M: Ah. I’d like to have an argument, please.

R: Certainly sir. Have you been here before?

M: No, I haven’t, this is my first time.

We just got our copy of Depletion and Abundance. I assumed that Sharon Astyk was too busy making an Abundance of food for Thanksgiving to post about Depletion, but George Monbiot roused an article out of her. And a good one.

George Monbiot is Arguing with Me…That Has to be Good

In the Guardian, Monbiot writes:

The costs of a total energy replacement and conservation plan would be astronomical, the speed improbable. But the governments of the rich nations have already deployed a scheme like this for another purpose. A survey by the broadcasting network CNBC suggests that the US federal government has now spent $4.2 trillion in response to the financial crisis, more than the total spending on the second world war when adjusted for inflation. Do we want to be remembered as the generation that saved the banks and let the biosphere collapse?

This approach is challenged by the American thinker Sharon Astyk. In an interesting new essay, she points out that replacing the world’s energy infrastructure involves “an enormous front-load of fossil fuels”, which are required to manufacture wind turbines, electric cars, new grid connections, insulation and all the rest. This could push us past the climate tipping point. Instead, she proposes, we must ask people “to make short term, radical sacrifices”, cutting our energy consumption by 50%, with little technological assistance, in five years.

There are two problems: the first is that all previous attempts show that relying on voluntary abstinence does not work. The second is that a 10% annual cut in energy consumption while the infrastructure remains mostly unchanged means a 10% annual cut in total consumption: a deeper depression than the modern world has ever experienced. No political system - even an absolute monarchy - could survive an economic collapse on this scale.

Astyk replies:

So let us start with our agreements - and one of the places we agree is that voluntary self-sacrifice is a hard nut to crack, and that a renewable build out is a lot more palatable to people. I agree that this is true. But like Monbiot, I believe there is a real and serious possibility that a renewable build out on the scale needed to keep things fundamentally the same may well fail. Monbiot uses the example of the sheer amount of funding marshalled for the bail out as proof of what societies can do in a short time. But there are two problems with that example. The first is that the very fact that we did marshall huge sums make it not more likely we can do it again, but much less likely. That is, finding the money for a build out just got radically less feasible as our government gave future wind turbines and insulation to bankers who jumped up and down on it and set it aflame.

The other danger is that the example of the bail out might be a little too accurate - despite pouring massive quantities of funds into finance, the combined efforts of many nations have manifestly failed, and at a huge price - not just a lot of money wasted, but a deep destruction of our future capacity to adapt to climate change. My deepest fear about climate change is not that we won’t begin to address it, but that we will falter in the middle of our massive industrial projects, having emitted the carbon, invested ourselves in one strategy, and have little or nothing left to begin any other shifts.

…

Now Monbiot speaks of “voluntary abstinence” not working - and I agree that this is mostly true, if one construes the term to mean “people acting in isolation to try and cut their emissions without measure and without support or enforcement.” Fortunately, we both agree this would be silly. That said, however, organized, collective, often government supported self-sacrifice from necessity and to protect one’s future from a vast disaster has worked, and Monbiot and I can both think of some obvious examples. During World War II, the British endured far tighter rationing than the US - but in the US, rationing was overwhelmingly popular and accepted despite the fact that there was no actual shortage of many of the rationed goods. And, while it is true that pure voluntary self-restraint often doesn’t work, what voluntary models do successfully do is engage the populace, make rationing acceptable, and provide structures for enforced rationing. So, for example, the voluntary food rationing in the US of WWI, which had mixed success, was adopted as part of the model and structure for enforced food rationing. The Victory Garden movement of WWI, largely popularly driven, was adopted as part of the plan for addressing possible (and in Britain real) food shortages. In both the US and Britain, Victory Gardens eventually provided more than 40% of all produce.

Read Sharon’s entire reply here

H: Why did you come in here then?

M: I wanted to complain.

H: Oh no, that’s next door. It’s being-hit-on-the-head lessons in here.

M: What a stupid concept.