Roast those hotdogs

Photo by Anthony Cantin on Unsplash

The new trend in human supremacy is “energy humanism”. According to energy humanists, we must support energy—all energy, including fossil fuels—because to be anti-energy is to be anti-human.

“Coal transformed our world and made it better, extended life expectancy and grew opportunities, and coal globally will be the largest source of electricity for decades to come. That’s not a policy, that’s not a desire, that’s just a reality.” — Energy Secretary Chris Wright

“Be pro energy, be pro human and don’t you ever apologize for it.” — Robert Bryce, energy analyst

I follow Robert Bryce because of his insightful energy analysis (although of course, I completely disagree with him on his conclusions) and so I watched his presentation “Embrace Energy Humanism!” at the ARC 2025 conference (ARC is Alliance for Responsible Citizenship) when he posted the link about a week ago. It is pure human supremacy from start to finish. Bryce even goes so far as to use poor women in India to tug on our heart strings, as he describes how energy has transformed their village (they can now grind spices with electric gadgets and watch TV and have lights).

Then up popped an article on E&E News quoting Energy Secretary Chris Wright using poor people in Africa to make his similar point.

Neither of these men ever mention the natural world, of course. The well-being of all the other 10 million species on planet Earth takes a backseat to the well-being of humans. Not even a backseat; it’s like they don’t exist at all (except as “resources”, of course). Neither of these men mention that the reason humans “need” energy is because we all exist in a modern world—including the poorest among us—which makes living without energy almost impossible. Neither of the men mention that one reason “poor people” exist in our modern world is because they’ve been stripped of their land, their culture, and their ancient ways of being and forced into a world in which living without energy really is true hardship.

These men aren’t wrong that “energy poverty” is horrible for anyone living in the modern world. It is.

But their conclusion is wrong. Their conclusion is to modernize all people further by bringing them more energy. More energy means higher consumption and more destruction of the natural world. We are already well into the sixth mass extinction, well into catastrophic ecological overshoot, and so more energy to more people will, along with making people’s lives temporarily more bearable, speed up the acceleration toward collapse.

If we were living as human animals integrated within the web of life, rather than living separately, dominating and destroying the Earth, the only energy any humans would have access to is the same energy all other living beings have access to: the sun’s energy expressed through photosynthesis in plants, which then feed animals, including us. But that way of life has been foreclosed to the vast majority of human animals on the planet, and so we are stuck in the modern world as if we were stuck in the Matrix.

This modern world cannot last, because it is destroying the very foundations of life on Earth, and we are not exempt from the consequences of that. We can pretend for a short while, but eventually our time will run out as the threads of the web of life fray beyond all recognition.

As the consequences of our human supremacist way of life become more and more visible and the cries to “act” become louder, the wealthy people who benefit most from the copious amounts of energy we extract from the Earth will find increasingly cynical ways to keep themselves wealthy. They will even stoop so low as to use poor people in India and Africa to rationalize business-as-usual—any argument that will keep those of us who are loyal to the natural world in our place.

This place is one in which we are not allowed to question business-as-usual, a place in which we must equate being rich with being smart and being good—because, after all, the rich people are the “job creators” and we are stuck in a world in which we are required to “work” and pay money to live on the Earth.

What a strange place it is to be, where we equate more destruction of our home and our non-human kin with being “pro human”. It’s like watching a family roasting hotdogs over the flames as their house burns down. “Look at all that energy!” the energy humanists command; it must be good. Who cares if death and destruction are the final outcome? Who cares if we are homeless when the embers finally turn to charcoal? We were able to roast those hotdogs and have one last meal at the end of the Earth.