Peter Grimes is a political sociologist whose paradigm examines society as a component of
the flow of energy through life. He was interviewed by Howard J. Ehrlich, a sociologist
who is a member of the editorial collective of the Baltimore Independent Media Center.
The interview was transcribed by Kristie Kozenewski and redacted collaboratively by
Grimes and Ehrlich.


E: What is the starting point of your analysis?

G: Energy.

E: Why?

G: It is a law of thermodynamics, the law of the universe, that all life requires energy, and
is sustained by using energy to suspend molecules in a state that they would otherwise not
naturally be in. While that is also true of other systems like stars, what makes life different
than stars is that life changes its environment in order to sustain itself while stars do not.

E: But the environment itself is constantly changing.

G: This is why life has to be adaptive and why evolution is always ongoing.

E: Let’s talk about climate and climate change. Is the climate different today than it was
at some other period of time like 10,000 years or 20,000 years ago?

G: Yes. The climate is an example of something that has always been changing. Just as
all life is changing, the climate system is affected by life and also, perhaps more
importantly, by non-life. Long before people were around, the climate was always
changing. The change in climate has always been the result of three things, of which two
are forces. One is the source of energy from the sun, which is a force. A second is the
flow of energy outward from the planet--which is radioactive and hence generates heat. It
is also hot because it is still in the process of compressing. A third factor is that materials
in the climate, the molecules that make the climate up, have themselves been changing and
the composition of the climate changes the rate at which it allows heat to leave the earth’s
surface and radiate out into space. Historically, in the “big history” sense going back well
before people were on the planet, the earth’s atmosphere was made up of large chunks of
nitrogen and methane and other gases which, as a whole, were inhospitable to life as we
currently know it and which tended to trap the heat more effectively and efficiently than
today’s climate. What has happened over the long run is that life--particularly plant life
using photosynthesis--evolved, and it began pumping oxygen into the atmosphere and
taking out carbon dioxide. Oxygen is a clearer gas than carbon dioxide is, from the point-
of-view of heat escape. The result is that the planet has been cooling over the past
multiple millions of years. An example of the long term trend and outcome can be found
in the White Cliffs of Dover and the Calvert Cliffs, both of which are made of calcium
carbonate. Calcium carbonate was at one time carbon dioxide in the atmosphere which
was trapped by animals and plants; their skeletons fell to the bottom of the sea floor and
hardened into calcium carbonate. That is an example of all of the CO2 that used to be in
the atmosphere and no longer is. However, in the past few hundred years we have, by
virtue of first burning wood, then burning coal, and now burning oil taken some of the
carbon that was sequestered or trapped by plants and animals in the distant past and put it
back into the atmosphere, thereby reversing the long term trend. The global result of that
has been a 4 or 5 degree average increase in the planet’s temperature and a CO2 increase
from levels that used to be a little over 200 parts per million in 1800 to now upwards of
350 to 370 parts per million. That may not seem like very much, however that is almost
double. To give you some perspective, it once was the case that there were 2,700 parts
per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere billions of years ago, long before life came
along to clean it out. Now we are reversing that CO2 diminution by pumping all this
carbon back in. The last time that the levels of CO2 were as high as they are now naturally
was during the age of the dinosaurs, 100 million years ago.

E: Is there consensus among environmental scientists that indeed the temperature is now
increasing?

G: Yes. There is no dispute on that question, even among those who are politically
uncomfortable with global warming. There is no dispute that it is occurring. The only
dispute has been over the rate in which it has been occurring and the ultimate levels it may
obtain.

E: What are the cultural and societal implications of an increase in temperature?

G: I can not speak to what the cultural implications are. I can speak to what the
environmental implications are and thereby the societal ones. There will be an increase in
the frequency and prevalence of virulent disease.

E: Why?

G: If you increase the temperature you increase the favorability of the environment for
micro-organisms in general which tend to thrive at warmer temperatures, to a point of
course. This is exemplified by the prevalence of disease in the tropics that are not found in
the polar regions or even in the temperate regions and we can anticipate that tropical
diseases will move towards the poles. Indeed they have already demonstrated that they
are moving towards the poles: Dengue Fever has been moving up Central America into
Mexico and now into southern parts of the United States. Malaria has been reoccurring in
the United States 50-70 years after it was thought to have been wiped out. That is one
factor.

The second factor is that the virulence of disease is affected both by population density
and by genetic mutation. SARS today is an example of genetic mutation which is a
routine process but is accelerated in conditions of higher temperature. Virulence is also
determined by population density and we have a greater population density on the planet
now than ever before. The reason that density affects virulence is that the more tightly
packed people are the faster disease can communicate from person to person. Thereby,
nastier diseases can live longer in the population because there are more hosts that they
can travel among before killing them off. In less dense population circumstances a
virulent, nasty disease might kill off the host before it has had the opportunity to be near
another potential host. In densely packed urban situations that constraint is removed so a
very nasty bug can travel very quickly. So that is one example of a change that can
happen to society which is an increase in mortality.

E: What about antibiotics?

Antibiotics are rapidly becoming less effective as diseases have mutated and side-stepped
the mechanisms that antibiotics use to kill them. So that by itself is another reason for
concern. I heard an epidemiologist recently report that he anticipated that at the rate that
diseases are evolving we will soon be back to the pre-antibiotic era in terms of our ability
to handle them. This means we would lose our ability to handle bacterial diseases.

E: What about genetic mapping and potential engineering—does it have a possibility of
curtailing that process?

G: Yes. In fact just recently on the cover of Science magazine they had a story on the
mapping of the SARS virus; prior to that they had decoded the malaria genetic code.
Whether and how that will affect our capacity to fight those diseases is as yet unclear to
me.

E: What about the implications of climate change for agriculture?

G: Thank you for bringing that up because I was not done with my enumeration of
facts—I just hit the disease one and probably more important is the agricultural one. One
of the things that has been happening is that the climate zones hospitable to the major
crops of our time—rice, wheat, and corn—have been shifting north faster than the natural
ability of those crops to move. Now we can plant things further north as the climate
moves north, but the soils that those crops are best fostered in are themselves the result of
thousands, if not millions, of years of evolution; so the soils further north are not
necessarily suited to the crops that the weather will become suited to. So it may not be
possible to grow wheat, or corn, or rice in northern Saskatchewan or northern British
Columbia because the soils are not suited for those crops even if the weather should warm
such that the climate would seem suitable.

E: As the crops have changed, presumably there have been strong implications for the
ability of a population to be fed from the native crops.

G: Precisely. We can anticipate that the availability of those crops will decline as the
conditions suitable for growing them diminish. Therefore the prices of those crops will
increase and the energy input required to sustain them will increase because we have to
remember that these crops are no longer growing naturally; they are only growing as a
result of our continuous input of fertilizers, insecticides, and water. As it is, 70% of the
world’s water is currently devoted to agricultural consumption and not direct human
consumption. Yet, the melting of the ice caps and glaciers around the planet means less
and less fresh water is available for feeding the water sources that we use for feeding
crops. As a result, we are at a long term fresh water decline at the very time when we can
anticipate that the need for fresh water will be in fact be increasing both for crop
consumption and for human consumption. That means that the price of food will increase
and water, which has historically not been priced at all, is becoming rapidly priced around
the world according to the recommendations of the World Bank. Even if the World Bank
were not directly involved in doing this, water would probably become commodified
anyway. That means the poor will not only starve, but also die of thirst and/or in an effort
to avoid being thirsty will drink polluted water. I heard a very poignant story on the BBC
about some family living right outside a nuclear facility near Baghdad. They were living in
what had been the watch tower of the facility because of lack of housing and they were
informed that the water in the facility was highly radioactive. They said that is really
unfortunate but if we don’t drink this we will die of thirst. That is probably a metaphor
for how the poor will live throughout the world increasingly.

E: Do you think that this portends an increased level of warfare as the result of the
diminishing resources?

G: Yes. I anticipate that it will. I think the wars over oil in the Middle East are but a
harbinger of the kinds of resource wars we can anticipate in the future. Historically,
governing elites within each nation have competed for control over valuable resources
within and outside of their national boundaries. That is one of the primary motivations for
imperialism. Centuries ago they.fought with each other over access to precious metals like
gold and silver, and during the current period they are fighting over perceived pools of oil.
In the coming era we are probably going to see an increase in wars over food and
agricultural land, just as during feudalism.

E: Before we leave the subject of climate, what are the other implications of climate
change?

G: It seems that climate change is coinciding with a point in history where global
capitalism is becoming less and less a competition among semi-equal states near the top of
the international power hierarchy and more and more like a consolidated empire centered
in the United States. The income disparities within this empire in general, as well as
within every component “country,” are growing geometrically, and those income
disparities necessarily mean that the global number of poor is increasing far faster than the
number of affluent. Therefore, the tightening environmental constraints on population
from global warming (such as rising prices for food and water) are going to be
increasingly felt by the majority of the population that is poor, which will lead to various
social break-downs and conflicts even more within states than between them. So we can
anticipate chronic, constant internal war regardless of its ideological justifications.

Allow me to digress with an analogy that will clarify the point. Every time that capitalism
has spread into new areas (typically by military conquest), it’s pioneers have sought to
convert every useful item into a commodity–something that required money for its use.
To do so they have usually tried to capture and control the production and distribution of
that object or process–just like the World Bank is seeking to do today by “privatizing”
water around the world. Since this process of “commodification” (pricing everything that
can be controlled) has historically been imposed on societies that had been non-capitalist,
and for whom such goods had previously been freely available (or at least distributed
according to rules of ancient custom), it has understandably led to popular revolts. The
ideology of these revolts has varied according to the ideas current at the time, and have
wandered all over the map from explicitly pro-monarchist (in early 17th Century England
during the resistance to the “Enclosure” movements) to its opposite as Communist (China
and Latin America during the early and latter-part of the 20th Century, respectively). Yet
despite these ideological wanderings, each of these movements shared in common a
resistance to the process of commodification, the imposition of capitalism, the segregation
of the community into categories of wealth and the ability to pay.

E: And the same social process is repeating itself in the Middle East.

G: Right. During the peak of the political power of OPEC in the mid-1970's, the price of
oil became higher than at any point before or since. These high prices allowed the oil-
producing states to finance social welfare programs for their populations that were the
envy of the world–far better than even those provided by the social-democratic
governments of the Nordic countries. Specifically, they could afford to provide cradle-to-
grave free health care, along with free education up through college. However, as the
monopoly power of OPEC declined after that mid-1970's peak (partially due to the British
exploitation of North Sea oil and the US exploitation of the oil in Alaska’s North Slope),
the real price of oil began a steady decline. The long-term result has been that the budgets
of the governments of the OPEC states have necessarily also declined, compelling cut-
backs in the very social services that had lent those governments legitimacy despite their
autocratic practices. Hence their collective ability to protect their respective populations
against the divisive forces of global capitalist commodification has eroded, exposing their
peoples directly to the forces of the capitalist world market. Just as has happened
everywhere else, the intrusion of commodification has swept away the non-capitalist social
structure and protections that it offered. Likewise, just as has happened elsewhere the
reaction has been the emergence of a violent resistence. Only this time, because of the
collapse of the USSR and–in my view inappropriate–discrediting of Marxist analysis, the
ideology of convenience has been Islam. Just as revolts against the intrusion of capitalist
relations of production and consumption in earlier societies led to the adoption of
ideologies of convenience for mobilizing mass opposition, so I think “Islamic
Fundamentalism” is essentially an anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist revolt grabbing the
ideology lying nearest to hand. In this case, it is a reactionary ideology.

E: So what does this have to do with Global Warming?

G: A lot. Just as the imposition of commodification with capitalism had the effect of
creating scarcity out of seeming abundance, and this imposition of scarcity led to popular
revolts using whatever ideology was handy, so too will the resource scarcities resulting
from global warming presumably lead to another wave of revolts, again using whatever
ideology lies ready to hand. Another set of examples can be found in the recent explosion
of wars of ethnic cleansing, every one of which was a response to the sudden emergence
of conditions of scarcity similar to those that global warming will bring. Hence my
prediction of chronic internal war, the collapse of centralized states, and a reversion to the
decentralized warlord-ism that is typical of the periods between centralized imperial rule.
The current revolt of the “Radical Islamists” fits right into this model, as do the current
warfare in Africa.

E: Let’s talk more directly about energy. Are we consuming oil, for example, faster than
the reserves that exist?

G: Of course. I mean, the reserves are static and our growth and consumption are not.

E: Can we predict when oil will run out?

G: Yes, but not with 100% certainty of course. Not to the year but probably to within 5
or at the most 10 years. The rate of growth of our consumption has been not simply
geometric but logarithmic. That is, if you plot the rate of growth of our consumption over
time on a graph, you would see that it goes from a gently sloping upward horizontal line
to a now almost purely vertical line. That means that the amount of time required to
consume the reserves is contracting, and no matter how much reserves we have left, you
can imagine conceptually that if the rate of growth of consumption were strictly vertical
then an infinite amount of reserves would be consumed in zero time. That is a
mathematical necessity. To the degree that our rate of growth in consumption is
approaching verticality then the amount of reserves we have left approaches zero.
Realistically some analysts have calculated that 2010 will be the year in which we are
going to peak in our ability to consume oil. Thereafter, the rate of consumption will have
to decline, and the price of oil will have to rise. This means that all production,
transportation, and consumption that requires oil will become expensive in a geometrically
increasing fashion.

E: Is there a likelihood that there are oil reserves that are untapped that will in some way
set back that period of time of depletion?

G: Yes, but the mathematics of logarithmic growth are such that the amount of setback
you get for every additional barrel of oil discovered becomes geometrically smaller. Even
if we doubled the amount of available oil we might only set back that time by 5 years. I
might add, going back to agriculture for a moment, that oil is a very important input to
agriculture; therefore the price of food even if we were not facing a diminution of
agricultural land area would have to increase insofar we use oil to create fertilizers and
pesticides.

E: Before we talk about the broadly recurring patterns of change in your analysis, what
about the likelihood of oil being supplanted by alternative energies: solar, photovoltaic
wind, and the like?

G: Certainly, all of those forms of energy can replace most of the functions currently
performed by oil. For example, one can easily envisage mechanisms of transportation
dependent not upon oil but upon photovoltaics or electricity where the electric power is
generated somewhere as a result of solar energy or wind energy. However, oil is uniquely
suited for the supply of fertilizers and pesticides because oil is a byproduct of life and it
contains organic compounds which are usable by other life forms. That is not the case
with other forms of energy. So, any post-oil agricultural production will necessarily be
what we now call “organic.” That is going to cause a temporary setback in agricultural
production quite independent of the other factors mentioned before, particularly if it were
not phased in gradually.

E: What are the things that makes your analysis different from many sociologists, many
Marxists? Do you see all of this as part of a repeating pattern in human history?

G: The Marxist analysis of capitalism has typically been thought of as a “road map” for a
planned and class-based revolutionary social change, leading to a better society. While
this vision may yet be realized someday, along with it came the assumption that all major
prior social-revolutionary changes in history had also been the result of class-based
revolts. Current archeological research implies that this vision of history is just wrong.

It has become apparent to me that there is a broad continuity of history which subsumes
the areas of both “Marxism” and its theoretical off-spring of “World-Systems Theory.”
This broader analysis studies how human social formations, regardless of their mode of
production, are ultimately dependent upon energy–just like all other forms of life. In fact,
every major shift in history between forms of human social organization can be traced to a
parallel shift in the way energy was acquired and consumed. For example, hunters and
gatherers used the energy in plants and animals that they found in front of them without
either planning or guiding their environment. They were merely consumers of what
natural selection provided. In time, hunters and gatherers were supplanted and replaced
by horticulturalists who actively guided the growth of the plants that they were gathering,
and ultimately, they in their turn by agriculturalists that even more intensively selected and
guided and directed the plants and animals they were cultivating. Yet, each of these forms
of human social organization reached the limits of their available energy supply and either
survived by finding a new form of energy or else died out altogether. Long before
European imperialism conquered the existing agrarian empires that were then dominating
the world, history had already been littered with the archeological skeletons of collapsed
prior agrarian empires. It used to be thought that these earlier collapses were because of
social phenomena such as civil and class wars, whereas now we understand more and
more that it was an environmental thing. Just as the Mayans collapsed because of a series
of droughts; it seems the Harrappan civilization collapsed because of deforestation; while
the Sumerian, Babylonian, and Greek civilizations probably fell due to a combination of
deforestation and excessive irrigation leading to poisonous levels of soil salinization.
Therefore, it seems the role of direct self-conscious human revolutionary action in the
collapse of these societies was less important than previously believed, particularly by
conventional Marxists. Instead, it now seems more reasonable to infer that the social
unrest documented as accompanying these imperial collapses were a symptom of the
process, not its main cause.

I think it is likely we are facing our own imminent collapse in a similar repetition of the
same pattern–where oil is now the energy source that trees and soil fertility were to earlier
civilizations.


E: What if Capitalism were replaced by a non-capitalist mode of production?

G: Just as previous forms of human social organization changed as a result of exhausting
the available energy supply, likewise we are reaching a dead end in our particular mode of
energy use today globally. Not only because oil is running out, but also because its use
has created this global warming phenomenon. Even if the production and consumption of
oil were to cease immediately, the sheer momentum and volume of the flow of energy
from its use on the ocean-atmosphere system has been so powerfully increased that it will
not go back to any pre-industrial norm for centuries. The degree of warming today is
simply incompatible with capitalist agricultural and industrial production. So, the bottom
line is we are reaching the same sort of energetic dead-end that our ancestors reached in
various points in their development. This energetic dead-end is wedded to the way capital
accumulation has evolved. The process of capital accumulation has had the long-term
effect of replacing labor with machinery, as the owners of capital have sought to reduce
labor costs. This is what is meant by “rising productivity.” It’s rise is always hailed as a
good thing by economists and government officials, yet from the point of view of energy
consumption the“down-side” is that labor displaced by machinery equals the replacement
of the solar/organic energy used by humans by the fossil fuels used by machines. Put
simply, the competitive drive among capitalist corporations to raise “productivity” by
replacing humans with machines has had the side-effect of accelerating global warming.

But I would argue that even if we were completely governed by a non-capitalist mode of
production we would still have to face decisions about how to get energy and use it. I
would like to think that a non-capitalist mode of production could have a politics that
would have allowed people to see this coming and avoid it before it got to this state, but I
can not know that this is true–and it certainly has certainly not been true for previous so-
called “socialist” countries. I am sure that in the current political economy, the interests of
multi-national corporations has become so intertwined with the infrastructure of oil
consumption that it is not available to them either individually or collectively to accept a
major change their method of energy consumption. It simply is too costly. While any
capitalist, multi-national executive might argue after hours over drinks and dinner that we
need to get away from oil consumption, the competitive dynamic of capitalism is such that
they cannot afford to actually implement that kind of a change on their watch because it
would have such devastating effects on their particular profit margins and they would be
out of a job. So it is institutionally structured into contemporary global capitalism that
there cannot be an adequate and timely response to the energy crisis.

E: So there is a new world coming, but it is not what the left today would choose or even
envision.

G: Right, there are two barriers. The first is the political-economy of capitalism. The
second barrier is the time lag in the full effect of global warming becoming apparent. I do
not believe it is likely that a social revolutionary response could evolve to address either
warming or capitalism (as a response to warming) in a timely fashion. In effect, we have
already missed our window of opportunity. There may in fact be the development (and I
suspect that there will have to be the development) of revolutionary anti-systemic
movements, just as the emergence of Osama bin Ladin is a revolutionary anti-systemic
movement. That may not be ideologically well-founded or guided; but people will not
indefinitely react to the polarization of global income passively; there will be increasingly
militaristic kinds of responses. Some of them may be progressive. Some of them may
even succeed in achieving state power here and there. But none of them can stop global
warming. It is simply too late, and we will have to live with it. Further, one of the
byproducts of global warming will be global depopulation via the diverse mechanisms of
agricultural contraction, water depletion, northward migration of diseases and insects, and
chronic warfare. That by itself will have profound political and economic effects that we
can only speculate about. Will it bring about technological regression? Perhaps also a
political and economic regression? I don’t know. Just as the fall of Rome led to a
regression to feudalism for a time, we may find ourselves going through a similar
regression. It does seem to me that we cannot stop this through any political movement
whatsoever. We might be able to stop global capitalism or--more likely--global capitalism
will find itself increasingly impossible to replicate because of its own internal
contradictions—particularly environmental ones. The kind of evisceration of the global
population will also be accompanied by increasing wars which will themselves be
revolutionary in intent if not in outcome. This presumably will lead to a destabilization
and collapse of the current global system. That is not necessarily a progressive or happy
thing, even if the people behind it are motivated with the best of intentions, which I doubt.
They nevertheless will be saddled with a world that will be environmentally bankrupt. It
will be very difficult to build the better world that we all wish were possible.
E: Could you envision an alternative future building adaptively and humanely on these
apocalyptic predictions? What do you think that the American leftist opposition should be
doing?

G: I do believe that we have options. Our first task is to defend democracy wherever
possible. We have already seen a frightening attack on our civil liberties with the “Patriot
Act” and related legislation. This attack can only be expected to become more intense as
global conflicts intensify. The worst-case outcome would be the complete conversion of
the government into a totalitarian state. We must use every means of persuasion available
to explain why this response will only make things worse, not better. The elimination of
liberty only encourages acts of terror, as opponents of the system are deprived of non-
violent means of expression.

A second task is to avoid the temptation to divide humanity into “us” vs. “them.” This is
precisely the kind of fear response that has led to the slaughters in Rwanda, Yugoslavia,
Chechnya, and the Israel/Palestine. Obviously this is related to the defense of democracy.
To fall victim to the fear of “terrorism” or Islam or Arabs or just poor people in general is
to go down the road into the Hell of ethnic cleansing. It is the road of Hitler. Our
challenges from the environment alone will kill many innocent people already, and there is
no point in adding to that death toll by dictatorship and civil wars. We must be reaching
out to unite people of different races, religions, and classes against the common dangers of
food and water scarcity, not attacking them. When people feel scared it is instinctive to
huddle together and build big walls against everyone else. Yet this is precisely the wrong
response.

A third task is to promote sustainability wherever possible. That means “alternative” fuels
such as solar and wind, using the most fuel-efficient vehicles that we can afford, and
purchasing and growing organic food. Not only as individuals, but best as entire
communities of like-minded people who are comfortable sharing their resources together.
Because our best chance of survival lies in being able to live “off of the Grid” since the
“Grid” will necessarily fail at some point. This strategy fits in with the others. We can
only develop viable life-boat communities if we can reach out to include those around us,
not lock them out with bigger walls. Our best mutual defense lies in mutual aid, not
distrust, in shared vulnerability and affection, not paranoia and weapons.

E: So where do we stand now? Presumably your analysis leads us to expect the deflation
of state power.

G: Yes. Even though I firmly believe that we are witnessing the effort by the United States
to create a global capitalist empire exemplified by the re-imposition of the crudest form of
colonialism in Iraq, the Balkans, and Afghanistan, I have not called for a violent effort to
contest that effort. It is not because I think that ordinary electoral politics within the
United States can change these policies. I do not. Nor is it because of any ideological
problem with revolutions in general. Rather, I simply do not think that an internal and
violent revolutionary opposition will be necessary. The empire is already falling anyway,
from the outside in. As the center draws all global resources into itself, it is reaching the
limits of its power to extract, and countries at the outer edges are collapsing because their
governments have been sapped of all resources: Rwanda, Burundi, DR Congo, Liberia,
Sierra Leone, Togo, Ivory Coast, Eritrea, Somalia, Indonesia, Paraguay, Argentina, the
Balkans. These proliferating horrors of state collapse and ethnic cleansing are not
coincidences. They are indicators of an ongoing and bigger imperial collapse at a global
level. Those of us in Europe and the United States are not immune. It is just that our
time has not yet arrived. It is like a hugely violent storm that our radar has detected but is
not yet visible to the naked eye. While it would be wonderful if we could snap our fingers
and eliminate the despotic seat of empire that is causing these crises, I believe that to try
to engage this power directly would be both suicidal and unnecessary. Suicidal because
their military and intelligence capabilities are so vastly superior to anything that ordinary
citizens could muster, and unnecessary because the global wave of systemic collapse will
sweep them away anyway.

So instead I urge us to expect a descent into societal chaos, and to defend against it by
soliciting the cooperation of folk from other classes, ethnicities, and nationalities in a
common effort to build an over-lapping alliance of democratic “life-boat” communities
that can provide their own food, water, solar energy, and social services. While are doing
so, we must engage in a rear-guard action to defend popular democracy and social
services at every level. If we are successful, eventually, after the dust has settled, our
grandchildren may find themselves living in decentralized agrarian communities that are
democratically governed and at peace with one another. They will have access to the
knowledge of history, and guide their collective future with wisdom.