Columnist Charley Reese is often insightful. In his May 19 Be Prepared, Reese sums-up mistaken, yet pervasively held notions of perpetual economic growth fueled by cheap energy that prove "particularly difficult to dislodge from the American mind."
One of the most pervasive and damaging myths in modern society is the belief in perpetual economic growth. Like the perpetual-motion machine, perpetual economic growth is an impossibility.This notion is particularly difficult to dislodge from the American mind because economic growth has been part of our lives. We've seen it with our own eyes. Of course, part of what we've seen is an illusion of growth created by gradual devaluation of the currency and statistical games played by the government.
But nevertheless, there has been real economic growth, and it has been powered by cheap fossil-fuel energy. "Cheap" is the operative word here. Subtract cheap fossil-fuel energy, and the life we know will be altered drastically — perhaps, if we don't prepare for it, catastrophically. …
[O]ur cheap fossil-fuel energy is on the verge of running out. According to essayist Wendell Berry, 99 percent of the oil burned has been burned in the lifetime of people still living. Something that took nature thousands of years to create is being consumed in decades. …
How did the notion that 6 billion people couldn't deplete Earth's resources ever get started in the first place? The constants in human nature throughout history have been selfishness, greed and a willingness to sacrifice the future for short-term gain. That's exactly what we are doing by laying a trillion dollars' worth of debt on our posterity. …
Energy represents a temporary value. … Military expenditures represent yet another ghostly and temporary value. … Paper is another impermanent value. If you think the paper your shares of stock are printed on has any permanent value, ask the people at Enron, who one day were well off and the next day were flat broke.
We just need to start thinking about the post-cheap-energy era. If your house, for example, is 25 miles from work, what will happen to its market price if gasoline is $6 a gallon? What will happen to public education if cheap energy becomes a thing of the past, as it surely will? Can we then afford to power the buses and the air conditioners and the lighting? …
Cross-posted at Ecological Economics
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