The Crash Course - Chris Martenson [127]
We don’t need any more studies, additional insights, or new books to be written. We already know all of these things, and many more besides. We don’t need a deeper understanding of what we need to do—we already have the necessary understanding. What we do need is the desire to make such changes a priority and to choose the sustainable path.
Food needs to be grown and consumed locally, and strategies for recycling the nutrients back to the farms need to be implemented. You can help start this process by demanding local foods, which is easy—just start buying them. By supporting local farmers, you help to secure the food that you and your community need in both the short term and the long term. Even better, start growing your own food in a garden, a window box, or even just a pot on the porch. Solutions to the issue of food, though daunting in scale, are easy to conceptualize and are already underway to some extent in virtually every community.
Energy
The prescription here is simple: We need to be as careful and conservative in our use of energy as we can possibly be. This means stop wasting energy. Not stop using energy; stop wasting it. That is a good first step. Given that fossil fuels are a “one and done” arrangement, sliding as they do down the frictionless entropy slide on their way to becoming lazy heat, we need to develop and nurture a brand-new appreciation for just how valuable energy really is. We really ought to see our fossil energy sources as the one-time, irreplaceable master resources that they are.
Currently, fossil energy sources are “valued” by an abstraction called money, which does an incredibly good job of masking their true worth by concealing the fact that they are limited and depleting. The idea that gasoline, a nonrenewable resource, is only considered to be “worth” a few dollars a gallon, when it capably performs the same amount of work as a human laboring for hundreds of hours, is just silly. Clearly it is worth more to us than its price would indicate. It should be valued more highly, and if it were, I’m confident that it would be used more wisely. If we want to preserve the order and complexity of our economy, and, by extension, of our society, then we need to begin by better appreciating the role of energy in delivering and maintaining both order and complexity.
It is this connection between the economy and energy that’s entirely missing from the current practice of mainstream economics. It’s almost as if the current practitioners of economic theory (with relatively few exceptions)1 are entirely unaware that the economy would have no form, no function, and no “life” without energy. This intellectual disconnect explains why we’re so deeply mired in the predicaments in which we find ourselves, and it explains why I view the risks to our future so seriously.
As Max Planck, the famous physicist, once said, “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”2 In other words, science advances one funeral at a time. Historically, new ideas do tend to run into stiff opposition from the establishment. There are too many economists and other people in positions of power who seem to have no idea of the connections between the economy, energy, and the environment. When reality finally convinces enough of them that it needs to be taken seriously, in what sort of a world will we be living?
Luckily, we don’t have to wait for economists to arrive at the truth before we begin to act more rationally and use our fossil fuels as if they were an extremely valuable, nonrenewable, one-time inheritance.
Economy and Money
We can already tell that our debt-based, backed-by-nothing fiat currency is performing badly, and as its resource props are pulled away, it’s likely to perform even more