This chart is going around:
This is a useful chart, in that it shows that we aren’t reducing absolute use of energy sources which increase global warming: the gains you constantly hear about, at a global level (there are country exceptions, such as Germany) are relative, not absolute and it’s absolute that matters.
But it’s a dangerous chart in the sense that it suggests that because we’ve never done something, we can’t. In the specific case it is misleading: we’ve never had any particular reason to not keeping old forms of energy, and energy revolutions are uneven: in Europe and America and Canada, biomass is used a lot less than it was in the past, but as population expands, especially in less developed countries, well, of course biomass keeps being used, especially for cooking, and as long as global population keeps increasing, even reduced per-capita energy use could easily lead to higher numbers.
But the larger issue is the “we can’t do what we’ve never done” before idea. It’s obviously untrue technologically. Back in the 19th century many leading scientists believed powered flight was impossible, to give just one of thousands of example. But it’s also true socially: we never had universal sufferage states, for example. Older Democracies had very sharp limits on the franchise. Modern corporations are a new form of social organization though they have some similarities to older forms (primarily religious: temples and, in particular, monasteries). Double entry book-keeping had massive social effects, so did various religious innovations and so on.
“We’ve never done it so we can’t do it”, with standard excuses of “it’s just human nature” (as if human nature isn’t very plastic) are the true doomerism.
We have changed how we live, socially, culturally and technologically, over and over again and we can do it again.
If we can’t, if we are nothing but larger versions of bacteria multiplying in a petri dish, only pretending to sentient, then we are doomed and in a certain sense, deserve to be doomed.
Only if we can change and take conscious control of how we change, recognizing that most (but definitely not all) of the constraints we have put on our ability to change are cultural and created by us, can we have an expectation of a good future ahead of us.
I’m betting we can do things we’ve never done before because any other bet leads places we really don’t want to go.
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