THE CLIMATE PR PUZZLE - Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels - page 23

This is all quite discouraging, to the point that a fourth conclusion seems justified:
Conclusion 4: Managerial elites will not be persuaded of all three previous conclusions until it is
too late to organize a proactive energy transition capable of sustaining the current basic structures
of industrial society.
It may be that our inability to voluntarily overcome our reliance on our dominant energy
source—fossil fuels—is hardwired into our DNA. Coal, oil, and gas have offered humanity a tem-
porary but enormous energy subsidy. All animals and plants deal with temporary energy subsidies
in basically the same way: the pattern is easy to see in the behavior of songbirds visiting the feed-
er outside my office window. They eat all the seed I've put out for them until the feeder is empty.
They don't save some for later or discuss the possible impacts of their current rate of consump-
tion. Yes, we humans have language and therefore the theoretical ability to comprehend the likely
results of our current collective behavior and alter it accordingly. We exercise this ability in small
ways, where the costs of behavior change are relatively trivial—enacting safety standards for new
automobiles, for example. But where changing our behavior might entail a significant loss of com-
petitive advantage or an end to economic growth, we tend to act like finches.
Does this mean that society is headed for sudden and utter ruin, that there is nothing we can do to
improve our prospects, and that there is absolutely no point in attempting to use public relations to
persuade a broad audience of the need for behavior change?
Hardly. As Dmitry Orlov explains in his book The Five Stages of Collapse , 4 there are degrees
of disorder that can unfold as societies hit the wall. The five stages he identifies are:
1. Financial collapse
2. Commercial collapse
3. Political collapse
4. Social collapse
5. Cultural collapse
In a recent essay he adds a sixth stage, ecological collapse . 5 His topic (and essay) are worth reading
in full, but the takeaway is simple: if you see that the society around you is approaching a period of
disintegrative change, do whatever is necessary to stop the process before it reaches stages 4, 5, or
(heaven forbid) 6.
Partial success in societal adaptation is better than none at all. Something similar may be true
with regard to our public relations efforts: messages underscoring “it's all about energy” and “re-
newables are the future” are marginally helpful in moving society and its leaders toward greater
understanding—even if they fail to point to the inevitability of reductions in energy availability and
the realization that “growth is over.”
Now add a time dimension. As Everett Rogers pointed out in his topic Diffusion of Innovations , 6
new ideas and technologies are adopted in stages: first come the innovators, then early adopters. An
early majority heralds more widespread acceptance, which spreads even further with the late major-
ity. At the far end of the bell curve come laggards, who resist innovation the longest. While today