There Is a Big Difference Between “Doomers” and “Doomists”
I think they actually represent two very different attitudes toward the future
I asked one of my many new AI buddies, “what does ‘ist’ as a suffix mean?”
To which he/she/it quickly and confidently replied:
The suffix “-ist” has multiple meanings, including:
A person who performs an action: For example, “motorist” or “typist”
A person who practices in a specific field: For example, “physicist” or “geologist”
A person who advocates a particular doctrine: For example, “socialist” or “Buddhist”
A person characterized by a specified trait: For example, “purist” or “sexist” …
Here are some examples of words that use the suffix “-ist”:
Apologist, Dramatist, Machinist, Realist, Socialist, and Thomist.
To which I would add: Doomist
To me, a “Doomer” is a very different kind of person than a “Doomist”. A Doomer is essentially a “prepper” or “survivalist”, that is, someone who is preparing to survive whatever Armageddon has in store for them (note we call them preppers, not preppists). A Doomer imagines they can make it through any coming apocalypse with careful planning and preparation. I see Doomers as less interested in the theory or ideology of Doomism. They are basically just looking out for themselves, and perhaps their immediate family. They tend to live in the woods.
In contrast, Doomists don’t want to save themselves. They don’t build bunkers in the woods. They believe such actions are futile. They are firmly convinced nobody can be saved, because they believe extinction, or something very close to it, is inevitable. They are true believers in the Church of Doomism, which promotes its own gospel, the gospel of “radical acceptance”.
I have written about radical acceptance before (here and here). The concept comes from clinical psychology, where it was developed by therapists to help individuals cope with various forms of personal addiction or grief. The idea is to acknowledge that there are forces in our lives that we cannot control, that we are powerless to overcome, and that we must accept in order to move forward with our lives. Radical acceptance is at bottom a personal coping strategy:
Radical acceptance can be defined as the ability to accept situations that are outside of your control without judging them, which reduces the suffering they cause. By accepting things for what they are, you can acknowledge your emotions without denying, avoiding, or ignoring the situation. It can be an effective way to process your emotions and manage difficult experiences. (source)
I believe Doomists make a category mistake when they conflate accepting something like alcoholism with accepting something like climate change. Confronting a massive global crisis — whether it be global warming, resource depletion, biodiversity loss, overconsumption, or some other aspect of our polycrisis — is simply a qualitatively different proposition than confronting a personal condition like alcoholism or grief.
The mistake, I believe, comes down to this. Radical acceptance in the face of personal tragedy can foster healing and alleviate suffering. It can help an individual reduce pain without being consumed by it. But radical acceptance in the face of a collective threat like climate change or resource depletion is more likely to have the opposite effect. For an individual trying to cope with the scale and complexity of our current portfolio of global crises, radical acceptance easily morphs into fatalism and despair. It becomes a way of surrendering, of reinforcing passivity, of thwarting action and justifying inaction.
This would not be so bad if there were not another significant difference between Doomers and Doomists: Doomists, like Jehovah’s Witnesses, are proselytizers. They are recruiters for the Church of Doomism. While Doomers just want us to get off their lawn, Doomists want us to join them in radically accepting the end we all face.
Joining the Church of Doomism offers another bonus: an opportunity to share in Doomists’ feelings of intellectual superiority as they look down on all the clueless people running around trying to do something to address any of the major challenges we face. By “do something” I mean invest in actions that diminish our CO2, methane, and other greenhouse gas emissions. That is Job #1 for humanity today. The list of efforts that can contribute to this goal is quite long (e.g., source), they are all ongoing, but they all involve hard work, significant costs, uncertain prospects of success, less than universal adoption, and dedicated political opposition standing in their way. Yet people … some people … persist. But for Doomists:
It’s much easier to just pull up the old rocking chair, crack open a can of beer, lean back, and enjoy the show.
Perhaps Doomists’ least attractive quality is their absolute self-assurance, which is more often than not based on inaccurate or out-of-date information. Once a Doomist decides something is “impossible”, it becomes very hard to change their mind. For example:
- Industrial Heat and Steel: Doomists believe you can’t generate the heat required to produce steel without fossil fuels. You can.
- Residential Heating and Cooling: Heat pumps and district heating are two technologies that could lower US energy requirements by 50%. Doomists believe such a transition is both materially and financially impossible. In reality, the key obstacles are bureaucratic red tape, political resistance, and availability of qualified installers.
- Intermittency and Long-Duration Energy Storage: Doomists believe the intermittency of wind and solar energy generation make it impossible to run a stable electric grid without fossil fuel backup. With new and more efficient battery technologies, however, states like California have overcome intermittency to the extent they now have to curtail renewable energy generation because they are generating and storing more energy than they can use. Contrary to the Doomist narrative, meeting power demand with intermittent sources like wind and solar is complex but feasible.
- Electric Grid Reliability: Doomists believe a renewably-powered electric grid will be inherently unreliable, resulting in regular power disruptions and blackouts. Current grids are indeed in poor shape around the world, but when integrated with established energy storage solutions (like long-duration batteries and closed-loop pumped hydro) and upgraded to deliver high-voltage direct current (HVDC) electrical transmission over long distances, they can deliver the reliability needed for a steady flow of electrical power, even in the absence of fossil fuels.
- Battery-Powered Passenger Vehicles: Doomists dismiss electric passenger vehicles (EVs) as a distraction. Indeed, EV adoption in the US is slowing down for a number of reasons. But in the rest of the world, particularly in China, EVs are shifting the landscape of energy usage in major ways. As gasoline and diesel production inevitably decline along with affordable oil, nations with established fleets of battery-powered vehicles will enjoy a significant economic advantage over nations still dependent on massive gas-powered land yachts, like the US is today.
- Electrification of Trucking and Rail Transport: Don’t get Doomists started about diesel. As far as they are concerned, diesel is irreplaceable. And the idea of of electrifying trucks and trains is simply too outlandish to consider. But as batteries have become cheaper, lighter, and capable of holding longer charges, electrified trucking has become a reality, no longer an impossibility. As for rail, most of the world’s railways are already electrified; only the US remains a holdout, thanks to strong resistance from the American railroad industry.
- Biofuels and Batteries for Aviation and Shipping: Doomists see no post-carbon future for aviation or maritime shipping. As with trucking, they see no viable substitute for petroleum-based fuels, so have no expectation that ships or planes can operate once affordable oil disappears. But battery-powered short-distance aviation is already a reality, and studies show we may have more than enough biomass available from food waste (up to one-third of all all food ends up as waste) to produce all the biofuel we will need to power maritime shipping and long-distance aviation between now and 2100.
- Mineral Availability for Renewables: Doomists like to cite Simon Michaux on mineral availability, other analysts find his calculations seriously flawed and conclude that mineral reserves are adequate to support energy transition needs.
- Mining without Fossil Fuels: “Impossible!” say Doomists. Not so, says the mining equipment industry.
- Agriculture & Fertilizers: According to Doomists, agriculture will inevitably fail in the face of climate change and resource depletion, largely because we will have no way to produce ammonia-based fertilizers once affordable fossil fuels are no longer available. But today, contrary this Doomist talking point, reliable processes are in place for producing decarbonized “green ammonia” without reliance on fossil fuels. In addition, new technologies are revolutionizing traditional farming as well as lowering agriculture’s CO2 emissions: precision drones for monitoring, seeding and fertilizing, low-tillage farming for improved soil health, and agrigenetics to bypass the use of ammonia altogether. Farming, like transportation, is electrifying in multiple ways that Doomists still claim are “impossible”.
- Geopolitics: Doomists do not seem to appreciate that our coming energy descent will not be an all-at-once, all-or-nothing event. Whatever average level of descent occurs, impacts will be distributed unequally around that average, across time, and around the world. Doomists like to cite Odom’s Maximum Power Principle as a kind of iron law that will forever preclude humanity from abandoning fossil fuels. But this ignores another iron law of Doomism: that fossil fuels are a finite energy source that will one day be gone. When that day comes, where will maximum power reside? It will reside with the countries and regions that have made the most progress in electrifying their economies and building the most extensive and reliable renewables infrastructure to power those economies. Countries that have failed to do so will find themselves on the wrong side of the Post-Carbon Maximum Power Principle. Today, the country that seems most aware of this reality is China and the country that seems most oblivious (and most paralyzed by pro-fossil fuel lobbyists) is the United States.
“The country that electrifies most rapidly and builds the most renewables to power its electrified economy will be the most competitive economy globally. One country seems to understand this, but other major economies are clearly not acting on any understanding that they might have.” (source, see also source, source).
Energy and climate experts who are not in the pocket of the fossil fuel industry tell us we can and should be able to escape our fossil fuel heritage. Indeed, we could begin today if we had the will to do so (source, source, source). What is holding us back is not the availability of potential solutions that can incrementally lower our dependence on fossil fuels and their poisonous emissions, but the opposition and political power of wealthy beneficiaries of the current system, along with the politicians they own. Radical acceptance plays directly into the hands of these titans of industry. It helps keep the masses quiet and out of the way. It renders inert one of the few forces capable of disrupting rapacious elites: active and disruptive withdrawal of public support.
Ultimately, Doomism and radical acceptance represent a recipe for paralysis. They give us permission to do nothing, to sit passively by while our world comes undone. But I believe it is much easier to embrace radical acceptance theoretically than it is to apply it practically.
Yes, you may think our future is hopeless, but are you ready to look your three-year-old granddaughter in the eye and say “honey, I’m sorry to tell you, but it’s inevitable: you’re going to die of starvation before you reach your 40th birthday”?
No, I don’t think anyone, excepting the psychopaths in our midst (and there are more of them than we could have guessed), has the stomach to do that. When the time comes, if the time comes, we will all fight extinction until our last breath. It’s what humans do, it’s what we have always done. Radical acceptance is a theory based on a failure to understand human nature. We are an aspirational species. We migrated into Europe in the middle of an ice age. Seeking something better has always been both our strength and our curse. It is the aspirational drive that has led us to our current crisis of overshoot and overconsumption. Radical acceptance is simply not in our DNA.
Because radical acceptance is paralyzing, it is the opposite of motivating. Perhaps most disturbingly, embracing radical acceptance makes it easier for Doomists to capitulate to fascism and authoritarianism. Once you decide fighting back is futile, you don’t fight back against even the things you should fight back against, such as the rise of fascistic regimes in previously democratic countries. But that’s a topic for another day.
