The Truth of Green Technology: Conservatives are Dead On

I just read an article in the Nation by Naomi Cline.  We had the distinction of being arrested on the same day at the Keystone XL Pipeline action at the White House this summer.  The article points out, among other things, that conservatives actually have a more realistic view of the coming fossil fuel collapse than do we environmentalists. We have tended to dwell in a world of denial that features living a personal green life style of recycling, installing energy efficient light bulbs and bringing our own bags to the super market.  These little adjustments, to an otherwise energy intensive life style, have always given a modicum of relief from the reality we have been escaping.  For example, I could tell myself, "See.  We're really saving the planet."  Unfortunately we're not.  We're destroying it.  Some of us cling to the fantasy that a newly discovered energy source will be made available through our science and technology.  My sister-in-law,for example, paves the bumpy road of diminishing fossil fuel with the hope that some scientist somewhere will find the answer to perpetual green energy and our culture of consumption will be able then to move on to new glories. 

The conservatives, most notably, the "drill baby drill" crowd are dead on.  The planet has run out of easily accessible fossil fuels.  The remaining supplies are more difficult and expensive to extract.  Irrespective of any meaningful time frame, we are running out and our economy will collapse no matter what we do.  But, to make things worse, if that were possible, the extractive practices now being employed to extend our destructive carbon economy for a few more years, such as deep water drilling and tar sands mining for oil, mountain top removal for coal, and horizontal hydraulic fracking for natural gas, are inflicting irreparable damage on our environment, our life support system.  These desperate extractive practices are called "extreme energy" for a reason. The worst news, however, is that by burning these fossil fuels to get that last gasp of energy, we may be hastening our own literal last gasp.  Let's face it.  If we continue to burn fossil fuels at there current rate, it will spell the end of any climate compatible with life as we know it on earth.  We are losing 200 species per day.  This is planet death.

The civilization we are living in presently and the capitalist economy that has allowed developed nations such as ours to enjoy cars, planes and all manor or power devices that make our lives easier, is about to end.  No matter what we do, it is ending.  Fossil fuels in the form of oil, natural gas and coal, are in finite supply on on our shrinking little blue ball.  These energy sources are the most powerful concentrations of pure energy that we have.  There is no alternative that we can turn to for relief.  I repeat: Our whole economy depends upon them.  There is no such thing as green energy.

I'm writing these thoughts right now while sitting  at UC Davis Medical Center in Sacramento where my partner of twenty-one years is recovering from a complex surgery.  It was a life saving procedure.  However, in order to get here we had to drive over two-hundred miles down the Interstate 5 freeway that runs the length of the west coast of the US.  The medical center itself in checker boarded with parking lots, massive garages and a network of connecting roads.  The entire complex is designed around the automobile.  And I can visualize a time coming ... no cars.

Moreover, the buildings that comprise the massive medical complex are fed by electrical power and heating centrally delivered from a sub-complex known as Plant Services.  When I walk to the Kiwanis Family House past this hub of energy distribution with its steaming cauldrons wafting vapors into the evening sky, I am struck by a feeling of tentativeness.  It's the same feeling I get toward the end fall, before the first few snow flakes sprinkle the forest with sparkles.  The daylight changes and the shadows lengthen.  It is a feeling like "this is going to end." 
We have a choice.  What we don't have is time.  We must pull the plug on the carbon culture now.  By any means possible.  It is going to end one way or another.  It will be an end that ends us or it will be a controlled end that allows for life to continue and sustainable cultures to thrive once again.  Every place on earth where civilization and capitalism have invaded, sustainable cultures that have endured millenia are obliterated for the privileged entitlement of the capitalistic monster.  The climate is capitalism's greatest market failure.  The cost of polluting does not appear in the ledgers or the bottom lines.  The cost of environmental degradation is considered an external.  The cost is being factored in by the relentless consistency of planetary physics.