I keep hearing people say we’ve got an energy crisis. This carries a few bullshit premises. The most obvious premise here: that we need “energy.” Why do we need energy? What does it do that’s so fucking important? Humans lived for millions of years without electricity. Indigenous hunter-gatherers had no need to create it. It requires an entire industrial economy that inherently destroys the land in order to create it. It does not make humans lives easier; it simply gives the rich more power and more destructive tools. How many people in the world even have electricity? We don’t need “energy.” At least not in the way they mean it. The energy crisis, as well as the economic crisis, really means that rich people continue to lose power, and they have so brain-washed us that we believe we need to do our part to keep the pyramid strong, our slavery in place. Civilization uses energy to take even more than we could without it. The less energy civilization has, the more limits it has to grow. That seems pretty fucking fantastic to me.
Nature provides all the energy we need in a sustainable way, as proven by 3 million years of human hunter-gatherers living on this planet without fucking it up. Think about the energy that hunter-gatherers used; seal blubber candle vs. light bulbs. Wood cooking fire vs. gas stove. Not only did hunter-gatherers have smaller scale societies (because they didn’t have agriculture induced population growth problems) but their energy usage came from “renewable” sources. They used the sun to dry food and wood to generate heat in the cold. This burning helped to break down the nutrients and minerals in the wood and make them readily available to fungi and bacteria. It also prevented the insanely destructive, large-scale forest fires we see today.
Without cheap oil or coal to generate the electricity and machinery, the industrial economy cannot exist. They call it “industrial” because machines (slaves, drones, robots) make it up, not people. Before industrial machinery, those in power used people. But it takes a slave with a stick a lot more time and energy to till a field than a farmer in his tractor. This excess of energy created the urban class of people, to manage the wealth (for the wealthy) created by these new machines. Real renewable energy does not mean a solar powered industrial economy. It means small-scale societies using hand-made tools (crafted from non-industrial materials) to encourage more biodiversity.
I don’t mean to say that everyone “should” stop using electricity and gas and everything. As long as you recognize you won’t have it forever, and as long as you use that excess energy to bring down civilization and promote cultures of rewilding. I use this computer, cell phone, cars, etc. etc. to educate people on how to live without them, and encourage them to stop these systems from destroying the planted. Remember, “green” technology doesn’t mean more sustainable” but “less destructive.” And more often it really means, “we’ve re-framed our marketing to pull the focus away from what we destroy, to point out what we don’t destroy so that you’ll forget that we continue to fuck shit up.”
I refer to the crisis that we really have going on as the “Bullshit Crisis.” Everyone listens to this civilized bullshit and just takes it in without question and the world continues to suffer. That looks like the real fucking crisis to me. The only crisis that matters is the Ecological Crisis. This crisis only exists because we have an economy and energy. The economic crisis means the end of growth, which means the end of excessive consumption which means the begining of the end of the ecological crisis. Fuck industrial energy, fuck the hierarchical economy, fuck this bullshit.
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