Do you think rising energy costs will be good for veganism?
I have been reading a lot about how in the next decade or two there will very likely be a large increase in the price of energy due to rapid depletion of cheap oil. People, books, or podcasts to follow include Nate Hagens and Richard Heinberg who claim that cheap and easy-to-obtain energy (i.e. high EROI energy) is fast depleting. Cheap oil typically comes from the Middle East e.g. the Ghawar Field in Saudi Arabia and this cheap energy, once gone, will mean that humanity will need to instead exploit very hard-to-reach energy sources such as tar sands, shale, and deep water oil.
According to Richard Heinberg, because of the likely rise in energy prices and declining global EROI, society will be forced to "power down" i.e. we will need to go back to simpler living. Nate Hagens calls this "the Great Simplification." Renewables offer humans a chance to transition away from fossil fuels, but renewables are not easy to transition because there is a considerable amount of energy required to build out renewable infrastructure e.g. wind turbines, solar panels, batteries, and grid. Currently about 80% of the world's energy needs are coming from fossil fuel sources, so we are still totally addicted to fossil fuels, and it seems unlikely that renewables can be scaled up significantly to replace fossil fuels, which means a large spike in energy prices is highly likely in the next decade or two.
So what does a world with depleted fossil fuels and higher energy costs look like? There are potential positives e.g. because AI uses a lot of energy, it is likely that AI will not be able to obtain the energy needed to pose much of a threat to humanity, and also ideas such as space exploration and living on Mars will also likely not happen because such endeavours require an enormous amount of energy. Something else that may be positive is that factory farming will be under pressure since factory farming is highly energy intensive requiring huge amount of natural gas for Haber-Bosch fertiliser production and diesel trucks to transport livestock feed and meat.
However, energy descent has negatives. For one, if energy prices rise, it is likely that meat prices for big animals will rise the most. We are already seeing this with beef, which is very expensive, but many are simply switching to meat from smaller animals such as chicken and pork as well as eggs, and CAFOs and intensive agriculture brings down costs, which makes industrialized CAFO chicken and pork still quite cheap relative to beef. Nevertheless, even if chicken and pork are cheap, traditional plant proteins such as tofu, tempeh, seitan, lentil and beans are usually as cheap or cheaper, and plant proteins are very energy efficient.
Another downside of the energy descent is that there is a real risk of authoritarianism because people get angry from rise in living costs and want someone to blame, so authoritarians give people what they want by creating scapegoats. Add to this the rise of AI misinformation as well as the ability to use AI to mass-produce propaganda and misinformation and we have a dire future ahead.
Another point I will raise is that modern civilisation has indeed made some progress in alleviating oppression e.g. there has been progress made on gender equality as well as abolition of human slaves, and the hope is that in the future non-human animals are in line to be the next group to be emancipated. However, progress is not guaranteed and humanity can easily revert back to the dark days or there may be no progress whatsoever in building out a vegan world. If a vegan world is never achieved, finding more energy (e.g. fusion power) or expanding humanity to other planets risks simply expanding suffering even further. It is not just animal suffering that is huge in a world with so much power. Another example is sex trafficking. Fossil fuels arguably enable transnational sex trafficking, which is akin to animal agriculture.
If there is a "power down" and energy prices rise, the collapse of modern civilisation may result in a reversion to traditional lifestyles, and this can include a significant amount of suffering. What may happen is that rather than have energy intense factory farming, humans revert back to traditional subsistence farming as seen in many poor countries, and we see in many traditional subsistence farming communities that animals are not treated well e.g. buffaloes till the soil and chicken are left to wander around to provide eggs and then slaughtered when they are old. Furthermore, gender equality is typically not respected in agricultural compounds as the role of women is typically to have children to provide more workers to work on the farm.
Another possibility is instead of a reversion to agricultural lifestyles, energy descent may result in people simply cutting down consumption. I call this Tang Ping which is Chinese for "lying flat" which is exactly the lifestyle that happened when Chinese youths facing economic challenges. They simply lived with their parents or lived in small dwellings or in share houses and did the minimum amount of work necessary to do virtually nothing, that is, lie flat. We see similar movements among other East Asian youths e.g. Sampo in South Korea and Satori in Japan. We are also seeing similar lifestyles in the West but it is framed and termed differently e.g. quiet quitting, minimalism, or leanfire. We are also seeing a decline in sex, that is, the co-called "sex recession" as well as separatist movements such as 4B and 6B4T, so as energy declines and the world gets more angry and authoritarian, it is highly likely that instead of having a grand return-to-the-land movements, instead everyone just separates from each other, severely reduces consumption, and do the minimum just to lie flat. Although this sounds somewhat dystopian, there are positive elements in this hyperautonomous Tang Ping lifestyle e.g. consumption and energy use will go down considerably. People may walk or ride a bike rather than indulge in excess such as SUVs or pick-up trucks. People will likely embrace informal urbanism and share dwellings, live in multifamily houses, or live in micro-apartments. Traditional plant proteins such as tofu and lentils will likely be cheaper than animal protein. People may spend a lot more time simply sitting or lying still and thinking about what just happened, which may make people more contemplative.
I don't know what is in store for the future, but these are some of my thoughts on what is possible, and I am interested in the implications of energy descent as it relates to the most vulnerable among us e.g. the poor and the animals. Richard Heinberg and even Nate Hagens say that the way ahead is to simplify life right now so that when energy prices rise in the future, we are prepared for it.
