Our societies are under strict control of people indoctrinated in economic thought. It seems harmless to try to start an enterprise with credit and then have the ambition to make more money than you invest, but that principle only bears fruit if the investment is physical and the yield is crops grown with solar energy. Once the investment is fossil fuels (bought with the credit) we are burning more energy than we get back, even in farming we burn 10 times more than we get out of it. There is no way to win in such a system, even if it can last a long time.
Leave them in the cold
Those at the top still believe there’s nothing wrong with fossil credit, they believe it is money people ‘work’ for. But a better interpretation is that its money people control for, they don’t work, but control the fuels to be burned or converted to make products and services. The control of the consumption of fossil fuels doesn’t create them, just like frying an omlet doesn’t make new eggs. It is very hard to convince some people that their ability to control and maximize cashflow is in itself not usefull. This is possibly because the people involved feel they fight for their own survival, and we all know fighting is in itself not usefull or productive even if it is necessary. The people in charge think they can be unproductive because they are protecting the order against many threats.
The flip side is surprisingly easy to recognize. Grow an organic vegetable, and you have more energy to spend on making wealth, personally or by fermenting or burning it. Grow a tree and you can make many things, burn it for heat, use it to grow mushrooms. Build a wind turbine and you have 5 MW electricity to bake bread, drive around, electrolyse, grind, weld you name it. Years and years of wealth production are afforded and the wealth really increases, the reserves of energy if you convert electricity to methane, methanol, nh3, plastic, hydrogen or carbon. Such wealth increase is REAL.
Economics doesn’t make the distinction between adding absolute wealth and using fossil fuel resources to create marginal wealth, because economics is about the cashflows that become maximized if every process requires fossil fuels or some kind of input that you never get enough of. If the leaders of this system are so indoctrinated and unable to make the distinction they can not steer us away from depleting our resouces. As long as fossil fuel resources aren’t depleted it is assumed no other resources are. This is because the people selling fossil fuels only focus and depend on selling it.
We could lament that our only option is to fight a bottom up battle against economic depletionism but we should rejoyce. It is the only effective method and it is totally possible to do it. All small steps help, adding renewable energy sources, planting trees, farming organically. It is not the sorry second option, it is the first option. The mistake some make is to desire to be in central control at the top, while the top only exist due to a system of central destruction. Like a flight of birds, you can move in the same direction without central control, just by learning and knowing the facts and opportunities. The world doesn’t need centralized top down government, it needs well informed local government that communicates its problems and solutions to whomever wants to learn.
Bottom up is not weak against strong, it is the choice to have many nuclei of power, that can unite but are not de facto united. Top down works only if one can hand down fossil fuels, and then it makes sence to centralize control (the access to it can easily be denied any competitor). In adding renewable energy resources we become more equal and less pushed to conflict. More renewable energy sources is what feeds the bottom up localized autonomy, it returns us to a focus on change we can touch and see in our every day environment, and if we focus on it the centralized top down control will weaken and vanish as its cashflows dry up.
Of course when an enlightened mentality grabs hold of the top down fossil fuel economic thinkers, something they have pretended many times, we may use their methods to achieve the change, but as control will shift to local anyway we may as well hope but not rely on it, nor wait for it to increase renewable energy sources (and storage) where we are. The limiting factor to producing renewables is the cut it now reluctantly gets of the fossil fuel budget. The goal of the bottum up movement should be to create renewable energy sources with renewable energy, then there is no limit to the capacity nor the wealth we can unlock, and no top down way to control it.