Robert Jensen at Countercurrents accuses the media of failing in their duty to question technological fundamentalism – the notion that the increasing use of increasingly more sophisticated high-energy advanced technology is always a good thing.

“If the central role of journalism is to raise the difficult questions that citizens should confront in a democratic society, journalists are not doing their jobs.”

It’s hardly surprising that journalists fail to question technology or the dogma of progress and growth. After all, journalists are as much a part of our culture and are as blind to its underlying ideology as any other occupational group. It’s rare that anyone questions the core assumptions of their society, at any time.  Why would we expect today’s journalists to be any different?

Jensen cites the example of automobiles and the burning of petroleum in internal-combustion engines. While our car-based transportation system has given us the ability to travel considerable distances, this technology also has given us traffic jams and road rage, strip malls and the interstate highway system, horrific carnage and death as a routine and unremarked fact of life. Our high-energy lifestyle has contributed to unprecedented global warming which threatens to destabilize Earth’s climate and unravel Earth’s ecosystems, of which human economies are but a fragile and dependent part.

Jensen argues that the “common response” to the social and ecological pathology of the car culture has not been to rethink the reasons and ways we transport ourselves, but rather to figure out how to replace petroleum so we can continue to drive, leading to the manic quest for “alternative fuels.” But we don’t see the car culture as pathological. In fact, we don’t see the car culture as a “culture” at all. It’s like the air we breath. We are so immersed in it that we take it for granted. It’s simply the world in which we live. We can’t imagine it any other way.

Peak oil threatens to unravel the very fabric of our reality. And it’s our response to peak oil that’s pathological. Rather than change our ways, we try to keep the car culture going at any and all cost.

Our faith in technology is just one element of our broader devotion to economic growth.  We have defined the good life as synonymous with consumption and the ability to acquire more and more of increasingly sophisticated technology. So we continue to pursue progress and economic growth. We cannot see, we refuse to see, that this path leads to death and destruction.

Jensen points out that those who challenge this dogma are routinely ignored or dismissed as naïve. But, Jensen asks, who is really being naïve?

“Naïve, perhaps, but not as naïve as the belief that unsustainable systems can be sustained indefinitely, which is at the heart of the technological fundamentalists’ delusional belief system.”

James Hansen warned the leaders meeting at the G8 summit that past approaches to climate change have proved a failure, and that continuing down that path “would doom our children and grandchildren to an increasingly impoverished life on a more desolate planet.” Hansen said if we are to avoid “tipping points” that would lead to catastrophic climate change – in geological terms, the end of the Holocene epoch within which human civilization developed and thrived – we must reduce atmospheric CO2 to no more than350 ppm.

So what was the G8′s bold response? To “move towards a low-carbon society” by endorsing the idea of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by 2050 while failing to set a short-term goal for actually getting their. And by the way, the 50% cut is from current levels, not from the 1990 levels that served as the baseline in Kyoto.

In other words, they set a target that guarantees catastrophic climate change and then failed to adopt any steps to actually achieve that grossly inadequate goal.

The G8 statement says: “Achieving this objective will only be possible through common determination of all major economies[.]” What ever happened to countries, to peoples, to polities? “Economies” don’t make decisions.

Hansen’s letter points out that responsibility for global warming is a physical fact, not an ethical statement; and is proportional to cumulative CO2 emissions, not to current emission rates. This is a result of the long lifetime of atmospheric CO2.  Responsibility of the United States is more than three times larger than that of any other nation. The United States, Europe, Japan, Canada and Australia are responsible for most of the fossil fuel CO2 in the air today. Looking at per capita emission, the United States and Canada are the largest emitters, while per capita emissions of Japan, Germany and the United Kingdom are about half that large.

The main concerns of the G-8, as laid out in the group’s joint statement, are to avoid the most severe consequences of global warming by cutting emissions, but only by guaranteeing “sustainable economic development” and “energy security.” Again paraphrasing, we’re willing to tackle global warming, but only if we don’t have to give up on our belief in unlimited growth.

Wendell Berry has a great article in Harpers exploring the Faustian bargain we have made. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves. Our problem is more than prodigal extravagance – it’s also an assumed limitlessness, a trait reserved for the gods. Yet we have founded our present society upon delusional assumptions of limitlessness.

As the ancient Greeks knew, the inevitable consequence of transgressing limits is tragedy. In Greek tragedy, an important function of the chorus was to ensure that the audience does not forget things, to put the actions of the actors in context. Let’s hope that the audience is paying attention, that the end has not already been written, and that the only thing left for the chorus to do is lament.

John Michael Greer has a great piece at The Archdruid Report (and the Energy Bulletin) exposing the fundamental error that underlies our thinking about our relationship to nature, that has led to our acting as if we are better than and above the natural world, that it’s there to be exploited as a “resource” to serve us.

He calls it the Silent Running fallacy:

“[I]t’s the mistaken belief that human industrial civilization can survive apart from nature. It’s this fallacy that leads countless well-intentioned people to argue that nature is an amenity, and should be preserved because, basically, it’s cute. That sort of argument invites the response, just as stereotyped and more appealing to our culture’s governing narratives, that hard-headed practicality takes precedence over emotional appeals and nature can therefore be ravaged with impunity.

“Yet nature is not an amenity, and the “practicality” that leads current political and business leaders to ignore the disastrous consequences of their own actions doesn’t deserve the name. If anything, industrial civilization is the amenity, and it’s not particularly cute, either. Nature can survive without industrial humanity, but industrial humanity cannot survive without nature[.]“

Writer, poet and farmer Wendell Berry has an article in Harpers reminding us that confronting the phenomenon of “peak oil” means confronting the end of our customary delusion of “more.”

The article is behind a paywall, but excerpts are posted at the Energy Bulletin. Here are some highlights.

“The general reaction to the apparent end of the era of cheap fossil fuel, as to other readily foreseeable curtailments, has been to delay any sort of reckoning. The strategies of delay have been a sort of willed oblivion, or visions of large profits to the manufacturers of such “biofuels” as ethanol from corn or switchgrass, or the familiar unscientific faith that “science will find an answer.” The dominant response, in short, is a dogged belief that what we call the American Way of Life will prove somehow indestructible. We will keep on consuming, spending, wasting, and driving, as before, at any cost to anything and everybody but ourselves.

“. . . Our national faith so far has been: “There’s always more.” Our true religion is a sort of autistic industrialism. People of intelligence and ability seem now to be genuinely embarrassed by any solution to any problem that does not involve high technology, a great expenditure of energy, or a big machine.

“. . . It is this economy of community destruction that, wittingly or unwittingly, most scientists and technicians have served for the past two hundred years. These scientists and technicians have justified themselves by the proposition that they are the vanguard of progress, enlarging human knowledge and power, and thus they have romanticized both themselves and the predatory enterprises that they have served.” Read the rest of this entry »