WEEKEND COLUMNISTS We have another energy crisis upon us. I remember the last one, caused by the Opec oil embargo and subsequent price rise in 1973-74, and the apocalyptic mood-music it provoked about the end of oil, and of civilisation as we knew it. It coincided with a particularly dark period in British industrial relations, culminating in two miners’ strikes, the imposition of a three-day working week and rotating power blackouts. There was something quite romantic, for me as a 15-year-old schoolboy, about parsing Virgil by candlelight, but I suppose it was rather a grim time for most adults.
Our current energy crisis is less immediately dramatic but more ominous in long-term outlook. The price of oil has fluctuated wildly in the past year, tending to obscure the arguments about whether we have in fact reached, or come close to, the moment of peak oil predicted by geoscientist M King Hubbert. But even if oil, by some miraculous dispensation, could be extracted indefinitely from the earth’s crust, we would still have an energy crisis, or a fossil fuel crisis. We are choking in our pollution, dangerously overheating the planet, and we have not yet come up with a reliable, consistent, safe and clean source of energy.
Of course there are those who maintain that nuclear energy is clean and safe, and that carbon capture and storage will solve everything, but the former argument remains contentious and the latter technology in an embryonic stage.
Writing at the time of the first energy crisis in the 1970s, the maverick Catholic priest, historian and ecologist Ivan Illich exploded the whole idea of energy crisis. Both the problem and the solution, according to Illich, were to be located not in the earth’s crust but in the mind of man.
The key to understanding the energy crisis, Illich said, lay in a “peculiar notion that man is born into perpetual dependence on slaves which he must painfully learn to master”. These slaves could be human beings or machines designed to perform slave tasks. The energy crisis, Illich continued, “focuses concern on the scarcity of these slaves. I prefer to ask whether free men need them.” He had the barmy-seeming idea that we would do better – that is to say would lead more human, fairer and freer lives – if we consumed less energy. Far from freeing us up, the addiction to ever-greater quanta of energy enslaves our souls, making us passive consumers rather than active doers, and concentrates power in mega-institutions.
All mainstream thinking about the energy crisis, now as then, as well as the thinking of gloomy ecologists such as James Lovelock and George Monbiot, assumes the need for ever-increasing amounts of energy from sources outside the human body. In his most scintillating book Tools for Conviviality (1973), Illich pointed out that all the great glories and horrors of civilisation up until the industrial age were achieved mainly by the power of human muscle. “A small energy parcel from each man was the major source of physical power with which temples were built, mountains were moved, cloth was woven, wars were waged.”
You might already be dangerously overheating with indignation about a reactionary thinker’s plan to return us all to the inhuman drudgery we escaped with such brilliant applied ingenuity, but hold your horses. Illich liked to be provocative, but it is worth thinking seriously about what he has to say. Much of the energy we consume goes on transportation, and this is the area which remains most stubbornly dependent on fossil fuels, and specifically oil.
In another book, Energy and Equity (1974), Illich focuses on the social and economic costs of the unstoppable growth of traffic (at the same time, Jacques Tati was making his gently humorous film Traffic). As you would expect, Illich did not see the solution in terms of new runways, ever-multiplying networks of motorways or even high-speed trains. What needed to be examined first was the mindset of the habitual passenger.
Removed from the sphere in which people still move on their own, this product of industrialism “has lost the sense that he stands at the centre of the world … The passenger has come to identify territory with the untouchable landscape through which he is rushed.”
The passenger’s personal alienation is compounded by city planning that prioritises cars and leaves those without them stranded in no-man’s land. Illich was decades ahead of his time in alerting policymakers to a problem which bedevils cities from Brasilia to Shanghai.
Another writer I bumped into a few times in my 20s, a contemporary of Illich, died just before Christmas. His name was Peter Vansittart, and he devoted most of his life to writing dense, allusive historical novels read only by a small circle of admirers. But I always thought there was something impressive about this tall, rangy, eccentric man with an untamed look. I remember friends telling me that Peter, when he lived in London, used to walk everywhere, whatever the weather or the distance. Shortly before he died at 88, Peter Vansittart was still walking energetically through the Suffolk countryside he loved. He reminds us of the untapped energy we possess, and its connection with freedom.
More columns at www.ft.com/eyres
