{"id":3514929,"date":"2025-07-22T11:12:48","date_gmt":"2025-07-22T11:12:48","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3514929"},"modified":"2025-07-22T11:12:48","modified_gmt":"2025-07-22T11:12:48","slug":"go-solar-go-vegan-and-still-collapse-beyond-the-global-environmental-problems-framework","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2025-07-22\/go-solar-go-vegan-and-still-collapse-beyond-the-global-environmental-problems-framework\/","title":{"rendered":"Go solar, go vegan and still collapse: beyond the global environmental problems framework"},"content":{"rendered":"

The end of June is usually an exciting time for me. Summer holidays approaching? No, it\u2019s when the Energy Institute publishes its annual\u00a0Statistical Review of World Energy<\/a>. Who doesn\u2019t love a big fat spreadsheet landing in their downloads folder to analyse to their heart\u2019s content? The answer to that, of course, is a good many. And, in the case of the EI energy data, I have to confess I\u2019m on a path to joining them, because I\u2019ve found my excitement diminishing.<\/p>\n

The main reason is because the figures tell the same darned story year after year. Despite endless talk about the purported \u2018transition\u2019 out of fossil fuels into low-carbon forms of energy, this resolutely fails to happen. Last year was no exception \u2013 the new data show that more oil, more natural gas and more coal were burned globally in 2024 than ever before in human history. Seriously, we need to stop talking about this mythical \u2018transition\u2019.<\/p>\n

True, there was a big proportionate increase in solar and wind consumption once again \u2013 up 16 percent from 14.4 to 16.8 exajoules globally. But in absolute terms fossil fuel use increased more \u2013 up 7.6 exajoules from 505.1 to 512.7 exajoules globally. In most countries, fossil energy use dwarfs lower carbon forms of energy consumption. To reduce fossil fuel use to zero by 2050, we\u2019d have to swipe out nearly 20 exajoules of fossil fuel each and every year between now and then \u2013 more than the entire global consumption of solar and wind energy, and more energy than is used in total by the world\u2019s fifth highest energy-using country, Japan (figures calculated by me from the EI data).<\/p>\n

This just isn\u2019t going to happen \u2013 and it\u2019s not because fossil energy companies are disgracefully dragging their feet over leaving the fossils in the ground, although that\u2019s certainly true. For reasons much discussed on this site in the past (for example,\u00a0here<\/a>), the existing global economy is fatally dependent on fossils. This can\u2019t go on indefinitely, but it\u2019s not going to change through some smooth replacement of unsustainable energy sources with sustainable ones. If we were talking seriously about using renewables as a bridging technology to transition to lower-energy, more local lifeways, I might be able to get behind the concept of \u2018transition\u2019. But we\u2019re not. Prepare for a bumpy ride.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot more that could be said in detail about these energy trends, of course. But there\u2019s a wood-for-the-trees danger in doing so that too easily evades the key headline \u2013\u00a0World economy inevitably hooked on fossils!<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 and draws us into a realm of global techno-fix solutionism whose number is up. The notion that the high-energy, super-connected global political economy may be able to sustain business-as-usual over the next few decades through newer energy and other technologies that can prolong its need for growth is dead in the water. Not that sustaining business-as-usual is an especially good thing, although probably better than disorderly collapse. But how to mitigate the effects of disorderly collapse now seems to me the key issue of concern.<\/p>\n

So how, then? It may seem like a cop out, but my argument is that the answers have to be approached locally, in a panoply of context-specific ways focused on generating adequate material livelihoods in given locales that can\u2019t be spelled out in some grand plan. There is no \u201cif we all just did x\u201d solution, shorn of local context, to the unravelling of the high-energy global economy. This kind of contextless thinking exemplifies what I call in my forthcoming book the \u2018world environmental problems\u2019 framework. It signally fails to provide plausible solutions.<\/p>\n

Another shopworn example of contextless global solutionism is the notion we can reverse climate change and preserve business-as-usual by turning vegan. This view has been given a fillip recently by Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop in a\u00a0paper<\/a>\u00a0he\u2019s been trailing heavily, for example on Rachel Donald\u2019s\u00a0Planet Critical<\/a>\u00a0podcast. The headline version of his argument is that animal agriculture is the biggest driver of global heating via methane emissions and deforestation. If everybody stopped eating livestock products, the argument goes, the planet would reforest and heal itself.<\/p>\n

There are so many problems with this that I don\u2019t really know where to begin. I probably\u00a0shouldn\u2019t<\/em>\u00a0begin, for the same reason that talking about clean energy transitions cedes too much ground from the get-go to illusory solutionism. In brief, I\u2019ll just say that I find Wedderburn-Bisshop\u2019s arguments a bit muddled on methane, vague on the relationship between pastoralism and deforestation, ignorant on grassland and fire ecosystems, dangerously complacent on natural carbon sinks and lacking in understanding of how profit-driven fossil capital drives agricultural overproduction \u2013 particularly of arable grains \u2013 in ecologically sensitive locations.<\/p>\n

But the problem isn\u2019t so much the specifics. Some of the things Wedderburn-Bisshop says are certainly correct technically. As always, it\u2019s the context, the wider inferences and the path dependencies that matter. For example, even if it were true, as Wedderburn-Bisshop claims, that animal agriculture has caused 60 percent of climate change since 1750, existing mainstream agriculture of all kinds relies fundamentally on cheap fossil energy. Without it (and also without a colonial attitude to other land and people) people would have to figure out how to produce food, fibre and fertility from their localities. Almost always, this would radically change the way they used livestock, and it would radically change a whole bunch of other things about how they lived. So the 60 percent figure implicitly misattributes the underlying cause of climate change and draws attention to the wrong remedies.<\/p>\n

One of those wrong remedies that I suspect we\u2019ll see amplified ever more loudly in the coming years is opposition to livestock husbandry of any kind, regardless of context. In the face of ongoing government failures to limit greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels, offloading the blame onto the eaters and keepers of livestock will help to divert attention from the more radical and systemic changes needed to deliver resilient local food systems. Perusing the website of Wedderburn-Bisshop\u2019s organisation, the\u00a0World Preservation Foundation<\/a>, I\u2019m struck by the absence of fossil fuels from its characterisation of why life on earth in peril, the prominence of corporate alt-meat approaches, and the silence about local agroecological approaches to food.<\/p>\n

Still, it\u2019s theoretically possible that some good may nevertheless come of this anti-livestock move. If it helps to push wealthy consumers away from long supply-chain consumption of meat sourced ultimately from ecologically vulnerable agricultural frontiers it might achieve something positive, provided it avoided the siren song of the corporate alt-meat agenda and emphasised more vegetable-heavy local food systems instead.<\/p>\n

But I\u2019m not holding my breath. I think it\u2019s much more likely that the narrative will be captured by corporate alt-meat and \u2018land-sparing\u2019 interests that will heap further opprobrium on small-scale mixed farmers and pastoralists of the Global South and North alike.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, I daresay those of us who make the case for a peopled, localist, rural and agroecological approach to food systems will continue to face the kind of putdowns I get quite regularly from pro-urban vegans and manufactured food advocates operating under \u2018world environmental problems\u2019 assumptions. I know this is going to sound patronising, but I suppose I have to steel myself to keep enduring these barbs with a kind of \u201cah bless\u201d empathy toward people who sweetly imagine their actions can help preserve our present world of mass urbanism and industrial food systems, perhaps understandably in view of the profound challenges involved in imagining anything else. Nevertheless, I think they\u2019re labouring under the misapprehension that their supposedly lower carbon footprints herald a promising long-term future trend for the preservation of a global-industrial and mass-urban civilization, rather than a last gasp attempt of that civilization to render itself sustainable in the face of its multiple inabilities to be so.<\/p>\n

Oddly, this puts me in company with those conservative or alt-right voices that deride people from the kind of urban, left-wing, eco-conscious world from which I hail as \u2018soulless bugmen, living in the pod\u2019. Yet I believe the soulless bugmen typically share with their alt-right critics an underappreciation of quite how colonial our relationship to land, food and the people who furnish it has become in modern times. The left-leaning urbanists are probably better placed to gain that appreciation politically, whereas the right-leaning ruralists are probably better placed to appreciate and embody it in their practices of daily livelihood-making.<\/p>\n

I discuss the importance of this non-colonial way of thinking about livelihood, of learning to be indigenous, quite a bit in my forthcoming book, along with its relation to capital-I Indigenous peoples. Because humans in general are as incapable of jettisoning symbolic systems like language, religion and money as modern humans are incapable of jettisoning fossil fuels, I don\u2019t think our relationship to land can ever be entirely non-colonial \u2013 which is okay up to a point, and perhaps even worth celebrating. But only up to a point that\u2019s been far exceeded by present human material systems.<\/p>\n

To his credit, Gerard Wedderburn-Bisshop does mention in the podcast that the historic modes of livelihood-making associated with Indigenous peoples are more sustainable, before rushing to the conclusion that \u2018we\u2019 don\u2019t, won\u2019t and\/or can\u2019t live like that. In the coming years, it seems to me likely that there will be strong selective pressures favouring those that try. This is why debates about livestock, ruminants, urban carbon footprints and the like are ultimately distractions, and why we need to kick this one-shot solutionism habit and its \u2018global environmental problems\u2019 framing. The key reality or privilege check should not be to calibrate our food choices against some universalised quantum of what\u2019s \u2018best for the planet\u2019, but to develop local food systems that can create modest local material (not monetary) livelihoods without the expenditure of significant fossil or other exotic energies and inputs. Currently, at a collective civilizational level, we\u2019re not doing that. And we\u2019re not even remotely on trend \u2013 as the Energy Institute\u2019s fossil energy data demonstrates.<\/p>\n

For my part, I\u2019m planning to cut the number of ruminant livestock I personally tend. This is for reasons unrelated to Wedderburn-Bisshop\u2019s intervention, though it will no doubt help me do my bit for global cooling, provided I don\u2019t err in other ways, for example with increased internet searches or railway journeys. Since the ruminant livestock I personally tend basically amounts to two breeding ewes it\u2019s not easy to cut the numbers while retaining a flock at all. The trick, as ever, is to build in more cooperation with other people.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m also planning not to get so drawn into debating global environmental problems type framings in the future. This probably won\u2019t be easy, given my residual enthusiasm for things like spreadsheets of global energy data. But I will try, because such debates are an endless pit of misery in which people parade their \u2018take away the number you first thought of\u2019 confirmation biases rather than engaging in the necessary political and cultural discussions. Since I\u2019ve just finished writing a book which makes a broad global case for not making broad global cases, I need to think about where else I might usefully focus my writing energies in the future. Suggestions welcome.<\/p>\n

Current Reading<\/h3>\n

Jane Cooper\u00a0The Lost Flock<\/em>\u00a0(a lovely memoir detailing the story of Boreray sheep and their place in premodern Highland economies \u2013 quite the antidote to too much world environmental problems thinking)<\/p>\n

Musa al-Gharbi\u00a0We Have Never Been Woke<\/em>\u00a0(I\u2019m still slowly working my way through this revelatory book broadly on the complexities of human claims to status and authenticity \u2013 to be discussed soon)<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There is no \u201cif we all just did x\u201d solution, shorn of local context, to the unravelling of the high-energy global economy. This kind of contextless thinking exemplifies what I call in my forthcoming book the \u2018world environmental problems\u2019 framework. It signally fails to provide plausible solutions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3514963,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[79716,213529,79719],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3514929","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-energy","category-energy-featured","category-foodwater"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514929","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3514929"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514929\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3514962,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3514929\/revisions\/3514962"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3514963"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3514929"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3514929"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3514929"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}