REVIEW: Powerdown - Options and Actions for a Post-Carbon World
Richard Heinberg
Clairview 2004 ISBN 1-902636-63-5

The end may well be nigh. In case you haven’t heard yet, quite a few people are suggesting that we really can’t go on like this indefinitely and the likelihood is that our civilisation is on the point of collapse. In Powerdown, Richard Heinberg attempts, with variable success, to bring this idea into the mainstream.

As is usual with this type of book, Heinberg’s analysis of the problems we face is lucid and credible. Oil production will peak, both the industry and its critics agree, in the next thirty years if not the next decade. The peak will be followed by a rapid drop-off in availability and spiralling energy costs as demand continues to grow, outstripping supply. In the meantime, climate change will nibble away at food production and cause increasing environmental and weather havoc, and natural resources such as fresh water, fish and timber stocks will continue to be depleted.. Add in a heavy dose of political instability and brewing economic crises and things look pretty black. Heinberg follows up with a brief but fair analysis of the attitude of the world’s elites, ‘For them, the coming decades will constitute a fatal game of Last One Standing, a brutal contest for the world’s remaining resources.’ And there’s no point ‘waiting for the magic elixir’: oil sands, hydrogen, perpetual motion etc. will not save the world.

Fair enough, most Corporate Watch regulars know all this and already have half an eye on a hideaway in the hills and a copy of Ray Mears’ Survival Handbook. If you haven’t, however, or you haven’t thought much beyond this, Powerdown is probably worth reading. As well as his accessible analysis of the problems, Heinberg has a knack for drawing analogies and telling stories, particularly of historical collapsed civilisations - Rome, imperial China and the Maya kingdoms, to name but a few. His storytelling extends to possible scenarios for salvaging culture from the ruins of our civilisation - not just surviving, but preserving some of what we have collectively learned, as Christian monasteries preserved some of the learning of Ancient Rome through the Dark Ages and in to the Renaissance.

However, although potentially useful, Powerdown is by no means the work of a guru. For a start, the book undermines itself to the point of duplicity - in Chapter 3, Heinberg presents his idea of ‘Powerdown’ ‘The only realistic alternative to resource competition is a strategy...to reduce per-capita resource use, develop alternative energy sources...distribute resources more equitably...’ etc etc. However, it quickly becomes clear that Heinberg himself does not seriously believe that this is possible. He claims that such a strategy would require strong leadership, then admits the paradox of centralising power in order to achieve a decentralised society (and has previously spent half of Chapter 2 detailing the lunacy of the current US regime’s War on Terror as part of a Last One Standing strategy). Also, here at CW, we also cannot fail to notice his total neglect of the problem of corporate power and the corporate drive for profit maximisation, which currently lock both government and economy into the ‘growth-at-all-costs’ model. Ultimately, the weakness of the author’s belief undermines the credibility of this proposal. It becomes clear that his heart is in Chapter 5, ‘Building Lifeboats’, where Heinberg offers the following ‘Sermon on the Collapse’:

Blessed are those who depend least on modern technology,
for they have not forgotten how to take care of themselves
Blessed are those whose culture is communitarian and not individualist,
for they will share and prosper.
Blessed are those who have no exploitable natural resources,
for no-one will bother them.
Blessed are those who know how to grow food,
for they will eat and feed others.

In the final chapter the book just about falls apart, again undermining Heinberg’s whole credibility. After repeating the analysis that the global elites are involved in a game of self-deception, he plunges into several pages of unfocussed rant against ‘the Movement’ (yes, with a capital M), which he seems to identify almost entirely with the policies of large, mainstream Western NGOs, who are apparently identical with ‘the leaders of the Movement’ [WHO? Ed.] The last twenty years of radical thought inspiring people taking to the streets appear to have passed him by. Worse than this, Heinberg then goes on to criticise ‘the Movement’ for refusing to address ‘population pressure’ other than ‘through the means of educating women and distributing birth-control information and devices’. Apparently, ‘no-one has yet been able to envision a way of significantly reducing the total human population of the planet over the course of the next few decades without resorting to some method that would compromise what many regard as the most sacred of human rights - the right to reproduce.’

This is either just wildly incoherent or cowardly to the point of dishonesty. Let’s put it simply - there are basically two methods of achieving population control. The first is consenting, through the empowerment and education of women and free availability of birth control technology (the method which has reduced births below the replacement level in much of the West and certain other places such as the Indian state of Kerala, which Heinberg actually cites as an example of good ecological practice elsewhere in the book). The second is coercive, as practiced in China and certain other places, which ultimately means strapping women to operating tables for life-endangering enforced abortions and sterilisations. Which is a fundamental abuse of human rights and a negation of the value of our civilisation. If this is what Heinberg advocates, he should come out and say so. If he knows of a third way, he should come out and say so. He has done neither, and unfortunately this failure more than anything else devalues his whole work.