The reality, according to Nafeez, is worrying.
“This century is the end of the age of fossil fuels and it doesn’t matter which way you look at it, even if you look at it from an optimistic perspective, you’re still looking at declining and depleting during the first quarter of this century,” he told Hopkins, the co-founder of the Transition communities movement .
“You’re looking at us running pretty low, costs getting high, and that impacting the economy, impacting our contemporary industrial way of life and causing a lot of problems if we don’t make those choices now to change the way we do things,” Nafeez said. “And I think that’s really the picture that I’m trying to get across. People get very bogged down with the detail of whether we’re going to peak in 2015 or if we’re going to peak in 2020 or 2035. For me, the peak in 2025 or 2030 is bad enough. We need to start preparing for these issues now.”
Nafeez told Hopkins that the world is moving into an era of expensive energy as fossil fuel sources become increasingly hard and expensive to extract. The fossil fuel companies and governments are talking about a boom but the reality is the continuous growth model is faltering.
“At the moment we face such an amazing and impressive convergence of different challenges, with environmental degradation, climate change, resource depletion, and these are obviously affecting our societies here and now. People talk about what’s going to happen in the future but we’re already seeing the impact on our societies in terms of food production, in terms of challenges to the way in which our societies are able to live and source their general industrial production.
“It’s impacting on the prices of everything. Everything is more expensive now. So we’re already starting to see the impact. There are some who’ve argued specifically that the kind of very specific global economic slowdown we’ve had since 2008, since the big banking collapse, and the events that have followed, are actually rooted in a wider, deeper problem based on our dependence on certain types of energy, namely fossil fuels. I think that’s a very plausible argument and the argument essentially goes something like, we are effectively in the age where cheap fossil fuels is no longer really an option.
“We’re now moving into the age of very expensive energy, whichever way you look at it. Our complete and utter dependence on cheap fossil fuels to basically do everything means that as we enter this age of more expensive forms of energy we’re facing this fundamental baseline problem, which is undermining the ability of industrial civilisation to do the things that it is used to doing at the cost at which it is used to doing them. This is how the argument goes, that this is what’s keeping growth down, keeping the fundamental dampener on growth.”
A massive change is needed but mainstream economics and modern-day societies have not taken this on board yet, according to Nafeez.
“I think we’re at a point now where we can make that choice, to say maybe we can harness the positives that we’ve developed with industrial civilisation and develop something new, a post-growth, post-industrial form of civilisation that doesn’t reject science and technology but recognises that ultimately you have to be living within the limits of your environmental systems. Unfortunately we don’t see that happening in mainstream economics. It’s very, very difficult to get economists to realise that the economy doesn’t exist in a silo, it’s embedded in the environment.”
For the full interview, check out Transition Network: HERE.
