Extinction Rebellion is More than a Smoke Alarm, it’s the Foundation of a Key Future Scenario
By: James Carli
Tags: Energy, Extinction Rebellion, Future, Ecology, Climate Change

Extinction Rebellion is More than a Smoke Alarm, it’s the Foundation of a Key Future Scenario James Carli 6 days ago·4 min read

Financial Times (FT) columnist Henry Mance has a new article out now that says that the ecological movement Extinction Rebellion (XR) is annoying but fundamentally necessary to our current place in the climate emergency, like a smoke alarm that beeps to remind you to change the battery.

XR, which came online in 2012 around the UN’s Rio+20 Conference on Sustainable Development, is much more than a beeping smoke alarm. Rather, it very well could be the sprouting kernel of post-fossil fuel civilization. What does that phrase mean?

This graph from a 2007 journal article by Pimentel and Patzek illustrates precisely what is meant by the phrase “post-fossil fuel civilization.” In 2019, oil giant Royal Dutch Shell claimed they had reached peak oil, meaning that we are already on the downslope of the age of fossil fuels as shown in figure B below. When the world is no longer producing, processing, or consuming the energy from fossil fuels, we will then be in the “post-fossil fuel civilization,” and while some elites in the rich world may have had the opportunity to pivot toward consuming electrical energy generated from renewable or off-grid capable power generation sources, it has yet to be seen if there will be the financial momentum or logistics sufficient for the wholesale global replacement of our entire world’s energy infrastructure to renewables — what economists and energy experts refer to as the “energy transition.” As we near the end of the fossil fuel age, XR’s ranks are destined to grow over the next many decades as systems continue to fail & people turn to an ecological alternative.

The field of futures studies, as exemplified by the work of the Tellus Institute and its offshoot, the Great Transition Initiative, presents humanity with potential scenarios for the future of global societal organization in an age of collapsing ecosystems. On a four-square spectrum where the X-axis describes the nature of our response to ecological crisis, from a centralized response to a distributed response, and the Y-axis describes the economic values that inform our response, from prioritizing exchange value to prioritizing the protection of life as our guiding economic principle, we can imagine four scenarios that will shape the future of societal development

On the Centralized Response side, we get

- State Socialism, or

- State Capitalism

And on the Distributed Response Side we get

- Mutual Aid, or

- Barbarism

You can read more about this approach to future scenarios in an excellent article in The Conversation by Simon Mair (on Twitter @simon_mair), a researcher affiliated with the University of Surrey’s Centre for the Understanding of Sustainable Prosperity (CUSP), another great futurism think tank.

While Mair points out that state capitalism is a leading response we are seeing now from places like the UK, Spain, and Denmark, XR represents the very early-stage foundation of a society premised around the mutual aid response, a distributed response to the climate crisis that places greater value on protecting life than on protecting exchange value. In this respect, XR represents a certain “church” of ecologism, one that is secular and non-ideological beyond upholding the primacy of life, even if at the expense of certain economic efficiencies. Its guiding philosophies and early displays of praxis indicate that XR will play an organizing role in the age of ecosystem collapse, much as the Christian church provided social cohesion during the Roman collapse. When science suggests that global temperature rises of 3°C or more are “incompatible with organized global society,” it’s important that alternatives begin developing now for when that day comes.

XR’s holistic approach opens the door to a panoply of new and exciting solutions for our future. Renewed conversations about the imperative of Georgist land use reforms, urban planning movements geared toward urban densification, transit, ending single-family housing and setback requirements, to going wholesale on Bookchinite Communalism and scaling up permaculture lifestyles to a global scale are all on the table now. XR also opens the door all the way to adopting the indigenous practice of cultivating an edible environment as the indigenous Amazonians developed in the Amazon rainforest, and making that the centerpiece of global development practice, something that is the ultimate manifestation of the relatively new corporate focus on “regeneration.”

The truth is that no amount of individual action — no recycling, no veganism, no electric cars — matter in the fight against the climate emergency as long as fossil fuels remain subsidized by governments. Therefore true activism must work on one of these three components — either directly shutting down fossil fuel production capacity, permanently sinking waste carbon & other greenhouse gases, or laying the foundations for a society that comes after fossil fuels, which is what XR is attempting. Anything else from a human survival perspective is either amelioration (like refugee relief, vital and important work), virtue signaling, or noise not worth expending energy on. We’re facing the reality that our collective deep future will involve a choice of joining a pro-social ecological movement or being thrown to a fascist man-eat-man barbarism. Which would you prefer?

James Carli was a Maltese UN delegate during Rio+20 prep meetings in 2012 and is co-founder of Third Nature Holdings, an LLC dedicated to fielding Bookchinite and permaculture concepts on a local level and creating educational content from this experimentation. He works as a fundraiser for a global aid agency in New York and lives in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina.