I have read with great interest the symposium on the prime minister’s essay and the global financial crisis (“The Rudd Essay & the Financial Crisis”, May 2009), as well as the Comment in the same issue by Flannery and Rowley. While many interesting points were made, I have found the series highly disappointing from such learned authors. For example, of course, Morris is right when he stresses that macroeconomics is not a science. We have known this for decades. Economics is structured as a religion and founded on myths. However, this very acknowledgement calls for much deeper critiques than any of those offered by these authors. This crisis is clearly unprecedented. Rigorous critical thinking requires that one would not only issue the usual critiques from each party’s standpoint and ideological make-up but also question in depth those very standpoints and ideologies. What is new in this crisis that is not dealt with by any of the traditional standpoints?

The global economic order is structured and run as a dreamlike perpetual-motion machine in total ignorance of thermodynamics and systems dynamics. None of this mattered much while human actions remained comparatively modest with respect to global ecosystems. In a so-called globalised economy that has now grown big enough to interfere significantly with natural systems, the fundamentals of thermodynamics, complex systems dynamics and ecology come back to bite with a vengeance, and other considerations begin to pale into insignificance. Neither Prime Minister Rudd nor his critics seem to have taken these key matters into consideration. Those of us who have done so, and for decades, are extremely worried but find it extremely hard to get are concerns heard. A key issue relates to net energy. Net energy is the amount of energy that is available to power the global economy when all the direct and indirect energy costs of mining, processing, transporting and distributing energy resources has been deducted. It is extremely hard to obtain good data in this domain since statistics deal essentially with the dreamlike perpetual-motion machine. However, enough is transpiring to cause major concern. Alongside a number of overseas experts, I estimate that net energy from all fossil fuel is trending towards hitting the zero mark most likely by around 2030 and almost certainly before 2040. Given the usual 40 to 50 years lead times for substituting major infrastructures, the present situation is nothing short of a global emergency, albeit one most decision-makers are only dimly aware of due to their current fascination with the more distant dangers of ‘climate change’ and the immediate challenges presented by the current recession. Let’s be clear: at zero net energy, everything grinds to a halt. Of course, one never gets to such a point as all structures begin to break down well before reaching that fated mark. Such collapses have happened before concerning individual civilisations. The novelty is in the matter being global this time round. This situation is far more radical than so-called climate change or a mere ‘financial crisis’; either are mere facets and consequences of the overall energy dynamics.

The Flannery-and-Rowley duo critique the unfolding of the CPRS and talk of “climate change”. Of course the CPRS has “become the focus of a distracting argument”. Of course the government is “not sufficiently informed to know … whether or not such policies are effective”. And yet neither Flannery nor Rowley seems to wonder if the issues are properly framed. Enough is known of the dynamics of global ecosystems and energy flows to be sure that any policy like the CPRS is bound to fail regardless of the details of its implementation. Yes, the complex set of issues subsumed under the label of climate change has now been recognised by most as actually taking place and being largely anthropogenic in character. However, as is sadly often the case with scientific matters when they impinge on numerous vested interests of a social, economic and political nature, the whole matter has been largely reduced to the status of myth at the hands of the media and many decision-makers in the public and private sectors. I refer to myth in both the anthropological and vernacular senses. Most of the current policies and business initiatives address the myth instead of the reality as the latter is analysed and insistently pointed out by the rapidly evolving disciplines focusing on global ecosystems. The consequences are already huge and taxpayers are footing the bill for actions and measures that are likely to prove ineffective or worse. Matters concerning so-called climate change are only a subset of the far more complex and worrisome degradation of the global ecology that now threatens some 95% of life on Earth.

There is urgency in addressing the reality instead of the myths. Doing so begins with dealing with the immediate energy emergency. There is no energy scarcity. Humans, not nature, create scarcity. There is 1.36GW of solar power for each square kilometre at the top of the troposphere (equivalent to a large power station); more than humankind will ever possibly require.

The essential technologies and know-how required for a transition to sustainable ways of living and doing business are known. The transition is feasible without the massive costs Flannery, Rowley and many others worry about, and without heavy-handed government policies.

This is a matter of cognitive failure; that is to say, the cognitive and cultural inability to figure out how to successfully meet the challenges within the necessary time frame despite the required knowledge and expertise being readily available. When cognitive failure happens to a given society, as it has happened many times historically in various localised fashions, that society simply crashes and usually never recovers. Centuries later, archaeologists uncover its lost ruins in the jungles or under the sands. In my view, those essays and comments manifest first and foremost the dangers of cognitive failure.