Let us start this discussion by noting that we are all living on a planet undergoing an energy crisis. That is not to say the nature of the crisis is such that the planet suffers for a lack of energy. The total flow of solar and geothermal energy available to the Earth and all its creatures varies little from year to year or era to era, save for the interference of “acts of God” like volcanoes. Rather, the crisis is in the amount and type of energy available to do what has, in one way or another, been determined to be the “useful work” of humanity, including transporting products, communicating, mining, harvesting and processing raw materials, building objects, growing food, and other activities largely superfluous to the planet’s 6.8 billion human inhabitants. The scale and nature of activities in which humans engage requires such large flows of non-renewable energy and resources that even given the most optimistic assumptions regarding technological and efficiency improvements, there is absolutely no way we will possibly sustain anything like our current consumption habits beyond the twenty-first century, and it is highly likely a forced transition away from unsustainability will occur long before that. Something has to give. We start from the premise, in other words, that our energy and resource consumption habits are unsustainable.
Is the problem that humans are using too much energy? Is, for example, the use of fossil fuels inherently unsustainable? It could be argued, and I will do so here, that the crisis of energy availability is in fact a secondary product of a first crisis of energy mis-allocation, what might be referred to as “wasted energy.” In other words, before we conclude that we are using too much energy, we should first carefully examine what it is that we are using energy to do. Before we take upon ourselves the difficult task of radically reshaping our consumption habits from the inside out, it makes sense to first engage the easy task of shedding that consumption and those activities that serve to benefit humanity the least, as well as those that are purely counterproductive. And what could be a bigger waste of energy than a “war on drugs,” particularly a war on cannabis, which really was just minding its own business and never did anything to hurt anyone?
