Kunstler: Upscale

…The past five days I went to a pretty major environmental conference put on by the Aspen Institute in their odd little mountain town — and nobody needs to tell me how un-correct it was that I flew all the way out to Denver and then drove a rent-a-car the size of a humpback whale deep into the heart of the Rocky Mountains to attend this thing. (I assure you, I wasn’t paid to go.) The Institute grounds — which looked like the set of a 1950s Raymond Massey movie about the future — were thick with many eminentissimos of Climate Change (minus Al Gore) and activists in “green” politics, more generally. The latest frightful measurements of retreating glaciers, vanishing species, and creeping deserts were proffered and everybody was suitably impressed by the acceleration of scary conditions facing the human race.


Being such a formal conference, though, with the putative mission to advance understanding and set agendas-for-action, a great effort was made through the medium of panel discussions to set forth various “initiatives” to deal with all the scariness, especially by enlisting the agencies of the US Government — and most especially with the prospect of a new administration sweeping out the detritus of Bush-dom next January.

I confess I found most of these well-intentioned proposals utterly implausible, along with their trains of hopes, wishes, and fantasies. The main conceit is that we can keep all the normal operations of the American Dream humming by some “non-carbon” related energy source — in other words, run WalMart without oil, methane gas, or coal — and that all the forces of government and capital can be marshaled to make that happen. The secondary conceit is that they would accomplish these things in an orderly process, harnessing “new technology,” as though it were a higher sort of school science fair.

My own opinion is that these birds have the scale issue wrong. The exigencies of the Long Emergency imply that virtually everything organized at the grand scale will tend to wobble and fail as the problems of energy scarcity and climate change converge. Institutions from the federal government to WalMart to the University of Arizona will face increasing impotence, incompetence, and bankruptcy. Vesting our hopes in propping up activities run at that scale is bound to be disappointing, to say the least, and the precursor to social upheaval to go a bit further. There’s probably a lot we can do at the finer and more modest scale, but that is not the scale that conferences like this focus on– in particular because so many of the participants are current or former high-up government wonks themselves. Anyway, the scale of global distress tends, by plain inference, to invoke the wish for global “solutions,” however detached from reality they may be.

Kunstler.com