Total War



It’s always an exciting and mind expanding experience to get a library card, and spend at least 25 years studying environmental history and ecological sustainability, while also developing a loving intimate relationship with the ecosystem around you.  There’s something healthy, intelligent, and sane about being present in reality, including its tremendous and worsening dark side.  Year after year, the more you learn and heal, the less at home you feel in this culture, which has little interest in the wellbeing of the family of life.

Becoming present in reality transforms you into a peculiar weirdo.  The herd will move away from you, as you move away from it.  Congratulations!  You are outside the fence, outside the cult, outside the mass hysteria.  You can think for yourself, question everything, and begin unlearning all the garbage that has been poured into your brain over the years.  You can seek better paths.

A week ago, I snapped.  I read the latest paper by William E. Rees, the professor who was co-creator of the ecological footprint concept.  He warns us that we are deep into overshoot, and idiotically hippity-hopping down the path to catastrophe.  “Half the fossil energy ever used (and half the fossil CO₂ ever produced), has been burned (emitted) in just the past 35 years!”  This is not a path with a long future.  Rees has come to the conclusion that humans are not “primarily a rational species.”  I agree.

The focus of his paper was on a narrow spectrum of the Earth Crisis: overshoot (i.e., excess demand for insufficient resources).  The full spectrum cannot be addressed in a nine page paper, or a nine volume report.  It’s far more complex.  Here’s what triggered me: “Defense of the status quo remains the default position of most other academic disciplines, governments, transnational corporations and international organizations.  Global society is mesmerized by the prevailing cultural narrative of perpetual material growth abetted by continuous technological progress.” 

In our culture, the vast majority has been trained to believe that the primary purpose of society is to pursue perpetual economic growth, to the highest degree possible, by any means necessary, at any cost.  This belief is passed, from one generation to the next, in every classroom, every day.  Accepted as certain truth, it arouses little controversy.  What is painfully absent is a competent understanding of the costs, the multitude of harmful unintended consequences.  Blinded by ignorance, this culture kills its grandchildren to feed its children.  We are the most highly educated generation that ever lived, and the most technologically advanced, the zenith of progress.

Rees wrote nothing I didn’t already know, but it’s so frustrating to wake up every morning on a planet that’s being obliterated by an epidemic of ignorance.  We’re not being pounded by a barrage of giant asteroids.  The fury is being driven by common beliefs and deep misconceptions.

The Rees paper triggered a flashback about Joseph Goebbels, the Minister of Propaganda in Nazi Germany.  He gave his most famous speech on February 18, 1943, “Nation, Rise Up, and Let the Storm Break Loose.”  Hitler understood that in the industrial era, access to petroleum was a necessity for all powerful nations.  Germany had lost World War I, and then got slammed with costly reparation bills, and then got clobbered by the Great Depression of 1929.  Germans were not happy, they had no oil wells, and they were willing to listen to the creepy ideas of rowdy beer hall gangsters.

Fortunately, the Soviets had oil wells in the republic of Azerbaijan, the Baku fields.  Hitler wanted this oil province for his Christmas present.  Unfortunately, he got a terrible ass-whooping while trying to take Stalingrad (23 August 1942 – 2 February 1943), the biggest battle of World War II.  His armies were severely hammered, and his lucky streak came to an end.  The tide was turning.  Folks back in Germany were seriously bummed out by this crushing defeat, and their hopes and dreams were going up in smoke.  It was time for a pep talk, and Dr. Goebbels stepped up to the microphone.

Now, Joseph was an incredibly talented orator, and a masterfully manipulative control freak.  Comrades, we just learned an important lesson — it’s time to take this war far more seriously.  It’s time for total war.  He whipped the crowd into a frenzy.  The auditorium roared.  The whole crowd repeatedly shouted slogans in unison.  They leapt to their feet cheering.  It was an explosion of high voltage enthusiasm, pure fanaticism.

In 1943, there was no TV or internet.  Goebbels was the dictator of information.  Via radio, he delivered the daily news to 60 million Germans.  Nothing was printed, by any source, without his blessing.  American reporter John Gunther was able to provide an uncensored version of the Hitler drama for his readers at home:  “To millions of honest Germans he [Hitler] is sublime, a figure of adoration; he fills them with love, fear, and nationalist ecstasy.  To many other Germans he is meager and ridiculous — a charlatan, a lucky hysteric, and a lying demagogue.”

Gunther wrote, “Like that of all fanatics, his capacity for self-belief, his ability to delude himself, is enormous.”  “His lies have been notorious.”  “He has no great capacity for hard work.”  “He hates to make up his mind.”  “His orders are often vague and contradictory.”  “When his men fail him, he murders them.”  “The leaders, jealous of each other, and knowing Hitler the all-powerful arbiter of their destinies, compete with one another for his favor.”  “His brain is small and vulgar, limited, narrow, suspicious.”  “He talked himself to power.”  “Hitler… can arouse an audience, especially a big audience, to frenzy.”

Gunther also described Goebbels, who had zero tolerance for dissenting news.  “Control the press of a nation and half of the job of dictatorship is done.  Goebbels has given living strength to the authority of this maxim.  As supreme dictator of the printed word in the Third Reich, nothing may be published in Germany without his consent.  He is at liberty to censor even the words of fellow cabinet ministers.”  “No journalist may find employment in Germany till Dr. Goebbels certifies his acceptability; no newspaper may publish anything without his tacit consent.  Incidental result: 1,400 German newspapers, about one-third of the total number in the Reich, have perished since 1933.”

It was in 1933 when the Nazi party came into power with 37 percent of the vote, according to Gunther.  Voters did not choose Hitler to become the new Chancellor, instead he was (legally) appointed by the departing president, von Hindenburg.  Nor did voters approve the termination of the Weimar Republic, and the establishment of a one-party dictatorship, Nazi Germany.  The new logo was a swastika in a white circle on a red background.  Note that “Nazi” is a nickname for the National Socialist German Workers Party.  Socialists!  (Gasp!) 

Steven Bach wrote that less than a week after Hitler became Chancellor, publications by rival parties were banned, and they lost their right of assembly.  A few weeks later, an emergency decree was passed.  “Curbs on personal liberty, on the right of free expression of opinion, including freedom of the press, of association, and of assembly, surveillance over letters, telegrams and telephone communications, searches of homes and confiscations of as well as restrictions on property, are hereby permissible beyond the limits hitherto established by law.”  Plans for the Dachau camp were soon announced.  By the end of 1933, fifty camps for “reeducating political prisoners” would be open. 

The Nazis encouraged the angry Aryan mob to hate designated scapegoats like Jews, homosexuals, gypsies, Jehovah’s Witnesses, political dissenters, and useless eaters (mentally ill, retarded, handicapped).  Today, the world is home to millions of scapegoats, in various regions, including political dissenters, investigative reporters, Muslims, Christians, Hindus, Buddhists, Jews, refugees, immigrants, indigenous people, and on and on. 

Today, populist loud mouths are popping up on every continent, like mushrooms after a fresh autumn shower.  While mainstream leaders do little about the Earth Crisis, beyond making lofty promises, the populists are working like crazy to demolish environmental protections, and accelerate the destruction.  The strains of ever-swelling population, the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and growing wealth inequality are making the mobs edgy and crabby, and I expect this to continue intensifying.  Nothing must interfere with economic growth.  Nothing!  The words of Goebbels and Gunther arouse a prickly sense of déjà vu.

The other night I grabbed Albert Speer’s book, Inside the Third Reich, and reread the final chapters.  Speer was Hitler’s architect in the early years, and later became the Minister of Armaments and War Production.  For twelve years he was in Hitler’s inner circle.  As I read Speer’s book, I was struck by the parallels between Nazis and today’s populist circuses.

In late March of 1945, just weeks before the fall of Berlin, Speer made a visit to the western front.  While German cities were rubble and ashes, the rural folks were in better shape.  Speer understood that the war was already lost, but in farm country, folks expressed continued faith in the war effort.  They believed that Hitler had a brilliant plan.  He was deliberately letting the enemy forces pour deep into Germany.  It was all a cunning trap.  Any day now, Hitler would unleash a new and terrible secret weapon.  The enemy would be crushed, and Hitler would claim the victory.  There were many people high in the Nazi government who believed this too.

Today, in our world, the total war against Big Mama Nature boldly charges forward, led by the holy banner of Economic Growth.  Propaganda ministers have instilled blind faith in our new secret weapons — solar panels, wind turbines, self-driving electric cars, artificial intelligence, sustainable development, metal drinking straws, and so on.  They tell us that we’ll be able to keep all our cool toys, without uncomfortable sacrifices, as we move beyond the primitive era of fossil energy, and continue our sacred journey to techno utopia.  And so, to contribute to the war effort, patriotic consumers must bravely shop till they drop.  Sieg heil!  (hail victory!)

Back to Speer.  In the last weeks of the war, as the enemy was closing in on both fronts, Hitler issued a series of decrees.  He ordered the destruction of his nation’s infrastructure.  This included the phone system, the telegraph system, the postal system, and radio broadcasting; electrical power, natural gas systems, oil and gasoline refineries, and water systems.  All ships and barges were to be sunk, specifically in ports and canals.  All locomotives, passenger cars, freight cars, roundhouses, and tracks.  All warehouses and industrial infrastructure.  All bridges were to be demolished, as well as dams, locks, and canal sluices.  All spare parts, wires, cables, cable diagrams, and descriptions of equipment were to be destroyed.  Coal mines were to be flooded, and their lift machinery destroyed.  All military equipment and weapons were to be trashed.

This plan freaked out Speer.  All the precious industrial infrastructure that he had struggled to preserve would be trashed.  At the end of the war, the German people would be in the Stone Age.  This was a death sentence.  He protested to Hitler.  Hitler didn’t care.  His plan was to evacuate the hundreds of thousands of German survivors by force, and burn down all buildings that remained standing — scorched earth.  If the war is lost, it will be because we were a weak people.  The future belongs to the strong.  Our survivors don’t matter.  “The good have already been killed.”  Many loyal regional leaders were willing to obey the orders of this decree.  Speer managed to convince many of them to preserve as much infrastructure as possible.

OK.  To put his in context, Hitler was just one nutjob, this Nazi story was about just one region, and their six year adventure in total war.  Today, every nation in the world has joined the Economic Growth cult, and its scorched earth mission.  Billions are fully committed to the war effort.  The destruction we now cause is vastly more than the World War II era.  With our computers, satellites, terrifying weapon systems, and enormous herd of consumers, we have never been closer to perfecting total war — and achieving a glorious victory.

Rees, William E., “Ecological economics for humanity’s plague phase,” Ecological Economics 169 (2020) 106519.  [LINK]  (Abstract only, full paper $$$)

Gunther, John, Inside Europe, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1938.

Speer, Albert, Inside the Third Reich, Macmillan, New York, 1970.

Bach, Steven, Leni: The Life and Works of Leni Riefenstahl, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 2007.

Afterburn

Once upon a time, Richard Heinberg was a mild-mannered college professor in northern California.  In 1998, he happened to read an article in Scientific American that revealed the peak oil theory.  A small clan in the lunatic fringe had been discussing the notion, but it was now being yanked out of the closet by a number of retired petroleum geologists — respectable experts having front line experience with an increasingly ominous reality.

Peak oil was terrifying.  The geologists were telling us that our way of life was racing toward the cliff.  Dignified ladies and gentlemen naturally swept it under the carpet, because the notion was certainly impossible in this age of techno-miracles.  Anyway, the anticipated calamity was still 20 or 30 years away, so there was no need to think about it.

In 2003, Heinberg published The Party’s Over, which explained peak oil to a general audience.  Since then, he’s made a career out of exposing the dark side of growth, progress, and other mischief.  Eventually, he left the university and joined the Post Carbon Institute.  His message is that resource depletion, climate change, and economic meltdown will blindside our way of life in this century.  He suggests that now is a great time to pay closer attention to reality.

Decades of explosive economic growth were only possible because of cheap and abundant energy, abundant high quality mineral resources, and highly productive oil-powered agriculture.  Today, the perpetual growth monster is kept on life support by pumping it up with trillions of dollars of debt.  Back in the 1960s, a dollar of debt boosted the GDP by a dollar.  By 2000, a dollar of debt boosted GDP by just 20 cents.  Today, the tsunami of debt is creating a new stock market bubble, and its collapse may be worse than the crash of 2008.  The notion that “growth is over” inspires the titans of finance leap from tall buildings.

Well-paid goon squads of spin-doctors are effectively conjuring doubts about peak oil.  What they don’t mention is the energy returned on energy invested (EROEI).  A century ago, it took one calorie of energy to produce 100 calories of petroleum.  The EROEI was 100:1.  Today, the EROEI of U.S. production has plummeted to 10:1.  Tar sands, oil shale, and biofuels all are less than 5:1.  Most fossil energy will be left in the ground forever, because of low or negative EROEI.  Imagine having a job that paid $100 a day, but the bridge toll for getting there was $105.

It’s already too late to cleverly pull the plug on climate change and live happily ever after.  Our current strategy, ignoring the problem and denying it exists, is the preferred policy of our glorious leaders.  It might be possible to soften the worst-case scenario if we reduced our fossil fuel consumption by 80 to 90 percent by 2050, a daunting challenge.  The transition to renewable energy will be turbulent, because of its numerous shortcomings.  For example, trucks, planes, and agriculture cannot run on electricity.  Many uses of oil have no substitute.

Welcome to the subject matter of Heinberg’s latest book, Afterburn.  We’re living in the final decades of a one-time freak-out in human history, the Great Burning.  For two centuries, we’ve been extracting and burning staggering amounts of sequestered carbon, for no good reason.  What were we thinking?  It’s nonrenewable, so using it as the core energy source for industrial civilization could only have a crappy ending.  For thousands of years, Arab herders traveled across regions containing oceans of oil, left it alone, and enjoyed a good life.  Self-destruction is not mandatory.

The book takes readers on an up-to-date tour of the unintended consequences of the Great Burning, and presents reasonable arguments for why it’s moving into the sunset phase.  The final chapters of Afterburn contemplate life after the burn.  What can intelligent people do to prepare for a way of life that will be far smaller, simpler, and slower?

In the 1930s, a Nazi control freak named Joseph Goebbels revolutionized mind control via high-tech propaganda.  This was made possible by the latest consumer fad, radio.  One person spoke, and millions listened, day after day.  Today, with the internet, and hundreds of TV channels, many millions are speaking at once, presenting a fantastic variety of viewpoints.  Truth (if any) can become a needle in the haystack.

Many huge ideas have been born in the lunatic fringe, presented by heretics like Galileo and Darwin.  At the same time, the fringe produces oceans of idiotic balderdash.  At the opposite end of the spectrum is the mainstream world, where the one and only thing that matters is ongoing economic growth.  Other issues, like climate change and resource depletion, are nothing more than annoying distractions that must be stepped around.

Heinberg is interesting because he camps in the no-man’s-land between shameless mainstream disinformation and the wacko hysteria of the fringe.  He’s a likeable lad, and a clear writer who makes an effort to be respectful and fair-minded.  Until recently, it’s been compulsory for eco-writers to include hope and solutions, even if they’re daffy, because bummer books gather dust.  It’s encouraging to see an emerging trend, in which the emphasis on hopium is becoming unhip, and readers are served larger doses of uncomfortable facts with no sugar coating.

Afterburn includes small servings of magical thinking, but overall it lays the cards on the table.  A way of life can only be temporary if it is dependent on nonrenewable resources, or on consuming renewables at an unsustainable rate.  An economy requiring perpetual growth is insane.  Nature will fix our population excesses and eliminate overshoot.  The lights will go out.  All civilizations collapse.  Ours will too.  We won’t be rescued by miraculous paradigm shifts.  The biggest obstacle to intelligent change is human nature.  Folks with food, money, and a roof don’t worry about threats that are not immediate.  There is a possibility that humankind will no longer exist by the end of this century.  And so on.

Yes, things can look a little bleak, but don’t surrender to cynicism and give up.  We can’t chase away the storm, but we can do many things that make a difference.  Learn how to do practical stuff, like cook, sew, and garden.  Become less reliant on purchased goods and services.  Develop trusting relationships with your neighbors.

Today is a paradise for folks interested in changing the world.  Imagine cool visions of a new and improved future where we could nurture cooperation, eliminate inequality, mindfully manage population, and minimize environmental injuries.  Unfortunately, visioning is limited by the fact that the future is certain to be radically different.  What can we say for sure about 2050?  I remain stubbornly confident that there will be sun and moon, mountains and oceans, bacteria and insects.

When civilizations die, most or all of their cultural information also dies.  Today, much of this information is stored in electronic media, or printed on acidic paper that has a short lifespan.  Heinberg believes that it’s essential to protect our books, because they are vital for cultural survival.  He fears that the amazing achievements of the Great Burning will be forgotten.  “Will it all have been for nothing?”

A far better question is, “What cultural achievements would we want to be remembered by?”  During the Great Burning, we’ve learned so much about environmental history and human ecology.  We are coming to understand why almost every aspect of our way of life is unsustainable.  (Our schools should teach this!)  The most valuable gift we could give to new generations is a thorough understanding of the many things we’ve learned from our mistakes, and the mistakes of our ancestors.  They need a good map of the minefield.

Heinberg, Richard, Afterburn — Society Beyond Fossil Fuels, New Society Publishers, Gabriola Island, British Columbia, 2015.

The book’s introduction is HERE.  Two other reviews of Heinberg books are Snake Oil: Fracking’s False Promise and The End of Growth.

The Future

Al Gore’s book, The Future, is fascinating and perplexing.  The world is being pummeled by enormous waves of change, and most are destructive and unsustainable.  What should we do?  To envision wise plans, it’s important to know the past, and understand how the present mess evolved.  The book presents a substantial discussion of six megatrends that are influencing the future:

EARTH INC is the global economy, dominated by a mob of ruthless multinational corporations.  It’s pushing radical changes in the way we live, work, and think.  Many leaders in the world have become its hand puppets, shamelessly selling influence in exchange for treasure and power.  Earth Inc. is the monster that’s killing the ecosystem.

GLOBAL MIND is the worldwide web that enables communication between people everywhere.  Two billion now have access to it.  It provides access to a cornucopia of fresh information — knowledge from sources outside the walls of culture and propaganda.  The Global Mind is our single hope for inspiring rapid, intelligent, revolutionary change.

BALANCE OF POWER is changing.  Following World War II, the world was happy, as America provided virtuous leadership that helped maintain stability in the world.  Today, the U.S. is no longer respected.  Power is shifting away from Western nations to new powerhouses, and from national governments to corporate interests.

OUTGROWTH is the explosion of unsustainable growth in almost everything — population, pollution, consumption, soil mining, water mining, extinctions, and on and on.  Earth Inc. is fanatically obsessed with perpetual growth, and aggressively flattens anything that stands in its path.  Bummer growth must be replaced with the benevolent growth of Sustainable Capitalism.

LIFE SCIENCE is providing us with technology to manipulate biological processes in new ways.  We’ll cure more diseases and live much longer.  Our ability to deliberately alter the genes of any living organism allows us to play a significant role in controlling the planet’s evolutionary journey.  Of course, evolution must be manipulated cautiously, to avoid embarrassing calamities.

THE EDGE is the catastrophically dysfunctional relationship between humankind and the ecosystem.  On the down side, trashing the atmosphere and climate has created a monster we cannot control.  On the plus side, it’s inspiring many enlightened efforts to guide civilization back into balance with the ecosystem.

Al Gore is a charming lad with a good sense of humor.  The son of a senator, Gore has spent much of his life amidst the barbarian tribes of Washington.  He eventually became the vice president and a wealthy tycoon.  While at Harvard, one of his professors was a pioneer in climate change research, a big juju subject, and a primary influence on Gore’s career path.  Gore is a senior advisor to Google, and a board member at Apple.  He is exceptionally well informed about the digital world, climate change, ecological challenges, global politics, and the shenanigans of the rich and powerful.

In the book, Gore sometimes jabbers like a politician giddy with optimism.  Yes, things are a big mess, and the status quo is in need of speedy, intelligent, radical reform.  We can fix it!  Politicians rarely win elections when their objective is damage control (Jimmy Carter’s mistake).  The way to win is to wear a big smile and promise hope, solutions, and better days ahead.  I sometimes wonder if damage control might accomplish more.

Much of the book is impressive, but its optimism for the future is not well supported by compelling arguments and evidence.  Readers learn that it’s not too late to nip climate change in the bud.  We simply need to reduce greenhouse emissions by 80 to 90 percent.  But how could we do this without blindsiding the system that enables the existence of seven-point-something billion people?  Easy!  Create a carbon tax.  Shift subsidies from fossil energy to renewables.  Require utilities to use more alternative energy.  Create a cap and trade system.  If every nation eagerly did this next week, our worries would be over.

Population continues to grow exponentially.  Gore recommends that we “stabilize” population.  It would be risky to actually reduce population, because this might trigger a “fertility trap,” a terrible downward spiral of population free-fall.  When there are too many seniors, and not enough taxpayers, pension systems collapse.

But stabilizing an enormous population raises serious questions about how much longer we can continue to feed so many people.  Agriculture is currently engaged in “strip-mining topsoil” on a staggering scale.  Each kilogram of Iowa corn costs 1.5 kilograms of topsoil, a precious nonrenewable resource. 

Gore asserts that this can be corrected by a transition to crop rotation, and to organic low-till technology.  But low-till cropping is designed for conventional agriculture, and works well with heavy applications of herbicide.  Organic low-till is still in the experimental phase, and is extremely difficult to do successfully, because weeds are not wimps.

While water usage is increasing, water resources are declining, because underground aquifers are being depleted in many highly productive farming regions.  Gore recommends drip irrigation, wastewater recycling, and cisterns for rainwater storage.  Considering the current scale of water mining, and the cost of high tech irrigation, it’s hard to see these options as effective solutions.  When the water is used up, farm productivity drops sharply, or completely.

Meanwhile, another monster is rising on the horizon — global phosphorus reserves are moving toward a crisis.  Because phosphorus is an essential plant nutrient, this will have huge effects on conventional agriculture.  Oh, we also need to get the nations united behind reversing deforestation, fish mining, and mass extinction.  

Gore says that it would be insane to burn the fossil energy we’ve already discovered, because this would worsen the effects of climate change.  But we’re unlikely to stop.  Experts aren’t sure when Peak Oil will arrive, but it will, and it will be followed by an era of increasing turbulence, as industrial civilization is painfully weaned.  Most of the easy oil has already gone up in smoke, and what remains is far more difficult to extract.  Expensive oil means expensive food, and many poor people can barely afford food today.  Spikes in food prices led to food riots in 2008 and 2011.

Gore adores civilization’s two magnificent achievements, democracy and capitalism, but he laments that both have been “hacked” by the evil slime balls of Earth Inc.  If we don’t fix this, we’re doomed.  It’s time to fetch our pitchforks and chase the slime balls away.  The solution to our problems is to restore dynamic democracy, and then create a utopia of Sustainable Capitalism, which will allow Sustainable Growth to continue forever!  The best is yet to come!

The book provides an impressive discussion how we got into this mess.  It’s unique in that it comes from a card-carrying member of the global elite, not a hungry dirty radical.  Readers are given a rare opportunity to enjoy the view from the top of the pyramid.  I hope that the second edition clarifies some questionable assumptions in this otherwise fascinating book.

Gore, Albert, The Future — Six Drivers of Global Change, Random House, New York, 2013.