The Fool on the Hill: The Vision Thing

The state of the nations

We live, these days, mainly, in states which are constituted as 'representative democracies' — which is to say, most people get to vote, once every few years, for one of a limited range of candidates from a limited range of parties. Our information about these parties, their representatives and their policies, comes partly from the parties themselves, but mostly from media which is controlled either by hyper-wealthy and usually highly corrupt elites, or by the state.

After the election, those who are elected go away to a far distant city where they work in a set of buildings largely insulated from ordinary people, and find that, through 'procedures,' and 'conventions,' and 'party discipline' they are largely prevented from having any real impact on policy.

And in all significant countries, all the political parties are effectively controlled, through one mechanism or another (but most commonly though 'political donations'), by corrupt elites.

There's a vanity of small differences here. We'll say 'my country (which ever our country is) is more democratic than that other country.' And it may be true. Britain, where Lord Lebedev of Siberia has a permanent, unelected, lifetime seat in the legislature, may be 'more democratic' than the Russian Federation where he was born, and where his father served (and allegedly still serves) as a spy. But it's more democratic only in the sense that 100° Celsius is cooler than 101° Celsius. It is cooler, yes; but if you're a frog in a laboratory flask, it's a difference from which you don't benefit greatly.

The vision of politics

In this state of the nations, as I said, we're offered a small slate of choices from a small cabal of parties from which to choose the policies which will determine our future.

And as this week's edition of the Guardian's Politics UK podcast points out, none of the major parties currently canvassing for votes in England have any convincing and appealing vision of the future. I should say: this is not solely an English problem: I'm not aware of — perhaps because the kleptocrat-owned media chooses not to report on — any major party in any significant nation anywhere in the world which has such a vision.

But the question is why not? Because, surely, in such a lack-lustre field, a party with a solid, appealing vision would be assured of success?

The sorry answers to that sorry question are what this essay is about.

The acquisition of stuff

We live in a society which valorises the acquisition of stuff. It's through the acquisition of stuff that we establish our basic security, secure our status, and demonstrate our success. And it's through the acquisition of stuff that those of us who are competitive, compete.

And there's no limit to the amount of stuff the competitive will seek to acquire. We've seen exactly this in the Sahel, where people establish their status through the size of their herds of cattle. The consequence is that the herds grow until they consume all the pasture; and then of course the herds starve, and the people starve with them.

We've seen exactly this in Rapa Nui. The rich of that island chose to acquire stuff in the form of enormous statues. To move the statues, they cut down trees. I mean, why not? The island had plenty of trees...

Until it didn't. Until they'd cut down the last one. And then the ecosystem collapsed. And then, of course, everyone starved, and what had been a rich and vibrant economy fell into desperate poverty.

And that's where we are now, and that's why a vision which is both convincing and attractive is difficult to frame.

The sin of gluttony

To make stuff takes energy. The value of stuff is at least partly determined by how much energy it takes to make; and, to show that they're really successful, that they're really powerful, people choose to own and use stuff that's particularly profligate of energy.

• Very large houses.

• Very powerful cars.

• Holidays in far away places, with travel by air.

• Large motor yachts.

• Private jets.

And yes, all of these things are nice to have; but one of the things that's nice to have about them is the knowledge that most people around the world can't have them. That they set you apart.

But there are limits to energy, and we're reaching them.

Almost all the energy available to us comes from the sun. Energy has been coming from the sun for (literally) thousands of millions of years; and our planetary ecosystem has been using it to clean our atmosphere of excess carbon, storing it in mineral form underground. By doing so, it's made the planet habitable by lifeforms such as us. The planet isn't magically habitable; it wasn't always so.

A very similar planet not very many million miles from here is extremely uninhabitable. It's uninhabitable because its ecosystem didn't do this, and consequently its oceans boiled and the water vapour was eventually lost to space. That's irreversible: Venus can't now get its water back. People say, hopefully, that yes, probably we will wreck the planet, but over millions of years Gaia will correct, and life, perhaps even intelligent life, will again flourish. That's teleological nonsense. It's perfectly possible to wreck a planet permanently. Our nearest neighbour demonstrates that.

Over the past two hundred years — but mostly, in fact, over the past fifty years — we've burned several hundred million years worth of stored sunlight. We've dug up and pumped out and burned so much of that stored mineral carbon, returning it to the atmosphere, that the planet is ceasing to be habitable; and if we don't stop doing that, completely, very soon indeed, the planet will have ceased to be habitable.

Which means, everyone dies. Not just the people of Tuvalu. Not just the people of the Ganges and Niger deltas. Not just the peoples of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf. Not just the peoples of the Sahel. You. You or, if you're lucky, your children.

That's not an appealing vision.

The limits to energy

At this point I had to pause writing this essay, because my solar-powered electricity system had, uhhmmm, run out of energy. Which is sort of the point.

But the problem with stopping burning fossil energy — with stopping putting all that carbon back into the atmosphere — is that, as a civilisation, we'll need to use much less energy. Not 'much less petrol', not 'much less fossil hydrocarbon', much less energy. We've been burning through a million years' worth of fossilised sunlight in a single year, and we can't do that any more.

I think people have got used to the idea that they can't put petrol in their cars any more. They're thinking about biofuels, and 'green hydrogen', and electricity. But they're missing the point.

Yes, we can take good arable land which could grow human food, and use it to grow crops to use as feedstock to produce biofuel; but not much biofuel, because otherwise people starve. We can take surplus electricity that our grid can't yet handle and use it to split water to electrolise hydrogen; but not much hydrogen, because its an inefficient use of electricity which we're going to be critically short of anyway.

And yes, we can take electricity which we generate from the sun (and the winds and the waves and the rain, all of which are driven by solar energy), and from the tides and from geothermal (which aren't), and use that to power cars. But actually we can't afford to do that, because we need that electricity to smelt metals, and process materials, and cultivate and transport food, and heat homes.

The material world

In any case we can't have many cars, because they're extremely wasteful of metals. Metals — and other minerals, including the rare earths used in batteries — are not only extremely costly in energy to refine, they're also extremely costly to extract, to mine. So in all probability most of the metal that ever will be mined, already has been.

The truth is, we're going to be very short of materials.

It's very hard to produce cement for masonry, and in particular to produce concrete, without burning a lot of carbon. It's possible that there may be zero-carbon ways of doing this that are practicable at scale, but I don't know of them. I think we're going to have to do almost completely without concrete, which is going to fundamentally change how we build structures such as houses, buildings, bridges, dams.

We can't use most of the plastics we use now, because they're fossil hydrocarbon, and whatever we do with them, when they're no longer useful they somehow have to be disposed of. We can't burn them, because that releases those hydrocarbons into the atmosphere, and we can't landfill them, because they're toxic in the ecosystem.

We also can't replace much of them with 'bioplastics', for the same reason we can't produce much biofuels: because feedstocks for bioplastics competes for land use with food for people.

This means that, apart from stone, ceramics, timber and timber products, and natural fibres of various kinds, we're not going to have a lot of materials to make stuff out of. And for an elite that validates and demonstrates its power through the acquisition of stuff, that's not a message that is easy to hear.

Caring and sharing

At this moment we have a lot of stuff. But very little of the stuff we have is built to last a long time; and very little of the stuff we have is designed for a low-energy future. We can build stuff that lasts a very long time. There are plenty of medieval (and older) buildings, and not a few medieval clocks, for example, still in everyday use. We know how to do this. It's just that, as a matter of habit, we haven't.

And one of the problems of a grossly unequal society is that an awful lot of the stuff we have is designed for an opulent, profligate lifestyle, while at the other end of the spectrum a great deal is so shoddy that it has very little durability.

So, although in the short term, we could in principal share out the material wealth we have and, in the rich north at any rate, that would give everyone enough stuff — enough material things — to live a life we would recognise as a good life, that stuff won't last and we can't keep on replacing it without utterly destroying the ecosystem.

Which means, for people for whom our current consumer economy is their reality, it's very hard to see a vision which means anything more than a future which combines ever increasing inequality (because we have, already, ever increading equality, and the elite, who fund our politicians, don't want that to change) with, for most people, ever increasing poverty.

Looking to windward

It's very easy to look to windward and see the storm clouds gathering. Because they are real: they are gathering. The storm is coming.

To create a vision, then, for the future, which people can believe, which people can embrace, which can give them hope and energise them to work together to weather the storm, we have to make them see the fresh brightness which comes when the storm front is past; and we have to create a programme which they can believe in for how we can all, together, make it through to that bright new day.

I've already written a bit about how I believe that new society can work. What we need to think about now is how to get there.

Obviously to stop here is a bit of a cliff hanger; nevertheless I'm going to do so. I believe that we can create such a strategy. I do have ideas how to get there from here. I shall write more, soon. But not today.

Share on social media