The Future Is Not What It Used to Be: Climate Change and Energy Scarcity

1. The Transitory Nature of Industrial Society

1 The Transitory Nature of Industrial Society There is a wry little tale about a turkey. The turkey observes that the farmer brings food every morning without fail, and so concludes that it is well provided for and has nothing to fear. As the weeks go by, it becomes fatter and maintains its comfortable view of the world until its complacency is shattered on the eve of Thanksgiving when the farmer arrives to wring its neck.1 The turkey in our story falls prey to what was identified by David Hume as the problem of induction: from a strictly logical viewpoint, it is inadmissible to predict future events, or infer general laws, on the basis of observed empirical regularities (Hume 2000 [1748], §4.1.20–27;§4.2.28–32). The problem of induction appears inescapable for two categories of people: abstract philosophers in search of logically incontrovertible universal laws, and one-dimensional rationalists limited by a linear worldview like that of the turkey. For all practical purposes, however, philosophers and other sentient beings can solve the problem of induction by cultivating a critical, inquisitive mind and by taking a more sophisticated, systemic perspective. For the sake of the argument, let us fancy an animal endowed with genuine intelligence and thus replace the “inductivist turkey” with a “reflectivist turkey.” Such a smart creature could, in principle, understand the logic of the farm rather than just worrying about mealtimes. It would thereby overcome the problem of induction and understand that it is being fed only for a limited period. A systemic perspective would thus allow the turkey to grasp its existential predicament, make predictions about its fate, and perhaps even warn its inductivist fellows. 2 Chapter 1 This suggests a more existentialist reading of the story, to complement the epistemic interpretation. It is important to note that understanding the logic of the farm would not necessarily imply that the turkeys on that farm would be able to rescue themselves. In the worst case, they might simply lead disconsolate lives in the fearful expectation of Thanksgiving Day. Humankind is in a similar predicament. On a finite planet, the fact that resources have been abundant in the past does not mean they will always continue to be so. As in the case of the reflectivist turkey, a nonlinear understanding of the world system mandates us to jettison the comfortable inductivist habit of extrapolating the future from the past, and enables us to make predictions about our shared trajectory. Once again, however, there is no guarantee that we are able to escape our personal and/or collective fate. Because this is so, many people understandably prefer denial and selfdeception to an unvarnished recognition of the predicament we are in. To keep deluding ourselves, all we must do is stubbornly refuse to substitute a reflectivist attitude for our inductivist mental habits. But, unfortunately , collective self-delusion does not alter the fact that, in the long run, the current industrial way of life is incompatible with planetary limits. As we will see, climate change and energy scarcity are the most obvious cases in point. The Human Predicament As every historian knows, any specific form of human society is transitory . Industrial society is unlikely to be an exception. It will pass away, Figure 1.1 The inductivist turkey. Source: Courtesy of Horst Friedrichs. The Transitory Nature of Industrial Society 3 just as all people are bound to die. Short of a miraculous breakthrough such as fusion technology, or the apparition of some other deus ex machina, industrial society cannot outlast the availability of such finite energy resources as fossil fuels.The specter of catastrophic climate change indicates that industrial society may become unviable even before the exhaustion of its resource base. The reason is simple: in a world where material resources are finite and environmental sinks have limited capacity to absorb emissions without serious damage to natural ecosystems and human societies, the extractive and polluting intensity of industrial society is not sustainable. Once vital resources have been depleted, world population cannot continue , as it does today, exceeding the planet’s carrying capacity, that is the number of people who are able to live on it sustainably at a given level of technological and economic development.2 In the meantime, industrial society is already testing the absorptive capacity of the atmosphere via anthropogenic climate change. Even a no-growth economy (Victor 2008; Jackson 2009) at current...