Tweet
The Age of Scarcity Industrialism
It’s been suggested several times..., that the process of coming to terms with the reality of peak oil has more than a little in common with the process of dealing with the imminence of death. The five stages of getting ready to die outlined by Elizabeth Kübler-Ross in a series of bestselling books back in the 1970s – denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance – show up tolerably often in today’s peak oil controversies. There’s good reason for the parallel, because the end of the age of cheap abundant energy marks the terminus of many of today’s most cherished assumptions and ways of looking at the world, and it also means that a great many people alive today will die sooner than they otherwise would.
More than twenty years have gone by since I tended the dying in nursing homes, in one of a flurry of low-paying jobs I held after leaving college. Getting to know the guy with the scythe while the people around you are heading through life’s exit turnstile teaches lessons that don’t fade easily, though, and from that perspective I’m not at all sure the parallels have been taken far enough. In particular, it’s interesting to note that the same five stages – or at least the first three of them – also characterize our collective response so far to the predicament of industrial society.
When the diagnosis arrived at the beginning of the 1970s, for example, the immediate response was the one Kübler-Ross could have predicted: denial. By the end of that decade that response became an overwhelming political force. “It’s morning in America,” Ronald Reagan proclaimed, as his workmen tore down the solar hot water heaters Jimmy Carter installed on the White House roof: in some ways the definitive political act of the Eighties. Political gimmickry and reckless overpumping of North Slope and North Sea oil fields forced the price of oil down to the lowest levels in history, and made it possible for the industrial world to wallow in one last orgy of mass consumption, the final blowoff of the Age of Exuberance.
The next stage on Kübler-Ross’s list, anger, arrived on schedule as the Eighties gave way to the Nineties. By the decade’s end that stage, too, became a political force that put its poster boy in office, with a little help from hanging chads and the Supreme Court. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq filled the same role in the new phase that the junking of the White House’s solar panels filled in the old, a definitive sign that the new attitude held center stage in our national soap opera. It will be interesting to see whether the winning candidate in the 2008 election pursues a weak version of Bush II’s policies, as Nixon did Johnson’s and Bush I did Reagan’s, and crashes and burns on schedule around 2012; history doesn’t repeat itself, as the saying goes, but sometimes the rhymes are exquisitely precise.
One way or another, though, the stage of anger is fading out. Even oil company executives are starting to mention peak oil and global warming, and politicians are starting to tone down their rhetoric and climb aboard various bandwagons – ethanol, biodiesel, or what have you. This marks the arrival of bargaining. This stage has certain advantages; where denial refuses to deal with death, and anger looks for someone to blame for it, bargaining looks for things that can be done to make the Reaper change his mind. I’ve argued before that we’re well past the window of opportunity in which the decline and fall of industrial society might have been prevented. Still, that doesn’t foreclose the chance to cushion the decline and get things of value through the approaching mess, and these should be at the top of the industrial world’s agenda right now.
More than twenty years have gone by since I tended the dying in nursing homes, in one of a flurry of low-paying jobs I held after leaving college. Getting to know the guy with the scythe while the people around you are heading through life’s exit turnstile teaches lessons that don’t fade easily, though, and from that perspective I’m not at all sure the parallels have been taken far enough. In particular, it’s interesting to note that the same five stages – or at least the first three of them – also characterize our collective response so far to the predicament of industrial society.
When the diagnosis arrived at the beginning of the 1970s, for example, the immediate response was the one Kübler-Ross could have predicted: denial. By the end of that decade that response became an overwhelming political force. “It’s morning in America,” Ronald Reagan proclaimed, as his workmen tore down the solar hot water heaters Jimmy Carter installed on the White House roof: in some ways the definitive political act of the Eighties. Political gimmickry and reckless overpumping of North Slope and North Sea oil fields forced the price of oil down to the lowest levels in history, and made it possible for the industrial world to wallow in one last orgy of mass consumption, the final blowoff of the Age of Exuberance.
The next stage on Kübler-Ross’s list, anger, arrived on schedule as the Eighties gave way to the Nineties. By the decade’s end that stage, too, became a political force that put its poster boy in office, with a little help from hanging chads and the Supreme Court. The US invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq filled the same role in the new phase that the junking of the White House’s solar panels filled in the old, a definitive sign that the new attitude held center stage in our national soap opera. It will be interesting to see whether the winning candidate in the 2008 election pursues a weak version of Bush II’s policies, as Nixon did Johnson’s and Bush I did Reagan’s, and crashes and burns on schedule around 2012; history doesn’t repeat itself, as the saying goes, but sometimes the rhymes are exquisitely precise.
One way or another, though, the stage of anger is fading out. Even oil company executives are starting to mention peak oil and global warming, and politicians are starting to tone down their rhetoric and climb aboard various bandwagons – ethanol, biodiesel, or what have you. This marks the arrival of bargaining. This stage has certain advantages; where denial refuses to deal with death, and anger looks for someone to blame for it, bargaining looks for things that can be done to make the Reaper change his mind. I’ve argued before that we’re well past the window of opportunity in which the decline and fall of industrial society might have been prevented. Still, that doesn’t foreclose the chance to cushion the decline and get things of value through the approaching mess, and these should be at the top of the industrial world’s agenda right now.