Energy Policy Is One Aspect of the Crises Facing Our Civilization

In response to my recent piece called “Those Whose Hearts Are Open See the Need for Clean Energy,” Debi Ireland writes:

Good message Craig. You are doing good work. We need renewable energy. Dependence on fossil fuels is creating a global crisis. Check out this movie by Nafeez Mosadeqq Ahmed at TEDxHornstull. 

Thanks, Debi.  And wow, that movie is fantastic; I don’t know how I had missed it.  I heartily recommend this to all readers, and simply offer a few words in summary, as follows.

Those of us who spend time reading about energy policy and environmental justice know that what we’re really looking at is a complex combination of dozens of different disciplines.

For instance, while there’s nothing wrong in saying that we’re going to combat climate change by migrating to renewable energy, it is a gross over-simplification, and it also ignores the real causes of climate change.  Yes, the most easily identified, proximal source of greenhouse gases is our reliance on fossil fuels, but that’s just the beginning of the exploration into a much more complicated network of human behaviors.

The movie takes several huge steps back from the normal discussion, and asks us to challenge some of our assumptions, as an example, that civilization’s highest priority is economic growth, which relies on the never-ending appetite that consumers have for material things.  This consumerism, in turn, demands easy and inexpensive solutions for providing the energy required to manufacture and distribute these goods.  But don’t we all know that this is ultimately unsustainable, when the very concept of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources is itself so clearly absurd?

The Crisis of Civilization examines our 21st Century society in a profoundly broad and holistic fashion, bringing together notions of global politics, imperialism, terrorism, food and water shortages, as well as our concepts of who we are as people.  The speaker demonstrates a solid understanding of renewable energy, but concludes something that I think all of us understand implicitly: no possible adoption curve for solar, wind, geothermal, etc. will enable humankind to escape the necessity to rethink and reinvent itself.