“No to taxation without representation”

Power is organization. All politics is about power, thus about organization. Yet understanding organization, in concept, structure, and process, is mostly missing from American politics today. Largely never understood, the greatest organizing force of the Industrial era was fossil fuels. The mass scale burning of fossil fuels resulted in an unprecedented global reorganization of nature, human society, and culture. In understanding energy’s role in organizing human affairs, a recent book titled Energy and Civilization A History, by Vaclav Smil, is seminal, essential, and excellent. I would place Smil’s work aside Braudel’s Civilization and Capitalism, as ingenious history that helps us understand the past and present, offering much needed guidance for a necessary reshaping of the future.

Smil succinctly sums up his history with this paragraph,

Smil brilliantly concludes,

Read the above paragraph again. Understand this is a completely opposite conclusion from our established and dominant industrial thinking and values. However, they are essential insights for a world struggling with a toxic legacy of past energy use and the pressing need to completely redesign global energy use for the future.

The global political legacy of fossil fuels’ reorganization of society is a largely unimpeded trajectory of inequity. Smil writes, “By 2015 the richest 10% of humanity (living in 25 nations) claimed about 35% of the world’s energy. In personal terms, this meant that a week’s worth of per capita energy use in the United States is equivalent to the total annual primary energy consumption of an average Nigerian and two years of the annual energy supply for an average Ugandan.”

First Nigerian Oil Well

Ken Saro-Wiwa

“Ken” Saro-Wiwa was a very popular writer and television producer known across Nigeria. A beautiful and powerful voice for democracy, he advocated for the rights of his Ogoni people. In 1995, Nigeria’s military junta, with the complicity of Shell Oil, arrested Saro-Wiwa and eight others. A mock trail was staged, after all were hung. At the exact moment Ken Saro-Wiwa gasped his last breath dangling from the end of a despotic junta’s rope, tens of thousands Americans of every race, creed, gender, and income were literally at the other end of that rope filling their tanks with Nigerian oil.

Oil completely reorganized America and Nigeria politically and economically, creating immensely powerful and undemocratic entities such as Shell and Nigeria’s military junta. In the parlance of economics, the 20th century’s dominant value system, Saro-Wiwa’s and his compatriots’ deaths would simply be written off as an “externality,” a cost not needed to be accounted, so too the destruction done to Ogoniland.

The political economic value system developed in the Industrial era has been a poor measure of the real costs of energy. As Smil writes, “To talk about energy and economy is a tautology: every economic activity is fundamentally nothing but a conversion of one kind of energy to another, and monies are just a convenient and often unrepresentative proxy for valuing the energy flows.”

Today, it is obvious to more people, though not nearly enough, that new value systems must arise for a proper accounting of the true value and costs of energy, certainly this is no small task. To do so requires overthrowing the entrenched ideas, systems, and powers of “those who believe that endless technical advances can satisfy steadily growing energy demand.” Smil points to a piece by Ivan Illich, Energy and Equity, which sort of brilliantly does exactly that.

I’ve spent a number of years talking about the need for analysis using an understanding of the politics of technology. Illich’s piece, written fifty years ago, does exactly this. He refutes industrialism’s greatest tenets writing, “Beyond a certain point, more energy means less equity,” and, “Over industrialization enslaves people to the tools they worship, fattens professional hierarchs on bits and on watts, and invites the translation of unequal power into huge income differentials. It imposes the same net transfers of power on the productive relations of every society, no matter what creed the managers profess, no matter what rain-dance, what penitential ritual they conduct.” Amen.

These are keen insights and necessary critiques utilizing analysis derived from a politics of technology. ALL adopted technologies create their own environments, bestow their own values, and institute power structures. As an example, using a spot-on insight of American car culture, Illich writes,

Illich precisely reveals how the present talk of monopoly and anti-trust, which after decades disappearance has shown a weak reappearance in our broken politics, doesn’t even reach the level of inadequate. American anti-trust politics never had a great understanding of the power challenges created by industrial technology, thus over time, it was largely hopeless in results.

In one excellent point on the politics of energy and technology, Illich notes the inequity of a high-energy transportation system, where speed itself is unequally accessible political power. Those with the greatest power wield the greatest speed. A simple example today is access to private jets. Barron’s writes there’s, “22,000 business jets flying around the world,” speed is power.

Illich concludes the most human designed social transit systems, thus the most democratic would center on walking and the bicycle. He writes, “Participatory democracy demands low-energy technology, and free people must travel the road to productive social relations at the speed of a bicycle.”