Climate, Energy, Morality, and How We Thrive as a Species on a Finite Planet
We tell ourselves stories to help us cope with existence, but too often we bend our stories to fit a misguided, destructive, and utterly unsustainable worldview.
In this revised audio version of a 2019 article I published in Medium, we begin with a tight shot on Venezuela and the Trump administration’s recent military action and claim to its oil. From there, we slowly pan back and consider the moral grounding of a civilization convinced of its “God-given” right to extract, destroy, and dominate, if it means there is more energy to burn.
We can find a better way to live, one based on our fundamental, biological morality.
The shifting justifications from the Trump administration for toppling Nicolas Maduro, if not his entire regime, dance around the obvious.
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Venezuela has the largest confirmed oil reserves of any other nation on the planet.
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In a recent Politico article, Energy Secretary Chris Wright, soon to visit Venezuela as of this recording, claims the invasion was not a move for more oil supply, but simply a nice coincidence.
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How nice?
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What a lovely coincidence.
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Who knew?
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Donald Trump is a little less coy, saying straight up that the US is taking over Venezuela's oil.
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He's given the US oil execs their marching sink your money in Venezuela's broken energy infrastructure and do it now.
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It's for the good of the country, which as we know is just a happy coincidence of our military adventurism.
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American oil companies, though, aren't so sanguine.
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Exxon CEO Darren Wood said that Venezuela is uninvestable in the country's current state.
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ConocoPhillips CEO Ryan Lantz said the country's energy system needs to be restructured.
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In contrast, Chevron is ready to go, as are smaller independents and wildcatters who are all went to get to Venezuela yesterday.
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According to a CNBC article.
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Go get em boys.
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There's black gold in Latin America.
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If it's starting to sound a little tawdry, it's because it is.
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If it feels like we're not being told the truth, it's because we're not.
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If the whole project seems slapdash and unsustainable, well, you know.
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But this isn't just about Venezuela and its oil.
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Lets consider the moral character of a country, a civilization that would foreclose the future in a clutching attempt to wring every last molecule of, as Donald Trump and many others characterize it, the God given wealth underneath our feet.
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And Trump won't jeopardize that for dreams and windmills.
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Instead, Trump doubles down on invading other countries, on eviscerating the one sector that can truly secure American energy dominance in the 21st century, and that's renewable energy.
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And on coal, beautiful clean coal.
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Trump is probably the only person alive who thinks that coal is either beautiful or clean.
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It is dust from the past burning its way into a chaotic future.
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Indeed, in the capitalist transactional sense, there is vast monetary wealth for a few in fossil energy, but ultimately it is illusory.
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Capitalism's demand for ever expanding growth eventually makes fossil fuels a losing proposition.
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Extraction becomes costlier, conflict is inevitable.
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Wealth is siphoned to a top sliver of society and the short sighted recklessness of burning past economic, social and Planetary Limits smacks of civilizational insanity.
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ront of the United nations in:
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Many argue that this is immoral and a moral fantasy.
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Nevertheless, it is one in which most of us live, whether we like it or not.
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Of course, we all need energy.
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We're all just bundles of energy.
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Energy and mass are equivalent.
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It's a world full of energy.
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We need energy to power the machinery of our biology, let alone modern life.
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But things are moving so fast, accelerating exponentially, like the Keeling curve that measures the rise in atmospheric CO2.
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Without question, humanity has flourished from the wealth beneath our feet, as Donald Trump says.
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As such, there is an argument for the moral good of pulling up the trapped sunlight in our ever more sophisticated methods of extraction.
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This makes some of us uncomfortable.
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How can we consider a fossil fuel economy a good thing when we see the environmental destruction, social injustice, unrestrained greed, and existential climate crisis that come with it?
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I suggest that the good we derive from access to fossil energy is not a moral grounding for humanity.
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Moral good may derive from it just as moral wrong.
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Fossil fuel extraction is a method, a tactic, a technology, and one that has run its course.
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It is not a basis upon which to hang any moral argument.
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It is amoral.
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Just like our president, fossil fuels, like Trump, have no basis in morality.
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Many of us underpin our moral sensibility in some form of religious ideation to ease our existential dread, defend our existence in a vast, uncaring world, and justify our behavior as righteous.
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An abstract notion of God serving as a governing force, force that guides our conduct.
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We then often bend these ideas of God to fit our behavior.
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For instance, burning fossil fuels is what God would have us do.
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The conundrum with pinning the ultimate nature of morality on any particular myth or story, including the inherent moral rightness of endless growth and extraction on a finite planet, is that we pin our allegiance, and thus our humanity, on the story, not the underlying principle the story intends to illustrate.
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We learn to hate those we don't know or who don't believe in our story, or at least dismiss them as deluded and dangerous.
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In the process, we demean our humanity.
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The moral injury extends to our shared environment, habitat destruction, pollution, biodiversity loss, and climate chaos.
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But what if morality is rooted not in the wealth beneath our feet or some invented God, but in our biology, in our evolutionary niche as Homo sapiens, in our collective humanness Writing in New Scientist, Neurophilosopher Patricia Churchland argues against the common notion that our self interested survival precludes all altruism.
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In Deliver Us from How Biology, Not Religion, Made Humans Moral, Churchland says that it is through the evolution of our mammalian brains and our unrivaled ability of learning and abstraction that we find our moral ground.
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The plasticity of our brain and the flexibility in our social interactions necessitate innate selflessness.
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Without it, we would never survive.
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We would never have come to be care for the other kin kith and beyond is the biological basis for moral behavior.
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This is generally true of all mammals and even birds to some degree, Churchland writes.
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But no other species has climbed so high or developed such complex social interaction as Homo sapiens.
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All this is enormously oversimplified, of course.
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It seems like war, cruelty, dishonesty, gluttony, egocentrism, violence and greed are all part of the human package.
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Ages of philosophers have posited the reasons why it will be on the minds of philosophers when the last breath of humanity flickers out sooner or later.
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It isn't about energy per se.
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Energy is a reality, philosophically and cosmically speaking.
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It isn't about embracing deprivation.
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We all deserve human dignity, which implies a basic level of physical, emotional and mental well being.
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But we violate our biological morality by pursuing a mentality of extraction, dominance, detachment, dominion over the earth and all that lay upon and within it.
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Fossil fuels entrench us in a Faustian bargain.
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It has corrupted the human spirit even as we have thrived in its heat.
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It is the cognitive dissonance that isolates us from our moral grounding.
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It is here, in our shortsightedness, that we risk losing ourselves entirely.
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is updated audio version of a:
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