Back in America

Hi, Stan. Can you hear me? Where's my... Here it is. System preferences. So, there we go. That's much better. If you're tired of arguing with strangers on the internet, try talking with one of them

in real life. Welcome to Back in America, the podcast. I am Stan Bertolow and this is Back in America. Today I'm speaking with Richard Henberg, a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and one of the world's foremost advocates for a shift away from our current reliance on fossil fuel. Richard has written for many publications, including Nature, Reuters, Wall Street Journal, The American Prospect, Public Policy Research, Quarterly Review, just to name a few.

He's been quoted by Reuters, the Associated Press, and Time Magazine. He has appeared on Good Morning America, Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, Australian Broadcasting Corporation, Al Jazeera, and C-SPAN. Leonardo DiCaprio called on Richard's expertise for his documentary The Eleventh Hour. Richard, I wanted to speak with you today about a topic that's increasingly present in Europe and which is making its way into North America. That is the concept of our society's collapse, or l'effondrement, as it is now called in French.

The idea is that the process by which basic needs such as water, food, shelter, clothing, energy, etc., are no longer provided at a reasonable cost to a majority of the population by services regulated by law. As Pablo Serving puts it, collapse is both distant and close, slow and fast, gradual and brutal. It involves not only natural events, but also, and above all, political, economic, and social shocks, as well as the events of a psychological nature. Collapse means that our fossil fuel-based civilization cannot sustain itself, and it

will fail. People that study how societies collapse believe that tomorrow is going to be very, very different from today, that no green energy and no technology are going to save our way of life. Not even the concept of degrowth will work, since we can't force humanity into stopping production and consumption, especially in developing countries. So yes, they say, we are running into a war. But what's interesting is that the same person, those who are convinced that we will sooner or later collapse, are also full of hope.

They say that we have to do everything we can today to smoothen this collision. We have to decelerate, we have to put on our seatbelt and prepare everyone for the shock. They are convinced that preparing for the world to come will give us hope as we work to create a better society, more collective and resilient. So Richard, this is why I wanted to speak with you today, not as a prophet of doom, but as a man of vision and hope. Welcome to Back in America. Thank you, Stan.

Good to be talking with you. So Richard, Americans value optimism and have a go-to attitude. They are hardworking people, future-oriented and probably a bit more materialistic than European. Capitalism and free enterprise are sacred value here in this country. These are that for many Americans, the concept of social collapse is just unimaginable. That's right. And in fact, it's very difficult for Americans to think of a world without economic growth.

And I don't think Americans are unique in that. But certainly in this country, we've had many decades of uninterrupted growth, mostly uninterrupted. I mean, what we think of as recessions and even, well, the Great Depression was the biggest interruption we've seen in the last century. And what we did in response to the Great Depression was to create a new economic system called consumerism, which is based on ever-increasing rates of extracting raw materials, manufacturing products, distributing and selling those products, and then ultimately turning them into waste.

And the idea is that all Americans are not citizens or people, we're consumers. And that's our most important role in life, because the more we consume, the more we keep the economy growing and going. And if we do that, then there will be jobs for everyone. Investors will make profits. Tax revenues for government will go up. And so the government will be able to provide more services. But of course, the whole thing is based on the idea that this can go on forever.

We can continue growing the economy in perpetuity, which of course is absurd if you know any math at all. You run into the problem of the exponential function. I want to come back to that in a minute. And in fact, I was going to quote Arthur Keller, who is a specialist of systemic vulnerability in France. His view is that there are basically four types of vision of the future. The first one is the limitless, people that believe that business as usual will go on

and that there is no major issue with the biocapacity to scale. Then you've got the people that believe that we can actually find a way to sustain our way of life with green energy and all those stuff. Others are the degrowth, people that understand that the planet has limits and will recommend stopping growth. And then finally, the collapsed. And he argued that the collapsed are people that believe that our civilization will somehow collapse are the ones that are in the right.

What do you think of those four visions? I would like to think of myself as being in the degrowth camp. If there is some way that we can shrink the whole human economic enterprise to a size where it's no longer undermining the viability of the Earth's ecosystems, then we could have some sort of planned and survivable process of adaptation rather than having to face a collapse. But realistically, I think collapse is the most likely outcome just because no one in a position of power and authority is interested in degrowth.

It's discussed a little bit in Europe, as you mentioned, but there's no one in Washington, D.C. who is recommending degrowth or even talking about it. No U.S. presidential candidate has mentioned the word, and I will be extremely surprised if anyone does before the actual election. But that being the case, then our plan seems to be to keep the accelerator smashed against the floorboard until we hit the wall. And that's collapse. Now, as you said, collapse can come in many forms.

As a sort of secondary strategy, I think it's also important to explore ways in which collapse can be managed or reduced in severity to whatever extent it can. And I've actually been part of a couple of networks of scholars and scientists who are discussing whether there are ways of doing that. And I have to say the discussion hasn't gotten very far because without some sort of buy-in from people with the authority to actually do something, then it's all sort of wishful thinking. Yeah.

Yeah. And I want to come back to what you do on that front. But I've heard a lot of people say that we need to stop the catastrophic discourse. They say that the future remains open and that the heuristic of fear is no longer relevant. But it provokes hostile reaction and it's pretty counterproductive. What would you say to that? Well, I think for many people that's true. Many people are psychologically ill-equipped to discuss collapse.

It's just too formidable a possibility to contemplate. And we're seeing that right now with the worldwide coronavirus epidemic. I've had many conversations with friends and family and so on where people are just unwilling

to contemplate the possibility that we may have to quarantine whole cities, that the kind of economic downturn that China has experienced as a result of de-networking its economy may occur throughout Europe and North America. So if people are psychologically fragile, having difficulty just keeping up with the challenges they already have in their lives, then the discussion of collapse is not really very helpful. It just provokes resistance. Let's go back to the topic of preparation for what is called a collapse.

I've read that you advocate community resilience. What does it mean? Well resilience is kind of the opposite of what we've been aiming for in the global economy

for the last few decades. We've been aiming for economic efficiency, which means doing away with redundancy, reducing the size of inventories, and also lengthening supply chains so that we can access the cheapest labor and the cheapest raw materials wherever they are on the planet. So that's given us cheaper products and it has helped to grow the Chinese economy very rapidly and to a massive level. But economic efficiency comes at the expense of resilience because at the end of the day, after you've pursued globalization and economic efficiency for decades, what you end up with

is a very brittle super networked global economy, which is what we have now.

China unplugs its economy from the rest of the world in order to fight this virus. What happens? Well, China's demand for oil goes down. Therefore, OPEC has a meeting so that the Saudis can try to persuade everyone to produce less oil so that the oil price doesn't crash. Russia doesn't go along with that, the oil price craters, and who does it hurt? It hurts American fracking companies who are producing tight oil from shale. So, one thing happens on one side of the globe and somebody on the other side of the globe

feels it. We're so networked at this point that it's even making it difficult for us to fight the virus in most practical ways. Here in the United States, we don't have enough face masks. So the authorities are telling us, you don't need a face mask. Face masks don't work. The reason they're telling us that is not because face masks don't work. It's because there aren't enough of them and they want to avoid a panic and keep the face

masks that there are available for the healthcare workers, which is perfectly rational. But how do we get into this situation? Well, the face masks are made in China. China's not shipping us any and we didn't have big enough inventories. So this is where we are. The solution to all of that is to build more resilient, localized economies with more redundancy, more inventories, shorter supply chains. This is something we've been advocating at Post Carbon Institute for 15 years now.

And unfortunately, the folks in charge have not been listening to our little voice on the internet. No surprise there. But we see the results of it and what's going on right now. Talking about the oil crash that we are seeing today, do you think that the risk is that a sudden stop in consumption could lead to the inability to make the investment profitable and therefore to store the production chain definitively? Yeah, I think the shale producers in the US are going to be chased out of the market pretty

quickly. The big companies like Exxon and Chevron may be able to stay in the game for a while, but even they're going to be forced to pull back on their investments. And there are dozens of companies that produce in the shale sector. And almost none of them have been profitable. None of them have generated money above what they've been able to attract from investors and to borrow. So it just doesn't look good.

The same thing with the tar sands in Canada or the oil sands. Very expensive oil to produce. And they've already been cutting back on expansion plans. And I think this is going to force even more cutbacks. I'm very hesitant to say, well, this is the peak of world oil production because I've been talking about that for the last 20 years. And I'm afraid I've made a couple of wrong calls in that regard. So I'm very hesitant to say it now.

But on the other hand, it is looking kind of peakish around here. So we could be on the brink of a major crisis as big as 2008. Oh, yes, definitely. And it could, in fact, be much worse this time, just because in 2008, I think the central banks and the governments had more of an ability to stimulate the economy. They've already used those tools. Interest rates are already very low. And then in the coronavirus situation, what does stimulus actually accomplish?

If you've got millions of people who are staying home and not participating in the economy, is giving them a little more money going to change their consumption decisions? Are they suddenly going to decide to go on a plane trip to Italy and see some art because they feel a little more flesh in their bank account? Of course not. So the ability of the government and central bank authorities to deal with is quite limited this time. So I think it could, in fact, be worse than 2008.

But who knows? We're still at the very beginning of this. So it's too early to make absolute pronouncements like that. Right. Going back to the community, I understand that having a more resilient community makes sense. However, the way you describe it was really on an economical level, where you would be calling for business to be more local, stop the globalization process that we know today.

However, if we look at the other aspect of the picture, which is the oil peak, which is the fossil fuel economy, etc., that won't change much. If your enterprise can't function because you don't have any oil, whether it's local or distant, it still can't work. So what are all other aspects of resilient communities that you're advocating? Well, resilient communities are going to be ones that find ways to solve basic human problems using less energy and less materials. That will be the case whether we plan for it or it's forced upon us.

The communities that do that will succeed better than the ones that insist on trying to maintain business as usual as long as they possibly can. Another aspect of community resilience really has to do with psychology and group psychology. How much are the people in the community thinking together, working together, meeting together, trusting one another? That's really the most important thing. To what degree do the members of the community interact with each other in an attitude of trust and cooperation?

In that regard, there are some worries. We've seen increasing political polarization here in the United States and other countries. That's tearing apart that fabric of trust that's really important in order to weather periods of retrenchment and collapse. The other thing is the coronavirus itself. People's response to it, of course, is to pull back from social interaction. Social distancing is the phrase that we're hearing. That's necessary as a response to the pandemic.

Of course, it keeps people from interacting with one another in churches, at arts events, in community celebrations of all kinds, political events, you name it. All of these are really the fabric of the community. Over the short term, over the next few months, the pandemic is going to be tearing and ripping at that fabric in ways that are not good for building community resilience. I think it's really important that we find ways, whether it's through computer networking and social media or whatever, to maintain those ties as much as possible and support local arts and community events in maybe new ways, find new ways of doing that.

If we just retreat into our little safe zones, then I think it's going to be very hard to rebuild those institutions and those bonds of trust. What I was wondering, reading about community resilience and trying to imagine in my head what it would look like, I could see a scenario where you would have communities very well prepared with permaculture, with the tight bonds among people, et cetera. You would have communities which are not prepared at all, people coming from big cities who did not anticipate that change.

You could easily see how the two communities or the two kinds of people, the prepared and the unprepared, would come together probably in a violent way. Yes, that's entirely possible. And there are no ways of guaranteeing an easy and peaceful transition into our future. But for those who are prepping, I think it's important to game out those kinds of situations and say, well, what's the best way to ensure our well-being and survival if other people aren't taking those kinds of preparatory measures? Well, one way is to make yourself a useful part of the community, a respected and useful

and trusted part of the community so that people will listen to you when you say, well, we should be preparing, and so that people will come to your defense or rally around you when going gets tough. So that goes against the prepper mindset of a lot of folks who say, well, it's just a matter of stockpiling guns and ammunition and canned food. I don't really see much success at the end of that strategy because sooner or later somebody else with a bigger gun is going to come along and it just does not go well. In the US, we saw a lot of that during the Cold War, where you were building a bunker

in your backyard and indeed having militia and trying to be a survivalist. So that's not what you advocate.

There's much more of that going on today than there was during the Cold War, actually. It's more underground now. I don't mean in bunkers, but I mean in terms of public awareness. But the prepper movement is very active in the United States. There are a lot of folks who have 100-pound bags of rice stashed away along with rifles and shotguns and ammunition and so on. Wow. Do you have any numbers, any stats on that? No, I don't think it's easy to collect such numbers, but I'm sure it's in the range of

low hundreds of thousands. Okay. All right. Wow. Let's move on, if you will, to a question that comes back often, which is, in our current business as usual scenario, what do you think would happen to the world-growing population in a planet that has limited carrying capacity? Is there a consensus on that carrying capacity? No, there is no consensus on a long-term carrying capacity.

Various scholars have tried to imagine what is the long-term carrying capacity of the planet without fossil fuels, let's say, and the estimates range all the way from fewer than a billion up to a larger number than we currently have. But you have to look at the assumptions that are associated with those kinds of calculations.

I think the number is certainly lower than our current global population, probably significantly lower. And so what will get us from our current population to that number is likely to be a series of ongoing events. It's unlikely to be a single

catastrophic event unless it were a nuclear war. That's one thing that could result in that. A series of pandemics would probably be more gradual. Certainly, the coronavirus is not going to do it, even if it's as lethal as the 1918 flu and 50% or 70% of the people in the world are infected with it. In that scenario, several tens of millions of people may die from this thing. That's a worst-case scenario. But we're adding 80 million people a year on a net basis still from population growth. So

it's like World War II that killed 60 million people. But in terms of world population growth, it just created a little notch in the graph. But we kept on going. So unless we encounter much worse pandemics than this one, I think the engine of population reduction is probably more likely to be driven by starvation and violence, which is not a fun conclusion to come to, but that's what it looks like. And what do you say to people that say, Right. Well, we do currently, because we're drawing down the long-term carrying capacity so that we can use it over the short term. We're destroying topsoil through erosion and salinization.

We're poisoning the earth. We're destroying the earth. We're destroying the earth. We're destroying salinization. We're poisoning the environment with pesticides and herbicides and artificial fertilizers in order to produce the crop yields that we're currently producing. So yes, our current crop yields are enough to feed everyone if they were properly distributed. But can we continue mining the world's topsoil at current rates? No, we can't. And of course, theoretically, somebody is always going to come up with the back of the envelope idea. Well, if we just grow all our food in test tubes, it's not going to happen. We can do that on a small scale, just like we can produce biofuels on a small scale to run our cars or even a few airplanes.

But we're not going to transition whole industries or the whole food system

in a manner like that because it's just too big.

I'm just pausing because this is a lot to take in, right? You wear, I don't know if you still are, but you wear an ardent proponent of sustainable low carbon energy. What is your take on biofuel? I think you just mentioned that. And what can listeners practically do to switch to a greener provider? Is that even possible? Well, yeah, it is possible up to a certain extent. Biofuels require a lot of energy for their production. And if we were going to grow biofuels or produce biofuels on a large enough scale to really make a difference, that would require basically growing a lot more crops specifically for fuel and burning more of the biosphere. Here in North America, now it's different in other parts of the world, but here in North America,

we are using as much energy as all of green nature absorbs from sunlight on an annual basis.

So biofuels, we would have to basically be burning all of nature's productivity every year rather than growing food and allowing some of nature to continue to support wildlife and so on. There's no future in that. And as I mentioned, biofuel production is very energy intensive. So if you look at the energy required versus the energy that you're getting out at the end of the process of making the ethanol or the biodiesel, in most cases, it's the energy that's being produced. In most cases, it's an energy sink rather than an energy source. So biofuels are really not a good answer. If we are going to make an energy transition away from fossil fuels to some other kind of industrial energy system, it's almost certainly going to be based on

electricity, or at least parts of it will be based on electricity. So electrifying transportation really does make sense, but can everybody have an electric car in the future? I think it's probably very unlikely. The battery materials, lithium and so on, are limited. So reducing your need for transportation is very important. An electric bike can be a good solution. Public transportation, electrified public transportation. And these same kinds of solutions apply in all other fields, whether it's home heating or the food system. Find ways of solving problems and meeting needs using less energy, doing it more locally, and where you use energy, see if you can access it through electricity and use renewable sources to produce the electricity if possible.

Is it going to keep us from collapsing? Probably not. But collapse is a relative term. When societies collapse, that means they get smaller, sometimes in temporarily chaotic ways, but they reorganize themselves. Chances are the collapse of modern industrial society will not be universally fatal. There will be survivors, and those survivors will have the opportunity and the necessity of redesigning systems. And if we already are thinking along the lines of what sort of systems could support us long term, then the people who do survive will benefit greatly from our thoughts and efforts along those lines. Good. I've got three questions to go. Last year, 2018 and 2019, we saw the rise of the youth climate marches, right? Strike for climate.

Today, what we see is that a lot of those kids feel that they haven't been heard, and they are

looking for alternatives and how to carry on with their movement. What would be your advice to them and maybe to their parents? Right. Well, that's difficult because those decisions, you know, those young people have to make the decisions for themselves. I mean, I'm sure they're not all that interested in having more advice from an elderly white man. I'm sure they get that all the time. So, you know, hopefully I can provide some information and perspective. But in terms of what to do with it, you know, young people, they have a lot of time in front of them to experiment and to adapt, and they're going to be having to make those decisions for themselves. Okay, fair enough.

So, I mean, you know what? I don't know if you know Pablo Serving in France, but he said that Yann is one of the voice behind Les Fondrements or The Collapse. And he said that up to the moment when he realized that we were actually going to collapse, he was growing extremely depressed because he couldn't find a way out of it. And the day that he realized that collapse was the only issue to our situation, he started to become more optimistic because he could see, just as you said, that we've got something to strive for, building a better society, working locally, doing everything that you advise. What is your own personal experience with that? I think it's similar. I mean, I used to teach at a small private college, and it was a yearlong

program through which I took students. It was called Culture, Ecology and Sustainable Community. And we looked at all of the vulnerabilities of modern industrial society and how unsustainable it is. And for the first couple of months, the students were always depressed. I mean, it was always, well, I knew it was bad, but I had no idea. Can't we talk about something else?

And then usually around halfway through the, you know, the first half of the year, around halfway through the year long program, the realization settled in that, yeah, we're in for it. And what am I going to spend my life doing? How about investigating and building alternative systems now? That's going to be a lot more interesting and productive and life-affirming than just sitting in front of my computer and watching as things come apart and fretting over it and so on. And so, you know, every student did some kind of

yearlong project that they devoted themselves to that was, whether it was permaculture related or most of them were. And by the end of the whole experience, you know, it was like, wow, everyone was reoriented and had a new way of looking at the world and some way of dealing with the information and making a difference. So, yeah, I've had a similar experience to that. It's happened over maybe a longer period of time, maybe the last 20 or 30 years, but

that seems to be the natural trajectory. Right. What do people usually don't understand about what you do?

It's all pretty much common sense when you are dispassionately looking at the facts. But

we human beings are not motivated just by facts. We're motivated by, you know, emotional tendencies and preferences and

our already our investments, emotional investments. And many people, I think, are very much emotionally invested in business as usual and keeping things going the way they are at any cost. And therefore, even to imagine that it's possible that

the world is fundamentally unsustainable and on a track toward it's just not.

So they'll go to any length to rationalize and justify excluding the facts or ignoring them. And so that's what I see happening. OK, all right. And finally, a question which I always ask back in America is what is America to you?

That's a big question. You know, it's many things. It's a geographic place. It's a set of interconnected ecosystems. It's a lot of people who have different histories and have come from different places and try to adopt some kind of collective cultural and political agreements so that there's some kind of cohesion. America is an economic system. It's a political economic system that has found ways of dominating much of the rest of the world over the last century or so. It's a colonial system. It's a, you know, America is it's an ideal of freedom, but it's also a perpetrator of genocide and slavery. It's many

things. It's complicated. And I don't always feel comfortable being here, but

for better or worse, this is where we are. OK, good. Oh, gee. Oh, yeah. David Fleming was an author who just passed away a few years ago. Unfortunately, he passed away a few years ago. David Fleming was a very famous writer and a very famous writer. David Fleming was an author who just passed away a few years ago, unfortunately, but he did leave us some terrific book, a couple of terrific books, one of which is called Lean Logic and another is called Surviving the Future. Actually, Surviving the Future is the one I would recommend. Terrific book and written in a lighthearted spirit, but with very, you know, eyes very wide open. Thank you so much. Thank you, Richard. Thanks for your time. Bye bye.