Crash on Demand: Welcome to the Brown Tech Future

A couple of quick comments on your new essay.
1) the criticism of the US (and soon to be world) shale oil boom (note 4 in the essay) was not by a qualified person, and has already been shown to be inaccurate. It is a fact that many shales are full of hydrocarbons, and that the development of the technology required a lot of searching the ‘adjacent possible’ (see the book “where good ideas come from) by a several oil independents (see “The Frackers” book), and this was an expensive and risky business….essentially only undertaken due to desperation (which seems to be a capitalist phenomenon more than government one). It is also a fact that up to 50% of the rock in any particular geologic basin (see the wiki articles) are shales (vs. sandstone, etc.) The amount of rock in all of the world’s basins is massive. The important point here is that horizontal + fracked wells are very expensive, and require high oil/gas prices to pay for them. “High” is relative, but if the oil is there and worth $200/bbl, it doesn’t take a very efficient well to pay for that. So it is highly likely that oil produced from horizontal + fracked wells will be limited by the price of the oil (and not much else), that is until this technology has been fully deployed… possibly many trillions of dollars from now. I was trained as a petroleum engineer in the early 1980s and was somewhat surprised by these developments, based on what I was taught and saw in the 1980s and 1990s, but I know better than to argue with demonstrations in the field with arguments based on theory and stories from old text books. I have seen enough to not love the oil business, but I have learned to accept that there a lot of people that are clever, highly motivated, willing to take risks, and can see things that I can’t, given where they are in the ‘adjacent possible’… and their lack of interest in sharing their knowledge with the likes of me.
2) The above point has no force except in relation to time. Nothing is different but the number of years it will take to get past the ‘fossil fuel era’. This is manifest. But it is also possible/probably that many clever, highly motivated people with be able to come up with things unforeseen in our ‘planner’s droop’ oriented philosophy. Have a look at the many variants on fusion being pursued, from polywell and it’s kin to good-ol LENR. Failing success in one of these high-risk ventures, and given where I live in New Mexico, USA, where there is almost as much sunshine as in Australia, I am pretty sure that solar panels can go a long way to a stable energy consumption picture, at least everywhere that is not dramatically energetically overpopulated (see the David MacKay TED talk) such as the UK and most of the rest of Europe. The simple reason is that energetically, solar panels are a positive energy return item, i.e they return 4-5 times their energy investment. (See the “Do the Math” blog for more). There is no reason to believe that they will not continue to be built in large numbers until something better has come along…. the solar panel technology is easy and well understood. It’s not going anywhere. At worst, we will have to rearrange our consumption to better fit the 5 hours of high solar power availability, and a lot of people will have to move to the desert, but this assumes failure to develop liquid batteries (see the TED talk by Donald Sadoway). This is far from a full-on descent scenario.
As far as your politics goes, try reading “The Righteous Mind” to better understand the range of political ‘tastes’ and conservative institutions such as property ownership and where they come from. It never hurts to be informed… it’s what you don’t know that hurts you. I am sympathetic with people who are afraid of the future and want to be prepared…. this is the only strategy worth considering, given our lack of advancement over the ant and the grasshopper in the old tale.

Dear David Holmgren,
Whether a problem can be solved–or whether it’s even worth solving–often depends on how you define the problem.
So, “thank you.” One way our global “problem” can be defined, is by individual suffering and happiness, and your work has helped me to personally transcend a great deal of suffering to find happiness and contentment. Most obviously, you have helped me to start building my own beautiful, resilient, low-impact way of life, with a rewarding connection to nature that I couldn’t have imagined 10 years ago. But your Permaculture Principles have also helped me to reconnect to my career as a classical musician in a way that turned burn out (literally, personal energy depletion) into regenerative activity.
I try to be “worthy” of that “solution” by paying it forward.
No matter what the future brings, this “problem” will continue to be worth the attention of Permaculturists.
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I greatly appreciate your approach in COD. From a “dissensus” strategic stand, I think there are many people who feel dis-engaged by thoughts of hopelessness who may be re-energized by a “resistance ethos.”
As nature solves its problems through “random lateral exploration,” we may need to beware of a Permaculture that has become just another part of the status quo. While it’s good that Permaculture can reach out to “mainstream” constituencies, some part of Permaculture needs to be positioned to attract a next-generation counter culture, as these natural social critics are always the engine of real social change and innovation. And they are the most likely to act upon Permaculture in meaningful ways that will create truly valuable models for the future, as opposed to the conservative farmer in my county who “practices Permaculture” because he uses mulch whenever he can. THAT is a “Permaculture” that’s ready for its long sleep in the compost heap.
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Other than suffering/happiness, I have yet to find other ways of “defining” our global predicament that call me to action. Many of the battles I would have fought are already lost: to use oil wealth to address social inequality and suffering, to transition to “Green Tech,” to save the self-regulating emergent quality I experience in my biome and our world ecosystem, to prevent the Anthropocene Mass Extinction Event, to prevent the irradiation of the Northern Hemisphere…. If you aren’t familiar with Paul Kingsnorth’s infamous “Dark Ecology” essay I suspect that you may find some spiritual resonance here:
https://www.orionmagazine.org/article/dark-ecology/
I see that I am the “problem,” when I define the “problem” as I did above. It is just my own ability to accept inevitable change as the world adapts to its most headstrong children.
But each person, each ecosystem, each being… these are true victories to be had.