An Overdose of Pessimism

According to James Lovelock, father of the Gaia hypothesis that the Earth is one giant living organism, we’re doomed. In recent writings, including his book “The Revenge of Gaia”, he explains: “We are in a fool’s climate, accidentally kept cool by smoke, and before this century is over billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable.”

He is referring, of course, to global warming, which he likens to an eon’s long fever for the planet. Because humanity is responsible for this warming that makes us the pathogen, a bleak take on our role in the wider world. And for Lovelock, it is probably too late for us to do much about it (except by a rapid and complete switch to nuclear power).

Lovelock is not alone. A host of doomsayers–from James Kunstler in his “The Long Emergency” to Matt Savinar on his blog “Life After the Oil Crash”–predict the end of civilization as we know it with the end of our culture’s life blood: oil. Not unlike Thomas Malthus predicting mass starvation based on an imbalance between population and food production in the 19th century, they believe that humanity cannot surmount its present addiction to oil.

They may be right. Just because humanity invented its way out of a food crisis to prove Malthus wrong is no reason to think that we can do it again when so much of our lives–the fuel to run our transportation, the electricity to power the computers that dominate our lives (and on which I am writing and posting this screed), and yes, our food production–rely on ever-diminishing and ever-polluting fossil fuel resources, primarily oil.

Scientific American