman wrote in May 2019 that environmental conflicts are responsible for “the murder of two environmental defenders each and every week,” his data was out of date within two months. By July 2019 Global Witness (GW) had tabulated that “More than three people were murdered each week in 2018 for defending their land and our environment.” Their report found that mining was the deadliest economic sector, followed by agriculture, with water resources such as dams in third place. Commenting on the GW findings, Justine Calma wrote “Although hydropower has been billed as ‘renewable energy,’ many activists have taken issue with the fact large dams and reservoirs have displaced indigenous peoples and disrupted local wildlife.”

GW recorded one murder sparked by wind power. Murders traceable to “clean” energy will certainly increase if it out-produces energy from fossil fuels. The largest mass murder of earth defenders that GW found in 2018 was in India “over the damaging impacts of a copper mine in the southern state of Tamil Nadu.” Copper is a key element for “clean” energy.

Myth 10. One watt of “clean energy” will replace one watt from use of fossil fuels.  Perhaps the only virtue that fossil fuels have is that their energy is easier to store than solar/wind power. Solar and wind power are intermittent, which means they can be collected only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing. Storing and retrieving their energy requires complex processes that result in substantial loss of energy. Additionally, the characteristics of solar panels means that tiny fragments such as dust or leaves can block the surface.

Therefore, their efficiency will be much less under actual operating conditions than they are under ideal lab conditions. A test described by Ozzie Zehner found that solar arrays rated at 1000 watts actually produced 200-400 watts in the field. Similarly, Pat Murphy notes that while a coal plant operates at 80-90% of capacity, wind turbines do so at 20-30% of capacity. Since they perform at low efficiencies, both solar and wind energy require considerably more land than misleading forecasts predict. This, in turn, increases all of the problems with habitat loss, toxic emissions, human health and land conflicts.

Myth 11. “Clean energy” is as efficient as fossil fuels in resource use. Processes needed for storing and retrieving energy from intermittent sources renders them extremely complex. Solar/wind energy can be stored for night use by using it to pump water uphill and, when energy is needed, letting it flow downhill to turn turbines for electricity. Or, it can be stored in expensive, large and heavy batteries. Wind turbines “can pressurize air into hermetically sealed underground caverns to be tapped later for power, but the conversion is inefficient and suitable geological sites are rare.” Daniel Tanuro estimates that “Renewable energies are enough to satisfy human needs, but the technologies needed for their conversion are more resource-intensive than fossil technologies: it takes at least ten times more metal to make a machine capable of producing a renewable kWh than to manufacture a machine able to produce a fossil kWh.”

Myth 12. Improved efficiency can resolve problems of “clean energy.” Perhaps the most often-stated illusion of green energy, this is one of the most nonsensical claims. It shows a complete lack of understanding of market economics and consumer habits. Energy efficiency (EE) is the same as putting energy on sale. Shoppers do not buy less of something on sale – they buy more. Stan Cox describes research showing that at the same time air conditioners became 28% more efficient, they accounted for 37% more energy use. Findings such as this are due both to users keeping their houses cooler and more people buying air conditioners. Similarly, at the same time as automobiles showed more EE, energy use for transportation went up. This is because more drivers switched from sedans to SUVs or small trucks and there were many more drivers and cars on the road.

EE parallels increased energy consumption not just because of increased use of one specific commodity, but also because it allows people to buy other commodities which are also energy-intensive. It spurs corporations to produce more energy-guzzling objects to dump on the market. Those people who do not want this additional stuff are likely to put more money in the bank and the bank loans out that money to multiple borrowers, many of whom are businesses which then increase their production.

Myth 13. Recycling “clean energy” machine components can resolve its problems. This myth vastly overestimates the proportion of materials that can actually be recycled and understates the massive amount of “clean” energy being advocated. Kris De Decker point out that “… a 5 MW wind turbine produces more than 50 tonnes of plastic composite waste from the blades alone.” If a solar/wind infrastructure could actually be constructed to replace all energy from fossil fuel, it would be the most enormous build-up in human history.  Many components could be recycled, but it is not possible to recycle more than 100%, and actual recycling is vastly less of that (often about 3-4%). A build-up would mean an exponential growth rate which would produce an expanding mountain of non-recycled components.

Myth 14. Whatever problems there are with “clean energy” will work themselves out. Exactly the opposite is true. Problems of “clean” energy will become worse as resources are used up, the best land for harvesting solar and wind power is taken, and the rate of industrial expansion increases. Obtaining power will become more vastly difficult as there are diminishing returns on new locations for mining and placing solar collectors and wind mills.

Myth 15. There Is No Alternative. This is the most obscene of all efforts to deny damages of “clean” energy. Repeating Margaret Thatcher’s right-wing verbiage, energy deniers say “We have to do something because moving a little bit in the right direction is better than doing nothing at all.” The problem is that expanding energy production is a step in the wrong direction, not the right direction.

The alternative to overgrowing “clean” energy is to remember what was outlined before. The concept of conserving energy is an age-old philosophy that an earlier incarnation of environmentalism realized as it used the word “reduce.” Those who tunnel vision on the horrible potential of climate change have an unfortunate tendency to mimic the behavior of climate change deniers as they themselves deny the dangers of alternative energy. Too many of today’s environmentalists respond to any attempt to realistically assess problems of “clean” energy with a three monkey approach of “I won’t hear it; I won’t see it; I won’t print it.”

Kris De Decker traces the roots of toxic wind power not to wind power itself but to hubristic faith in unlimited energy growth: “For more than two thousand years, windmills were built from recyclable or reusable materials: wood, stone, brick, canvas, metal. If we would reduce energy demand, smaller and less efficient wind turbines would not be a problem.”

Every form of energy production has difficulties. “Clean, renewable energy” is neither clean nor renewable. There can be good lives for all people if we abandon the goal of infinite energy growth. Our guiding principle needs to be that the only form of truly clean energy is less energy.

Don Fitz has taught Environmental Psychology at Washington University and Fontbonne University in St. Louis. He is on the Editorial Board of Green Social Thought, newsletter editor for the Green Party of St. Louis and was the 2016 candidate of the Missouri Green Party for Governor.

Fantasy and Fatality in the Facebook Era: A Lamentation for My Father

Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.

–James Baldwin

Seven weeks ago, my father died – abruptly, unexpectedly, and prematurely. I say that as a simple matter of fact because despite my utter heartbreak, no amount of euphemisms or platitudes will change the reality of the situation.

Some people might find it odd to state that my father died prematurely considering he was 72 years old, but my dad was a young, active, and agile 72. Throughout his adult life he always appeared about 10 years younger than his age. Everyone he knew was shocked by the news. The cause of death was determined to be stenosing coronary arteriosclerosis (narrowing of the heart vessel due to plaque) which apparently led to cardiac arrest. The medical examiner’s office stated that his death was due to “natural causes,” but there was nothing natural about his death, just as there is nothing natural about the way we are forced to live our lives.

Like most people, my father was a genuinely good man who deserved far better than what the world gave him. It turns out, unbeknownst to me, that my father was yet another in the long list of casualties of this brutal, immoral, unethical, and unjust American culture. It’s a society that cares little about affording a dignified life to decent people with integrity who have tried their best (i.e., the vast majority of all humans), but instead exalts and rewards rapacious narcissists and psychopaths.

Presumably precipitated by the economic downturn in 2008, my dad faced financial setbacks that appear to have accumulated rapidly, as they so easily do. His strains were also psychological and emotional. I have come to believe his latter troubles initially stemmed from unresolved childhood trauma, the nature of which I suspect and have evidence toward, but will never know for certain. From what I uncovered after his death, the stress he carried in recent years must have been nearly unbearable. Yet under these overwhelming conditions, he took large measures to avoid letting anyone, even those closest to him, learn anything about the extent of his difficulties.

My father spent a great deal of time helping others in his community, whether through his volunteer work with local non-profit and civic groups or just through interpersonal interactions. Undoubtedly a constructive, generous, and kind way to vent some of his emotions, it was also a way to keep too busy to think about them. What he didn’t do was directly acknowledge, confront, and share his own problems.

I discovered that my dad, like many, sought comfort by reading the type of shallow clichés circulated all over social media to remain hopeful: suggestions like “Life is going to get better at the proper time and you will be stronger and more at peace than ever before,” or “When life is dragging you back with difficulties it means it is going to launch you into something great.” That peace and greatness never came for my dad. These platitudes may help one get through the day, but they are generally hollow at their core, which is why they can be contradictory and do little to truly assist people in need.

My father also played the lottery every week, saying that if he won he’d start a foundation to support his favorite charitable causes. Really, he was hoping for a miracle.

Sadly, my father’s secrecy and inability to communicate and to deal with issues and emotions often put a gulf between us. Tragically, there is little doubt that the repression of his anguish and his extreme chronic stress contributed inordinately to his untimely end.

My father’s philosophy with regard to misfortune was to let it go and move on. He put on a brave and jovial face for most people and bottled up the crushing pressure he actually endured. There were numerous reasons for his particular reaction to hardship. He did not want to bother or worry others. He tried to remain sanguine in the face of adversity. He believed in the mistaken notion that how hard you work is directly proportional to the rewards you receive and your “success” in life. He also thought that if you do good things, good things will come back to you. He probably blamed himself for his woes, even though he and others like him are not at fault; the fault lies with a cruel, viscous system.

Ultimately, I think he knew, consciously or not, that a lot of people really do not want to hear about others’ burdens. We live in a culture of forced happiness. What plagued him, just as it does so many other Americans, was the need to keep up appearances in order to keep other people contented and maintain our collective delusion that the world is fair and good.

There’s no room in the Facebook culture for depression or for exposing the reality of our insanely difficult lives in our insanely corrupt and unforgiving society. Most social media sites are all about putting on our best face. (Twitter, at times, offers a slight exception.) It’s a digital fantasy land. Typically, we remain fairly superficial and positive, marketing ourselves as optimistic, hard-working, productive, self-sufficient, successful members of society. After all, what are social media sites like Facebook but simply personal public relations pages? They are a brilliant way for the techno-capitalists to exploit us doubly. They peddle our privacy to other companies then sell it back to us. Meanwhile, we maintain a façade. Our front promotes the illusion that notwithstanding the profound troubles of the world, all will be OK in the end and social media will help.

Pretending our myriad troubles do not exist, whether through denial, avoidance, or escapism is commonplace in our society. Spending our days wallowing in our sorrows is not a healthy way of managing our struggles, but neither is trying to circumvent them. To even attempt to overcome our current perilous planetary predicaments, we must take immediate action to acknowledge their existence and strive to contend with them,

Much of our lives is based on fantasy. We seem to prefer it that way, to prefer avoiding simple truths. For example, far too many prefer to believe the illusion that Chelsea Manning, or Edward Snowden, or Julian Assange are traitors to America than believe the facts revealed by them: that the American government (as well as its corporate colluders) spies on its own people and murders people all over the world for profit, or that both of its major political parties lie, cheat, and steal to win elections and to line their own pockets.

Our denial and avoidance is why inequality and environmental degradation have spiraled out of control, regardless of what out-of-touch cherry-picking privileged voices try to tell us. Most of our public officials, media personalities, corporate moguls, and other elite spokespeople, irrespective of political or ideological affiliation, deny the existence of our major societal and ecological issues or avoid their true natures

Privileged voices will say that we are generally faring better and living longer than ever, belying the widespread suffering in our country and throughout the globe. The truth is a huge percentage of Americans lack their basic needs of food, clothing, shelter, and (clean) water, or their connection to basic necessities is tenuous at best. Those on the ground experiencing economic insecurity know that the specious statistics on employment and poverty do not tell a realistic story at all. Half of all Americans are poor or near poverty.

Financial insecurity places tremendous pressure on the individual. This pressure manifests itself in the form of rising suicide rates, the opioid epidemic, and the countless who suffer in silence. And then there are the innumerable premature, preventable deaths that can be attributed to the inability to access or afford medical care, environmental toxicant exposure from poor living conditions and proximity to polluting industries, and overall stress.

When we do acknowledge the existence of poverty (rather than only focus on the middle class) we still avoid the true cause. Poverty is not about jobs but about wealth (i.e., hoarding of resources) and exploitation of people and planet for profit. Our troubles are not that we don’t have jobs or that they pay far too little. Yes, those are very proximal and real and I know them all too well. But our real trouble is that we even need a “job” to survive. So much of the work that we all do daily is unpaid and not considered valuable enough to warrant survivability. Our troubles are not that more people need to “work,” as defined by the powers that be. Our trouble is that no one should be deprived of basic human necessities (i.e., human rights) because the work they do is not deemed of value or because they do not or cannot participate in the monetary labor market created by those who exploit and hoard all of the resources on the globe.

Exploitation and hoarding of resources and people are also at the heart of our environmental predicament, but many shun these topics. While there may be some left who still outright deny that anthropogenic climate change exists, perhaps more pernicious are those who recognize it but avoid the fundamental causes. They focus mainly on fossil fuel consumption rather than all consumption. Even the current IPCC report suggests that the changes needed to cope with our climate emergency involve more than just energy. Moreover, too many neglect concurrent ecological emergencies such as biodiversity loss, which stems from humans’ land use change and from toxic contamination, not from climate change. We purposely ignore the ills of overproduction and overconsumption at our own peril. We also disregard those around the world who suffer the most from our conspicuous consumption and endless waste.

The overuse of natural resources to produce all of the products and materials of modern life, the subsequent production of toxicants that exist within our products or as byproducts to production, and the insatiable consumption of more and more unnecessary and useless merchandise is the real problem which we evade. In addition, our indefatigable belief that technological innovation will pull us out of our ecological mess, when overall, all it has done is continually intensify it, is yet another form of fantasy and denial. It is merely humanity’s lottery ticket out of ecological catastrophe.

You cannot begin to fix a problem when you pretend the problem doesn’t exist. Our social habit of avoidance and denial is placing tremendous stress on individuals, on society, and on our planetary ecosystem. Stress is wreaking havoc everywhere we turn. The stress on individuals shows up as increases in morbidity and mortality. The stress on society reveals itself as hatred and divisiveness misdirected toward the innocent instead of the perpetrators of our pains. The stress on our environment crumbles our ecosystems and may soon render our species extinct.

The stress of avoidance and denial in order to maintain an acceptable appearance in a callous superficial culture ultimately killed my father.

Some of my dad’s existential difficulties are similar to my own. I attempt to acknowledge and work through them as best I can on a daily basis. The primary problem I face right now is the deep sorrow, guilt, hurt, regret, and remorse I feel about his death, our strife, and my inability to alleviate his suffering. I am not seeking empty reassuring slogans or phrases (e.g. “Everything happens for a reason,” “Things will work out in the end,” This too shall pass”) to cope with my grief. I can’t just move along and go back to normal because my life will never be the same and grief will always remain. But writing about my father in the context of larger issues is one way that I am trying to face this trouble and come to terms with it.

As long as we ignore the true nature of our troubles and offer platitudes and half-measures as solutions, our societies and ecosystems will no doubt collapse under the stress, just like my dad did. My father should have lasted at least a decade longer. He should have had a safe and contented retirement. He had so much more life to live, but he ran out of time. Unless we all stop denying and avoiding our profound social and environmental crises, I fear we as a species are going to run out of time as well.

Kristine Mattis holds a Ph.D. in Environment and Resources. She is no relation to the mad-dog general. Email: k_mattis@outlook.com

On December 5, former vice president Al Gore met with Donald and Ivanka Trump in an effort to convince the president-elect that he should not gut federal policies and agreements dealing with climate change. Three days later, actor Leonardo DiCaprio also paid the Trump duo a visit, urging them to help build a green, climate-friendly economy with lots of jobs. The two men could not have done less to prevent climate catastrophe if they had flown up to Alaska together and asked the glaciers to please stop melting.

In a conversation with Gore on December 6, the climate-hawk governor of California, Jerry Brown, urged optimism. He believes that other world leaders can convince Trump that his retrograde climate policy is not a good idea politically. (First, though, those leaders are planning to convince Syrian president Bashar Assad to adopt Scandinavian-style social democracy.)

Meanwhile, Scientific American and a whole slew of scientists want you to sign a change.org petition calling on Trump to make the United States a leader in the climate struggle (and to be sure to use the hashtag #ActOnClimate.) I expect, though, that you’ll be at least as effective if you start your own petition urging Chevrolet to stop building SUVs and make bicycles instead.

Trump of course ignored these entreaties, instead demanding from the Energy Department the names of all personnel who have been involved in efforts to reduce carbon emissions. We can assume that he didn't make the request because he wants to give those employees raises.

It’s time to stop petitioning Trump and take the climate fight elsewhere. If saving civilization from an untimely heat death actually does depend on whether or not the U.S. president can be convinced to take appropriate action, then we were already in deep trouble long before 2016. Policy steps taken by current and past presidents, as well as campaign promises made by Hillary Clinton, all fell far, far short of cutting emissions as much as is needed to avert disaster. They didn’t even get us to the starting line.

Ambitions for federal action on greenhouse emissions have sunk to such depths that, according to a climate-conscious writer for The Hill, “our best hope” is, of all people, Ivanka. Even if she were to convince Donald not to scuttle the Paris Agreement on climate, we’d still be in the realm of futility, talking about worldwide carbon-cutting pledges that would lead to a world-shattering global temperature increase of 2.7 to 3.5 degrees Celsius (and that’s in the unlikely event that all countries live up to their commitments under the agreement; it's likely to be worse.)

Will Donald make it easier to get radical?

Instead of begging our megalomaniac-elect to save the world, we should follow the examples of the Standing Rock Sioux, the #ShutItDown activists, the city of San Francisco, and others who are confronting the ecological crisis where it’s happening.

Arguing for that in an invigorating December 1 Portland Rising Tide essay, Arnold Shroder noted that the opening for building a bigger, more radical, more effective movement may be wider now than it was before November 8. He wrote,

“Federal intransigence on climate is such that most plausible scenarios for significant near-term emissions reductions involve states, counties, and municipalities—who have managed [until now] to convince themselves that meaningful climate action is the job of someone with more power, like the federal government and the United Nations—to find diverse and creative ways to dismantle their fair share of the fossil fuel economy.”

However, Shroder continued, most local and state officials are still going to act only when pushed to act, so intense public pressure and bold actions will be needed: “Direct action can influence the behavior of political entities which are capable of significantly impeding Trump’s agenda. This is true in many respects. The fact that so much of the political establishment, even on the right, is averse to Trump likely creates unique opportunities. . . . [I]nstitutional collaboration at all levels is necessary for any of this madman’s visions to become reality, and in a way that has perhaps never been true of a US president, it isn’t at all clear where he will and will not receive that collaboration.”

He points to the defiant resolution passed by the San Francisco Board of Supervisors a month after the election (and the huge street demonstrations that followed), in which they declared that the city will “never back down” in its support of climate action, immigrant protection, Black Lives Matter, women’s rights, LBGTQ rights, workers’ rights, and universal health care, adding, “We will not be bullied by threats to revoke our federal funding.” Cities large and small across the country have declared similar intentions.

Shroder too urges that activists who are focused primarily on climate and the fossil-fuel menace join forces with those fighting back against racism, mass incarceration, and deportation; those resisting the growing impunity of police with their right to harass and shoot at will; those fighting for workers’ rights, and people carrying out many other struggles. We’re going to need demonstrations more frequent and even larger than those that helped stop Washington’s war on Vietnam.

Getting over Paris

This better path now open to the climate movement—that is, instead of asking Washington or corporations or the investor class, “Please do this,” to tell them, “We’re gonna do this and this and this, no matter what you say or do”—can energize people at a time when prospects are seeming grimmest. But most people or groups, even climate-aware ones, won’t be roused to action unless prominent figures—not just celebrities like Gore and DiCaprio, but all national and local climate leaders—make clear the scale of the emergency and stress that incremental emissions reductions are doomed to fail.

The need for quick, urgent action is not a hard case to make. Despite allowing the global temperature to rise by two and a half to three and a half degrees, the Paris agreement declares that its eventual goal is to hold the rise to a degree and a half. That’s because all of the realistic projections now show that even the old goal, a two-degree rise, will mean catastrophe. Achieving the 1.5-degree goal will require eliminating all greenhouse emissions within the next 15 years, and sooner in the case of heavy emitters like the United States.  

That’s a very tall order. But one benefit of 2017’s horrific alt-reality will be that activists and organizations won’t be bound by the political horse-trading that under a Clinton or Sanders administration would have meant settling for incremental, far-too-slow emissions reductions. Now they will be free to push hard, out there in America, for the immediate, steep drop in the use of fossil fuels and other greenhouse-gas sources that is so essential.

But they will also have to be publicly candid about a hard consequence of such deep cuts: that they will require America and other high-emissions nations get by on far less energy from all sources.

Why’s that? Well, suppose we overthrow this regime soon and get serious. Building wind, solar, biomass, and geothermal infrastructure will be essential to sustaining civilization, but a rapid buildup will require huge energy inputs. And we will have to be abandoning fossil fuels at the same time we are constructing renewable energy infrastructure. The concurrence of those two crash campaigns will leave far less net energy to be consumed for doing everything else we need to do.

So the transition will be tough, but what about the long run? Can renewable sources eventually supply as much energy as we now consume, so that America can eventually return to today’s profligate lifestyle? Some research reaches optimistic conclusions, but more hard-nosed studies that take all limits and pitfalls into account find that once we start dealing with on-the-ground realities, we will have to accept that the energy abundance we’ve enjoyed in this short-lived fossil-fuel era won't be repeated in a renewable-energy future.

The primary limitation we will face in building renewable energy capacity is its higher requirement for energy input per unit of energy generated. That can be ten to twenty times larger than was required for mining and pumping the coal, oil, and gas with which today's world was built. That leaves much less net energy to be used by society at large.

Second, we will obtain less and less energy per unit of energy invested as time goes on. That's because we are already exploiting the best locations for wind, solar, and biomass power; we’ll be moving on to successively less windy, sunny, productive places.

Furthermore, some of the wind and solar energy generated, maybe much of it, will have to be stored using batteries, hydrogen, compressed air, or other means. It will then have to be reconverted either to electricity or liquid fuels and transmitted from often remote regions to places where people and businesses are concentrated. All of those processes will severely shrink the net energy available to society, because much energy is expended during both conversion and transmission.

Finally, all production of wind, solar, geothermal, and biomass energy has an ecological impact on the landscapes where it occurs. So if we are to halt our degradation and destruction of the Earth's natural ecosystems, it will be necessary to declare some large areas off-limits to the energy sector.

Patrick Moriarty and Damon Honnery of Monash University in Australia have been examining scientists' projections of global potential for renewable energy generation, and pointing out all of these limitations. They have concluded that future renewable output “could be far below present energy use.”

The bottom line: we will have to redesign our economy and society to get by with a permanently lower input of energy and other resources. This will require a World War II-scale mobilization, something that obviously isn’t going to happen in a Trump administration; however, if we mount emergency mobilizations in communities, counties, and states around the country, along with open political rebellion in defense of the Earth, we could start cutting emissions and blazing a trail for nationwide climate mobilization at the same time we are striving for rapid regime change.

A new nation conceived . . .

Slashing energy consumption will be a hard sell in America unless a majority of the country understands clearly the dreadful consequences of not doing it. So in reassuring people that lower energy consumption won’t mean the end of the world, some international comparisons might be useful. It's just as important to emphasize that lower energy consumption won't be the end of the world. On this point, so international comparisons might be useful.

For example, consider scenarios in which we reduce the net energy available to run American society (total energy, from all sources) by 50, 75, or 85 percent. Next we could ask which countries today have similar per-capita consumption of energy. (Since no one can really be sure how much we’ll have to reduce, I chose those percentages arbitrarily before looking at the data, in order to avoid any charges that I was cherry-picking percentages or countries.)

There are four countries that consume about half (45 to 55 percent) as much energy per capita as Americans do: France, Japan, Slovakia, and Slovenia. So clearly, a well-functioning society with good quality of life can easily run on that kind of energy input. (By the way, all four of those countries have much lower income inequality scores and higher human development indices than we do.)

But unfortunately, any realistic examination of our predicament tells us that we are going to have to cut energy use by a lot more than half.

The group of countries that consume about a quarter (22 to 28 percent) as much energy per capita as the United States is more of a mixed bag: Bosnia, Croatia, Cyprus, Mexico, Montenegro, and Thailand. (Hong Kong is within this range as well, but it’s not a country.) All but Mexico have better scores for income inequality than the United States. Among 150 nations, the ranks of these six “25 percenters” on the human development scale run from around 30^th best (Croatia and Cyprus; compare with USA at no. 28) to near 70^th (Mexico and Thailand.)

Some of these countries would clearly be better places to live than others (based on my experience, I’d go for Croatia any day!), but the larger point is that consuming 75 percent less energy than Americans do doesn’t require adopting the lifestyle of the Neolithic.

If it turns out that we will have to go further and get by on about 85 percent less energy per capita, our present-day examples are Armenia, Botswana, Costa Rica, Cuba, Ecuador, Egypt, Georgia, Jamaica, Jordan, and Panama. Lower living standards for sure, but wide variation in quality of life. The main problem making some of these countries, and some of those listed above, less-than-desirable places to live is not that they are energy deprived. It’s that a large share of their populations endure material deprivation while a privileged few hoard much of the wealth and power. (Note that such conditions clearly exist in today’s United States.)

This is not to say that by going on a strict energy diet, the United States would come to resemble present-day France or Bosnia or Ecuador or any other country. We’d still be America, but a thoroughly transformed America—maybe better, maybe worse. Done right, the scaleback would force us to stop expending energy on all kinds of wasteful, socially harmful, or ecologically destructive activities. We would ensure that everyone has sufficient access to the shrinking energy pie, along with a good livelihood and good quality of life.

To achieve that transformation it will be necessary, in Marx and Engels’ terms, to expropriate the expropriators. The 99 percent will have to seize wealth and political/economic power from the 1 percent. But in a world with a ceiling on available energy, there will also need to be a shift of resources from the top half to the bottom half of the population if there’s to be sufficiency for all.     

No more soft pedaling

Up to this point, the mainstream climate movement has been highly allergic to talking about energy reductions of 75 percent or more, let alone the economic transformation that would entail. Some have refused to let go of the idea that the “American way of life” can be sustained; others have known all too well what was required, but soft pedaled their message for fear of scaring the wider public away from climate action—a maneuver writer Chris Shaw has decried as the “not in front of the children” strategy.

I have heard that argument made ad nauseum in another, no less condescending form: “We have to let people have hope!” OK, fine. In the perilous years ahead, I’m going to respond to that nostrum this way: “I agree. So start asking your readers or audiences or neighbors this: “What gives you more hope: broiling ourselves on the High setting under Trump, cutting emissions gradually so as to broil ourselves on Medium under the Paris Agreement, or turning off the broiler and living with a lot less material abundance but in a more just, more fair world?”

Stan Cox (@CoxStan) is the author of Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing and, with Paul Cox, of How the World Breaks: Life in Catastrophe’s Path, from the Caribbean to Siberia. Write him at t.stan {at} cox.net