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Shoutback Dept., No 2. Thanks to Ran Prieur for seconding my complaint about the Carter "energy sweater" urban myth, which holds that "Nerdy Jimmy Carter Wore a Sweater When Talking About Energy." This is wrong. To reiterate: Carter wore the sweater on many occasions after the '76 election, it was part of his laid-back "man of the people" persona, post-Nixon and his foppish uniforms for White House guards. Yet for some reason, media mavens of the left and right and even bloggers continue to enliven their prose with the image of the "nerdy energy sweater."
I've been enjoying Ran's site, which has many interesting things to say about dropping out and living off the grid that I hope to respond to in the coming weeks. Here's a pearl from his blog:
Notice that every article about energy systems contains the word "needs." How much energy do we need? Our ancestors did fine for two million years, or two hundred million if you count our pre-human ancestors, with energy gathered by plants through photosynthesis, taken into our bodies through eating, and channeled through our muscles. Do industrial energy systems make us happy? Do they give our lives meaning? Then why are suicide and depression rates higher in countries with greater per-capita energy consumption?
The only thing we need, beyond basic survival, is participation in a system that builds itself bottom-up from autonomous action. "Energy" makes us miserable and stupid when and only when it is gathered and parceled out by control systems. The nice thing about oil and coal is that they run out, and that they pollute the air to cause eco-catastrophes, which are far preferable to having our lives managed by the institutions that own the energy. Sustainable, clean energy that you can't cheaply gather in your back yard is the worst technology possible, because it will enable the systems that enslave us to continue forever.
I think behind human history is an evil collective consciousness that wants to crush the spirit of life, and techies are unwittingly resonating with it. After they take care of energy, they'll invent a way to make us immortal, so we can't even get out by suicide. We will become eternal torture victims of the megamachine, just like in Harlan Ellison's classic sci-fi story "I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream."