"We are facing multiple grave world crises — peak oil, climate change, inequity and species extinction to name just a few. When I began this book our situation was very serious — now it is life threatening. The survival of industrial society as we know it today is in doubt. Twenty years of so-called sustainability conversations have led nowhere, and green has degenerated into a marketing term. The time for scientific and technological solutions to problems caused by science and engineering is long past. Survival requires that we begin to see that energy technology is the root cause of many serious world problems. As William Jevons pointed out decades ago, ever more efficient machines designed by scientists and engineers means ever-increasing consumption of fossil fuels and more generation of CO2.
Our problem is cultural, not technical. It is a character issue, not a scientific one. We have never bothered to ask or answer the question “What is energy for?†We have allowed cheap fossil fuels to change us from citizens into mere consumers. We in the modern world have become addicted to consuming energy. In the past, our spiritual traditions warned us against materialism — an older name for our current addictive consumerism. But contemporary religions seem to concede that humanity’s main purpose is to consume the products of a fossil fuel-based, perpetual-growth economy. As Wendell Berry says:
The churches generally sit and watch and even approve while our society hurries brainlessly on with the industrialization of child-raising, education, medicine, all the pleasures and all the practical arts. And perhaps this is because religion itself is increasingly industrialized: concerned with quantity, “growth,†fashionable thought and an inane sort of expert piety. From where I’m looking, it seems necessary for Christians to recognize that the industrial economy is not just a part of a quasi-rational system of specializations, granting the needs of the body to the corporations and the needs of the spirit to the churches, but is in fact an opposing religion, assigning to technological progress and “the market†the same omnipotence, omniscience, unquestionability, even the same beneficence, that the Christian teachings assign to God." -Pat Murphy, Plan C Preface
