What to do? Start a journey with us. We don’t quite know how it will end but we know how it will begin. It starts here. The first day of the rest of your life with a commitment to change something new every day for the rest of your life. Making incremental steps to reduce your footprint to sustainable levels in the hope that we can salvage some of the better features of our modernity. You just can’t do nothing and live with yourself. When your children ask you ‘what did you do?’ can you look them in the eye? If you don’t do anything do you think your children’s children will have children at all? You are fighting a war for THEM. The war is with yourself. A call to arms.
It doesn’t matter if your view of the future is utterly grim (i.e., destruction of the human race kind of grim) or overly-rosy (wind-turbines and hydrogen powered cars). All that matter is that the future will be very different. Energy will be very expensive. Consumer goods will become rare. There will be no more consumerism. There will be no more fossil fuels. Energy will be clean and sustainable. There just won’t be much of it. Hence life will be simpler and slower. The economy will not be an engine for growth. There will be no time or money or energy for ambitious foreign policy, armies, warships, bomber planes or any of this paraphernalia. Things will stay the same for long periods and things will not always get better.
The greatest treasury we leave our descendents will be the contents of our landfill sites.
Free-market dogma suggests that the free hand of the market will conjure up some technological marvel to cure our ills. This is both right and wrong. The free market did indeed conjure up the early oil exploration but that was easy – you just had to drill in the right place. A free market didn’t exactly put a man on the moon. The market responds to price triggers. Technology becomes viable as the substitute's price increases. However, that substitute may require 50 years development whilst the price of oil has just gone up a million%. How quickly can a free market respond? In any changing market there is a time of social adjustment and it will be painful for many. Your economy may completely collapse and your people starve well before the price mechanism conjures up anything other than fuel poverty. Our free markets have done nothing but conjure up greed and the ever speedier gobbling up of finite resources. So we had all better hope that things happen very slowly for the free market to adjust to the new reality. The fear is that the pursuit of short term profit will lead to unwise investment decisions based upon the delusional premise of unlimited cheap oil.
Investment capital needs to be released into our futures and our commons. Not the past and the private. Failure to do so will lead to human suffering. Free markets do not always relieve human suffering if there is profit in that suffering. Hence the pain must be felt by the investment bankers, insurance firms, the WTO and financiers. Business is good. Small Business is good when the individuals running it are personally accountable for the actions of their Business activity. Likewise free markets are ‘good’ and the same is true for ‘democracy’. Sadly much of our ‘free markets’ are not free in the Adam Smith-sense of the word, nor are our ‘democracies’ democratic.
Hence the message is that you cannot wait for other people, either politicians or big business to prepare you for what has to be done. YOU must do what is necessary for YOU. And what you do is not divorced from the community, society and economy around you. Hence the wisdom in your buying power will effect the market and the Big Business. You control them, not vice versa. Likewise with politics. You vote for them. If you don’t like them find someone else to vote for or stand yourself. It is not true to say that you don’t know what to do. You have to look for the answers, and they are here.
The conclusion is that when we are all taking responsibility for our future and we all act to prepare ourselves for the future then the Market and Democracy will also work. They will not, by themselves, do anything useful. WE are the Market and we are the Politicians of this new society. They are not divorced from us. They only appear divorced because not enough people take positive actions. Not enough people care. What has to happen before you care? Do you have to be hungry, jobless or cold before you care? I would prefer to see that day off well in advance.
What will happen? Carbon rationing, i.e., fossil fuel rationing is heading to a gas pump near you. Will you be ready? And when we say ‘gas pump’ we don’t just mean the transport sector. We mean every aspect of the economy from building new homes to the food on your plate. You ration energy and you ration the economy. Hence we will need to find alternatives means of existence. If you are not ready then you will find this painful and you will suffer. If you have spent thirty years in preparation then you will find the change much easier.
How can I stop partying when everyone else is enjoying themselves? I am sacrificing something of mine and they are stealing it from me! Shouldn’t they suffer too? Oh, they will, in the longer term. Well, by doing it slowly day by day. By educating other people. It seems unfair when you have such a good habit in recycling every last item only to see your neighbours bin full to the brim. Why should you bother when they don’t? Because you are better then them. You will be happier.
Why happier? Do you really need a holiday? Do you need to fly for personal pleasure? Is it really pleasurable? Some fly a lot on Business and hate it. Learn to culture your dislike for things society teach you are ‘norma’l. You do not need a foreign holiday. NOBODY really needs to fly anywhere. Maybe your parents never flew anywhere on holiday and neither will your children. Did they miss out? Will your children. Flying is neither normal nor a right. It is a privilege born of cheap oil. It is a brief ‘high’ before reality takes control again.
If you need a car to drive to the shops or to work then this is a result of your society, economy and culture organising itself around the automobile. If it was not then none of this would be necessary. Hence the more people orientate themselves around NOT driving anywhere then our culture and economy will change to suit what we are doing. Sadly this is probably going to happen too late, i.e., when no one has any petrol to put in their cars. Then they will wander off to the local convenience store to find that it shut down due to competition from that big out of town supermarket you used to drive to. Therefore YOU must offer leadership to your community.
BUT everything costs more if I choose a low carbon lifestyle/fairtrade/ethical/organic. etc…. NO, it doesn’t. Cheap oil has subsidised everything else. Once you remove that you realise that you are paying for the true cost of goods. (Or something closer to the true cost.) What is the opportunity cost of paying this extra money? You can’t afford that twice yearly skiing holiday that you used to jet of too? Enough said!
Call it a form of voluntary taxation. You pay now for something that eventually everyone will be paying for. But you are ready for it. Look at it another – you offer leadership to the market by voting with your money. The more people that do this the more the market will change to accommodate this new reality. You are changing the world by creating a new norm. Sometimes it saves you money too! If you were not jetting off to the