Beyond Zero Emissions: What's Wrong with Big Green Tech

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[jal]

One cannot, for example, overestimate just how psychologically committed we are to the context into which we are born and have lived.
…
Nicole Foss: “Fortunately, other strategies exist beyond attempting to preserve the unpreservable. What we must do is to decentralize – to build parallel systems to deliver the most basic goods and services in ways that are simple, cheap and responsive to rapidly changing circumstances.”

HOW?

Easy.
Get the big fishes in the little ponds to lead the movement.

🙂
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[joshfloyd]

I think John cuts to the heart of things here with respect to the pervasiveness of the “big-system” worldview. The Beyond Zero Emissions approach to thinking about energy transitions is a sobering case study of just how hard it is to climb out of the “big systems” and “hard engineering” way of thinking about effective response to our situation. I have some first hand experience with this. I’m in Melbourne, Australia, where BZE is also based. Matthew Wright, BZE’s founder, gets a lot of air time here, and in fact the last time I heard him speak was at a debate as part of the Sustainable Living Festival in February, the subject of which was “Economic growth will save the planet” (https://festival.slf.org.au/program/sustainability-edge/economic-growth-will-save-planet). Nicole Foss was also a participant, and the gulf between the quality of Nicole’s response and Matthew’s couldn’t have illustrated more starkly the divide in worldviews. Those I spoke to afterwards agreed to a person that Nicole was far and away the standout, both in terms of message and delivery, while Matthew just shouldn’t have been on the same stage. To be fair, he wasn’t actually spruiking the BZE message–but if his contribution to the debate was anything to go by, it did little for BZE’s credibility.
In terms of the scale of the challenge in bridging this worldview divide, I also have some direct personal experience. For a number of years I’ve taught post graduate courses in sustainability thinking and energy foresight, the approach to which is well aligned in many important respects with TAE, and with the concerns John raises above. At least one of my former students was part of the team that produced the BZE stationary energy transition report. I don’t know for sure that he wasn’t trying to bring the influence of our courses into that work–but if so, this certainly wasn’t reflected in the outcomes. This is pretty much reflective of the overall experience bringing a worldview-centred approach to formal “sustainability education”. Some run with it, for others it’s just a source of bemusement.
I’ll be keen to hear Illargi’s expanded views on the problems of Big Green Tech. My own take on the BZE approach (along with the Greenpeace Energy Revolution report from a few years back, and the similar one from WWF) is available here: https://beyondthisbriefanomaly.org/2012/02/29/energy-transitions-feasibility-studies-and-the-limits-of-abstraction-the-case-for-a-soft-systems-approach/

[einhverfr]

Recently I have fallen in with Distributists (mostly Catholic and Orthodox, but I like to think I am helping bring Distributism to Neopaganism as well). Distributism arose in the English Catholic community in the early 20th century as a reaction against big systems thinking and an attempt to get back to an agrarian, small business society. Chesterton for example (while rather caustic in his religious views) made the insight that I think fits this article very well:

“Too much capitalism does not mean too many capitalists but rather too few.”

That’s about it. Not much more can be said there except to say that too few capitalists will always lead to too much capitalism. In the end I think that distributed economies are fundamentally better than centralized ones. In this regard I think Distributism beats Capitalism at its own game.

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