The end of June is usually an exciting time for me. Summer holidays approaching? No, it’s when the Energy Institute publishes its annual Statistical Review of World Energy. Who doesn’t love a big fat spreadsheet landing in their downloads folder to analyse to their heart’s 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’m on a path to joining them, because I’ve found my excitement diminishing.
The main reason is because the figures tell the same darned story year after year. Despite endless talk about the purported ‘transition’ out of fossil fuels into low-carbon forms of energy, this resolutely fails to happen. Last year was no exception – 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 ‘transition’.
True, there was a big proportionate increase in solar and wind consumption once again – up 16 percent from 14.4 to 16.8 exajoules globally. But in absolute terms fossil fuel use increased more – 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’d have to swipe out nearly 20 exajoules of fossil fuel each and every year between now and then – more than the entire global consumption of solar and wind energy, and more energy than is used in total by the world’s fifth highest energy-using country, Japan (figures calculated by me from the EI data).
This just isn’t going to happen – and it’s not because fossil energy companies are disgracefully dragging their feet over leaving the fossils in the ground, although that’s certainly true. For reasons much discussed on this site in the past (for example, here), the existing global economy is fatally dependent on fossils. This can’t go on indefinitely, but it’s 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 ‘transition’. But we’re not. Prepare for a bumpy ride.
There’s a lot more that could be said in detail about these energy trends, of course. But there’s a wood-for-the-trees danger in doing so that too easily evades the key headline – World economy inevitably hooked on fossils! – 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.
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’t be spelled out in some grand plan. There is no “if we all just did x” 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 ‘world environmental problems’ framework. It signally fails to provide plausible solutions.
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 paper he’s been trailing heavily, for example on Rachel Donald’s Planet Critical podcast. 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.
There are so many problems with this that I don’t really know where to begin. I probably shouldn’t begin, for the same reason that talking about clean energy transitions cedes too much ground from the get-go to illusory solutionism. In brief, I’ll just say that I find Wedderburn-Bisshop’s 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 – particularly of arable grains – in ecologically sensitive locations.
But the problem isn’t so much the specifics. Some of the things Wedderburn-Bisshop says are certainly correct technically. As always, it’s 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.
One of those wrong remedies that I suspect we’ll 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’s organisation, the World Preservation Foundation, I’m 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.
Still, it’s 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.
But I’m not holding my breath. I think it’s much more likely that the narrative will be captured by corporate alt-meat and ‘land-sparing’ interests that will heap further opprobrium on small-scale mixed farmers and pastoralists of the Global South and North alike.
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 ‘world environmental problems’ 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 “ah bless” 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’re 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.
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 ‘soulless bugmen, living in the pod’. 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.
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’t think our relationship to land can ever be entirely non-colonial – which is okay up to a point, and perhaps even worth celebrating. But only up to a point that’s been far exceeded by present human material systems.
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 ‘we’ don’t, won’t and/or can’t 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 ‘global environmental problems’ framing. The key reality or privilege check should not be to calibrate our food choices against some universalised quantum of what’s ‘best for the planet’, 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’re not doing that. And we’re not even remotely on trend – as the Energy Institute’s fossil energy data demonstrates.
For my part, I’m planning to cut the number of ruminant livestock I personally tend. This is for reasons unrelated to Wedderburn-Bisshop’s intervention, though it will no doubt help me do my bit for global cooling, provided I don’t 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’s 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.
I’m also planning not to get so drawn into debating global environmental problems type framings in the future. This probably won’t 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 ‘take away the number you first thought of’ confirmation biases rather than engaging in the necessary political and cultural discussions. Since I’ve 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.
Current Reading
Jane Cooper The Lost Flock (a lovely memoir detailing the story of Boreray sheep and their place in premodern Highland economies – quite the antidote to too much world environmental problems thinking)
Musa al-Gharbi We Have Never Been Woke (I’m still slowly working my way through this revelatory book broadly on the complexities of human claims to status and authenticity – to be discussed soon)
Thanks for the interesting comments - much to agree with. In case it needs clarifying, I've got no problem with veganism - it can be a wise choice on any number of grounds, and for sure there's much about the global livestock industry that's horrific and ecocidal. It's just that I find exaggerated claims about it in respect of the climate problematic.
I found theearthly link a bit problematic too in that respect. Maybe I will try to clarify these issues some more as requested by some folks here.
Thanks for your essay Paul P - I enjoyed it. My new book engages with distributism, subsidiarity & elements of conservative thought.
Your title "Go solar, go vegan and still collapse" made my smile.
I went vegetarian in 2015 after seeing the Cowspiracy film, and had given up chicken before that, have been vegan for about 8 years. But I don't suffer any illusion that it "will save the planet" and didn't go that way because of carbon footprint, but simply because of the inherent cruelty in the industry. If someone wants to eat meat or fish, that's fine by me, as long as they catch it, kil it, skin it, gut it and cook it themselves.
The way I look at is, if everyone went vegan, the planet would be in an even worse state. Think it through.
Lets say in 1973 everyone read Limits to Growth and the entire world went vegan. The human population today would be over 14 billion. Or more. Wut? Yes.
Does anyone think that the rate of deforestation would have got any less?
No, the capitalist machine would have carried on regardless, only now you could feed more people per acre harvested once you've got rid of the pesky cattle and sheep. It is said a meat eater requires 15 acres, a vegetarian 5 acres and a vegan 1 acre. Those ratios are probably suspect but even so, I think readers can see the pattern. So now with more people you can cut down even more of the rainforests and convert it to crop growing, from which you can then feed more people. The entire Amazon would have probably gone by now and the world's climate be in an even worse state.
So no, being vegan isn't an answer to climate change. It's a sane moral response to the hideousness of the agricultural industrial complex, and a personal taste and texture choice, but only those.