A really good movie draws me into its world and has me seeing and feeling the place, the time, and the circumstance of its lead characters. I feel a personal connection to them, empathize with their plight, and their story echoes around inside me for days.
The summer of 2023 has me feeling I am a character living in such a movie. A science fiction or horror flick. But it is all wrong and the writers need to start over. Here we are, seeing this unfolding crisis. An existential crisis breaking out in real time. Real Earth time. And that is only adding to the horror of it all. Humans do not grasp Earth time even with the magic of time-lapse photography. We are watching a slow moving train wreck while failing to stop the next scheduled train coming down these tracks.
In the movie we are alongside the protagonists; Smart scientists sounding the alarm, craven political leaders who never seem to grasp the enormity of the moment, news media and brave journalists sounding the alarm into an abyss. And the existential threat, be it an asteroid, a pandemic, an alien invasion or even zombies, is met and ultimately conquered in a moral tour de force.
Let’s look at today’s highlight reel. Heat wave upon heat wave roils cities across the world. Wild fires burn uncontrollably, choking the air, leaving those whose health is compromised to rely upon face masks left over from Covid just to breathe outdoors. Both polar ice packs are dissolving into the oceans, their cold, fresh waters disrupting the very machinery that maintains our hospitable climate. Ice loss that was expected to happen over a century’s time has occurred in less than a decade. Its implications will effect everyone regardless of where they live on Earth.
Earth’s human population has exceeded eight billion persons. It was 2.5 billion the year I was born. Feeding and housing this population growth is destroying ecosystems evolved over millennia that created the Eden in which humankind has thrived. All signs point to the collapse of this Eden as we continue our march forward. We are living in a mass extinction event if our own making. This is the sixth time Earth has seen such massive loss of life. The most recent one was 65 million years ago. A giant meteor wiped out the dinosaurs to initiate that event. Today’s extinction event is driven by no less deadly a menace.
The Industrial Revolution made the modern world come into being. What sparked the revolution was man’s creative use of combustion. Over millennia, wood was the primary source of combustible fuel, and societies rose and fell with its availability. When wooded lands in the Middle East were felled to fuel the Bronze Age, a great civilization disappeared when desert took hold where woodlands once stood.
But what gave the modern Industrial Revolution legs was the use of fossil fuels. First was coal. It was supercharged with the discovery of oil. Oil, and its derivatives drove a new era of combustion. Indeed, its use to power industry, transportation and innovation created our modern world. So endemic are oil based products that in the lead up to war in the Middle East, the George W. Bush administration took to calling oil “the lifeblood of Democracy”.
Oil may always have a place in our chemistry and pharmaceutical industries. But its combustion to create heat is the monster in this horror movie and it is driving this ongoing extinction event. The Age of Combustion, of burning things to power our transportation and industry must come to an end. Burning things to cook our eggs and heat our homes is killing us, slowly but surely. Specifically, burning things that combine carbon with oxygen is killing us. Science and our own eyes tell us so. The news media and brave journalists report the facts of the matter. And our political class, like Nero in ancient Rome, fiddle as Earth burns.
The public could demand change, but they are of a divided mind. Balkanized by predatory use of the internet, people are fed information intended to cause confusion. The playbook was written by the tobacco industry when evidence of cancer from its use led to calls for government regulation. There was too much money being made to let human lives get in the way of massive profits, so false information and outright deception was employed to keep making tobacco money.
The same strategy is being used by oil interests in the climate crisis. It is even worse today as many governments own and operate oil companies in addition to leasing oil fields and taxing it products. Governments see the loss of oil profits as an existential threat to themselves, even as the combustion of petroleum fuels an even greater existential threat to nationhood itself.
In the genre of disaster movies, we follow the protagonists and never really see much of the greater population. We might catch a scene of people running for cover and fleeing danger. But that is not a credible strategy against this threat. The ultra-wealthy are building bunkers and island fortresses to hide away. But unless we act to counter the crisis and transform our wealth building from combustion based energy to electro-magnetic energy, their escape plans are folly.
This is the bottom line truth: We can overcome the climate crisis, feed our entire population, and even prosper only if we leave the Age of Combustion behind. There are too many of us; we are burning up the world trying to make everything work. We need a new plan. The good news is that we have one.
Electrify everything. Cars, boats, planes, RVs and even lawn mowers. Electricity and clean carbon-free fuels such as hydrogen must replace petrochemical combustion in every industry. And regenerative agriculture predicated upon sustainable practices must replace brute force agriculture driven by petrochemicals. We can ally ourselves with the Earth itself to kindle a new Industrial Revolution. It will save us from this extinction event whose fuse has been lit with an oil fueled blowtorch.
The movies alway end with a single climatic moment, when good overcomes evil and our heroes turn back the threat. That’s not going to happen in this movie. We are facing crises we can only overcome with the sustained application of creative human ingenuity. All of the threats but one.
Greed. The mistaken belief that wealth is defined by a number; an assessment of ownership in something that we expect should last forever. It is a greed fueled delusion. Stock markets are forever churning over existing companies giving way to newer ones innovating our future. All living things, including multi-national corporations, must some day die to make room for the creation of new life.
Oil industries are so embedded into pubic and private investments that threats to the oil economy are seen by many as personal. But investors have to understand, oil use is an addiction. Like tobacco, alcohol and heroin, addictive substance use kills its user. If you really value your wealth, you will find new places to better invest it.
I am hoping for a happy ending to this movie. I won’t live long enough to see its ending. But indeed, no one my age should expect to. This is an inter-generational battle. The two Chinese characters that are used to translate the English word “crisis” are “dangerous” and “opportunity”. And what is history but the never ending story of “dangerous opportunities” and the consequence of the choices we made.