The 8 Emotional Responses to Peak Oil
|
Tweet this story! Support our efforts for a sustainable world.
|
|
The following article has been adapted for the web from The Transition Handbook: From oil dependency to local resilience by Rob Hopkins.
It is worth pausing to reflect on how all of this thinking about peak oil and the changes ahead is affecting us. Having been around the subject of peak oil for a while, I have observed many people go through the process of becoming aware of peak oil, having what I sometimes call their ‘End of Suburbia moment’, and have seen how that awareness affects them. For some it is a traumatic shock, for others an affirmation of what they have always suspected. For many though, it is not so clear-cut either way. I have noticed, over the years, certain symptoms of what I have come to call ‘post-petroleum stress disorder’. Perhaps you might recognise some of them:
1. Clammy palms or nausea and mild palpitations
Finding out about something with such profound ramifications for the way we live can be a profound shock to the system. There are certain ways our bodies respond to this, and for many people the first manifestation of this disorder is physical discomfort.
2. A sense of bewilderment and unreality
Many spiritual traditions speak of a ‘dark night of the soul’, when the nature of the emptiness of reality is revealed and we are forced to let go of the understanding to which we have become attached. Peak oil and climate change put a mirror up to our lives and the society around us, enabling us to see that what we had seen as being permanent and real is in fact a fragile illusion, dependent on long supply lines and an uninterrupted flow of cheap oil. When you see the illusory nature of the world around you, it can leave you feeling bewildered.
I remember a science fiction film I saw years ago called They Live, which started with a man finding a box of sunglasses behind some dustbins. When he put a pair on, he could see that many of the people around him were in fact aliens who were in the process of taking over the Earth. Whenever he looked at advertising billboards, what had read ‘Drink X, it’ll make you happy’, now read ‘Consume and Die’ and so on. Unfortunately, the film then degenerated into a relentless blasting of aliens with guns, but it was a very powerful metaphor for what an emerging awareness of peak oil does to our perception of the world.
3. An irrational grasping at unfeasible solutions
“Aha!” some people say, “it’ll all be fine because we’ll just switch to hydrogen!” Or nuclear power, or free energy machines made using technology recovered from UFOs. We are even told that hundreds of earnest souls, beavering away in their garages, have created devices that can yield untold quantities of free energy, in complete disregard of the laws of thermodynamics, but that every time they are about to launch them publicly, they are bought out by oil companies and the plans are put in a drawer; or that other, more sinister things happen to them. Either that, one might say, or actually they just never invented them. Or they didn’t work.
Anyway, for those suffering from this symptom, there is a confident belief that there is a silver bullet out there that will enable business-as-usual to continue uninterrupted, steadily growing our economies ad infinitum. As we saw in Part One of The Transition Handbook, the more one looks at it, there is no single technology that can enable us to continue as we are. Nuclear, hydrogen, ‘clean’ coal and biofuels all have severe limitations. Fossil fuels have been a one-off energy bonanza that nothing else can replace (indeed, it has been argued that we are close to ‘Peak Everything’, to use the name of Richard Heinberg’s latest book4). That doesn’t prevent people grasping at things that simply won’t work. It is what Heinberg calls ‘Waiting for the Magic Elixir’.5 The reality is that all the technologies and appliances that we will need are already out there in the world; we just have to get on with it, rather than fantasising about impending wonder technologies.
4. Fear
In our work promoting responses to peak oil and climate change, we should not lose sight of the fact that for many people this is a very frightening subject. Indeed, one could argue that if you don’t find it scary, you haven’t really got it. For some, that fear can be paralysing, and for others it can trigger a shut-off mechanism. It is important that we don’t just dump potentially scary information on people, but rather we need to allow an exchange of information and room for people to digest what they have been told.
5. Outbreaks of nihilism and/or survivalism
For some, peak oil can affirm their long-held belief that people are inherently selfish anyway and what is the point – we’ve all had it. The survivalist response differs in that rather than thinking it is not worth doing anything, it assumes that one should prioritise self and loved ones above all else, that one should design for one’s own survival; that a ‘head for the hills’ response is a valid one. This response is a particularly North American one, as I found out in response to a piece I wrote called ‘Why the survivalists have got it wrong’. It elicited more comments than any other previous piece on Transition culture, offering a fascinating insight into those for whom individual survivalism is seen as a viable option. Some came via survivalist websites which featured such gems as “Which is better, a gun or a club? You can use a gun as a club, but you can’t use a club as a gun.” Of course in the US, heading for the hills is more of an option, in the UK we simply don’t have the space, and decanting en masse to Dartmoor or Snowdonia would be a fairly unrewarding process. The most usual manifestation of this symptom that one encounters in the UK is “Well, we’ll be OK, we’ve got a little place in the Pyrenees.”
Ultimately, any response that is sufficient to the scale of the challenge is about coming home, about being aware that we are a part of the networks around us, and that we need to nurture and rebuild them, rather than imagining that we can survive independently of them. Indeed, we could see a belief that we can exist and flourish independently of the communities around us as being a dubious ‘luxury’ of the Age of Cheap Oil. We will have to learn to meet and greet each other once again, as well as learning how to co-operate and communicate.
6. Denial
In this time when climate change and peak oil are so rapidly entering the public consciousness, and the implications of what they will mean are starting to sink in, inevitably, for some people, denial comes to the fore. This can take many forms. It could be the man I sat next to on a bus who told me he had seen a TV programme where a scientist had said the world was, in fact, warming from the inside out (!), or it could be those who say that climate change is caused by sunspots or by natural cycles, despite the wealth of evidence to the contrary. It could be those who say that climate change is actually a conspiracy cooked up by the New World Order in order to further curb our freedoms, or that peak oil is a conspiracy by the oil industry to allow them to make more money. The internet is full of half-truths and misunderstandings for those who wish to construct such denial mechanisms.
One of my favourite denial stories comes from my friend Graham Strouts,6 who tells of a conversation with a woman with whom he had been discussing the impacts peak oil will have on the food supply system. They discussed how oil-dependent food is, and how vulnerable the system is. Then, to Graham’s amazement she said, “Well it doesn’t worry me – my husband didn’t eat for a year once.” Didn’t eat for a year?! Apparently he had done some kind of meditation practice and she was convinced he hadn’t eaten for a year. Of course the assertion that it is a fairly well established scientific fact that if you take the food away from a population, they tend to start keeling over after a few weeks didn’t do too much to change her position.
There is no way of completely avoiding denial, as none of us is beyond it. It pops up in all kinds of unexpected guises, and it is a natural reaction; we can’t go around thinking about climate change, peak oil and the end of economic globalisation ALL the time after all! It becomes a problem when it closes us to the realities of the issue, and inhibits our ability to respond. Denial is a natural response, but we need to remain vigilant to it.
7. Exuberant optimism
At the end of the first public screening of The End of Suburbia that I organised in Ireland, a man in the audience said: “We’ve just been told the Oil Age is coming to a close, to which I say, ‘bring it on!’.” While I can appreciate the sentiment he expressed, it is not quite so straightforward. As the Hirsch Report identifies, to make the transition away from the oil-based economy will require at least ten years, preferably twenty, and a failure to adequately prepare would be disastrous. Responding to peak oil with exuberant optimism needs to be balanced with an appreciation of the massive challenge it presents.
8. The ‘I always told you so’ syndrome
I must confess that I see this one in myself. Having been involved in permaculture and natural building for many years, I naturally see peak oil as the opportunity to roll out permaculture and straw/clay houses with hemp plasters on a previously unimagined scale. For those interested in organics, peak oil is seen as the opportunity to really step up organics on a far bigger scale. The home-schoolers, the off-the-gridders, the market gardeners and the home composters may well all have their “I told you so” moments. This, for me, is entirely laudable, and a natural reaction for those who have for years been promoting various aspects of the post-carbon society years ahead of time. However, there are other people out there who are waiting to use peak oil for their ‘I Always Told You So’ moments from not such benign motivations.
The British National Party have taken to the issue of peak oil with great gusto, popping up at peak oil gatherings and declaring that within the peak oil challenge are the seeds to their ascendancy. Historically, fascists have always preyed on times of economic collapse and hardship, and this one is no different. One needs to take any claims of “I told you so” (including mine) with a questioning mind and great discernment.
It is clear, for example, that for the makers of the classic peak oil film The End of Suburbia, who were no fans of suburbia to start with, peak oil provided a great opportunity to dance upon its grave. The temptation to say “I told you so” can also mean that we neglect to really analyse the strengths and weaknesses of our proposed solutions in the context of diminishing net energy. We need to really think through the implications – in a low-energy context – of our proposals, and not remain too attached to our long-cherished beliefs and ideas. We may find instead that by letting go of them we actually come up with something better and more appropriate to a culture in transition.
Resources
- Heinberg, R. (2007) Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines, New Society Publishing.
- Heinberg, R. (2004) Powerdown: options and actions for a post-carbon world, Clairview Books.
- A permaculture teacher at Kinsale FEC, who publishes www.Zone5.org.
