Stragedy Unfolds

A bitter rant on Europe's self-implosion

The writing is on the wall, but who cares. Photo by Phil Goodwin on Unsplash

It is now the second time I’m having afterthoughts upon publishing an article. After writing about how Europe’s well intended but disastrously planned environmental initiative puts us right on track to a permanent deindustrialization, thoughts kept coming up on why is that not seen as a problem by policy wonks. Perhaps understanding the parallels with what is currently unfolding in Eastern Europe could help lift the fog.

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There is a looming sense of civilizational decline in Europe, stemming from the loss of cheap condensed energy. Yet, denial and hope, together with its eternal springs, still reign supreme in the higher echelons of power. There seems to be a firm belief, that no matter how unattainable the objectives we set to ourselves are, someone, somewhere will surely come up with something. Intermittent „renewables”? Costly, heavy, material and energy intensive to make batteries? Oh, someone somewhere is surely working on a storage solution (or more) to come around those minor technicalities. Not enough resources to build all that stuff? Oh, someone somewhere will surely open up a new mine… After all, demand and a good deal of subsidies always begets more supply, now isn’t it?

Well, no. That level of magical thinking is an insult on all practitioners of sorcery, and leaves even underpants gnomes’ green with envy. There are no more cheap and easy to get resources to extract, and what’s even more concerning, there are no more habitats left to destroy on this planet. Mining the seabed, and stirring up all the carbon stored in the sediment, is just one of the most disastrous ideas… Oh, and as an aside, there is no more surplus energy from oil left to do all that additional digging, smelting, transportation and manufacturing, but that’s really just me nitpicking on some minor details.

The “underpants gnomes’ dilemma” from the famous South Park skit

A quick glance at Simon Micheux’s, Vaclav Smil’s or William E. Rees’s work should convince any sane person that the supposed green transition is not only physically impossible to carry out, but it would only hasten global civilizational and ecological decline — and that is not to say, that our present way of life is any more sustainable. A well planned and executed downscale in energy use together with a great deal of simplification could at least soften the blow, but even that seems to be a little too late. Still, how all that fails to penetrate the minds of the supposed experts, writing policies and mandating a 90% cut in fossil fuel use and their subsequent replacement with “renewables” in a mere sixteen years, remains a mystery.

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For a better understanding why is that so, I suggest to take a look at a somewhat simpler (and more acute) problem: what to do when your foreign policy fails devastatingly? The answer is easy: double down on failed investments, and keep on pushing in hopes that magic could happen any time soon. Send more money, weapons, even troops. And if nothing of the sort worked before, well then that’s just another reason to give it a try; lessons from the Napoleonic wars and WWII be damned. And when everything fails, well, then blame the colossal failure on those who opposed the idea from the get go on a rational basis (and those whom you’ve been busy calling names anyway).

While the idea might seem far fetched, it is important to see that the concept behind green politics and EU foreign policy both stem from the same root. It doesn’t matter if we talk about sanctions and weapons manufacturing, or zero emissions and a hydrogen economy: all such ideas assume that fossil fuels are an easy to replace source of energy, and that alternatives could take up the slack within a matter of years — together with the buildout of a set of industrial capacity to back it up. Needless to say, nothing could be further from the truth.

We, and not only Europeans but all modern humans, have become detrivoirs, feeding on the fossilized sunlight captured by plants and algae eons ago. We almost literally eat oil and gas in the form of fertilizers, pesticides and herbicides, not to mention the fact that we burn diesel to harvest and deliver what we eat every day. (Agriculture and the food industry burns eight to ten calories for every single calorie you eat.) The same goes for manufacturing, construction and countless other businesses — including the making of “renewables”, too.

Fossil fuels are both essential to our existence, and are killing us at the same time. This is why no nation is ditching them willingly, and every one of them who can increase their consumption does so. “Renewables” on a global level thus only come on top of a mountain of carbon emissions, and not as a substitute. Sure, civilization is possible to maintain without fossil fuels, just not this one… In a sane world, we would be actively preparing for a hard landing following ecological overshoot; equipping communities and people with the necessary skills and knowledge to have at least a slim chance of surviving what’s coming. In order to avoid an abrupt downturn, we would be also working on prolonging the descent as much as possible and making it less steep, not pretending that it can be avoided... 

Our elites of course turn a blind eye to this most inconvenient predicament, and place all their hopes in a green energy miracle coming about in the years ahead. A utopia with solar panels, electric cars and digital services everywhere… And till that future arrives, all their trust is placed in the tooth market fairy to sort out other sources of fossil fuels for them, and to push those who have a massive surplus of those polluting resources into an economic collapse. Yeah, sure that sounds perfectly logical. Underpants gnomes rejoice.

Despite all that, and notwithstanding all the protests and a truly dismal economic outlook, people staffing institutions, like we have on the old continent, can only fail upwards. Critical thinking and reasoning skills are no longer part of the selection criteria, let alone having a training in a scientific or engineering field. ‘Oh, God help us, those pesky nerds might come up with some technical argument we might need to take seriously!’ No. That cannot happen.

There is one, and only one exam one needs to pass in order to succeed in such a political environment buried in denial: the test of loyalty. Once one manages to get into the inner circle by first having been born into the right family, and then by proving his/her/their (or fill in the blank) loyalty to the cause by demonstrating a firm belief in an alternate reality, it absolutely doesn’t matter how big a failure they turn out to be on the job. No wonder, that the opposition is getting stronger by the day (who could’ve guessed that?) and that bad news are just getting more numerous. 

Sure, calling everything which might point towards a more nuanced understanding of reality dis- and misinformation works for a while, but in the end might prove unfruitful. As long as the mass media, universities and influential think tanks are all on your side, though, nothing can go wrong… Right? Well, the problem is that this is the textbook example on how to end up in an echo chamber, with elites discussing ideas solely among themselves. As Aurelien wrote recently: “people in a political and strategic bubble talk only to each other, hear only their own thoughts repeated, read only their own opinions restated, and are constantly reassuring each other that everything is going to be fine.”

Locked up in their alternative universe, however, they fail to grasp that the other side (let alone physical reality) might have a say or two in how their magnificent plans unfold… Historical examples are aplenty, and rarely end in a happily forever. Pretending that collapse isn’t happening — be it economic, societal or military in nature — is not a recipe for success, to say the least. But hey, this is what you get with the current crop of elites. I’m not saying that are no more sane, well trained and intelligent people left in the halls of power, but such people find it increasingly harder and harder to get above a certain level. They are the low and middle ranking officials trying their best to make sense of the orders given to them, and to have their voices heard, but apart from being allowed to publish one or two well informed articles in journals with a very narrow expert audience, they are not allowed to talk.

Those who understood from the get go that an energy and resource deprived subcontinent of Eurasia with a hollowed out economy and a grossly overestimated GDP could not possibly win an economic (let alone a shooting) war with a well industrialized and relatively resource rich neighbor (who by the way did everything they can to avoid such unfortunate turn of events) were quickly pushed aside. Even today, when all this has become glaringly obvious, the party line still insists that winning is only a question of money and political will — and crossing even more red lines… Newsflash: one cannot buy that which is no longer there, nor send in troops trained for a wholly different kind of war, and hope to succeed. Besides, pouring more cash on a limited industrial and resource base only ends up in inflation — and again, the parallel is hard not to see with green energy policies.

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Given this deadlock, where questions of physics, geology, mathematics or military science are subject to loyalty tests, it is hard to imagine how a realistic plan could be put forward. Perhaps it is not surprising, that instead of planning for a radically different future, we see a growing push for more centralization, and the hardening of existing structures. In other words: increasing bureaucracy and complexity. In a world where energy and resources are about to become even more scarcer, however, this is the diametric opposite what systems allowed to do their job tend to do. Increasing complexity always begets a corresponding rise in energy consumption, thus when energy inputs become inadequate, simplification and decentralization is what usually follows. And the later that decomplexification is delayed, the louder the crash becomes. Human folly reliably goes against natural tendencies though, so just like with other civilizations who encountered more predicaments they could pretend to handle, ours in Europe is duly on track to self-implosion. As Arnold Toynbee once astutely observed:

Civilizations die from suicide, not by murder.

We have reached a level of detachment from reality where a complete political collapse have not only become inevitable, but something looming ever closer. So just like we could not help but walk straight into the stragedy now unfolding on the eastern battlefronts, we are most unlikely be able to save ourselves from the economic collapse stemming from an entirely self imposed deprivation of fossil fuels, as opposed to a strategic withdrawal and an active planning for a post-industrial future. Europe is just about to prove Toynbee’s point in a spectacular way, which we can but hope will not end in a continent wide war.

Until next time,

B

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