Reset

                One of the worst things about the American political scene is its fascination with gossip, scandal, and personal cults.  That was true before Trump became president, and he has ramped up the drama to unprecedented levels.  Every day is a new crisis that threatens the norms of democracy, and every news cycle is a frantic hand wringing over what went wrong today.  We can’t even remember what seemed so important three days ago.  Some of this is surely by design, but whether it’s intentional or not, the result is that we never spend any time talking about the real issues, the real political concerns that we are on a collision course with.  We should be preparing ourselves for dramatic changes on the horizon, but instead we’re playing this endless game of Duck Duck Goose with an orange clown.

                We should be preparing for the end of oil and the end of work.  We should be talking about the impact that both of these all but inevitable events are going to do to radically change our lives.  Sweden has announced that it is outlawing fossil fuels in 2020.  The EU is seriously considering banning the use of plastic in packaging.  Meanwhile, we’re trying to figure out who Trump is going to pardon next.  One of the consequences of an utterly incompetent president is that we fall further behind the rest of the world when it comes to preparing for what’s next. 

                It’s not a new thing to contemplate the end of oil.  James Ridgeway was writing about it back in the early 70’s.  What is new is that some forward- thinking nations are actually starting to plan for it.  It not only means that we have to rethink the sources of energy that we use, we also have to rethink how that shift alters economic, political and social structures that have been built around the use of fossil fuel.  Oil is a centralizing technology, and using it to generate heat and power requires a fast infrastructure of extraction and distribution.  When oil goes away, how does the new energy source both allow and require us to rethink and restructure our relationship to that infrastructure.  If we think about the military consequences of oil alone, it is clear that there are new opportunities and new challenges ahead.

                If new energy is more diffuse and more local, if it doesn’t depend on energy grids and distribution networks designed to serve the petro-chemical industry, what can we do that was hard to do before?  If everyone could ‘own’ their own energy, even if they had to buy the means to produce it, what would that mean to our patterns of settlement and trade?  The risk is that we’ll plod along thinking that tomorrow will be mostly like today and miss the chance to get out ahead of that change.  The end of oil is going to be the largest economic and social shift since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, probably even bigger than computers.

                The same thing can be said about work.  No country in the world has ever been more dominated by ‘work’ than we are.  It’s how we judge someone’s worth, their position in society, and it determines what standard of living we expect to have.  It is deeply ingrained in our cultural values of personal morality – it’s what Locke said made it ok to take someone else’s land, if you were ‘working’ it and they weren’t.  We are facing the replacement of human workers with AI, robots and computers.  There simply won’t be enough jobs for the number of people who need them.  Whenever a politician says that their goal is create more jobs, mark them off as a liar and a fool.  It ain’t happening.  What are we going to do? 

                We can’t just continue to hope that the tomorrow will be mostly like today mantra will apply to this issue.  Should we be moving to guaranteed work, as some have suggested.  Should we reprioritize work to put more emphasis on education, childcare and the environment?  It this the mechanism to redistribute wealth in a way that makes democracy sustainable?  These issues are not just cosmetic.  They are deeply structural and game changing.

                The next time you turn on the news and see Trump’s face, forget about the scandal of the day and think for a minute about what we’re not talking about.  Whatever happens to him, we’re still going to have to face and work our way through at least these issues and probably more.  Let’s spend our time thinking about what is possible instead of always focusing on what is so obviously wrong.