Fossil Fuels and Modern Myths

This is the tenth article in a series about the Earth-system – how our planet has shaped us as human beings, and how we, in turn, have shaped it. Read the series: Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5 | Part 6 | Part 7 | Part 8 | Part 9 | Part 11 | Part 12

As heterodox economist Steve Keen likes to point out: Technology without energy is a sculpture. A city without energy is a museum. And labour without energy is a corpse.

That’s a vivid summation of the fact that there is no economy without work, and there is no work without the flow of energy. But we do not create energy. We can only take existing energy and change its form, converting heat energy into motion or motion into electricity, for instance. And as energy flows through the processes of doing work, converting from one form to another, some of it is lost at every step, irreversibly depleted as waste heat that can’t be recovered to perform work, including to support life. These rules governing energy flows of course also apply to the human economy.

Yet our presently dominant mythological universe—which guides policy today no less than the ancient Sumerian belief system guided theirs—doesn’t accept these kinds of empirical constraints. It teaches instead that different forms of energy and materials are perfectly substitutable and able to sustain energy use and economic growth without limits. Its stories dismiss the diminishment of the living world and dismemberment of its essential geochemical cycles as though they’re neutral to the flows of energy and materials that comprise the global economy. It even posits that technology can substantially ‘decouple’ economic growth from consumption and its associated pollution.

Illustration: Pariplab Chakraborty

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Our modern stories substitute money for energy and materials, and then reify money as a thing in itself. Disregarding physics and ecology, they foreground the finances that represent the flows of capital in the world. But the finances aren’t real, in that they don’t account for the true biophysical cycles and interrelationships constraining the larger system which provides all that capital. Finances float above the world, when reality is enmeshed within the world; they constitute merely a selectively descriptive artifice, an opaque bubble of reasoning that ultimately obstructs our view of what’s actually happening in the larger, biophysical world of which we’re an inseparable part.

This modern story-verse lets us imagine that we can get more out of a system than what goes into it. We call this magic profit. But it is a trick of accounting. For gains at the center of our finite system are actually losses from its peripheries; whatever we take as profit is ultimately felt as a loss to someone or something else. In the present world, that loss usually cuts most deeply into the non-human biosphere as well as the most vulnerable members of global society. Of course, our mythology simply labels losses to the biosphere or the exploitable classes as externalities: things that don’t concern us. Yet they do concern us, for by over-extracting from them, we’re destroying the body within which we live.

The main intervention that separates many of us from the toll our modern way of life extracts from the Earth-system is the windfall of combustible fossils we’ve found. These have temporarily expanded the pool of energy at our disposal by many thousand times, compared to when we lived by the daily flows of solar energy, alone. This transient glut of energy has allowed us to build infrastructures and technologies that delay our awareness of some of the worst consequences of our overexploitation—or at least keep them hidden from the notice of the wealthier segments. Take for instance, the use of air-conditioning to fend off the rising heat of global warming. Or the daily transport of mountains of trash from urban centers to outlying areas—sometimes to other countries. Or fishing that uses industrial vessels to travel farther, faster, and longer and still bring back large hauls of seafood, even while ocean life rapidly collapses; meanwhile, many fisherfolk limited to paddle or wind power can no longer adequately feed themselves from near shore.

Think of the use of artificial agro-chemicals that supplement our exhausted, depleted soils, enabling us to grow more food today, even while worsening soil depletion and water pollution in the longer term—not to mention the impact of such chemicals on human health. Consider the groundwater mechanically pumped for irrigation today, increasingly dehydrating those same lands into the future. Then there’s the fact that about half the nitrogen in any human body (on average) now comes from fertilisers derived using natural gas—meaning at least half of us literally wouldn’t even exist without it.

Combustible fossils have enabled us to separate our need for fire from the daily and seasonal cycles of solar replenishment, which had always limited how much work was possible before. Now we can make seemingly unlimited amounts of fire—extra-somatic energy—as fast as we want, deploying it to grow more food, increase the human population, and consume Earth’s resources at a rate at least 1.7 times the rate it takes to replenish what we’ve taken. Of course, this figure can’t account for resources that are non-renewable on any human timescale, like marble and copper and combustible fossils, so the true rate of over-consumption is actually far more extreme. But it’s clear enough that if we’re using excess energy to exploit any essential resources faster than the Earth-system can replenish them, then our rate of consumption is, by definition, unsustainable.

Today a person who lives like a middle-income American uses extra-somatic energy greater than the labour of 400 people working on their behalf every day—you might say they have 400 ‘fossil-energy slaves.’ Yet we’ve become so accustomed to this fossil energy that we take it as an entitlement, part of our casual expenditure.

This glut of excess energy came as a boon to formerly enslaved humans and animals because humans and animals are more costly to maintain than dredging and delivering energy from ancient sunlight stored in combustible fossils. Systems of forced labor began to crumble away as the fossil energy juggernaut gained steam during the 18th and 19th centuries. Despite this, it’s worth noting that there are more enslaved persons in the world today than at any previous time in history. Intimate and domestic work, commercial fishing, brick-making, and a few other contexts remain, in which fossil energy apparently hasn’t been able to replace the scope of benefits derived from enslaved or exploited workers. This tracks with the logic of capitalism, whereby humans and other living things are commodified as labor or resource stocks, and the motive to profit off of them exerts downward pressure to exploit them as much as possible, literally stealing their life energy for the exploiter’s benefit.

‘Fossil-energy slaves’ don’t need to be fed and housed. But they do create an overload of excrement in the form of excess carbon dioxide, which heats the planet and acidifies the oceans, and sooty particulates, which soil the air. We have for centuries ignored these costs, while it has accrued to extremes that now threaten life as we know it.

By August of 2023, humans had already exceeded Earth’s capacity to renew the resources we had used, globally, since the start of the year. This means global human consumption requires 1.75 Earths to meet its annual demand. Image source: Earth Overshoot Day. Image credit: National Footprint and Biocapacity Accounts

There are those who insist that technology can forever continue to shield us from the consequences of our actions, that, in fact, the Invisible Hand of the market will guide us to solutions. But thus far, market-driven technological innovation has not proven itself to be a rectifying force in broadly addressing ecological balance. Rather, it manufactures human needs, which it then promises to fulfill, for good or ill, and without regard to equity or sustainability of any kind. No one has so far explained how a system set up to enrich small groups of investors, who will do whatever it takes to make their returns, externalizing the harms while privatizing the gains, might now begin to build a world in which environmental problems are solved without creating new ones—driving us deeper into our progress trap—or further exploiting people. Restoring ecological balance will never be the goal of this profit-maximising economic system.

Capitalism, in fact, works against cooperation and mutual aid. It requires institutional poverty to keep labor cheap. Economic elites actually spoke this aloud in the US in 2021, when workers given economic relief during the COVID-19 pandemic refused to return to work in some of the most exploited sectors of the economy. In response, elites unabashedly remarked that workers should not have been given financial assistance. Rather, they should have been kept economically desperate so as to induce them to continue working in poor conditions for low wages. As anthropological economist Jason Hickel says, ‘It is critically important to understand that the dual social-ecological crisis is being driven, ultimately, by the capitalist system of production. The two dimensions are symptoms of the same underlying pathology.’

In promoting a belief that economies can grow infinitely on a planet with finite materials and energy flows, modern mainstream economic models are completely untethered from biophysical realities. They amount to a dangerous delusion. And yet, they dominate the present conversation on how to maintain our only planetary home. We should be wary of advice promulgated by economists or scientists—or anyone—who makes claims in contradiction of biophysical constraints or who is disinclined to entertain a more holistic framing of our predicament and how our planetary system works, even acknowledging its many facets that remain still a mystery to us.

This includes most orthodox neoliberal economists, such as William Nordhaus, whose prize-winning economic analyses of the costs of global warming have become a standard approach for evaluating responses to climate change. Yet the conclusions seem breathtakingly naive regarding the effects this calamity will have on actual human bodies and endeavours, treating the problem as though the human system is separate from the Earth-system. One must recognize, for example, that mounting crop failures due to rising heat represent not merely a drop in GDP contributed by a small sector of the economy but famine and death for swathes of people, mass migration, social instability, geopolitical upheaval. I daresay, heat will directly or indirectly come to affect labor and productivity even among workers in air-conditioned offices, whom Nordhaus felt assured could simply continue business as usual. Analyses like these are a reminder that modes of denial come in many flavours.

The myths of mainstream economics have infected multiple other disciplines too, colouring the way investigators frame their questions. They’re built into the scientific analyses of the IPCC reports, for instance, in promoting ‘net zero’ as a sensible emissions reduction target. Yet ‘net zero’ isn’t possible without massively scaled carbon capture infrastructures—which don’t exist! And while no evidence is forthcoming that they can ever exist, ‘net zero’ remains central to official conversations because it is the only ‘solution’ that protects the economic growth imperative. Similarly, the most ‘hopeful’ IPCC scenarios accept a 67 percent chance of restraining global warming to (maybe) sub-catastrophic levels (at least for the Global North, given it’s already passed the point of catastrophe for millions). Who would board a plane that had a 33 percent chance of crashing? Yet these are the approaches modelled and promoted by the IPCC because they’re the ones that can still be squared with economic growth.

Not one of the mitigation pathways highlighted by the IPCC includes modelling that imagines growth curtailed through policy means—a managed reduction of ‘productivity,’ first by reducing workdays, for instance—or takes into account the possibility of economic collapse directly resulting from the impacts of climate change. But, in fact, end-of-growth scenarios are the most likely, most necessary, and therefore most deserving of our attention. Equitably reducing and stabilising the size of humanity’s environmental footprint on a global scale is the only way to address ecological overshoot—which is the underlying, existential problem we face.

Yet post-growth scenarios lie beyond the scope of establishmentarian discussion. Among the power brokers, it’s simply taboo to question either the growth imperative or the superiority and absolute virtue of techno-industrial civilisation. It’s forbidden to question the business-as-usual material entitlements of the highest consuming sectors of global society, whatever the cost to the rest.

The self-delusional sleight-of-hand frequently employed is the promise that growing the economy will bring everyone along to some acceptable level of equity by promoting ‘development’—teasing the world with visions of everyone living like a comfortable American. But this is a fantasy, at best. Conjuring illusions of eternal growth is a way of stealing from the voiceless—including future generations—to enrich the most powerful in the present. Industrial ‘development’ is a form of colonisation, in which Adivasis and Indigenous peoples are stripped of their autonomous, land-based livelihoods, and then reprogrammed into labourers and consumers, while their erstwhile resources are redeployed for industrial profits. In other words, the modern economy is a Ponzi scheme. It delivers benefits to some today only by stealing vast resources from the most vulnerable, today and into the future. It is self-limiting. And it will implode.

The momentary surfeit of cheap and abundant excess energy for the past three or ten generations (depending upon one’s location) has made it possible to dangerously delude ourselves about how our planet actually works, to the point of constructing a story-verse utterly detached from the biophysical realities to which we nevertheless remain bound. Today, we of industrial civilisation belong to a death cult where the prasad offered by our high priests is oil. We gulp it down, believing it to be our salvation.

The reality is that the proverbial pie—which is literally the material Earth and its sustainable energy flows—is fixed in size; it cannot be made larger. Attempts to enlarge it are foundationally destroying its ability to support multitudinous life—including humans—by causing global heating, extreme pollution, and biospheric collapse. Rather than fantasise about expanding it, we should be re-creating stories in resonance with what is biophysically true. We should be looking to redistribute what is real, equitably, in a manner that supports life across the whole of the biosphere. We should be trying to rediscover the holistic wisdom of non-industrial peoples, who understood themselves to be part of their environment, not separate from it, thereby rediscovering our potential human selves: beings who evolved to live in communities of shared meaning and mutual aid, not atomised nodes in de-socialised networks, locked into crass competition for basic subsistence or upward mobility.

Most of us, though, are inextricably enmeshed within this hegemonic system of capitalist overexploitation and overconsumption. In this context, what can we hope for? Some thoughts on this in the next essay.

Usha Alexander trained in science and anthropology. After working for years in Silicon Valley, she now lives in Gurugram. She’s written two novels: The Legend of Virinara and Only the Eyes Are Mine.