Here are the two things I think you left out. First, you talk about people needing to move to more rural locations as city jobs will dry up, but fail to note the other half of that equation: there will be much less gasoline and other fossil fuels to run farms. The thousand-acre farm managed by one guy whose wife has a town job so they can make ends meet will not be feasible when all that gas, and gas-derived fertilizer and pesticide and herbicide, is gone. Those things are essentially a substitute for human labor. So the people leaving cities will also be NEEDED as farm labor. And no, I'm not going to use the requisite word here, "back-breaking." I've been homesteading for decades, growing half our food, and my back is not broken. I enjoy most of my work.
But the other thing is the assumption that as the fossil fuels our energy-intensive way of life requires, luxury-supplying livelihoods will dry up and necessity-providing ones will expand. This is how it SHOULD be, but there is an alternative path, and this choice of paths, I think, is the fight that is shaping up now. The alternative is not ecomodernist fairy tales. It's a world divided between enclaves in which the rich continue to live lives of luxury for several decades, using up the last of the fossil fuel for production of renewable energy supplies--for themselves--and for jet travel. The rest of us will be left to struggle for survival in a hot, depleted world with chancy agriculture, whose goods will be appropriated by the rich if their regular supplies don't come through. I also envision prison-factories, to supply the slave labor needed for the elite lifestyle. No, this planet doesn't have the amount of minerals and energy required to fully replace the current fossil-fueled infrastructure with renewable energy and e-vehicles. But pretending it does allows public subsidy for the production of enough of these things to supply the ruling class with all they want.
Note that I'm not positing a conspiracy, necessarily--some of the elite may be thinking along these lines, but many may not be thinking about it much at all; those pushing a Green New Deal may imagine it will lead to a lovely world where everyone can live like upper-middle class Americans without serious pollution. While we who talk about the necessity of downscaling (gasp!) don't get a hearing.
Now tell me why my ugly vision is less realistic than yours. Please.
" ... there will be much less gasoline and other fossil fuels to run farms. The thousand-acre farm managed by one guy whose wife has a town job so they can make ends meet will not be feasible when all that gas, and gas-derived fertilizer and pesticide and herbicide, is gone."
Good point. And it's difficult to know how this will play out. Some have proposed that because food is a necessity society should choose to immediately (or at some point in time) or rapidly phase out 95% of the airline industry and a similar amount of automobile traffic, while diverting these fossil fuels to agriculture. But these people tend to assume that the only way to feed humanity is through modern industrial agriculture. I do not share this assumption, of course! And so a much more labor intensive mode of food production -- done locally, mostly -- makes a lot of sense to me. And, as I argued in the essay, a low energy economy necessitates a very different approach to livelihood generally, since most jobs in today's world will disappear as we consume less energy and materials. So I think community self-provisioning of food at the immediate local scale will be a huge part of our transition away from an energy and materials intensive economy. (I see no need or benefit in making such self-provisioning of food take place in a money economy. It will be better for all if we simply decomodify food altogether.)
"But the other thing is the assumption that as the fossil fuels our energy-intensive way of life requires, luxury-supplying livelihoods will dry up and necessity-providing ones will expand. This is how it SHOULD be, but there is an alternative path, and this choice of paths, I think, is the fight that is shaping up now. The alternative is not ecomodernist fairy tales. It's a world divided between enclaves in which the rich continue to live lives of luxury for several decades, using up the last of the fossil fuel for production of renewable energy supplies--for themselves--and for jet travel. The rest of us will be left to struggle for survival in a hot, depleted world with chancy agriculture, whose goods will be appropriated by the rich if their regular supplies don't come through. I also envision prison-factories, to supply the slave labor needed for the elite lifestyle. No, this planet doesn't have the amount of minerals and energy required to fully replace the current fossil-fueled infrastructure with renewable energy and e-vehicles. But pretending it does allows public subsidy for the production of enough of these things to supply the ruling class with all they want."
This is an interesting line of thought to explore, for sure.
I suspect very strongly that as we begin to significantly leave the economic regime which was made possible by relatively cheap and abundant energy and materials, and made possible by fossil fuels, myriad aspects of our political culture, traditions and habits will simply fail to function as they had. Initially, most likely, the economic (and political) elite will try to hold the familiar system together, but this will fail. It won't work, because there will be simply too many who will lack access to basic means of livlihood -- food, shelter, medicine, etc.
The current class system requires some small number of folks to be desperately poor, and others to be just a little poor, and yet others to be lower middle class, and others to be middle class and above.... Otherwise, the whole thing will snap. It can't deal with two or three times as many desperately poor folks as we now have. It can't manage with three or four times as many being homeless as now are. It can't go on with millions literally starving in, say, the USA.
I don't think it will be possible for a tiny few people (e.g., in the USA) to maintain high end luxury lifestyles with everyone else (nearly) struggling to simply survive, quite literally. And PART of my reasoning here has to do with how fish in the ocean require the many sizes of fish, from minuscule to middle sized (and all sizes between) up to giant, with all sizes between. The whole ecosystems collapses if most of the tiny or middle sized -- or giant -- fish disappear. The industrial system is just like this, as built. A luxury yacht's production requires a lot of folks working as tiny and little fish, some working as big fish, and the giant fish to pay for the damned thing.
If the giant fish try to run the world for themselves while the little and tiny fish are starving and homeless, the entire system that makes the world go around for "the elite" will break down entirely, both economically and politically.
It's true that a luxury life for the 1% in enclaves would not be possible without a lot of workers--hence the prison-factories. Enough people could be charged with crimes to ensure an adequate population of slaves within them. For entertainment, the talented within the 99% could be invited into the enclaves--some would refuse but many would choose selling out to have guaranteed food and shelter, etc. It's true that today's complex economy with all that international shipping requires more than a few, well-distributed workers, but it doesn't require anything like the number we now have--surely a third of us are working bullshit jobs, and many of the rest work to supply the current middle class.Of course many of these "released" workers will end up supplying farm labor.
Unfortunately, Mary, I cannot say that's not a possibility, given the state of world politics at the moment and its trajectory. I'd like to say that the people would not put up with it, but perhaps they would? Child labor in sweat shops in dangerous conditions? Why not! Prison factories for weed smokers? Sure!
I don't think this scenario would last more than two or three decades, but the US is turning into a police state now, without a lot of dissent, as the media are in lockstep with the government and the public is effectively divided into two camps, each seeing the other as the enemy. I also think likely a small percentage of the ruling class actually thinks these things out, makes nefarious plans--they're just each "just doing my job," protecting corporate profits, fending off a threat from protesters against a key pipeline, a police training facility, an export facility, a carbon dioxide pipeline, an airport expansion. They think the climate crisis can be dealt with by a heap of bullshit as long as it's spraypainted green, and they aren't even aware of the biodiversity and other crises. It's always been true that if you're in the 1%, things look pretty rosy right up until collapse.
I like how radically you think. We must think radically and hardly anyone does.
To be on your ride you must accept as a given the collapse of jobs. I’ve been thinking UBI, which is predicated on that, for a decade. People are blind. More jobs is a bedrock appeal to voters. The myopia is stunning. It has to be possible to sell something better. Maybe we just lack for good ideas and those of us who have such things should be talking.
I’d argue against your vision in that it’s unnatural to go back to behavior from an earlier era – it’s like a fairy tale. This is an extraordinary time, but still I can’t see your bucolic vision by choice except if we detonate enough of humanity so that a small tribe regenerates the species.
Love this: There will be no such “energy transition” as that. That story has been a public relations stunt meant to distract us from what we really must do if we’re to both care for human needs and dramatically reduce ghg emissions. Please keep in mind that a dramatic increase in build-out of so-called “renewable” energy infrastructure will (a) require more minerals and metals than we have, (b) burn more fossil fuels over the next crucial decade than we can afford to burn, and [c] take more time than we have to do this in.
Big jump to conclusion. You are correct in observing trends. Grappling with the big questions. The runaway train on which we are on board. And the wisdom behind your observations. As Suzanne suggests, there's a gap in terms alternative actions. You leave us with: collapse. So, I support your voice, and you require more readership. When complemented with proactive available alternative. Unless you wish to describe a big vision future, which also has is place as long as it doesn't blind is to next steps
"You leave us with: collapse. So, I support your voice, and you require more readership. When complemented with proactive available alternative."
It has been my observation that the word "collapse" means at least five hundred different things to any group of a thousand people. So "collapse" is a word we need to flesh out carefully when we use it, as there is no common consensus on what we are supposed to mean by this word.
For many people, "collapse" is a shorthand for mass death -- a massive die-off of much of the human population as the means of feeding, clothing, housing and caring for one another and ourselves rather suddenly breaks down. This can happen, it is said, due to a breakdown of the financial system, or of the climate or ecological systems, or even from a breakdown of various social systems which are not directly about the economy and finance.
For others, any significant dropping off and away from economic growth is perceived as a kind of "collapse".
Certainly, the current capitalist financial system requires perpetual growth to sustain itself, as it's a debt-based system from top to bottom, and when debts can no longer be 'serviced', money will cease to be created and the whole thing will basically fall off a cliff.
But economic growth, of course, could not be perpetuated indefinitely. So it was always going to come to an end at some point.
My work is in many respects about trying to avert a certain kinds of collapse, such as a collapse of ecosystems and the biosphere ... and of the capacity of humans to meet their basic needs (rather than their excessive desires and wants). To do this, there is no option other than some form or another of degrowth. And degrowth is not simply synonymous with an end of growth (of GDP / GWP). It's not the same thing as post-growth. Degrowth is a deliberate, strategic approach to addressing overconsumption, overproduction and maldistribution of 'resources' -- products and services. Degrowth seeks to meet our legitimate human needs without the sorts of excesses which can only lead to various kinds of collapse.
A conversation I had with someone today made it much more clear to me that while I understand somewhat perfectly what my argument actually amounts to in this essay, it's decidedly not entirely clear to others what my argument actually amounts to.
Part of what I'm saying is that it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a "luxury" economic sector which doesn't take an integrated EEE orientation on what "luxury" can even mean now. So I'm offering a new paradigm, and not merely a new idea. Sigh. That's more to ask of "ordinary people" -- if such people exist -- than I had initially presumed. Do "ordinary people" exist? No, I think not. We're all just people doing our best to make sense of a mad, mad world.
Here are the two things I think you left out. First, you talk about people needing to move to more rural locations as city jobs will dry up, but fail to note the other half of that equation: there will be much less gasoline and other fossil fuels to run farms. The thousand-acre farm managed by one guy whose wife has a town job so they can make ends meet will not be feasible when all that gas, and gas-derived fertilizer and pesticide and herbicide, is gone. Those things are essentially a substitute for human labor. So the people leaving cities will also be NEEDED as farm labor. And no, I'm not going to use the requisite word here, "back-breaking." I've been homesteading for decades, growing half our food, and my back is not broken. I enjoy most of my work.
But the other thing is the assumption that as the fossil fuels our energy-intensive way of life requires, luxury-supplying livelihoods will dry up and necessity-providing ones will expand. This is how it SHOULD be, but there is an alternative path, and this choice of paths, I think, is the fight that is shaping up now. The alternative is not ecomodernist fairy tales. It's a world divided between enclaves in which the rich continue to live lives of luxury for several decades, using up the last of the fossil fuel for production of renewable energy supplies--for themselves--and for jet travel. The rest of us will be left to struggle for survival in a hot, depleted world with chancy agriculture, whose goods will be appropriated by the rich if their regular supplies don't come through. I also envision prison-factories, to supply the slave labor needed for the elite lifestyle. No, this planet doesn't have the amount of minerals and energy required to fully replace the current fossil-fueled infrastructure with renewable energy and e-vehicles. But pretending it does allows public subsidy for the production of enough of these things to supply the ruling class with all they want.
Note that I'm not positing a conspiracy, necessarily--some of the elite may be thinking along these lines, but many may not be thinking about it much at all; those pushing a Green New Deal may imagine it will lead to a lovely world where everyone can live like upper-middle class Americans without serious pollution. While we who talk about the necessity of downscaling (gasp!) don't get a hearing.
Now tell me why my ugly vision is less realistic than yours. Please.
" ... there will be much less gasoline and other fossil fuels to run farms. The thousand-acre farm managed by one guy whose wife has a town job so they can make ends meet will not be feasible when all that gas, and gas-derived fertilizer and pesticide and herbicide, is gone."
Good point. And it's difficult to know how this will play out. Some have proposed that because food is a necessity society should choose to immediately (or at some point in time) or rapidly phase out 95% of the airline industry and a similar amount of automobile traffic, while diverting these fossil fuels to agriculture. But these people tend to assume that the only way to feed humanity is through modern industrial agriculture. I do not share this assumption, of course! And so a much more labor intensive mode of food production -- done locally, mostly -- makes a lot of sense to me. And, as I argued in the essay, a low energy economy necessitates a very different approach to livelihood generally, since most jobs in today's world will disappear as we consume less energy and materials. So I think community self-provisioning of food at the immediate local scale will be a huge part of our transition away from an energy and materials intensive economy. (I see no need or benefit in making such self-provisioning of food take place in a money economy. It will be better for all if we simply decomodify food altogether.)
"But the other thing is the assumption that as the fossil fuels our energy-intensive way of life requires, luxury-supplying livelihoods will dry up and necessity-providing ones will expand. This is how it SHOULD be, but there is an alternative path, and this choice of paths, I think, is the fight that is shaping up now. The alternative is not ecomodernist fairy tales. It's a world divided between enclaves in which the rich continue to live lives of luxury for several decades, using up the last of the fossil fuel for production of renewable energy supplies--for themselves--and for jet travel. The rest of us will be left to struggle for survival in a hot, depleted world with chancy agriculture, whose goods will be appropriated by the rich if their regular supplies don't come through. I also envision prison-factories, to supply the slave labor needed for the elite lifestyle. No, this planet doesn't have the amount of minerals and energy required to fully replace the current fossil-fueled infrastructure with renewable energy and e-vehicles. But pretending it does allows public subsidy for the production of enough of these things to supply the ruling class with all they want."
This is an interesting line of thought to explore, for sure.
I suspect very strongly that as we begin to significantly leave the economic regime which was made possible by relatively cheap and abundant energy and materials, and made possible by fossil fuels, myriad aspects of our political culture, traditions and habits will simply fail to function as they had. Initially, most likely, the economic (and political) elite will try to hold the familiar system together, but this will fail. It won't work, because there will be simply too many who will lack access to basic means of livlihood -- food, shelter, medicine, etc.
The current class system requires some small number of folks to be desperately poor, and others to be just a little poor, and yet others to be lower middle class, and others to be middle class and above.... Otherwise, the whole thing will snap. It can't deal with two or three times as many desperately poor folks as we now have. It can't manage with three or four times as many being homeless as now are. It can't go on with millions literally starving in, say, the USA.
I don't think it will be possible for a tiny few people (e.g., in the USA) to maintain high end luxury lifestyles with everyone else (nearly) struggling to simply survive, quite literally. And PART of my reasoning here has to do with how fish in the ocean require the many sizes of fish, from minuscule to middle sized (and all sizes between) up to giant, with all sizes between. The whole ecosystems collapses if most of the tiny or middle sized -- or giant -- fish disappear. The industrial system is just like this, as built. A luxury yacht's production requires a lot of folks working as tiny and little fish, some working as big fish, and the giant fish to pay for the damned thing.
If the giant fish try to run the world for themselves while the little and tiny fish are starving and homeless, the entire system that makes the world go around for "the elite" will break down entirely, both economically and politically.
It's true that a luxury life for the 1% in enclaves would not be possible without a lot of workers--hence the prison-factories. Enough people could be charged with crimes to ensure an adequate population of slaves within them. For entertainment, the talented within the 99% could be invited into the enclaves--some would refuse but many would choose selling out to have guaranteed food and shelter, etc. It's true that today's complex economy with all that international shipping requires more than a few, well-distributed workers, but it doesn't require anything like the number we now have--surely a third of us are working bullshit jobs, and many of the rest work to supply the current middle class.Of course many of these "released" workers will end up supplying farm labor.
Unfortunately, Mary, I cannot say that's not a possibility, given the state of world politics at the moment and its trajectory. I'd like to say that the people would not put up with it, but perhaps they would? Child labor in sweat shops in dangerous conditions? Why not! Prison factories for weed smokers? Sure!
I don't think this scenario would last more than two or three decades, but the US is turning into a police state now, without a lot of dissent, as the media are in lockstep with the government and the public is effectively divided into two camps, each seeing the other as the enemy. I also think likely a small percentage of the ruling class actually thinks these things out, makes nefarious plans--they're just each "just doing my job," protecting corporate profits, fending off a threat from protesters against a key pipeline, a police training facility, an export facility, a carbon dioxide pipeline, an airport expansion. They think the climate crisis can be dealt with by a heap of bullshit as long as it's spraypainted green, and they aren't even aware of the biodiversity and other crises. It's always been true that if you're in the 1%, things look pretty rosy right up until collapse.
I like how radically you think. We must think radically and hardly anyone does.
To be on your ride you must accept as a given the collapse of jobs. I’ve been thinking UBI, which is predicated on that, for a decade. People are blind. More jobs is a bedrock appeal to voters. The myopia is stunning. It has to be possible to sell something better. Maybe we just lack for good ideas and those of us who have such things should be talking.
Here’s a summary of objective elements of a game plan of mine: What's on A ROADMAP TO THE FUTURE? https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/p/whats-on-a-roadmap-to-the-future. Not that I have to be a flagpole if a better one comes along, but I haven’t found any other roadmap with any action on it now. Mine is for what we-the-people can do to change the direction we’re going. Here’s my changemaking track: https://suzannetaylor.substack.com/s/changemaking-now.
I’d argue against your vision in that it’s unnatural to go back to behavior from an earlier era – it’s like a fairy tale. This is an extraordinary time, but still I can’t see your bucolic vision by choice except if we detonate enough of humanity so that a small tribe regenerates the species.
Good material for conversation….
Love this: There will be no such “energy transition” as that. That story has been a public relations stunt meant to distract us from what we really must do if we’re to both care for human needs and dramatically reduce ghg emissions. Please keep in mind that a dramatic increase in build-out of so-called “renewable” energy infrastructure will (a) require more minerals and metals than we have, (b) burn more fossil fuels over the next crucial decade than we can afford to burn, and [c] take more time than we have to do this in.
Big jump to conclusion. You are correct in observing trends. Grappling with the big questions. The runaway train on which we are on board. And the wisdom behind your observations. As Suzanne suggests, there's a gap in terms alternative actions. You leave us with: collapse. So, I support your voice, and you require more readership. When complemented with proactive available alternative. Unless you wish to describe a big vision future, which also has is place as long as it doesn't blind is to next steps
"You leave us with: collapse. So, I support your voice, and you require more readership. When complemented with proactive available alternative."
It has been my observation that the word "collapse" means at least five hundred different things to any group of a thousand people. So "collapse" is a word we need to flesh out carefully when we use it, as there is no common consensus on what we are supposed to mean by this word.
For many people, "collapse" is a shorthand for mass death -- a massive die-off of much of the human population as the means of feeding, clothing, housing and caring for one another and ourselves rather suddenly breaks down. This can happen, it is said, due to a breakdown of the financial system, or of the climate or ecological systems, or even from a breakdown of various social systems which are not directly about the economy and finance.
For others, any significant dropping off and away from economic growth is perceived as a kind of "collapse".
Certainly, the current capitalist financial system requires perpetual growth to sustain itself, as it's a debt-based system from top to bottom, and when debts can no longer be 'serviced', money will cease to be created and the whole thing will basically fall off a cliff.
But economic growth, of course, could not be perpetuated indefinitely. So it was always going to come to an end at some point.
My work is in many respects about trying to avert a certain kinds of collapse, such as a collapse of ecosystems and the biosphere ... and of the capacity of humans to meet their basic needs (rather than their excessive desires and wants). To do this, there is no option other than some form or another of degrowth. And degrowth is not simply synonymous with an end of growth (of GDP / GWP). It's not the same thing as post-growth. Degrowth is a deliberate, strategic approach to addressing overconsumption, overproduction and maldistribution of 'resources' -- products and services. Degrowth seeks to meet our legitimate human needs without the sorts of excesses which can only lead to various kinds of collapse.
A conversation I had with someone today made it much more clear to me that while I understand somewhat perfectly what my argument actually amounts to in this essay, it's decidedly not entirely clear to others what my argument actually amounts to.
Part of what I'm saying is that it makes no sense whatsoever to speak of a "luxury" economic sector which doesn't take an integrated EEE orientation on what "luxury" can even mean now. So I'm offering a new paradigm, and not merely a new idea. Sigh. That's more to ask of "ordinary people" -- if such people exist -- than I had initially presumed. Do "ordinary people" exist? No, I think not. We're all just people doing our best to make sense of a mad, mad world.