Emerging idea from reading JMG -- adult and family pedagogy and research around the post-peak technologies that might be useful; which will many of them be revised versions of pre-fossil fuel tech; but leveraging everything we've learned, the supply chains / existing infrastructure, and the ease with which metrics, comparisons, analytics can be assembled today. Perhaps a very 'New Alchemy' feel to it all.
2021-11-25 14:09:31
https://smallfarmfuture.org.uk/?p=1843:
I’d be very interested in seeing a blog post from yourself about how you relate to, or what key lessons you draw from, some of the different eco-radicals movements I mentioned. I agree that many of them are particular to their historical/regional context, but I’m very fond of the words “Luddite” and “Distributist”. While the first is particular to England’s industrial revolution, the English case is instructive for its primacy (Marx is obviously dismissive of the Luddites, but applies that title to a similar incidents across Europe in the tech section of Vol. 1). I like the word Luddite as a via media between primitivism and technocracy.
I’m attached to the Distributist label in large part because I believe it describes a social principle (the ideal of widespread ownership) commanded by God through the Vicars of Christ. But I think it could have a lot of appeal to a broad coalition: not so particular to England, its founding thinkers believed it was a universal alternative to the path of industrial centralization under capitalism or socialism. As a school of thought, it boasts Peter Maurin, Schumacher, and Wendell Berry. And it anticipated the central themes of the degrowth community (restoring the commons, balancing a decentralized state and market, returning to the land, protecting the dignity of work, etc) by a good century.
Interview w/ Tim Jackson https://twitter.com/RRword/status/1462818536863064066?s=20
Herman Daly https://twitter.com/christoph_gran/status/1463586735703695366?s=20
2021-11-26 08:18:51
ideas:
it's generally easier to prepare before the storm; some things are impossible to make happen during / after the storm. so: prepare before the storm.
the process of preparing, in the case of climate change, might actually mitigate the storm itself:
finally: it's the scale at which one can reasonably operate without being mired down.
other ideas:
alternative hedonism as a) important propaganda and b) a proper moral strategy that tries to incresae near-term happiness as well as long-term happiness
further: if you're not actually prototyping and iterating something and testing whether it makes you happy in the near term (farming lifestyle, nomadic lifestyle) you might find later that you should've made different choices
(this is likely very true of much of the utopian thinking among leftists around large, 'democratic' structures ... which might in practice end up being far more hierarchical and less exciting than they think. smaje and others make this point.)
2021-12-05 08:06:37
Need to revisit material with Bialek as per criticality in evolved systems ... write a science summary of it in light of Machta et al's paper ...
Some summary ideas.
Fusion.
It was invigorating to hear the discussion around fusion.
If one were sure that this was the transformative technology to focus on, I could imagine dropping everything, not worrying about the hierarchical nature of the organization, and just offering help at whatever level.
And certainly: in scientific research generally, one must settle for motivations that are far less certain, with positive impacts far less direct.
But now feels like a time to focus on more direct solutions, given the urgency of the climate crisis. And fusion doesn't even seem like it will necessarily do all that much to address our scenario, soon. It will be important down the line; let the experts work on it who can.
Meanwhile, the issues facing us are far more multifaceted, with a mix of high- and low-tech, far more socially involved, with priorites far more nuanced. A much richer landscape of possible projects. Not the same singular, driving force, or the easy metric of success ... but the payoff for being able to address this complexity is: immediate relevance, and an open playground of possibility.
--
Economic organization. After listening to the fusion discussion, I fell into a rut of worry that I'd allowed myself to become overly swayed by 'doomsayer' voices around the future of energy + climate. John Michael Greer, for example, is someone whose analysis has a breathtaking breadth of ambition, but who doesn't always feel solidly convincing; one feels one needs to fill in the gaps with one's own analysis and evidence, and I don't feel confident of my own sources and analysis. It was therefore bracing to read some of the essay collection about Vermont techno-economic sovereignty, 'Most Likely To Secede': many of the essays seemed to take as given some of JMG's points -- esp. about peak oil.
In particular, it was encouraging to see a thesis in MLTS that echoed almost precisely that in JMG's body of work: essentially, that we will eventually (and may soon) reach a point where oil becomes sufficiently expensive to extract that it is no longer a 'cheap' source of energy. Nearly all of our current infrastructure depends on cheap oil. There are perhaps possible alternative infrastructures that would not; but the easiest (only?) way to produce them requires oil. Building that alternative infrastructure will take some finite amount of time. It is possible (likely, given our current trajectory?) that we might run out of 'cheap oil runway' for building that alternative infrastructure; i.e., oil may become prohibitively expensive to extract before we've built renewable alternatives, which might mean that we simply don't have a way to build those alternatives at a sufficient clip to prevent a global 'collapse'.
Whether or not this analysis is relevant or correct (I tend increasily to think it is both), it does point to the fact that we've organized our economy and our resources in a very silly way. A rational approach to planning and building would look very different. Those who argue on behalf of our current approach tend to justify it by suggesting that any alternative is worse, or impossible. Given how dire the consequences of our current trajectory look to be, however, a simple counter might be: since we can't know for sure that there exists no possible, viable alternative, it's useful to at least explore some of the alternatives in case one of them ends up working.
All of this, however, is thought through in the 'royal sovereign' mode -- as if I had some ability to guide or direct society at large. When essayists engage in this mode, I suppose the implied hope is that someone (usually someone else) who possesses (or could organize to possess) actual power might be convinced by the essay and steer the behmoth in a different direction. Depending on this to occur, however, is about as wishful as depending on some savior techno-fix to address Peak Oil. Realistic interventions ought not to depend on being given the reigns of the Behemoth. Much writing and talk in this mode is really a sort of fantasy.
A further misconception: the assumption in this mode is typically that the solution ought to come 'from above'; that the crisis will unfold everywhere, all at once. It may be, however, that our window for top-down solutions -- if they were ever going to work -- has mostly passed, as the ability to govern at scale may dwindle as the era of cheap oil passes. It may be, in other words, that the scale of the 'optimal' solution is far more local than the above 'mode' assumes.
Yet further: we may be past the point of trying to salvage 'civilization', if that word is used to connote 'the way the world currently is'. So much of the world may need to change that our best hope for moving forward is to move forward with many, parallel 'local optimizers' -- those with local knowledge, trying to produce to best / most stable circumstances for their communities. The globally optimal system may be impossible to know or predict at this point.
Aside on 'Peak Oil' as a term. It doesn't currently seem to me to be the proper term for the above thesis. E.g. -- who really cares about 'peak oil' if the 'tail' of the production is sufficiently long? The truly important concept is 'the point past which oil becomes prohibitively expensive to recover'. Maybe 'Expensive Oil' or something along those lines is a better term?