Breaking the Chains: The Lust for Power vs. the Light of Energy

Tom00:00:09

Evan Jaekwa describes himself as an international business development professional, entrepreneur and multilingual traveler who has lived and worked in places including Japan, China and South America. He was in Peru when we spoke recently.Jaqua is the founder of the Solutions Party, a small political reform organization advocating transformative strategies to strengthen democracy, tackle deep rooted social issues, and promote honest solutions to build a more hopeful future for the world. And boy could we use that right now.The party's core thesis is that many of the most critical and challenging societal and governmental failures flow from incentives embedded within political institutions themselves. These failures cannot be solved without top down systemic change in how democracy works and how power is apportioned.The interview tape isn't up to my listeners standards, but nonetheless I'd like to explore some of his ideas and insights through my own perspective. I hope to have Evan back for a clean recording, but for now it's just you and me. So let's get started.What is more addictive than fentanyl, cocaine, heroin, tobacco or alcohol?Getting a little bit of it sets the brain on fire for most Under a scrip, critical thinking is cast aside except in the service of seeking evermore and disregarding the swath of destruction left in the wake of its craving. It is power. Naked, unbridled, unconstrained, unconscious power. The human brain is a wonderful thing, Evan Jaqua says.However, he warns, one of the big problems with the human brain is that it forms addictions very easily. And of all the substances, behaviors, predilections and pursuits that hook our neurobiology, Jaqua argues, the most addictive thing of all is power.From drug policy and healthcare to corruption and accountability, from culture wars to climate and energy policies, the Solutions Party argues that all of our social ills and dysfunction are downstream of a broken political environment, its institutions, and their relationships to power. What is power? The term carries a dual meaning, living at the intersection of physics, power, politics, psychology, and philosophy.Its dual meaning arises from its description of both the capacity to act, movement work, and a capacity to influence, coerce, and control. In physics, power is defined as the rate of energy transfer or a work performed.When we use the phrase powering through a task, we are describing how quickly we expend energy to reach a target or maintain momentum. Classically speaking, there is no power without energy, and energy without power is static, motionless, potential, unrealized or used up.Then there is the power to influence, and it is here that we arrive at the intersection of its dual meaning. I am not a particularly religious man. Nonetheless, I am reminded, well influenced by the biblical admonition of. Of the love of money.For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil. And some people eager for money have wandered from the faith and pierced themselves with many griefs.In other words, money isn't evil, it's just money. It's the lust for money that creates many griefs. Power and money are entwined as it is with money. At least in this sense, so it is with power.If money is a means of value transfer, then power is the means to act, move forward, persevere, and thrive. We need both to survive in the modern world. Power itself is not evil. Power administers societies and fuels civilizations.It drives the warm breeze and keeps people safe. It is the lust for power that leads us, ironically and tragically, into dark corners.The craving for it like a drug, hoarding it and lording it over others, to the detriment of the social project that surrounds all human activity. It's an enslaving quest not to collectively lead, but to rule over others.From small tribes huddled together in the flickering firelight, warding off the dark and dangerous nights of the antediluvian past, to the nighttime ablaze with electric lights stretching across continents, those who controlled fire had the power. Civilizations light up with power and the power hungry run toward the light, seeking to control it, parse it, and consolidate it into dominion.And thus our need for one kind of power, a flow of energy, light and warmth and protection, led to the quest for the other. It all begins with energy. Fossil fuels are a non renewable, globally traded, geopolitically contested resource in permanent decline.And that's before its flow was choked off in the Strait of Hormuz. Renewable energy is literally everywhere and effectively unlimited.Building an economy on the former when the latter exists is, in Jaqua's words, insanity. They had their time. Coal, oil, natural gas.But even while we still sit in its heat and glow figures huddled around flickering light, much like our ancient ancestors, we know it's unsustainable.But influence is concentrated in politicians whose positions of power are secured by the fossil fuel industry, a global entity more powerful than governments, because right now it powers nearly everything. Power that demands repeat customers. A constant growing demand for fossil fuels.Trainload after train load, tanker ship after tanker ship, gas tank after gas tank. An endless flow of energy dug up from the past, out of place with the present and the natural cycle of a living Earth.As author and climate activist Bill McKibben puts it, sunlight has to travel 93 million miles to reach the Earth. But none of Those miles go through the Strait of Hormuz.If there is one sure lesson we can glean from the misadventure in the Middle east, it is the foolishness of refusing to embrace the energy blanketing the Earth. The sun, the wind, the tides, gravity, the geothermal heat beneath our feet.It is equally foolish to believe that weaning the global economy off fall fossil fuels will be easy. But if there is a utopia to strive for, it is one based on decentralized unlimited power. The kind of power that we get from the sun.And just imagine what would be possible with unlimited energy. Large scale ocean desalination becomes viable, eliminating droughts and enabling cities in previously uninhabitable places.Carbon can be drawn back out of the sky. We've spent 2 cents centuries filling. Admittedly only a temporary solution to the problem of an unbalanced carbon cycle.But it could provide an opportunity to set the world on the right track. Plastics can be made infinitely recyclable.Nano identifiers embedded in packaging would allow automatic sorting and recycling, making the current patchwork system obsolete.But when the premier global climate conference struggles to even mention fossil fuels in its language, despite the clear implications of their continued use, we can ask ourselves why power?The other kind and money are why petro states and global fossil energy conglomerates demand that the extraction, transportation, processing and burning never stop. It is, after all, non renewable energy.The second we flip the switch, molecules of stored carbon must be dug up, moved and ignited in an unending flow. Their business model is embedded in almost every aspect of our lives, and they see no reason why it should end.Their fabulous wealth translates into power, the power to buy politicians, destroy ecosystems and tip the climate into a new normal. Energy is a public resource, like water, argues Jaqua, not a commodity.An energy economy predicated on fossil energy is a prime examp of the failure of institutional incentives.We dream of harnessing fusion energy here on Earth, but the sun has been a fusion reactor all along, and it asks nothing of us but that we catch what it sends. And these aren't the dreams of the fossil fuel companies. Their power and wealth depend on need, on scarcity, and on centralized control.And the solutions party understands this human corruptability, this craving for power at all costs as the core driver of our social ills. Without political reform, reining in that addiction is untenable. Jaequa paraphrases a line William F. Buckley made famous.Buckley said he'd sooner be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the faculty of Harvard. Jaqua swaps the professors for the politicians. He'd take 2,000 strangers off the street over the career political class running things now.Because as long as career politicians are beholden to special interests consumed by re election and the ceaseless hunt for money, nothing fundamental will change.So the Solutions Party begins with a disarmingly simple eliminate re election one term, no running for another office while you serve it a two year wait before seeking another. The point is to sever the link between holding power and seeking more of it. Severing that link inside the halls of government is only half the cure.The other half is rising freely all around us. The power that has nothing to do with politics. Unlimited energy means unlimited work.It means the ability to do things we long told ourselves could not be done, even to break the bonds of the power we started with, the kind that hooks the brain and won't let go. There are formidable challenges wrenching our energy economy away from fossil fuels. But these challenges are worthy and necessary.Certainly, building grid scale fusion energy is an enormous technical task. But there's always the sun. You cannot hoard what falls freely on everyone.The sun routes its light through no one's pipeline, and the wind asks no one's permission. The point is, it's all doable and being done, but slowly, even in the face of powerful opposition. The biggest challenge isn't technical.It's navigating the intersection of power's dual meanings. Term limits sever the link between power and the seeking of it. Inside the institution. Abundant energy severs it everywhere else.A resource that's harder to own is harder to use as a means of consolidating the other kind of power. I don't know if Jaekwa is right that we'll get there. The forces arranged against it are not abstract.They are wealthy, patient, and very good at convincing us to fight each other rather than to just look up, find solutions. But after speaking with Jaega and hearing of the Solutions Party, the despair I often carry into these conversations loosens his grip just a little.Because, framed this way, the problem isn't that we lack the means. We have the means. We're standing in them. Sunlight on the roof, wind off the water, heat beneath our feet. They've been there the whole time.What we lack is the will to stop guarding the old fire and the courage to trust that there's more than enough light to go around. Thanks for hanging in there and listening to this brief examination of the Solutions Party and Evan Jaqua's work and ideas.I'm not naive or some might say radical enough to believe that American democracy will adopt a one term only political class anytime soon, or that the moneyed forces brokering power will relinquish their control without trying to burn everything down in the process, literally and figuratively. That said, this is no excuse to cede agency or abandon hope. In fact, agency and hope are the central theme of this short podcast.I focused on energy among the many issues Jaqua addresses in the Solutions Party because of its relationship to power.Energy is the means by which we can wrest control from the power addicted politics that pollute our natural resources, public discourse and social projects. The energy we expend on living a life based on human values, the energy that bathes the planet every day.This is where we find the power not to rule, intimidate, impoverish or coerce, but to collaborate, celebrate and thrive. So maybe in the end, Jaqua is right. We can get there. We have the power.Check the Show Notes to find out more about the Solutions Party and other topics discussed in this episode. I'd love to know more about you, who's listening, what brought you here, and what you'd like to hear more of.I've put together a short listener survey and it would mean a great deal to me if you could take a few minutes to fill it out. The link is in the show notes. I'm Tom Schueneman and this is Earthbound Stories from the Anthropocene Life on a Warming Planet.If this episode moved you, made you think, or or helped you feel maybe just a little less alone in all of this. Please take a moment to leave a rating and review wherever you listen.It genuinely helps other people find the show and if you haven't already hit subscribe so you never miss an episode. Thank you, dear listener. I'll see you in a couple of weeks, and in the meantime, stay safe.