September 2020Borrowing in All Directions
You occasionally hear or read, in the trenches of internet comment threads, an argument against the possibility of AGW (or any human-caused negative impact on the planet, for that matter): that humanity is too small a force to have an impact on something as expansive and bountiful as the natural world. You know the arguments: we’re just insignificant humans, the Earth is resilient, we’ll stop if it gets really dire, etc. But you only have to step back a bit to see the reality of how we got here—and how untenable our situation really is. The facts don’t bear this out, and the more you consider it, the more apparent it becomes that we have, in fact, left very little untouched. This includes what has been bequeathed to us from the past as well as what lies ahead.
Most of the remarkable upgrades humanity has experienced over the last 150 years have come to us by way of a trust fund of sorts that we inherited. The “currency” in this fund is millions of years of accumulated solar energy, captured in the bodies of microscopic plants and animals and layered into sediments that eventually became oil. A lamp burning kerosene refined from oil returns the same heat and light that originally came from the sun so many years before. The engine in your car creates small explosions of gasoline that are translated into forward motion. It’s difficult to wrap your head around just how much of an advantage this has afforded us—oil changed the course of human history and vastly improved the lives of millions. It has also had a devastating impact on the planet. And the really striking part is that we have spent the majority of this trust fund in roughly a hundred-year period. Now imagine an entire system of production—and a standard of living—built around this seemingly magical equation.
We have had it easy in a way no other species at any other time has. Take food production as an example. Fields are cleared, ploughed, tilled, sprayed, and harvested, all through the use of fossil fuels. The fertilizers and pesticides applied to our crops are derivatives of oil. The trucks that transport the goods—and often the refrigeration systems that keep them cool—are all powered by tiny withdrawals from that same trust fund, ensuring a smooth ride from Mexico to Vancouver for a 99¢ head of lettuce.
Our lives have been vastly improved by this spending spree with fossil fuels, and at the same time we have done immense damage to remote forests, far-flung fisheries, and to the very atmosphere we depend on. But it’s time to see it for what it was: a temporary boost—a level-up out of the mud and chaos, but far from anything resembling a bottomless resource. Our next collective moves on the chessboard will have to reckon not only with our relationship to these fuels, but also with the expectations of a life made easy by stumbling across what was essentially buried treasure.
The vast power afforded to us by oil has also permitted an unprecedented expansion of the Great Human Machine. Our ability to collect resources and transform them into almost anything is astounding. We have gone from basket weaving to making helicopters in the geological blink of an eye. Our reach—even to other planets—has allowed us to explore, exploit, and deliver the spoils at incredible speed. Chainsaws penetrate the depths of the rainforest, and our nets comb the darkness of the once-mysterious oceans. A garment can be roughly assembled in Bangladesh with cotton from the U.S., sent to China to be finished, and then shipped to an H&M in Stockholm. We have become gigantic. There are no longer corners of the map with terra incognita scrawled across them. Global travel is almost routine now.
Our new, extended arms reach across the globe and draw everything back in to feed the machine. Giant tuna can no longer glide off into the abyss—the fleets are too numerous and too fast for escape.
We have taken millions of years of solar energy and used it to raise ourselves up from the mud and extend ourselves across the globe—but even this wasn’t enough. The more literal currencies we exchange (dollars, precious metals) were intended to be—much like oil—repositories of energy. A paper dollar or pound was essentially a promise to pay the holder with a corresponding amount of gold stored elsewhere. This system was gradually diluted, leveraged, and eventually decoupled from its relationship to more physical (though still symbolic) repositories of wealth. Banks are only required to keep a fraction of the money entrusted to them, and the amount of money in the system is constantly increasing. Much of the new money that is created is, in essence, debt to be repaid at some point in the future.
John Maynard Keynes called this a “link to the future,” and in much the same way that individuals feel comfortable taking on a mortgage or credit card debt, entire economies borrow colossal sums in the belief that the future will be bountiful enough to accommodate these obligations. Mortgages—borrowing from the future—can quietly deplete free time, culture, and relationships. What we are doing now in most developed economies is expanding the amount of money in circulation faster than the economy itself is growing, and we find ourselves in increasingly unfamiliar territory, pushing the limits of our models and assumptions. This becomes a gamble with consequences we only got a taste of during the financial crisis of 2008.
This is where we find ourselves today: we have almost completely exhausted a trust fund that took millions of years to accumulate, used it to create a standard of living and a degree of industrial capability never seen before, while at the same time borrowing so heavily from the future that it may be impossible to ever fully catch up. We are approaching limits in terms of energy, ecology, and economy—and the system we have built couldn’t be a clearer example of what it means to be unsustainable.
So the next time someone waves off your concerns about hitting even one of these limits, ask them what they think about how we’re going to deal with the possibility of hitting all three.