Whenever I talk about going to lower energy usage, a percentage of people shout out something like “But that would mean going back to the stone age, to lepers walking the streets and people throwing their feces out the window on our heads!!!” I think it is fair to say that variations on the “without power, life would be intolerable” is a common assumption.
Part of the thing that bothers me about it is that I don’t think it is true. I’ve spent a lot of time studying history, and I don’t think the lives of all of those in human history who preceded us were intolerable. I am extraordinarily fond of useful things like antibiotics and nutritional knowledge, but those are things that can be had in societies where *individuals* don’t necessarily have access to high technologies.

I’ve met a lot of people who lived all or much of their lives with very little power, and seen their homes, and I have ample visual evidence that often life can be quite graciously lived with little or no gas, electricity, and other inputs. The critical difference between a life lived graciously with little, and one without is the realm of how resources – whether land or fossil fuels or whatever – are used collectively. Thus, I’d like to propose what I think is an important and useful distinction – between public use of energy and resources and private use of energy resources. The former, I would argue, is essential to maintaining a good life, the latter is not.

People who have access to neither private resource nor public resources tend to be at a distinct disadvantage in terms of significant quality of life issues. Without public energy for things like clinics, the transport of food and goods, the importation of medicines, etc… life can be highly functional, but often is very vulnerable to disaster, either personal (disease, injury, loss of land or income), or public.
On the other hand, people who have few private energy, technology or natural resources, but have access to public ones often have extremely high quality of life, assuming that natural resources enable them to feed themselves and produce some tradable extras. There are parts of India, Cuba, Georgia, etc… where there is power for public buildings (some schools, hospitals, etc…), collective transportation (buses, trains, communally owned cars and taxis) and where energy is expended wisely on importing or making certain energy intensive goods that require (or are much eased by) the use of fossil fuels – but only on the ones that are demonstrably and significantly a public good. For example, money and energy are spent on power to pump water for the community well, or on vaccinations, but not the subsidy of personal transport or private electrification, generally speaking.

It is no accident that the places where a high quality of life and low levels of personal energy consumption coexist are often former or present Marxist cultures and economies, with strong cultural incentives towards the creation of a collective good. That said, however, it is not impossible for capitalist economies to also determine that personal good and collective good are the same – we have done so in time of exigency in the US, for example. What is required to do so is a fundamental belief in the value of cooperation – the idea that enriching your neighbor, even at the cost of one’s private wealth, makes you richer, not poorer. And of course, this is true, although we rarely believe it as a first thought.