We're running out of electricity - among other things

 by Margaret Swedish

What will it be like as things we rely on, that we don't even think about as we use them, begin to break down? Like flipping a light switch and the lights go on. Like writing an email and pressing "send."  Or that GPS voice telling you where to go, when to turn, how to get there, suddenly goes silent. Think about the 12 hours that AT&T customers suddenly lost all access to their accounts a couple of weeks ago. No way to make a phone call, no way to connect with others - workplace, family, the internet. Couldn't call AT&T to find out what was going on or how long it would last. Couldn't let family members know why they couldn't reach you or where you are.

Yes, some people were quite unnerved. It could happen just like that someday soon, the entire internet going down. A solar storm making a dead-on hit, Putin playing with his new nuclear space weapon (in development right now), the Chinese government deciding to shut down our electric grid or interfere with weather satellites as the hurricane is headed straight for Florida.

Dystopian, I know. But believe me, a lot of folks out there are very worried about how completely reliant we are on virtual technology, on computer chips and the internet, on satellite connections and smart phones, for our daily existence.

What really brought this to the forefront of my "musings in the Age of Collapse" was this article from just the other day in the Washington Post. Just to say, the headline really caught my attention.

Amid explosive demand, America is running out of power

Yikes! Seriously?

The tagline: AI and the boom in clean-tech manufacturing are pushing America’s power grid to the brink. Utilities can’t keep up.

Here's something we're having a little problem understanding. You can't just keep adding on more and more demand on an increasingly limited resource. And I am going to guess that millions of people had no idea that our wireless world in which we don't SEE or FEEL what these demands are doing to the planet is often as bad as, end even worse, than our use of paper, plastics, personal vehicles, and other materials we visibly use each day when considering our withering, destructive, ways of life on this abused, wounded, precious planet of ours.

From this article:

Vast swaths of the United States are at risk of running short of power as electricity-hungry data centers and clean-technology factories proliferate around the country, leaving utilities and regulators grasping for credible plans to expand the nation’s creaking power grid.

In Georgia, demand for industrial power is surging to record highs, with the projection of new electricity use for the next decade now 17 times what it was only recently. Arizona Public Service, the largest utility in that state, is also struggling to keep up, projecting it will be out of transmission capacity before the end of the decade absent major upgrades.

Northern Virginia needs the equivalent of several large nuclear power plants to serve all the new data centers planned and under construction. Texas, where electricity shortages are already routine on hot summer days, faces the same dilemma.

Yeah, it's bad. It's seriously bad. Despite infrastructure bills and money pouring into states for all sorts of projects, demand is overwhelming supply. Once again, we are growing new technologies without slowing down to consider impacts, limits, reality. Oh, so many millions of us just hate that word, and that, my friends, is one of the reasons we are in so much trouble.

I have copied this pic into my post because I want to offer to us all some reality, a good look at what is necessary, what is REAL, about what is being done to the planet directly connected to our industrial/technological ways of life. Take a close look. And to get a sense of the magnitude of this environmental disaster zone, see the tiny trucks to get a sense of scale. They are not tiny. Their tires alone are taller than we are.

© Jiri Rezac / Greenpeace

I made a visit to the Alberta Tar sands site just over a decade ago with a few Canadian colleagues. It was bad then, but this... Sweet God, how is it possible humans keep doing this.

Just to note: this was all boreal forest not that long ago, and the Athabasca River that runs through this geography once a source of fresh water for the indigenous communities that live in the region. Today, those same communities suffer extreme rates of cancer, renal disease, and more, their way of life utterly ruined. The forest is also our northern hemisphere's version of the Amazon Rainforest, lungs for this breathing planet, and a major regulator of climate.

It's bad enough that humans created this industrial monster. It's something else altogether that we have done so much lethal harm and cannot stop ourselves. The drive for technology and profit, for ease of life and convenience, fancier consumer items and global travel, is an addiction we are unable to overcome, even if it does mean the death, the end, of so much. What our children will see in this century...

I no longer expect us to learn. I don't even expect that those who have learned or are learning are willing to live an extreme of radical simplicity that would be required to move quickly into a new version of ourselves. Mystics and monks, maybe. Hard core followers of the actual texts of Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, or the actual real principles and ethics of Buddhism, perhaps. There will be some few who will try to shine a light on how we could do this, learn to live differently, not as separate individuals following our own self-interests (which is a violation of the Earth's natural laws), but in communities that rely on one another and the beings in our natural eco-communities for life and meaning. At the core of these communities would be an unshakable commitment to honor that Web of Life, to refuse to violate it anymore, and to become part of its regeneration and healing so that they may be preserved for the next generations.

"Inflection point" is an overused, abused term these days. That said, we really are at one. Right now, the choices humans are making are not encouraging.

The Math Does Not Lie

by Margaret Swedish

I spent some time this afternoon with a long essay by a physicist, Tom Murphy, who teaches at the University of California San Diego, entitled "Unsustainable Goose Chase." It's about one of my favorite themes, she says somewhat sarcastically, but also seriously. It focuses squarely on the "wicked problem" of our times - that we are living so far beyond the limits of sustainability on this planet that our doom is pretty much assured. It's in the math.

Math like this: "In this altered state, we find ourselves on a destructive rampage, as evidenced by the severe toll on habitats and biodiversity: about 85% of primary forest is gone; vertebrate populations have declined by about 70% on average since 1970; and now 96% of mammal mass on the planet is embodied in humans and our livestock. The dots are not difficult to connect. The combination of methods and substances available to us have allowed explosive exploitation of resources on a global scale. A paltry and decreasing amount of habitat—increasingly fragmented—remains.  The healthy, biodiverse regions are disappearing fast."

That paragraph is not from the goose chase but another article he linked inside that one, entitled, appropriately, "The Simple Story of Civilization." What he is pointing to, or explaining, really, is that the lives humans have been living in recent centuries, and in the decades of the 20th and 21st centuries especially, built upon the explosion of industrial and technological innovation since World War II, are completely impossible to sustain and have always been leading us toward this wall of biocapacity limits and our inevitable head-on crash into it. We are destroying the resilience of the natural world, the interlocking Web of Life, that keeps us alive. 

Entropy is the general trend of the universe toward death and disorder. Humans don't want to believe it, but the Earth actually has limits for how much life it can support and no life can surpass those limits for long without getting into a boatload of trouble. All the innovation in the world cannot violate those basic laws of nature. Physics teaches us that the basic principle at work here is rooted in the second law of thermodynamics, which is particularly relevant to our crisis. It's called entropy, one of the more frightening terms relevant to our times. This is Miriam Webster's brief description of it: entropy is "the degradation of the matter and energy in the universe to an ultimate state of inert uniformity. (James R Newman) : a process of degradation or running down or a trend to disorder."

Take a burning log, for example. When ignited, it gives off heat and lots of useful energy. But when burned up, it turns to ash. It cools. The same amount of energy is there, but it is no longer useful.

When energy is burned, it is burned. When it is ash, it is ash. When it is ash, it can no longer provide useful energy. It becomes waste. When useful energy (like fossil fuels) becomes useless (like CO2 in the atmosphere), it can no longer provide energy to do anything. You have to find new sources to burn, whether in the ground, growing in the forests, or sucking in the sunlight with panels made from rare earth minerals, and then mining of metals - lots and lots and lots of mining.

With humans now facing the depletion of the remaining oil and gas in the ground this century, new sources are being considered, tested, developed. Thus the search for renewable sources that can replace fossil fuels and keep the lights on - like the sun and wind and water, split atoms and hydrogen. But the energy they can produce ain't nearly enough to power this scale of human civilization. We know this, which is why those who promise renewable energy as a way to continue living as we do, but with different energy sources, are spreading false information, false promises, avoidance of what it would mean to really make this radical transition in the short time we have left to keep much of the Earth habitable.

Yes, we can keep some of the lights on, and some food in our markets, but the only way to meet the crisis at its essence is to begin the deliberate, planned, dismantling of the industrial civilization. Let's be real. What are the chances of that happening? That time will come, but it will come unplanned, in chaos and disasters, and with a stunning loss of human and other-than-human life.

We are using up the "resources" (hate that word) of the planet. We don't have enough energy sources left to provide 8.1 billion people with smart phones, much less food, and certainly not air conditioning on this heating planet, and what I have just been reading about the amount of water and energy that AI will drain from the planet [see from Forbes: AI Is Accelerating the Loss of Our Scarcest Natural Resource: Water] - well, again, it is impossible, though pushing ahead full speed in this direction now seems irreversible. The crash will come even sooner, though, because of this new, untamed, technology, now appearing in all our computer programs whether we want it or not.

Let's repeat this over and over until we get it. The only energy source that has made this era of industrialism and consumerism possible is oil. Oil is the god, the sacred fluid, of the civilization of economic growth, our church, our cathedral. It is fueling a global ecological crisis. And it will run out within decades. Still want to commit to it? Ain't it time to start thinking about another path to a livable future beyond the death of this industrial era?

Back in the 1990s, when I was becoming more deeply concerned about the looming ecological catastrophe, someone handed me this little booklet entitled, Friday Morning Reflections at the World Bank: Essays on Values and Developement. Not exactly a scintillating title, but it emerged from some early morning discussions among a few of the policy people who cared about the bank's ethical values and the global impacts of its programs. It was first published on 1991. Recommended to me was the essay by Sven Burmeister, one of the bank's deputy directors. What I read changed the direction of my life forever. I have shared this often since the 90s in talks and workshops I have led, in my book, Living Beyond the 'End of the World,' and in many blog posts and essays over the past decades. This is the excerpt that leapt off the page into my brain and never left it.

“...our current handling of the environment and its resources might lead to our ultimate destruction. In fact, if we continue on our present course, the question is not whether destruction will happen, but when. Acid rain, deforestation, ozone depletion, and global warming are clear signals that we are misusing and exhausting the resources of the planet... all resources are finite in the end... The important question is how we conceive of our relationship with nature. Are we here to exploit the earth and use up its capital? Or are we here to find an equilibrium with our fellow creatures, or to live as stewards off the income that the earth can yield without destroying its capital?...

“The ultimate constraint on resource use is the carrying capacity of the globe: per capita resource use should not exceed the level the globe can sustain for all the world’s people. Today’s per capita resource use in industrial countries is not sustainable for all inhabitants of the earth... the planet is capable of carrying only 500 million people indefinitely at the level of income and technology in the United States today. If resources were used more prudently as in Europe and Japan, the planet might carry one billion people indefinitely. Demographers estimate that, if present trends continue, the world’s population...will stabilize sometime in the twenty-first century at nine to twelve billion human beings.”

You see the problem. It's in the math. It doesn't work out for our survival. More technological innovation? Means more destruction of habitat. Solar panels, EVs, wind turbines - all require a massive scale of mining. Mining and manufacturing require a massive scale of energy. AI requires billions and billions of gallons of water. And humans continue to burn fossil fuels at record rates, the peak not expected to be reached until somewhere in the 2030s to 2040s. That's a whole lot of CO2 yet to be poured into the atmosphere, a lot of forest to be destroyed, a lot of habitats unraveled for all the living beings that lie in them.

It is okay to ask: What in the world are we thinking?!

So, answers to all this? That's where the wicked problem comes in. While no one really has a solution that would create an easy path out of this mess, we still have choice. The choice is about how to live through what's coming, what has already started to unfold. I will be reflecting on that a lot in coming blog posts, and there are many good, good people who are doing some deep pondering about how we start to build the kinds of communities brave enough to look at the reality as it is and start living accordingly - with the best of the human spirit instead of so much of the worst that we see these days.

And so I leave this for you - and me - to wrestle with in coming days. And while we're at it, let's add to our ponderings the notion of the Beloved Community and what that might mean for us now as we seek our paths through the mess we have made.

The Meaning of a "Wicked Problem"

by Margaret Swedish 

It would be good for us to understand well the meaning of this term. It is not a made-up description of a problem - that it is wicked, therefore negative, or bad, from our perspective. It is a technical term, used in science, research, engineering, and design. It is a term for a problem that is irresolvable, therefore wicked, objectively wicked.

And we are facing thousands of them now. We live among them, and the paralysis many feel over trying to find or imagine a way out of our predicament (another word it would help us to better appreciate) is because there is no path that gets us out of it. We face collapses now we cannot halt, prevent, or fix. We can only figure out how to live through them, adjust our lives to reality, instead of the fiction of our economic, industrial culture, and create in the face of a generational crisis a way to survive with some semblance of our basic humanity still intact.

This world will be so in need of us - if we can hang on to our moral values, our integrity, compassion, equanimity, selflessness, deep respect for the Web of Life, our dedication to what promotes goodness, what helps to ease the inevitable suffering (material loss, grief, want, fear, anxiety, harsh scarcities...).

Am I exaggerating the scale? Think of this new Age of Fire as the Earth becomes more combustible with drought and aridification, record heat, and too much human development within high-risk fire zones. Think the Texas Panhandle, California, Alberta, British Columbia, Australia, Chile, Greece - just a few locations with recent historic level wildfires. Fires that cannot be fought for their power and strength, a raging force of nature that surpasses the capacity of the tools we have to "fight" them.

Am I exaggerating the scale? Summers now that regularly see heat domes and temperatures that reach into the 120s - in Iraq and other Gulf nations, India, Chile, B.C., Arizona, Texas, parts of Europe... Or winters. 74 degrees in February in Wisconsin and the first tornadoes ever recorded in that state.

Am I exaggerating the scale? Atmospheric rivers flowing across the Pacific Ocean and smashing into California now are becoming increasingly powerful as more and more moisture from the warming atmosphere fuels the storms. Rain falling in feet, not inches, hills and mountainsides collapsing, billions of dollars in damage. And then the rise in sea levels from warming oceans and melting ice sheets in the Arctic and Antarctic that are causing the disintegration of shorelines and threatening more populations because humans built ocean communities in defiance of nature and climate change. Meanwhile, the national hurricane center is considering a new Category 6 for those storms as they get larger, more powerful, and more destructive

Am I exaggerating the scale? How badly have we also poisoned the planet and all living beings, including our own bodies? The National Cancer Institute, a government site, reported this from the year 2020, that 1,806,590 new cases of cancer would be diagnosed that year and 606,520 people would die from the disease. More than 40% of the U.S. population will get cancer in their lifetime. In the U.K., that percentage is over 50%.

I always thought that this would be the stat, the reality, that would change the culture, that would scare the hell out of us, that would make us say, "my God, we need to stop this." What we have done instead is create a sprawling largely for-profit cancer treatment and research industry. Rather than get the carcinogens out of the environment, we make cancer part of the industrial/economic growth culture. Clearly I underestimated the ability of investors and consumers to bear painful illness and death rather than give up their online shopping, their use of plastics (rising rapidly), and global travel.

Some people call this "adaptation." Some of us call it insanity, living outside reality.

Without intending it, we have created a culture of wicked problems now. Global baking and climate change? This crisis cannot be resolved by ending the production and burning of fossil fuels without massive economic collapses, raging poverty and want, wars and violent social conflict, and more. Nor can it be resolved by trying to replace the burning of these fuels with renewables that can never do the job that oil did, and that require mammoth extremes of environmental destruction in order to create the infrastructure for these fuels at the scale of what fossil fuels have enabled.

Take the 100,000 plus untested synthetic chemicals that humans have introduced into our waters, soil, food, and air out of the environment - plastics among them - and the economy collapses. Pick your poison.

I am not making this stuff up. This is all fact-based. This is studied, researched. I have been reading this stuff for decades. I have gone to the presentations, had intense conversations with some brilliant scientists, read the studies, in order to learn, to get this right, because I am annoyed by those who scare people with the unproven end-of-the-world stuff. What is proven and real is plenty terrifying enough.

It is easy to face the reality of our "wicked problem" with despair. But we have to move through that, too. That won't help us learn how to live through this time in a manner that uplifts the best, instead of the worst, of the human spirit.

So, a couple of points to make at the end of this essay. One: don't try to waste time and energy trying to fix what cannot be fixed - like industrial, consumer civilization. It was always headed to this end. It is a hyper-expression of the wicked problem. It is wicked. Let it die. Second: in the face of that collapse, we can learn how to live differently, with different principles, ethics, ways of life, moral and spiritual values that not only serve to ease a lot of the inevitable suffering to come, but also to begin moving away from this destructive culture to a new one, ways of life that regenerate the human connection with the Earth, what gave us life, what can still hold us if we can keep from losing it all, and if we can learn how to live in the wild diversity of the planet without ripping up those connections that hold us all together.

A culture of radical simplicity. A culture of letting go destructive, selfish modes of life. A culture that breaks with the logic of this one, i.e.; the accumulation of stuff, wealth, status. A culture of solidarity, community, becoming repairers of the breaches we have created, allowing the Earth to heal itself and to show us how to do it.

We must head in that direction if we really do want to survive. This is about learning how to live on this planet within the limits of her natural systems, with reverence and respect, without using her for our economic benefit but living within her in a way that is a benefit to all living beings.

You can be sure we will be writing more about this in the weeks and months ahead. Stay tuned. Share this around. Let's get a community of truth and compassion going right here.

 -------------------------------------------

Wicked problem: In planning and policy, a wicked problem is a problem that is difficult or impossible to solve because of incomplete, contradictory, and changing requirements that are often difficult to recognize. It refers to an idea or problem that cannot be fixed, where there is no single solution to the problem; and "wicked" denotes resistance to resolution, rather than evil. Another definition is "a problem whose social complexity means that it has no determinable stopping point." Moreover, because of complex interdependencies, the effort to solve one aspect of a wicked problem may reveal or create other problems. Due to their complexity, wicked problems are often characterized by organized irresponsibility. [Grabbed this off wikipedia. Well-sourced.]

Predicament: an unpleasant situation that is difficult to get out of: