Our tails get in the way

The problems and principles of energy descent

…Let us imagine ourselves climbing up a rather steep and precarious tree, boosted up by fossil energies into a place we simply could never get to without them. The problems we are facing right now all originate in our fundamental inability to voluntarily set limits — that is, at no point did most of us even recognize the basic necessity of stopping at a point at which we could get down on our own, without our petrocarbon helpers. So right now we look like Tiggers high in the trees — we can climb up, but we can’t climb down. Is the problem our fear or that our tails (our structural addictions to energy) get in the way? It can be hard to tell. But what is not terribly hard to tell is that one way or another, we have to come down — and probably quite rapidly. The goal is to avoid a painful “thud” upon descent.


Why do we have to come down? Well, there are two compelling reasons. The first is this: We can’t keep burning fossil fuels, period. And we have very little time to make our choices. The evidence for this has been building up steadily over the last two years, but the paper that James Hansen presented a few weeks ago pretty much put the final nail in the coffin — the old targets for carbon reduction are far too high, and we are going to essentially have to reduce industrial emissions to near zero, and very soon.

Gristmill