exit strategy or obsession

Everyday I am thinking about my exit strategy. My fossil fuel exit plan. It consumes most of my waking hours.

You might say I’m obsessed.

I say ‘why aren’t we all obsessed?’

We are, after all, living in an emergency.

I am mobilised.

It’s hard to explain to anyone what this feels like. Those who know me well see it in me at times. They either ‘get it’ or just put up with it – smile and nod. I guess it’s like any other obsession; I can’t be sure though, I haven’t been obsessed like this before. My whole life is directed by, decisions based on, the impacts on others (mostly unseen) and fossil fuel emissions.

This is my view of the world.

Getting off fossil fuels is everything. Diminishing negative impacts on others (globally) is everything.

At the moment, for example, I have 13 tabs open on my laptop all covering topics around my exit strategy/obsession (this may explain why I rarely write blog posts anymore). They range from how to eat sweet potato leaves and building solar cookers from waste materials to green papaya recipes and info on how to construct wicking beds from old bathtubs.

But that’s not where the obsession ends.

I’m sitting here at night, on my own, and what goes through my head? Guilt. I am using a light, a laptop and even a TV. Worst of all, I’m using the internet. I judge myself. I could be reading a book by candlelight – the truly low-impact thing to do on a rainy night at home alone.

Do you get the irony here? Each of these tabs on the laptop, all open so I can research this exit strategy stuff of importance, represents data usage which means data centres which means more fossil fuels and more emissions! Shit! This is what I mean.

Who else out there lives this way. All. The. Time.

OK, so I have just turned the light and TV off and lit a single, second-hand candle. Writing to you is a good reminder. Thank-you.

I know I’ve been getting slack and cutting corners – I used to be much more hard-core. I can try to justify it – I live in this big house and, through putting into action some of my low-impact ‘suggestions’ and strategies, we’ve decreased the total footprint of the household. 

It is not for me to ask others who are not as fortunate or as privileged as me to start making their fossil fuel exit plans (although I’m sure many are and some through no choice of their own as their homes disappear below the sea or are burned or bombed). But I must ask those who, like me, have benefited from the overconsumption of global resources and cheap energy in the form of fossil fuels, people of the global consumer class, to get thinking, get planning and start doing!

Sure, fighting for system change on the streets and in parliaments must be part of our strategy, but it can’t be (won’t be) everything. After all, the system that needs changing is a destructive, violent machine of which we are all cogs. Maybe system change will come just as quickly from, or at least be aided by, many of us putting into place our household exit strategies. It will definitely play a part. It has to. We can’t go getting arrested on the streets to get emissions down then fly home, jump in our cars and go cook the evening meal on the gas stove. Who’s going to take us seriously?

As I’ve said before, I don’t have any agency over any part of this violent industrial system apart from my own actions in my own life. I can talk to others, I can protest, sign petitions and even get arrested, but the only thing I can actually change right now is my own consumption of cheap energy and resources. I can be wise to my position of privilege and not abuse the world and others in it through my everyday actions just because that’s ‘how it’s always been done’ or that’s ‘just how it is’ or because ‘I’m just one person’. I’m acting as though I’m in a climate emergency where we need to fight on all fronts ALL. THE. TIME.

Talking to people around me I get the sense that some are thinking about their own strategies for moving away from fossil fuels. They’re talking about where they might live in the future, how they might change jobs so they don’t have to drive (or fly) anymore, what kind of food they can buy locally, what the future will be like for their kids and they’re gifting and swapping rather than just going down to the shops to buy stuff. Some are even deciding against having kids.

There are many other people I speak to who seem to have no intention of planning their own personal exit strategy (including some who see themselves as environmentalists). They believe governments will do it all for us so we just need to pressure them enough, all the while continuing to take overseas, fossil fuel intensive holidays, driving everywhere without a care and buying all the latest tech with nary a second thought to the impacts on others. 

Then there are those who have strategies that are based on using the latest, ‘green’ technology. This idea that we can continue to have the kind of lifestyles we’ve become accustomed to, after a few decades of access to cheap energy, by simply swapping out the old bits for new shiny renewables is dangerous. It shows that we, the wealthy minority, live in a bubble of privilege. We do not think of ourselves as global citizens with brothers and sisters in the millions who do not have access to cheap energy or resources. It does not understand there is a carbon budget – the amount of carbon we can still emit and stay under the very dangerous 1.5 degrees above pre-industrial levels of global warming.  Without acknowledging the right of every human on the planet the same level of access to resources, and acting from that point, we will continue with complete planetary overshoot and probably head straight into violent conflicts over massively dwindling resources in the near future. And we are being unjust.

I am not a prepper or survivalist. I believe in the power of groups, of working together, of community. It’s called ‘community-sufficiency’ rather than ‘self-sufficiency’. Living without money really teaches you that. I have always been reliant on others but when I used money I didn’t consider it ‘reliance’. Without the use of money I have been able to clearly see the heavy burden I was placing on others all across the world through long supply chains using the medium of money. Now my reliance is mostly a face-to-face affair, especially here at ‘Montague House 2023’ with Sharon. I can easily track my impacts on others, create win-wins with those close to me and I can chose what’s OK and what’s not. It’s (mostly) guilt-free and liberating. It’s the most vital part of my fossil fuel exit strategy. An exit strategy without community can never work.

I am always fine tuning my exit strategy and obsessing in new and different ways. I may not be completely free of fossil fuels as our ‘overdeveloped’ world, sadly and worryingly, is so tied into this cheap energy at this point in time, but I’m making a solid attempt, taking it all very seriously, and will continue to obsess over the details and see how far I can get.

It sure is easier without money.