Can grass roots grow into an oak?
Synopsis: We need to start restructure our lives using IT smartly, to largely eliminate the need for artificial power. Pursued over generations, this approach would be friendly to, and even enhance, liberty. Yet this is very different than the individualistic and compartmentalized, and piecemeal industrial regulatory, approaches, which is what conservation is often defined as.
This is a tangential response to Stirling Newberry's diary on the topic of:
Power for the 22nd Century [The Four Great Challenges].
You should read that.
This is also a response to my own ongoing challenge that we develop our own big ideas for world progress. Like Project for a New American Centry, but not evil. This is no fancy schmancy piece of finished work, but I do hope to get others thinking, and also fine tune my own ideas. I don't shy away from obvious or common conclusions. I'm not trying to be original here: Just correct. If you can point out work that has taken this thesis further, please do.
The topic here is how power in the 22nd century may shape society. Both alternative energy and conservation carry with them a potential for societal harm, for lost liberty and progress. That is not the result I expected to come back with. I expected to like everything those two possibilities might offer.... But giving it a fresh look in light of my recent study of our civilization... I don't.
If anything replaces oil and coal in this time frame, it will be something very different. Both are natural resources that require a lot of work, a lot of spent calories, but also a huge industry to acquire.
And we also have to allow that no replacement to oil and coal may be forthcoming anytime soon, maybe not even for 200 years. What then? That's a factor I don't think Stirling covered. But progress is fickle, and Buddha only provides reliably for Mr. Miyagi. Moreover, the "captains of industry" have a way of perverting the promise of progress.
While something like fusion, or for that matter broadly applied power of nuclear origin, might require a huge central infrastructure, it might not necessarily, and it might not necessarily require a calorie-intensive delivery chain either. In other words it might be pretty cheap once the technology is in place. If that is the case, we would have a real hard time preventing the financial elite from keeping a tight grip on that power with an iron heel to enforce it, so that they could extract a wildly disproportionate revenue from their asset.
The other possibility is a long period of little practical advancement but increasing scarcity. That actually wouldn't look very different from this world. Consider that much of the world already lives a Mad Max existence. The circle in which our perceived normality exists could shrink. It could shrink quite a bit before the people still inside it got too lonely, and got too much more altruistic than they/we are today. Yet, when large and cohesive societies or strata of societies fell from privilege, it is hard to imagine they would be as complacent about it, as, say, people moving from rural lives to suburban squalor tend to be. We shall see, if that's the case, whether class wars would result. But anyhow such struggles would not likely make life better,
So what other solutions are there? The only one we know is possible is one we can provide today, actually. One we can get to work on right now. It's nothing terribly original of course. No hamster wheels and no nukes. It is, essentially, conservation, but a different kind of conservation. One based on holistic reengineering of society one life and family at a time. Which would be far more effective than trying to solve problems within lives (and industries) individually, through various privations and alternatives that are work-intensive (and consume hugely) in their own right.
But that sounds troublingly authoritarian, doesn't it? Yes. This is perhaps the best solution but it is one that could not swiftly be enforced without being, well, forced. This would be an ugly thing for liberty on the face of it. And that's why we should get to work on it now, so that it is a generational shift, surrendering nothing, and done to our own advantage personally and for the world.
So, even though we are predisposed to look to conservation and to alternative energy, what I conclude we really ought to be looking at instead is how we can create better lives that require less power. That's a different focus than conservation. For example, we can use information processing and exchange to help people situate themselves to avoid commutes in their daily lives. We can reintroduce (and innovate) local production and make the shipment of goods over distances far more efficient. We can tie production to individual consumer wants, and reduce a tremendous amount of waste that way.
...That is conservation but it is also potentially the elimination of the need to apply power to certain human problems by effectively eliminating those problems, or making them solvable with food calories which are in turn produced only by the ecosystem.
Of course this last scenario is potentially a bad one for human liberty as well! But it's the best of the lot, potentially, too... And it is one we can get right to work on, one which could improve our lives, the lives of the impoverished in our countries, and those in other countries.
If you examine your feelings, perhaps you find you do not want to be free to expend unlimited energy commuting and working in a hive-like environment. Perhaps you want to live and work conveniently close together, with family and community not far, with all the advantages of a romanticized family farmer, and the fresh local produce, but still doing highly skilled modernized labor? Perhaps at minimum you can imagine a life with these lower tech aspects being what you'd like to offer your descendants. Imagine... A future that does NOT look worse than today; not more impersonal, not dirtier or noisier (at least not inescapably so). When is the last time someone spun you a yarn that suggested that?