End of Mythical Times - End of Wealth as we know it

Some readers may find the notion of myth as playing a central role in our supposedly rational world hard to digest. This calls for clarification. Myth is used here in a specific sense whereby for a combination of myth and related rituals to be socially effective and efficient two key factors are required: (1) strong belief in the mix of myths and rituals and (2) the myths must mask what is actually going on socially.

Perhaps a personal account may help. In 1981, US anthropologist Laura Nader and I met at the ANAAS Congress held that year at University of Queensland in Brisbane. We were both guest speakers on matters of how societies actually deal with energy crises and decide about courses of action. The title of her paper was “Magic, Science and Religion Revisited”. [1] In recent years, she had become part of US bodies overseeing responses to the first and second oil shocks and the US nuclear energy industry. As an anthropologist she was initially taken aback by what she observed and proceeded to apply her anthropological skills to try and understand the weird “tribes” she had landed into. At the time I was managing the NZ energy R&D program and as such had access to all the decision-making in government and industry in Australasia. As a social scientist (as well as being also an engineer) I was engaged in very similar research as Laura was.

The title of her paper was a wink at Malinowski's famous work on the Trobriands in 1925… She had observed that prevailing decision-making was a weird mix of "Magic, Science and Religion" with magical and mythical quasi-religious thinking playing key roles among people who were viewed and who viewed themselves as rational and making scientifically grounded decisions. I had observed exactly the same phenomena in my own Australasian fieldwork and reached similar conclusions. [2] Thirty-three years later we can all still observe the same dangerous decision-making brew. Our globalized, supposedly emancipated modern or even post-modern societies still largely think and decide (at individual and collective levels) in mythical ways, far remote from any scientific/critical thinking perspective.

In fact this mythical thinking syndrome has grown much worse over the years. Since the 1980s new issues have emerged that current decision-makers have next to nil experience or competencies to think through and deal with. So the recourse to mythical thinking, especially of the economics kind, concerning debt, employment, resumption of growth, energy transitions, or climate change is even more rife now than back then. Just consider in this light, for example, the huge disconnect between science and global warming politics that we have reviewed earlier concerning the Fourth Challenge. To use John Foster's very apt metaphor, in the main most decision-makers keep chasing dangerous mirages instead of acquiring the knowledge required to deal with the emerging realities. [3]

To clarify matters further, although notions of value and exchange are central to economics, since its inception some three centuries ago economists have not been able to produce a single theory of value and exchange that could past muster vis-à-vis thermodynamics and/or the social sciences and/or psychoanalysis.[4] Until now this inability to theorize value has not prevented economic or financial myths and related rituals to have some efficiency, so long as enough people believed in them and so long as large enough energy flows could be mustered at low enough costs. Those myths are now broken.

The EROI wild cat’s bites challenge everyone to face reality: economics, understood mythically as a domain separate from thermodynamic as well as from social and ecological matters, not only is incapable of enabling humankind to address present issues but also acts as a lethal obstacle against doing so.

To sum matters up to this point, it should be clear to all that with EROIs for oil and gas being in the process of falling below 10:1, with EROIs for coal only slightly behind but following similar trends, and in the face of the lack of any viable alternative, not only the gamble against the future that forms the basis for all present fiat currencies no longer holds but the same applies to the entire field of economics. De facto, not only the present global monetary and financial system is broken and can no longer be fixed but present economic thinking has become obsolete.

It also ensures that monetary metrics are no longer relevant for decision-making concerning energy and ecological issues (and any other issue concerning the longer-term for that matter). Instead, EROI and net available (free) energy per unit of time (i.e. power) have become the key metric to assess decision-making concerning the much touted and debated “energy and ecological transitions”, especially concerning the development of sustainable energy, transport, and communications infrastructures for any timeframe exceeding a few months.

Furthermore, any stable resolution of the monetary and debt systems conundrum most likely requires bringing back gold at the heart of a new system and even more so innovating boldly by anchoring any new monetary and financial system firmly into global thermodynamics, i.e. recognizing the fundamental links between value and global net annual energy flows.

As a consequence of the emerging realities summarized up to this point we may also expect that in the medium term a very substantial part of the huge investments already made in so-called “renewables” as well as in fossil fuel and nuclear resources, all with EROIs that are far too low, are likely to have been made in pure waste – except, of course, for those relatively few that can be leveraged out thanks to new high - EROI technologies.

A corollary consequence of the present EROI situation is also that, short of an urgently required paradigm shift enabling a rapid move from the present unsustainable EROIs to levels above 30:1, none of the present “energy transitions” already attempted (such as the German “Energiewende”) or that are the object of pseudo debates and new policy promulgations (as in France, for example) are likely to succeed. [5] In fact, predominant, EROI-oblivious, technology choices and investments focused on substituting fossil fuels with “renewables” in order to combat longer-term global warming are not only profoundly misplaced but, in a deeply bitter ironic sense, stand to actually accelerate an EROI-driven civilizational collapse, a collapse that would result in an abrupt drop of greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) and of most other forms of pollution, thus alleviating ecological dangers – as the well-known quip goes, “the operation was successful, unfortunately the patient died”. The same applies, of course, to all other EROI-oblivious policies aiming to pull the industrialized world from its debt and financial crisis.

Moreover, it should be clear at this point that matters go much beyond the mere “carbon bubble” and related “stranded assets” we considered in an earlier posting. Most forms of wealth that are not invested in thermodynamically and ecologically sound forms (typically in sustainably productive land, gold, real sustainable energy resources, thermodynamically sound buildings, and so on), or, even more importantly, in know-how and technologies enabling a high EROI-based transition to sustainability, are likely to vanish like mist in the morning sun over the ensuing decades.

[1] Nader, L., 1981, Energy and Equity, Magic, Science and Religion Revisited, 51st ANZAAS Congress, Brisbane.

[2] Arnoux, Louis, Energy Within Without, 1982, NZERDC, Auckland, New Zealand.

[3] Foster, John, 2008, The Sustainability Mirage, Illusion and Reality in the Coming War on Climate Change, Earthscan, London, UK.

[4] Concerning economics and the social sciences see Latouche, S., 1984, Le Procès de la Science Sociale [Social Science Put on Trial], Anthropos, Paris. Concerning psychoanalysis, we refer here, of course, to the body of knowledge that has been relentlessly corroborated by advances in the neurosciences over the last 30 years or so; see for example, Pommier, Gérard, 2004, Comment les Neurosciences Démontrent la Psychanalyse [How Neurological Sciences Corroborate Psychoanalysis], Flammarion, Paris.

[5] We say “pseudo debate” because the fundamental dynamics of the thermodynamics of the globalised industrial are not being addressed, the people involved are in the main not cognisant of those matters, the frameworks and terms of reference imposed and the very engineering of those “debates” largely preconditions their outcomes.

#fourchallenges #gdp #life #thermodynamics #world #eroi #finance