Keeping Score on the Hopium-Windup Purveyors – Part 1- Lester Brown

Not the most most fun, seeing how hopes ‘n dreams, plans n’ recommendations from our frontline authors and pundits have fared with the passage of a decade’s time, but this is the immediate fate of global humanity that we are talking ’bout, nothing less, so what could be more important than this to test the viability of macrofutilism?

Lester Brown was a capo in the climate change community, writing tons of books as the lead figure of the Worldwatch Institute, though he has long been retired, and the Worldwatch Institute probably was a few rooms and some file cabinets. As the lead author of “Plan B,” he was out to save humanity from the Climatastrophe, so let’s take a look at how his book World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse has stood the test of our recent time and age.

The first half of the book is a solid look, from the 2010 perspective of a very cited author, on the “deteriorating foundation” and “the consequences” of the global supersystem. Then comes the second half of the short book, which explicates the case for a soon-to-be-saved world, from this decade-old informed perspective. Remember, we are talking about the fate of the human world, as has been warned against by authors with research teams and long records of authorship, and what has now eventuated into our present. If you are looking for some good news in this examination of the global record, you can notice, as a human with at least a few hopes ‘n dreams left, that as of today, yes, we the living are not dead, yet.

1, Page 108: “And shifting public funds from highway construction to public transit and intercity rail would further bring the United States closer to the Plan B goal of cutting carbon emissions 80 percent by 2020.“

IN FACT: Global carbon emissions did not decrease by 80% – in polluted fact, they rose from 33.36 billion tons to 37.12 billon tons in 2021.

DISCUSSION: Lester Brown forgot to specify the mechanism to get global industry to, as James Hansen put it recently, forgo the free dumping of fossil fuel “in the air free of charge.” From the needed 80% reduction to stave off the Climatastrophe to an increase of over 10% is the ultimate confirmation of endemic institutional corruption that macrofutilism postulates.

Do not look for global carbon emissions to reduce 80% in the next decade, or to zero by 2050 as The Big Fix authors Hal Harvey and Justin Gillis have demanded in 2022. You don’t, by any chance, have that global enforcement mechanism handy, do you? You know, the one that will police the fossil-fuel-derived profits of our largest global corporations? “Carbon tax,” Hansen’s “carbon fee-and-dividend,” Harvey and Gillis’s magical Invisible Hand gravitating solely to “renewables,” any scheme or outlook or proposal you’ve got – who restrains, with all the necessary weight of violent policing and wholly transformed legal action, the most powerful actors in world history?

Come on, you’ve got to have an answer here. Global carbon emissions are on the worst trajectory possible, and the effects are going to be visible every day for the rest of your life, either in the news or right outside your doorstep.

Lester was right, by the way – 80% reduction of global carbon emissions was a precondition for the salvation of a return to the Holocene, but it didn’t happen. I didn’t pursue an 80% percent cut in my emissions in that decade, and neither did you. I am not going to do so willingly in the years to come, not unless the known world collapses around me, and I know no one who is planning to give up all social advantage to become -80% carbon people while all around them folks rush to grab their share of that cheap energy bounty.

Sure, you’ll recycle a little, maybe buy an electric car, get some new lightbulbs, perhaps even vote for a mush-mouthed old-timer for president whose apparatchiks issue nice climate pronouncements, but those “consumer” actions do not undue the damage of the past, and they are not, cumulatively, going to put a dent in those pesky yearly global carbon emissions. How are we getting down below 37 billion tons next year, gang? Ideas?

2. pg. 111 : “It is time for the United States to shift investment from roads and highways to railways to build a twenty-first century transportation system.

IN FACT: The US. Bureau of Transportation doesn’t even list “railways” on the list of “Us Passenger-Miles” table for 2000-2020. American roads are highways are stuffed, then and now, with fossil-fuel automobiles, light duty vehicles with short wheel bases, light duty vehicles with long wheel bases, trucks, combination trucks, two-axle trucks, and buses.

DISCUSSION: There are two cars in our household. One is a Honda Insight that gets 45+ miles per gallon, and the other is not. You own a car, too. Perhaps it’s a F-150, or a Hummer. Nobody is restricting your deity-authorized freedom to get in that car and drive to get some beef jerky, or to get to your bullshit job, or to see the fam so you don’t get disowned, or go see a Frank Valli tribute band this weekend at the casino. Those USA roads and highways are alive, coast to coast, with the sound of a crashing world to come. Those F-150s are not going to just sit in the driveways, are they? 2.8 trillion vehicle miles driven in 2020 as a grand decrease from the momentary high of 3.26 in 2019, but that’s still 2.8 trillion vehicle miles driven, almost all fossil-fueled, so, sorry, Lester’s dream was completely fanciful. We are drivin’ our ecosystems away, then, now, and into the future, as Eddie Rabbit sang.

3. pg. 113: “The US recycling rate for household appliances is estimated at 90 percent.”

IN FACT: Say what? Of the 22 million tons of small appliance waste in the US in 2020, only 5.6% was recycled.

DISCUSSION: The 2010s were a dismal failure as far as recycling vs. waste goes, so what will the 2020s be but yet more confirmation of this putrid custom of buying shit and then throwing it away in the good old US? Our household follows this tradition, not to the extent of yours, which is overflowing with trash and crap by the ton, mind you, but just ask the weekly trashman if we are good stewards of the earth. The trashmen of our country knoweth: Americans buy, and then they throw away. That’s what they’ve done, and that is what they will do, tearful Italian-American actor masquerading as a tearful indigenous elder for the benefit of the corporate greenwashing criminal gangs or not.

4. pg. 115: ” The opportunities to save energy are everywhere, permeating every corner of teh economy, every facet of our lives, and every country. Exploiting this abundance of wasted energy will allow the world to actually reduce total energy use over the next decade.”

IN FACT: Actually, that would be a resounding “no.” Total energy use over the decade of the 2010s. went contrastingly upwards yearly from 152,966 terrawatt hours in 2010 to 176,431 terrawatt hours in 2021, with a nice little pandemic dip that is all gone.

DISCUSSION: Energy efficiency gains would have been a nice idea, but as with all the corporate greenwashing pouring out of the well-funded Rocky Mountain Institute’s banana patch in Colorado, there are structural factors in humanity’s ultrasociality that lead to Jevon’s Paradox on this issue. Coal, oil, and natural gas are by far the leading -massive drivers of this constant increase, and if the good folks of the renewables world are correct in saying there will be a transition, sometime, that transition did not happen in the 2010s, and it is not happening now, and it will not come aboard with anything like the corporate fury that Plan B and the descendants of Plan B envision.

5. pg. 117: “Wind is the centerpiece of the Plan B energy economy. It is abundant, low cost, nd widely distributed; it scales easily and can be developed quickly. A 2009 survey of world wind resources published by the U.S. National Academy of Sciences reports a wind-generating potential on land that is 40 times the current world consumption of electricity from all sources.”

IN FACT: Wind did go up in the 2010s, starting out at 962 terrawatt hours in 2010 and “skyrocketing” to 4,872 terrawatt hours in 2021. However, coal, oil, and gas all beat wind by factors of 9, 10, 1nd 12. No centerpiece – more an afterthought in that decade,

DISCUSSION: Plans and reports that demonstrate theoretical yield of upsurges in nominally renewable energy sources are subject to the infinitely greater forces of socio-political power that control all energy markets.

6. pg. 129: “It is easy to envisage a world with thousands of geothermal power plants gnereating some 200,00 megawatts of electricity, the Plan B goal, by 2020.

IN FACT: OK, there is a total world geothermal power plant output of 15 gigawatts in 2021, but that math doesn’t turn out so well: 15 gigawatts X 1,000 = 15,000 megawatts, not 200,000.

DISCUSSION: This record is now epic failure after epic failure, and people wonder why there macrofutilism exists as a worldview? Well, people don’t “wonder” about a worldview that barely exists, but a stray bot might wonder, as well it should.

7. pg.: 133: “Google made headlines when it announced in mid-October 2010 that it was investing heavily in a $5 billion offshore transmission project stretching from New York to Virginia called the Atlantic Wind Connection.”

IN FACT; Alas, according to Wikipedia, “Financing for the project never lined up, reportedly because the low cost of natural gas made large scale offshore wind uncompetitive.”

DISCUSSION: So much hype, so many “innovative” projects within the global capitalist economic structure, so many premature deaths.

8. pg. 134: “Governments are considering a variety of policy instruments to help drive the transition from fossil fuels to renewables. These include tax restructuring, lowering the tax on income and raising the tax on carbon emissions to include the indirect costs of burning fossil fuels. If we can create an honest energy market, the transition to renewables will accelerate dramatically.”

IN FACT: Governments are still “considering” a variety of those fun “policy instruments,” – perhaps, maybe a junior intern or two might bring one up at the coffee break table, but all of these proposals lie in corporate shredder containers. The tax system continues this decade, as it did last decade, to obscenely reward fossil fuel corporate polluters and extract high levels of tax from middle class and poor people.

FINAL DISCUSSION: Sorry, nothing that was proposed by this reputable source and determined author was even remotely accomplished during that last benighted decade. Nothing. Zero.

This represents a track record for determining the fate of humanity on this one subject, applicable to the other major, world-definitional subjects like ultra-extreme wealth inequality, loss of biodiversity, healthcare disparities, extinctions of species, loss of common mental health, and others. However, as some people have come to understand, we as humans can do nothing about the human predicament, some of us have have enjoyed a ride atop the fossil fuel rocket ship, and there is no set date on when that ride ends for us. All we can ask of our next round of would-be saviors and futurologists is that they take a look back every once in a while, and then raise a toast to the enduring folly of ungovernable humanity.