Beautifully woven, as always. And thanks for the general alert to all this, I only knew bits before. "At all costs" is the devastating part, one of those things you instinctively don't want to accept because the horror of it is too gargantuan.
This is bleak. How did all these narcissists gather in one place and convince themselves of their supremacy? Have none of them encountered a brown bear while hiking or storm while sailing? How could anyone truly believe their superiority to the forces of nature?
I remember the soil - and that it's dying by being overworked. I remember the ecosystems that were there before we chopped down the forests so cows could eat grass which only works at 6% efficiency in catching sunlight. I remember thinking that Precision Fermentation was a fantastic idea because it might prevent most of this - and return the 2 BILLION hectares of forest we've chopped down to graze cattle. That's 3 TRILLION trees - and at a rough average of 1 ton of carbon per tree - that's climate change solved. Solar power at 22% efficiency converting water into hydrogen and feeding it to bugs to give us our 9 most essential amino acids (protein) and fats and carbohydrates without killing animals! Without dominating most of the ecosystems on the planet! Without surrounding ecosystems in a sea of agriculture so that animals and ecosystems cannot migrate as the climate changes - they're literally surrounded! I dreamed of abundant solar power from rooftops and floating on water reservoirs and coming from brownfields and some deserts growing the majority of bulk protein and fats and carbohydrates we could want. Solein (from Solar Foods) has been fashioned into pancakes, mayonnaise, and something like bacon strips. From chicken tenders through to seafood sticks!
Then Chris Smaje came on and made baseless assertions against the energy transition. (On his website he admits to being influenced by Simon Michaux!) Then he made a few assertions against Precision Fermentation - all the while ignoring that even if his energy figures about how much solar would be required are true - solar is now on a 3 year doubling curve - and hydrogen production just got 20% more energy efficient anyway! https://reneweconomy.com.au/australian-electrolyser-start-up-gets-huge-global-backing-in-countrys-biggest-ever-clean-tech-fund-raising/
I thought there would be more technical conversations trying to justify these claims. But instead of proving that he was right - you both started psychoanalysing why you were both right - and how your opponents that 'believe in' Precision Fermentation could be so wrong! What belief systems to they unconsciously swallow to make them this way?
Apparently - because I'm excited by the potential of PF to feed the world and save nature - I support “imperialistic technocratic forces” that “kick indigenous people off their lands”. I’m responsible for “robbing them of their culture – and language - and with this even their ability to think!” Not only this - I’m for “forcing people to live in industrial feedlot cities”.
There I was thinking I was a climate activist with a passion for walkable Ecocity neighbourhoods, but it seems somewhere in raising a family and doing my job and encouraging my fellow citizens to vote for climate action I somehow accidentally put on a brown shirt and started goose-stepping down Sydney’s streets!
THEN Rachel started questioning why George Monbiot and other defenders of PF get so upset and emotional? Gee - I wonder!
Meanwhile - Chris Smaje's answer? Some huge fraction of society must go back to Amish agriculture and horses. Let alone that horses would require an extra 10% of agricultural land just for fodder JUST FOR 3% of the farms to pull a tiny tractor like in the 1920's! Let alone that the population is also 15% bigger than when this study was done in the 2000's. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/04/bring-back-the-horses/ Just how much land does Chris want us to consume in our quest to feed ourselves?
Let’s imagine what you say is right and renewables really CANNOT maintain industrial society (which is NOT what the peer-reviewed engineering says). Let’s imagine that we really must quickly decant billions of people out of the cities into the countryside to start farming before we cook the planet on fossil fuels.
To be blunt - how’s that going? We only have 20 years to Powerdown and decarbonise. Why does the global trend still seems to be moving INTO the cities when according to Degrowthers we should be deindustrialising and moving the other way? When are the peer-reviewed renewable engineers going to admit Degrowthers are right and renewables cannot do the job? When are the governments of the world going to admit this? When do you expect the DER will be set up? (The Department of Emergency Ruralisation.) How much energy will it cost to rebuild 4 billion homes? Who is organising this so our last pockets of nature don’t succumb to slash-and-burn agriculture when some new city-slicker wrecks their soil and the family start to starve? Or as Monbiot points out - how are we going to feed everyone when modern farming is so much more productive than older farming?
Also: “Most of the places where large numbers of people live do not have sufficient fertile land nearby to support them. A paper in the journal *Nature Food* [found that](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-020-0060-7) only a quarter of the world’s people could be fed with staple grain crops grown within 100 kilometres of where they live. The average minimum distance at which the world’s people can be supplied with staple foods, it found, is 2,200 kilometres. Much of the world’s food is grown in vast, lightly-habited lands (US plains, Canadian prairies, Russian steppes etc) and shipped to tight, densely-populated places.
These are the numbers to which people of Chris’s persuasion most furiously object, even though they have no answer to them. Why? Because the numbers are incompatible with their worldview. They show that, while agrarian localism might be great as far as it goes, it simply cannot, by itself, meet the challenge of feeding the world.”
Climatologists mainly used to deal with Climate Deniers. Now they're forced to debate Climate Doomers! Doomer defeatism destroys activism. You may as well get hedonistic. "Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Big Oil understands this - and have funded Climate Doomers! Climatologist (Atmospheric Physicist) Simon Clark explains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSG2Dw2mL8
One of the big trends in Climate Doomer thought? That renewables cannot do the job. They’re not good enough. Etc.
But I see wind and solar growing exponentially - and the potential to electrify everything. I also see the potential for us to turn today’s cities into Eco-cities - much nicer places to live. I have hope that things are not quite as desperate as hoping that a “Department of Emergency Ruralisation” must be set up. From the people I work with and meet - a Department like that is about as likely as the Easter Bunny feeding us if civilisation collapses. For if it comes to relying on Degrowth Ruralisation, we’ll be decades to late. Globally - people are moving into cities. Degrowthers want them to move back out? If that were our only hope - as Monbiot points out - there might not be any arable land for them to farm by the time they finally get out there!
There are many idiotic things about their groupthink but one of the more absurd ones is that they appear to believe they understand human beings sufficiently, while massively misunderstanding human beings.
There's an enormous amount we do not understand about human beings. We certainly do not understand enough about human beings to know how to engineer the future in the way they fantasize (all of which is utterly impossible, of course). It's ridiculous enough they don't realize this--but then to think they know things which they do not know and base it all on this.
In the end, all of this is a type of marketing. Yes, they have created a subculture with a goofy-ass groupthink but the purpose of much of their fantasizing is due to the need to sell technology to investors (and to the public--but these are related). Incredibly, their sales pitch has been so internalized that they now believe the world-creating fantasy they made up to peddle their wares. In a sense THEY are the product. They are required to posit themselves as visionaries. Within the groupthink bubble, they sell it to others sharing the same vision.
Some people are describing it as a religion or very similar to one. That's plausible. LOL, of course it started in California. land of thousands of bespoke religions. Perhaps if they'd been in NYC this wouldn't have happened in quite the same way--although they have incredibly spread their creed to MIT and elsewhere. But, for some reason, no place is more amenable to L. Ron Hubbard -like CEOs than California. Why? Maybe because people historically tended to emigrate to the state to make their fortune, there's a sense that anything is possible? So you can just make shit up and all the people around you who believe that anything is possible are very receptive?
I don't know.
What's also mind-blowing is the stuff they say is SO DUMB AND UNINTERESTING. It is not simply implausible but uninsightful, trivial, unimaginative, Elmer Gantry had more interesting views than these tech Elmer Gantrys. Unfortunately, the aspect of it that is like a religion makes it impossible for them to be responsive to outside criticism--and that's also probably the point. I never saw how closely capitalism fits with cults but now I do because with a cult you get a 'team,' and managing the team is easy as they are more likely to follow you blindly. It is every capitalist's dream!
And someone below mentions narcissism, which makes sense as a diagnosis but it has its roots in hucksterism --a very American thing.
What a lovely weaving / linking of metaphors here. Mitochondrial. Restructuring society for social entanglement on the mycelium model (shades of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomes). Wild and Ingold. AI and literally out of this world supremacist eugenics. Thanks for one of your best introductions to out of the box thinking.
Loved the fishing analogy - I was right on the end of the line! The role of stories comes up quite frequently in discussions about how we deal with this planetary crisis and the far right have already captured the imaginations of those looking for solid ground with their own story of how to get out this mire.
Those of us who are looking to preserve human life and avoid the more catastrophic consequences of the current trajectory also need to have story to coalesce around. George Monbiot in an interview today with Politics Joe gave another great analogy. He likened our narrative to a tapestry without a loom. Lots of brightly coloured threads lying tangled on the floor. We need to get weaving!
If any of these “tech bros” had been in my middle-school classes (teacher of 20 years here), I would have consulted with the special-education/learning support teacher. I would have started a file for observation for possible implementation of learning support structures. They all have very similar traits.
The West makes existence about the matter/body, while the East makes it about the energy/spirit. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and so the East occupies itself with figuring out what purpose a finite body serves for the immortal energy that occupies it for the duration of time we call life.
The West, through Science and Economics, tries to calculate how much energy and money will it take for the finite human body to become immortal like Energy/Spirit.
East understands instinctively that to continue enjoying the immortality of Energy, one must become Light (not heavy) by reducing attachment, by not letting the body's senses hijack the spirit into relationships that lead to possession of things (consumerism), or people (slavery) or land (wars), or ideas (religion).
The West is trying to achieve what it already has.
Individualism is the idea of Heaviness - owning can never let anyone become Light. To become light as Energy, one needs to stop being heavy as Matter.
Matter is bundled Energy, Time is the natural duration of Matter unbundling itself back into Energy. Unless one wants to get the whole world busy with the unbundling, it's been happening on its own forever.
I think we need someone to champion the soil (like Sadguru) in Silicon Valley - like an Elon Musk, focused on the soil - what we are doing to the land & water to grow corn for fuel and meat, is beyond stupid…we deserve to be eliminated in a painful death
Beautifully woven, as always. And thanks for the general alert to all this, I only knew bits before. "At all costs" is the devastating part, one of those things you instinctively don't want to accept because the horror of it is too gargantuan.
This is bleak. How did all these narcissists gather in one place and convince themselves of their supremacy? Have none of them encountered a brown bear while hiking or storm while sailing? How could anyone truly believe their superiority to the forces of nature?
I remember the soil - and that it's dying by being overworked. I remember the ecosystems that were there before we chopped down the forests so cows could eat grass which only works at 6% efficiency in catching sunlight. I remember thinking that Precision Fermentation was a fantastic idea because it might prevent most of this - and return the 2 BILLION hectares of forest we've chopped down to graze cattle. That's 3 TRILLION trees - and at a rough average of 1 ton of carbon per tree - that's climate change solved. Solar power at 22% efficiency converting water into hydrogen and feeding it to bugs to give us our 9 most essential amino acids (protein) and fats and carbohydrates without killing animals! Without dominating most of the ecosystems on the planet! Without surrounding ecosystems in a sea of agriculture so that animals and ecosystems cannot migrate as the climate changes - they're literally surrounded! I dreamed of abundant solar power from rooftops and floating on water reservoirs and coming from brownfields and some deserts growing the majority of bulk protein and fats and carbohydrates we could want. Solein (from Solar Foods) has been fashioned into pancakes, mayonnaise, and something like bacon strips. From chicken tenders through to seafood sticks!
Then Chris Smaje came on and made baseless assertions against the energy transition. (On his website he admits to being influenced by Simon Michaux!) Then he made a few assertions against Precision Fermentation - all the while ignoring that even if his energy figures about how much solar would be required are true - solar is now on a 3 year doubling curve - and hydrogen production just got 20% more energy efficient anyway! https://reneweconomy.com.au/australian-electrolyser-start-up-gets-huge-global-backing-in-countrys-biggest-ever-clean-tech-fund-raising/
I thought there would be more technical conversations trying to justify these claims. But instead of proving that he was right - you both started psychoanalysing why you were both right - and how your opponents that 'believe in' Precision Fermentation could be so wrong! What belief systems to they unconsciously swallow to make them this way?
Apparently - because I'm excited by the potential of PF to feed the world and save nature - I support “imperialistic technocratic forces” that “kick indigenous people off their lands”. I’m responsible for “robbing them of their culture – and language - and with this even their ability to think!” Not only this - I’m for “forcing people to live in industrial feedlot cities”.
There I was thinking I was a climate activist with a passion for walkable Ecocity neighbourhoods, but it seems somewhere in raising a family and doing my job and encouraging my fellow citizens to vote for climate action I somehow accidentally put on a brown shirt and started goose-stepping down Sydney’s streets!
THEN Rachel started questioning why George Monbiot and other defenders of PF get so upset and emotional? Gee - I wonder!
Meanwhile - Chris Smaje's answer? Some huge fraction of society must go back to Amish agriculture and horses. Let alone that horses would require an extra 10% of agricultural land just for fodder JUST FOR 3% of the farms to pull a tiny tractor like in the 1920's! Let alone that the population is also 15% bigger than when this study was done in the 2000's. https://solar.lowtechmagazine.com/2008/04/bring-back-the-horses/ Just how much land does Chris want us to consume in our quest to feed ourselves?
Let’s imagine what you say is right and renewables really CANNOT maintain industrial society (which is NOT what the peer-reviewed engineering says). Let’s imagine that we really must quickly decant billions of people out of the cities into the countryside to start farming before we cook the planet on fossil fuels.
To be blunt - how’s that going? We only have 20 years to Powerdown and decarbonise. Why does the global trend still seems to be moving INTO the cities when according to Degrowthers we should be deindustrialising and moving the other way? When are the peer-reviewed renewable engineers going to admit Degrowthers are right and renewables cannot do the job? When are the governments of the world going to admit this? When do you expect the DER will be set up? (The Department of Emergency Ruralisation.) How much energy will it cost to rebuild 4 billion homes? Who is organising this so our last pockets of nature don’t succumb to slash-and-burn agriculture when some new city-slicker wrecks their soil and the family start to starve? Or as Monbiot points out - how are we going to feed everyone when modern farming is so much more productive than older farming?
Also: “Most of the places where large numbers of people live do not have sufficient fertile land nearby to support them. A paper in the journal *Nature Food* [found that](https://www.nature.com/articles/s43016-020-0060-7) only a quarter of the world’s people could be fed with staple grain crops grown within 100 kilometres of where they live. The average minimum distance at which the world’s people can be supplied with staple foods, it found, is 2,200 kilometres. Much of the world’s food is grown in vast, lightly-habited lands (US plains, Canadian prairies, Russian steppes etc) and shipped to tight, densely-populated places.
These are the numbers to which people of Chris’s persuasion most furiously object, even though they have no answer to them. Why? Because the numbers are incompatible with their worldview. They show that, while agrarian localism might be great as far as it goes, it simply cannot, by itself, meet the challenge of feeding the world.”
https://www.monbiot.com/2023/10/04/the-cruel-fantasies-of-well-fed-people/
Climatologists mainly used to deal with Climate Deniers. Now they're forced to debate Climate Doomers! Doomer defeatism destroys activism. You may as well get hedonistic. "Eat drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die." Big Oil understands this - and have funded Climate Doomers! Climatologist (Atmospheric Physicist) Simon Clark explains. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XSG2Dw2mL8
One of the big trends in Climate Doomer thought? That renewables cannot do the job. They’re not good enough. Etc.
But I see wind and solar growing exponentially - and the potential to electrify everything. I also see the potential for us to turn today’s cities into Eco-cities - much nicer places to live. I have hope that things are not quite as desperate as hoping that a “Department of Emergency Ruralisation” must be set up. From the people I work with and meet - a Department like that is about as likely as the Easter Bunny feeding us if civilisation collapses. For if it comes to relying on Degrowth Ruralisation, we’ll be decades to late. Globally - people are moving into cities. Degrowthers want them to move back out? If that were our only hope - as Monbiot points out - there might not be any arable land for them to farm by the time they finally get out there!
There are many idiotic things about their groupthink but one of the more absurd ones is that they appear to believe they understand human beings sufficiently, while massively misunderstanding human beings.
There's an enormous amount we do not understand about human beings. We certainly do not understand enough about human beings to know how to engineer the future in the way they fantasize (all of which is utterly impossible, of course). It's ridiculous enough they don't realize this--but then to think they know things which they do not know and base it all on this.
In the end, all of this is a type of marketing. Yes, they have created a subculture with a goofy-ass groupthink but the purpose of much of their fantasizing is due to the need to sell technology to investors (and to the public--but these are related). Incredibly, their sales pitch has been so internalized that they now believe the world-creating fantasy they made up to peddle their wares. In a sense THEY are the product. They are required to posit themselves as visionaries. Within the groupthink bubble, they sell it to others sharing the same vision.
Some people are describing it as a religion or very similar to one. That's plausible. LOL, of course it started in California. land of thousands of bespoke religions. Perhaps if they'd been in NYC this wouldn't have happened in quite the same way--although they have incredibly spread their creed to MIT and elsewhere. But, for some reason, no place is more amenable to L. Ron Hubbard -like CEOs than California. Why? Maybe because people historically tended to emigrate to the state to make their fortune, there's a sense that anything is possible? So you can just make shit up and all the people around you who believe that anything is possible are very receptive?
I don't know.
What's also mind-blowing is the stuff they say is SO DUMB AND UNINTERESTING. It is not simply implausible but uninsightful, trivial, unimaginative, Elmer Gantry had more interesting views than these tech Elmer Gantrys. Unfortunately, the aspect of it that is like a religion makes it impossible for them to be responsive to outside criticism--and that's also probably the point. I never saw how closely capitalism fits with cults but now I do because with a cult you get a 'team,' and managing the team is easy as they are more likely to follow you blindly. It is every capitalist's dream!
And someone below mentions narcissism, which makes sense as a diagnosis but it has its roots in hucksterism --a very American thing.
What a lovely weaving / linking of metaphors here. Mitochondrial. Restructuring society for social entanglement on the mycelium model (shades of Deleuze and Guattari's rhizomes). Wild and Ingold. AI and literally out of this world supremacist eugenics. Thanks for one of your best introductions to out of the box thinking.
Loved the fishing analogy - I was right on the end of the line! The role of stories comes up quite frequently in discussions about how we deal with this planetary crisis and the far right have already captured the imaginations of those looking for solid ground with their own story of how to get out this mire.
Those of us who are looking to preserve human life and avoid the more catastrophic consequences of the current trajectory also need to have story to coalesce around. George Monbiot in an interview today with Politics Joe gave another great analogy. He likened our narrative to a tapestry without a loom. Lots of brightly coloured threads lying tangled on the floor. We need to get weaving!
"Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour,
Rains from the sky a meteoric shower
Of facts...they lie unquestioned, uncombined.
Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill
Is daily spun, but there exists no loom
To weave it into fabric..."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay-
Beautiful and apt! One of my dad’s favourite poets.
If any of these “tech bros” had been in my middle-school classes (teacher of 20 years here), I would have consulted with the special-education/learning support teacher. I would have started a file for observation for possible implementation of learning support structures. They all have very similar traits.
The West makes existence about the matter/body, while the East makes it about the energy/spirit. Energy can neither be created nor destroyed, and so the East occupies itself with figuring out what purpose a finite body serves for the immortal energy that occupies it for the duration of time we call life.
The West, through Science and Economics, tries to calculate how much energy and money will it take for the finite human body to become immortal like Energy/Spirit.
East understands instinctively that to continue enjoying the immortality of Energy, one must become Light (not heavy) by reducing attachment, by not letting the body's senses hijack the spirit into relationships that lead to possession of things (consumerism), or people (slavery) or land (wars), or ideas (religion).
The West is trying to achieve what it already has.
Individualism is the idea of Heaviness - owning can never let anyone become Light. To become light as Energy, one needs to stop being heavy as Matter.
Matter is bundled Energy, Time is the natural duration of Matter unbundling itself back into Energy. Unless one wants to get the whole world busy with the unbundling, it's been happening on its own forever.
I think we need someone to champion the soil (like Sadguru) in Silicon Valley - like an Elon Musk, focused on the soil - what we are doing to the land & water to grow corn for fuel and meat, is beyond stupid…we deserve to be eliminated in a painful death