Environmentalism is a self-harming meme
Man cannot survive by memes alone. Nevertheless, we’re currently determined to test meme-life to destruction.
We’re emotionally airlifted to a destination, then we labour to deploy our rational selves to justify where we have landed.
The digital economy enables collaboration at scale and pace previously unimaginable. Novel and fast covid vaccines are a superb example of how fast and far we can move with our digital tailwind.
A darker collaborative perspective on the digital economy is its potential to globalise civil wars. Civil wars are the worst conflicts as once escalated they destroy our lived compromises and make enduring peace hard without the subjugation or extermination of one of the participating tribes.
Meme-life is a significant accelerant in our current nascent civil wars — the culture, race and environment conflicts in Western societies. Like the Arab Spring, real concerns, instabilities and injustices in need of resolution underlie these causes. Like with the Arab Spring, hypermedia information platforms may be accelerating a ‘just’ uprising without a realisable solution.
The memes are strong, crossing borders and continents. Protesters share a feeling more than a shared aim. Of these struggles the environmental conflict is the one that has the potential to be hypermedia accelerated to a state whereby meme overwhelms our lived and accepted reality, driving fissures and failures that lead to outright conflicts.
That pumping carbon and other pollutants into the atmosphere and exhausting and damaging our environment and biodiversity, all alongside a planet heaving with humans, presents humanity with real existential catastrophe risk is without question. How to quantify and manage that risk is full of uncertainty. The meme masters would have you believe it’s a simple choice, a simple identity. The question they pose is merely do you have the morality to choose righteously? Do you have the correct religion?
The environmentalist meme of the moment is that the science on climate risk is settled and that we are living in a climate emergency. The imminence of catastrophe may prove true and an argument that it is already here can be made. But the ‘scientific’ unequivocality and immediacy of climate emergency is a dangerously explosive meme absent a real world plan that uncomprehending voters can get behind. The dark underside of stoked fear is cynicism and nihilism…and violence.
Radical environmentalism is increasingly mainstream and it disables our ability to cope in a rational pragmatic precautionary way with environmental risks. The solution presented is to stop all evil and magically the good solution will establish itself. Only those imbued with recalcitrant evil prevent the awakening. A meme cocktail that lays the grounds for dehumanisation of opponents and conflict. We will see eco-terrorism and murder this decade.
The unequivocal but always avoided truth is that human society at all levels of sophistication is an energy based system. We cannot live well beyond the amount of excess energy we harness. Free will, free time, education, art, technological advancement, food abundance. The extent to which we enjoy these privileges is the extent to which we live in an excess energy system.
All of human advancement is a story of better harnessing of energy. Never have we replaced an energy source. Rather, as our use of energy grows we just add a new even better source on top. That we plan to do something so entirely revolutionary and novel as replacing our dominant energy source within a few years is not rational expectations. It’s meme-pumped ideological thinking.
A rational non ideological starting place would be a focus on impactful technologies we understand well and can accelerate their development and deployment to combat carbonageddon. So yes, wind and solar, although don’t downplay the carbon invested in actualising these solutions. However, if we’re genuine and rational rather than meme-pious then nuclear fission and carbon capture must play, at a minimum, a significant accelerated transitory role as we await new systemically applicable energy sources and facilitating technological solutions.
Technology is not energy, be wary of the evangelists and charlatans who peddle that line. Sadly, we are quite gullible when it comes to the magic of technology now that it has moved well beyond our lay comprehension. No energy solution we have true technological sight of comes anywhere near the energy density and portability of oil, nor its massive energy return on investment (EROI). Oil’s EROI is our affluence and technological sophistication!
Absent a technological revolution like no other in the space of a few years, none of the green energies can replace hydrocarbons. Anyone who claims differently has not committed to any serious system thinking around how human society functions. To proclaim a net zero religiosity without wholesale systemic energy planning and investment is magical thinking on a scale never before seen or attempted. Any serious plan must include investment in and management of hydrocarbons to facilitate the rapture, sorry, I mean transition.
Our strengthening environmental idealism could make the destructive grand ideological experiments of Soviet and Sino socialism look like minor dream sequences or The Inquisition seem scientifically rational by comparison.
The net zero meme is being religiously adopted by politicians, legislators and business. They are desperate to harness the power of the meme for short term approval clueless to the consequences. Like the environmental militants they too do not have an executable plan for net zero. Nevertheless they are setting targets and laws. They are setting the trap.
It’s becoming more likely that we will experience an energy crisis soon. The size and consequence of this crisis will overwhelm the climate crisis narrative for most people. None of us understand the science or long term consequences either way but we will understand the immediate effects of the energy crisis and the attendant deep and painful personal costs it brings.
This is a road to real intra and inter societal conflict. The chances it moves from civil disobedience to hot internal or external wars is high. Our foes know this and for that reason the likes of China and Russia are intent on ensuring maximum energy supply to their economies and that means a lot of hydrocarbons. Watch what they do, not what they say.
The more we embrace meme unreality, the more likely it is we hopelessly or desperately capitulate to hydrocarbon gorging in the next few years, to hell with the long term.
Will we survive our meme surfing or is it our road to renewed serfdom?
