#2 The greatest magic trick of all time

Last night I had a dream that I was in a gym full of fancy exercise machines. All around me, fit-looking people were exercising in black face masks. The masks were designed to make it harder to breathe so they could get fitter faster. When I arrived, the gym staff had run out of proper masks so I was given a thick wool one that made it almost impossible to breathe. I tried to use a machine but couldn’t figure out how it worked. Everyone around me was gliding and pumping away and I just stood there feeling stupid and left out.

Something about this dream resonated with this research into climate change and economics. I am going to link them somehow!

I’ve been learning about a concept called “energy blindness”

I was introduced to the concept through this video “ The great simplification” and this podcast by Nate Hagens.

Nate zooms out to give a quick history of life on earth - from the formation of the planet to the development of modern society. He points out that across the vastness of time, energy is the currency of life.

“Everything in nature that moves or requires effort, first requires calories," Nate says. "It’s no different in human systems. Every single aspect of our society, every product, every service that results in GDP first requires an energy conversion - there’s no exception to that.”
Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification

I thought about this for days and it ripened into a major epiphany:

Absolutely nothing happens without energy!

Not an amoeba swimming through a prehistoric ocean, a lion eating a gazelle or me writing an email. Absolutely everything requires energy. I should have known this from studying physics, but the significance hadn't hit me.

Shortly after, I had another epiphany: 

The world was made from buried sunlight!!! 

This is the greatest magic trick of all time!

For millions of years, plants have captured the sun’s energy through photosynthesis, creatures have eaten the plants and geological processes have folded all the dead matter under the earth’s surface and transformed it into fossil fuels (oil, gas and coal).

For millions of years this “geologically stored sunlight” lay untapped. Until in the early 19th Century we figured out how to extract it. As Nate pointed out, this discovery kicked off the most energy-abundant and active period in the earth's history.

Unlike human or animal labour, which you had to pay for, fossil fuels were essentially free. You just had to pay to extract them. The quality was incredible and the supply seemingly endless.

“To our ancestors, the benefits of carbon energy would have appeared indistinguishable from magic.”
Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification

This sudden injection of energy meant we could make stuff cheaper, get more profits and pay higher wages. It brought billions out of poverty, turbo-charged our populations and fuelled the development of our cities, technologies, global supply chains and modern lifestyles.

“We rarely think about it or talk about it, but we’re all alive during the carbon pulse, the few hundred years where humans are drawing down earth’s energy battery, millions of times faster than it was trickle charged by daily photosynthesis.”

Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification

It’s like we’ve discovered a huge pot of money and have gone silly spending it.

The scale of this pulse of carbon energy is mind-boggling

It really came home to me when I watched a talk by an astrophysicist called Tom Murphy as part of this online seminar hosted by Victoria University of Wellington. This is Tom's slide showing the rate at which humans have used energy 8000 years into the past and future.

“From an astrophysicist’s perspective, we’re used to looking at vast tracts of space and time and this is like a supernova, it’s an explosion. What we’re experiencing in these last few hundred years is our fireworks show. It’s very unusual. Nothing like it has happened before.”

Astrophysicist, Tom Murphy

 I definitely didn’t learn that at school!!

Our culture is energy blind

It’s only taken a few generations for this incredible abundance of energy to become normal. Now we don’t even notice it. In Nate's words:

“We swim in energy-use like a fish swims in water and we are largely unaware of it".

Nate Hagens, The Great Simplification

He talks about how our economists, financial institutions, universities and media simply don’t acknowledge the importance of energy.

We talk about economics in terms of financial markets and money. But these are made-up things. Governments and banks can create money out of thin air and pump it into the economy to stimulate growth. But they can’t make energy. And that’s what real things need to grow and survive.

Energy is the real currency - not money.

What do we make of all this!?

I was sharing my epiphanies with my partner over the weekend and together we were processing what this all means for us. Firstly, we probably won’t be able to live the lives we were promised - owning a house, buying new clothes, travelling the world, having our own car - these lives requires more energy than we can afford. We were thinking about the internet, seemingly invisible and sustainable, which actually sucks huge amounts of fossil fuels to run networks and data centres. We talked about the breakfast we were eating, which took fossil fuels to grow and transport to us; the cup of tea we were drinking which required power to boil the kettle and to treat the water and transport it through huge pipes all the way from Upper Hutt to our house. Then there’s the tea bag, which came from India… our phones, the concrete step we were sitting on, our car… it’s almost too big to comprehend.

It seems like it should be depressing to think about all this. And yet there was a sense of hope in talking with my partner. The fact that we’re together and we want to wake up from this dream and understand how our world really works and how it might be possible to change.

I want to be present to the real experiences of people and to be open to the support and wisdom of the natural world, which tends to get forgotten in all the rush to produce and achieve.

This brings me back to my dream and the feeling of trying to run on a treadmill while breathing through a thick woolly mask. 

The dream resonated with a feeling I’ve had all my life - a sense of pressure to perform and achieve - that I’m not going fast enough and have to keep up. Just like the modern world, the gym equipment was using lots of energy, just so we could work hard.

It seems to me that humanity has gone drunk and delirious from glutting on pure carbon energy and fallen into a weird, stressful, luxurious dream. There’s something insatiable and senseless about the drive to grow and produce.

Studying science has taught me that our knowledge grows by creating theoretical models of the world and using these to make predictions and plans. When things happen in the world that don’t match our model, we’re obliged to throw it out and look for a new one.

Climate change is a sure sign that we’ve got our model wrong

Floods, fires, storms and faltering eco-systems were not the future we planned. It feels right to open my eyes and see what’s happening.

Expanding my sense of time has given me a sense of possibility. If land-based mammals managed to return to the ocean and evolve into dolphins, surely we can figure out a way to transition to a life without cheap fossil fuels.

To me, it’s an enlivening prospect to wake up and be present for this time of change.