Previously in Looking down the barrel…

This is our last post in the Looking down the barrel series on the emerging global demand for something else than what we currently have.

In this series, we have demonstrated that we are living through the last ten years of the Oil Age and examined some of the main consequences of what is shaping up as the defining event of the 21st century. We have called this the Oil Fizzle Dragon-King (OFDK) — Oil Fizzle because net energy from oil, delivered to the globalised industrial world (GIW) as transport fuels, is rapidly fizzling out and will be close to nil around 2022, and Dragon-King because although this threat has been dangling in front of everyone’s nose for decades almost no one saw it coming (Dragon-Kings being unexpected but nonetheless high probability, high impact events versus Black Swans being low probability, high impact events).

In Part 1 we pointed out that the globalised industrial world (GIW) is losing access to the two main sources of energy it vitally depends on, phytomass and net energy from oil. Loss of access to phytomass is most critical to food supply. The fizzling out of net energy from oil, that triggered OFDK from around 2012 onwards, is critical to all forms of transport globally… and without transport, well, everything else grinds to a halt.

In consequence we are now caught in an avalanche of untoward events triggered by OFDK. OFDK integrates, compounds and accelerates all other issues and threats besides the fizzling out of net energy from oil — global warming, ever mounting total debt and related financial matters, tensions between the 10% wealthiest of the global population and the 90% Remainder, other ecological threats, and many more. In doing so OFDK forms an avalanche (also called a self organising criticality, SOC) that we consider to be powerful enough to disintegrate the GIW over the next decade or so.

At heart, we are caught in this avalanche because of persistent cognitive failure prevailing globally among decision-makers, that is, the inability to become aware of, to understand and to deal with major challenges as they arise, and to make effective use of available knowledge and expertise to do so.

We have shown that cognitive failure specifically stems from what we called the Tooth Fairy syndrome, a weird commingling of magical thinking and believing in myths, amalgamated with bits and pieces of science and rational thinking thrown in, here and there. This eerie commingling was inherited hardly modified from pre-industrial societies. It renders all present governments and large centralised corporate businesses ill equipped to handle the nexus of closely interrelated financial, economic, social, energy and ecological challenges engendered by OFDK. Their beliefs and resulting decision-making have created the present global mess. They show no inclination to drop their Tooth Fairy beliefs. They all demonstrably lack the expertise and experience to chart a new course. Their response times are also demonstrably far too slow (e.g. it took over 50 years for them to acknowledge and begin act on global warming). Many, especially governments and energy businesses, are in financial trouble or will be very soon. After repeated failures, all are in the process of losing credibility and legitimacy in the eyes of billions of people. And yet the expertise to meet the present avalanche of challenges is available within the global scientific, engineering and entrepreneurial community.

In Parts 2 to 9 we examined the genesis of OFDK, its avalanche character, its global warming and other ecological facets, and how both the 10% and the Remainder are under immediate threat from it. We stressed that both the petroleum production system (PPS) and the GIW have entered what we called the big mad energy scramble (BigMES). While many parties sense mounting problems that are symptomatic of the impending end of the Oil Age, under the sway of the Tooth Fairy none has any comprehensive understanding of OFDK. All are largely flying blind and try to survive on an “everyone to themselves and the devil take the hindmost” basis.

We then came back to food and transport issues, since these two are probably the most critical areas of concern as the OFDK avalanche unfolds. In Part 10 we focused on food, real food, the kind of food one learns about when one lacks it, aka the prospects of famine, recurring famine, globally, over the next 10 years and perhaps beyond that — one of the main likely consequences of OFDK, in the absence of rapid responses to it. In Part 11 we assessed the implications of OFDK on transport, real transport, the kind that, as for food, one learns about when one lacks it, aka when petrol pumps run dry erratically, recurrently, planes don’t fly, container ships don’t ship, and trucks no longer truck things around… Under the garb of a bright fantasised future made of self-drive electric vehicles, “renewable energy”, the Internet of Things, and more, we observed Tooth Fairy-impelled, massive, cognitive failure in the process of knotting together an abrupt, global, breakdown of all forms of transport — the very transport that we have come to take for granted and without which our world can no longer operate.

Of course, what emerges from those 11 posts is not only grim looking, to say the least, but also in sharp contrast with the dominant discourses conveyed by mainstream media, politicians and captains of industry, be they those in denial of climate change or “Peak Oil”, endlessly promoting “growth” and bright futures, or those on the “greener” sides of life alerting about countless issues but nonetheless focusing resolutely on even brighter futures once those issues will have been bravely overcome. Yet this OFDK that we have observed “looking down the barrel” is based on the work of thousands of researchers who each, in their own domains, over the last four decades have been relentlessly pointing at breaks, discontinuities, breakdowns, impossibilities and dangers ahead, along the path followed by the GIW.

So now, in this concluding post of our first series, Looking down the barrel, we are going to explore how to address the future under OFDK. The point is not to “predict” what is going to happen — no one can. Instead our focus is how to think how to figure out how to respond to the OFDK threats, how to find ways of surviving it, of extricating ourselves from its consequences, of learning the lessons to be leaned and preferably come out better off, in terms of sustainable ways of living. In other words, how to develop something else than what we currently have? In a first chapter A we will consider how to think the future to develop a robust method enabling us to sail in uncharted waters. In a second chapter B we will explore where this leads us.

A — Sailing in uncharted waters

Futureless

In a 2013 interview, 1994 Japanese literature Nobel prize winner Kenzaburô Oê explained how for a long time he had difficulty understanding a verse of Dante’s Divine Comedy, but that after the Fukushima catastrophe it began to make sense to him. He referred to a moment when “the future seems to be shut: the knowledge we used to have about the world and society now appears void of meaning”:[1]

“Quando s’appressano o son, tutto è vano nostro intelletto; e s’altri non ci apporta, nulla sapem di vostro stato umano. Però comprender puoi che tutta morta fia nostra conoscenza da quel punto che del futuro fia chiusa la porta”.

“When things draw near or happen, we have no intelligence of them; and if no one clarifies them for us we know nothing of the state of human affairs. So you may understand that our knowledge will be wholly dead from the moment that the gate of the future shall be shut.”[2]

In the dire context of OFDK, Dante’s and Kenzaburô Oê’s insights feel eerily poignant. Those of us who have spent a lifetime investigating global energy dynamics have become acutely aware that nowadays most people have no real intelligence of what is in the process of unfolding energy wise. We also do know for sure that at present the “gate of the future is shut” and will remain so until enough people take matters in their own hands and invent ways to forge a novel path. This is why, throughout this series of posts we have insisted on both the demand for something else and the necessity of an entrepreneurial approach to fulfilling it.

To bluntly highlight the lack of future for the GIW, and in consequence for the entire global population (except perhaps for the few hunter-gatherers still surviving in some jungle remnants), let’s reconsider our assessment of how the availability of net energy from oil per head of global population has evolved since the early days of the Oil Age. In our view, this amount per year is a much better index of the global situation than any GDP trajectory. It is this amount that conditions everything else and it is not subject to inflation and the vagaries of fiat currencies.

Figure 1 — Olduvai or what else?