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@[email protected]@[email protected] Sorry to dive in uninvited, but from a different angle I’d recommend reading Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet by Thomas Murphy ( https://staging.open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/980 ). Murphy is an astrophysicist and the book is an entry-level introduction to energy, its use in human societies, and all the implications that flow from our energy use. It’s quite accessible if you’re comfortable reading STEM textbooks; it might be a bit tough if you find reading about physics and math boring or difficult. He does provide a lot of handholds and personally I think it’s worth the struggle.
The reason I suggest this book in this context is that I find a lot of people tend to be “energy blind”, meaning they don’t see the implications of human energy use and what it would actually mean to do something like reduce fossil fuel usage. Reducing fossil fuel usage would necessarily reduce quality of life for billions of people, for instance–there’s almost no way around it. The book goes into why. This simple fact is deeply relevant to any theory of change. How can you convince several billion people to purposely lower their quality of life or forego apparent opportunities to increase their quality of life in order to force the reduction in fossil fuel use that is necessary to keep human civilization from ending altogether? How do you do this without falling back on authoritarian structures, especially as the situation becomes increasingly desperate-looking?
I think another ideology we need to get past, one a lot of people seem to be deeply defensive about, is the one built on the belief that we can have large amounts of energy whenever we want it and the supply will continue to go up in perpetuity. This belief is false–it’s like believing the Earth is flat, or that your maladies are caused by unbalanced humors–but a large number of people in the so-called developed world take it as a fact or at least as an operating principle (before anyone dives down my throat about this: read Murphy’s book. Seriously. Read it with care). “The economy” is fundamentally grounded in this false ideology. “Car culture” in the US is grounded in it. What many of us think “work” and “a job” are/should be is grounded in it. What many of us think of as “fairness” and “equity” is grounded in it. Etc etc etc.
You’re always invited, and always fun to run into you on the other side of the fediverse from my perspective (I could never find a satisfactory way of using both lemmy and Mastodon on a single account that worked for me).
That’s such a great suggestion! I haven’t read it but will now, and I’ll get back to you when I do.
@[email protected] @[email protected] Sorry to dive in uninvited, but from a different angle I’d recommend reading Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet by Thomas Murphy ( https://staging.open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/textbooks/980 ). Murphy is an astrophysicist and the book is an entry-level introduction to energy, its use in human societies, and all the implications that flow from our energy use. It’s quite accessible if you’re comfortable reading STEM textbooks; it might be a bit tough if you find reading about physics and math boring or difficult. He does provide a lot of handholds and personally I think it’s worth the struggle.
The reason I suggest this book in this context is that I find a lot of people tend to be “energy blind”, meaning they don’t see the implications of human energy use and what it would actually mean to do something like reduce fossil fuel usage. Reducing fossil fuel usage would necessarily reduce quality of life for billions of people, for instance–there’s almost no way around it. The book goes into why. This simple fact is deeply relevant to any theory of change. How can you convince several billion people to purposely lower their quality of life or forego apparent opportunities to increase their quality of life in order to force the reduction in fossil fuel use that is necessary to keep human civilization from ending altogether? How do you do this without falling back on authoritarian structures, especially as the situation becomes increasingly desperate-looking?
I think another ideology we need to get past, one a lot of people seem to be deeply defensive about, is the one built on the belief that we can have large amounts of energy whenever we want it and the supply will continue to go up in perpetuity. This belief is false–it’s like believing the Earth is flat, or that your maladies are caused by unbalanced humors–but a large number of people in the so-called developed world take it as a fact or at least as an operating principle (before anyone dives down my throat about this: read Murphy’s book. Seriously. Read it with care). “The economy” is fundamentally grounded in this false ideology. “Car culture” in the US is grounded in it. What many of us think “work” and “a job” are/should be is grounded in it. What many of us think of as “fairness” and “equity” is grounded in it. Etc etc etc.
You’re always invited, and always fun to run into you on the other side of the fediverse from my perspective (I could never find a satisfactory way of using both lemmy and Mastodon on a single account that worked for me).
That’s such a great suggestion! I haven’t read it but will now, and I’ll get back to you when I do.