Waiting For The Lights To Go Out  

Even "The Times" is starting to give air to the "end is nigh" school of thought in a long, rambling piece. Presumably this is just one of those opposing opinion pieces newspapers sometimes run to annoy their core readership (like the drivel Fairfax let Gerard Henderson and Miranda Devine pump out) - in the Times' case, the core readership is rich luddites who enjoy the Murdoch press party line.

Of course, it could be that the British are both a lot more disposed to gloom than Americans are (losing an empire didn't help matters) and are also a bit more aware of the world around them (I'm generalising of course, using that caricature of a red-state american that most of us foreigners have in mind).

We've taken the past 200 years of prosperity for granted. Humanity's progress is stalling, we are facing a new era of decay, and nobody is clever enough to fix it. Is the future really that black, asks Bryan Appleyard
The greatest getting-and-spending spree in the history of the world is about to end. The 200-year boom that gave citizens of the industrial world levels of wealth, health and longevity beyond anything previously known to humanity is threatened on every side. Oil is running out; the climate is changing at a potentially catastrophic rate; wars over scarce resources are brewing; finally, most shocking of all, we don't seem to be having enough ideas about how to fix any of these things.

It's been said before, of course: people are always saying the world will end and it never does. Maybe it won't this time, either. But, frankly, it's not looking good. Almost daily, new evidence is emerging that progress can no longer be taken for granted, that a new Dark Age is lying in wait for ourselves and our children.

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Progress, therefore, is faltering but, on aggregate, it moves in the right direction. Hitler was defeated and judicial torture may, in time, defeat terrorism. We just have to accept that three steps forward also involves two steps back. The point is to keep the faith.

But what if it is just faith? What if the very "fact" of progress is ultimately self-destructive? There are many ways in which this might turn out to be true. First, the human population is continuing to rise exponentially. It is currently approaching 6.5 billion, in 1900 it was 1.65 billion, in 1800 it was around a billion, in 1500 it was 500m. The figures show that economic and technological progress is loading the planet with billions more people. By keeping humans alive longer and by feeding them better, progress is continually pushing population levels. With population comes pollution. The overwhelming scientific consensus is that global warming caused by human activity is happening. According to some estimates, we will pass the point of no return within a decade. Weather systems will change, huge flooding will occur, and human civilisation if not existence will be at risk. This can be avoided if the US and China cut their carbon-dioxide emissions by 50% at once. This won't happen, as they are fighting an economic war with progress as the prize. There are many other progress-created threats. Oil is one diminishing resource, and fresh water is another, even more vital one. Wars are virtually certain to be fought to gain control of these precious liquids.

One worrying sign of a new dark age is the rise of Dominionism in the US (and its much weaker offshoots that have been transplanted into the other anglo-saxon nations). While this has been a creeping problem so far any sort of post-peak crunch could turn it completely toxic, as angry people seek an ideology that gives them certainty and someone to blame for their problems.

Dr. James Luther Adams, my ethics professor at Harvard Divinity School , told us that when we were his age, he was then close to 80, we would all be fighting the "Christian fascists."

The warning, given to me 25 years ago, came at the moment Pat Robertson and other radio and televangelists began speaking about a new political religion that would direct its efforts at taking control of all institutions, including mainstream denominations and the government. Its stated goal was to use the United States to create a global, Christian empire. It was hard, at the time, to take such fantastic rhetoric seriously, especially given the buffoonish quality of those who expounded it. But Adams warned us against the blindness caused by intellectual snobbery. The Nazis, he said, were not going to return with swastikas and brown shirts. Their ideological inheritors had found a mask for fascism in the pages of the Bible.

He was not a man to use the word fascist lightly. He was in Germany in 1935 and 1936 and worked with the underground anti-Nazi church, known as The Confessing Church, led by Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Adams was eventually detained and interrogated by the Gestapo, who suggested he might want to consider returning to the United States. It was a suggestion he followed. He left on a night train with framed portraits of Adolph Hitler placed over the contents inside his suitcase to hide the rolls of home movie film he took of the so-called German Christian Church, which was pro-Nazi, and the few individuals who defied them, including the theologians Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer. The ruse worked when the border police lifted the top of the suitcases, saw the portraits of the Fuhrer and closed them up again. I watched hours of the grainy black and white films as he narrated in his apartment in Cambridge.

He saw in the Christian Right, long before we did, disturbing similarities with the German Christian Church and the Nazi Party, similarities that he said would, in the event of prolonged social instability or a national crisis, see American fascists, under the guise of religion, rise to dismantle the open society. He despaired of liberals, who he said, as in Nazi Germany, mouthed silly platitudes about dialogue and inclusiveness that made them ineffectual and impotent. Liberals, he said, did not understand the power and allure of evil nor the cold reality of how the world worked. The current hand wringing by Democrats in the wake of the election, with many asking how they can reach out to a movement whose leaders brand them "demonic" and "satanic," would not have surprised Adams. Like Bonhoeffer, he did not believe that those who would fight effectively in coming times of turmoil, a fight that for him was an integral part of the Biblical message, would come from the church or the liberal, secular elite.

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Bush may turn out to be a transition figure, our version of Otto von Bismarck. Bismarck used "values" to energize his base at the end of the 19 th century and launched "Kulturkampt", the word from which we get "culture wars," against Catholics and Jews. Bismarck 's attacks split the country, made the discrediting of whole segments of the society an acceptable part of the civil discourse and paved the way for the more virulent racism of the Nazis. This, I suspect, will be George Bush's contribution to our democracy.

Also in The Times, a reasonably alarmist piece on peak oil that even mentions dieoff - but then goes on to discuss how to reduce energy dependence on an individual basis (along with all sorts of other stuff, finally ending on a 17th century survivalist note).

Not everyone believes we’re doomed. Cheerier prognostications suggest that our future will more closely resemble 1990s Cuba. The US trade embargo, combined with the collapse of Cuba’s communist allies in eastern Europe, suddenly deprived the island of imports. Without oil, public transport shut down and TV broadcasts finished early in the evening to save power. Industrial farms needed fuel and spare parts, pesticides and fertilizer – none of which were available. Consequently the average Cuban diet dropped from 3,000 calories per day in 1989 to 1,900 calories four years later. In effect, Cubans were skipping a meal a day, every day, week after month after year.

Of necessity, the country converted to sustainable farming techniques, replacing artificial fertilizer with ecological alternatives, rotating crops to keep soil rich, and using teams of oxen instead of tractors. There are still problems supplying meat and milk, but over time, Cubans regained the equivalent of that missing meal. And ecologists hailed their achievement in creating the world’s largest working model of largely sustainable agriculture, largely independent of oil.

By drawing attention to the coming oil crisis, can we reduce the worst effects? Can we steer ourselves towards the Cuban ideal? If so, how? Well, let me tell you what I did. First I switched exclusively to wind power as the source of my domestic electricity, through a company called Ecotricity, which promises the price will not differ significantly from what I paid before.

Then I got a man round to give us a quote for installing double-glazed sash windows. The latest, high-spec glass, I was told, traps domestic heat but allows sunlight to pass through, which means you can turn the themostat right down in winter. My wife was not exactly keen, but agreed so long as we didn’t have PVC frames. This meant the price would be high: £5,489.81 including VAT.

I contacted a company that specializes in solar power: Dulas is based in Wales but had already installed panels at the home of London’s mayor, Ken Livingstone. If I acted quickly, Dulas told me, I could get government subsidies of more than 40 per cent. (The funds available are running out fast.) With the smallish roofspace available, I could expect to generate about 750 kilowatt hours – less than a quarter of the energy we used last year. And for even that modest amount, I’d have to spend more than £5,000 – and get planning permission too.

I put my name down for a domestic wind turbine, the first on the market. I worried a little about the noise upsetting my neighbours, but the man who runs Windsave, David Gordon, insisted that traffic at the end of my street makes a greater racket. Again, I would need planning permission, but Gordon believes local authorities have been encouraged to allow this kind of thing. The turbine would cover roughly a third of my electricity needs. The cost: £1,500.

Another possibility is to dig a borehole in my garden and pump energy from the earth. This can produce four units of heat energy for every unit used to power the pump: a good return. But digging a bore hole some 100 feet deep turns out, unsurprisingly, to be rather costly. Additionally, I’d have to scrap my radiators and install a new underfloor heating system. Great technololgy, clearly, but best suited to new buildings. Contractors I spoke to were a bit vague about costs, but one suggested the total might reach above £20,000. “And that wouldn’t be very good value for money,” he added.

In the meantime, I wrote to my supermarket, urging it to make the origin of food even clearer, and to flag seasonal products. That way it would be easy to avoid buying, say, a bag of apples that had been flown all the way from New Zealand. Then I thought, why not produce some of my own food at home? I bought a tray for sprouting seeds (highly nutritious, apparently) and started the long process, as yet unresolved, of persuading my wife that we must dig up our flowerbeds and turn the garden into an allotment.

I even got in touch with a local vicar, who keeps chickens in his garden, and asked how I might do the same. Father Andrew Cain was enthusiastic. “A small garden is fine as long as the chickens have shelter from the sun, and plenty of greenery.” He particularly commended chickens for reducing stress: “Sitting among them at the end of the day is very relaxing. You can even pick them up and give them a cuddle.”

Does this really amount to “saving the world”? I’ve saved the best till last. Remember Nancy’s nursery, and the peculiar car I saw in Connaught Square? After waiting around for the woman driver to return, I started asking questions. Here’s what she told me. The car is called a G-Wiz, it runs entirely on electricity – unlike hybrids such as the Toyota Prius –has four seats and storage in the bonnet and is no bigger than a Smart car.

Why hadn’t I heard of them? “Because to keep the costs down we don’t advertise. We rely on word-of-mouth.” The financial savings seemed amazing. A G-Wiz costs as little as £7,000. It does not incur road tax. It’s in the cheapest insurance bracket, and exempt from the congestion charge. In Westminster, you can park for nothing in pay-and-display spaces, and also in your local car park, with free electricity to charge the batteries.