Man, I'm tellin' ya. It's been all downhill since 1974!
Posted on 12/30/2002 6:36:44 PM PST by aculeus
We will pay the price for believing the world has infinite resources
With the turning of every year, we expect our lives to improve. As long as the economy continues to grow, we imagine, the world will become a more congenial place in which to live. There is no basis for this belief. If we take into account such factors as pollution and the depletion of natural capital, we see that the quality of life peaked in the UK in 1974 and in the US in 1968, and has been falling ever since. We are going backwards.
The reason should not be hard to grasp. Our economic system depends upon never-ending growth, yet we live in a world with finite resources. Our expectation of progress is, as a result, a delusion.
This is the great heresy of our times, the fundamental truth which cannot be spoken. It is dismissed as furiously by those who possess power today - governments, business, the media - as the discovery that the earth orbits the sun was denounced by the late medieval church. Speak this truth in public and you are dismissed as a crank, a prig, a lunatic.
Capitalism is a millenarian cult, raised to the status of a world religion. Like communism, it is built upon the myth of endless exploitation. Just as Christians imagine that their God will deliver them from death, capitalists believe that theirs will deliver them from finity. The world's resources, they assert, have been granted eternal life.
The briefest reflection will show that this cannot be true. The laws of thermodynamics impose inherent limits upon biological production. Even the repayment of debt, the pre-requisite of capitalism, is mathematically possible only in the short-term. As Heinrich Haussmann has shown, a single pfennig invested at 5% compounded interest in the year AD 0 would, by 1990, have reaped a volume of gold 134bn times the weight of the planet. Capitalism seeks a value of production commensurate with the repayment of debt.
Now, despite the endless denials, it is clear that the wall towards which we are accelerating is not very far away. Within five or 10 years, the global consumption of oil is likely to outstrip supply. Every year, up to 75bn tonnes of topsoil are washed into the sea as a result of unsustainable farming, which equates to the loss of around 9m hectares of productive land.
As a result, we can maintain current levels of food production only with the application of phosphate, but phosphate reserves are likely to be exhausted within 80 years. Forty per cent of the world's food is produced with the help of irrigation; some of the key aquifers are already running dry as a result of overuse.
One reason why we fail to understand a concept as simple as finity is that our religion was founded upon the use of other people's resources: the gold, rubber and timber of Latin America; the spices, cotton and dyes of the East Indies; the labour and land of Africa. The frontier of exploitation seemed, to the early colonists, infinitely expandable. Now that geographical expansion has reached its limits, capitalism has moved its frontier from space to time: seizing resources from an infinite future.
An entire industry has been built upon the denial of ecological constraints. Every national newspaper in Britain lamented the "disappointing" volume of sales before Christmas. Sky News devoted much of its Christmas Eve coverage to live reports from Brent Cross, relaying the terrifying intelligence that we were facing "the worst Christmas for shopping since 2000". The survival of humanity has been displaced in the newspapers by the quarterly results of companies selling tableware and knickers.
Partly because they have been brainwashed by the corporate media, partly because of the scale of the moral challenge with which finity confronts them, many people respond to the heresy with unmediated savagery.
Last week this column discussed the competition for global grain supplies between humans and livestock. One correspondent, a man named David Roucek, wrote to inform me that the problem is the result of people "breeding indiscriminately ... When a woman has displayed evidence that she totally disregards the welfare of her offspring by continuing to breed children she cannot support, she has committed a crime and must be punished. The punishment? She must be sterilised to prevent her from perpetrating her crimes upon more innocent children."
There is no doubt that a rising population is one of the factors which threatens the world's capacity to support its people, but human population growth is being massively outstripped by the growth in the number of farm animals. While the rich world's consumption is supposed to be boundless, the human population is likely to peak within the next few decades. But population growth is the one factor for which the poor can be blamed and from which the rich can be excused, so it is the one factor which is repeatedly emphasised.
It is possible to change the way we live. The economist Bernard Lietaer has shown how a system based upon negative rates of interest would ensure that we accord greater economic value to future resources than to present ones. By shifting taxation from employment to environmental destruction, governments could tax over-consumption out of existence. But everyone who holds power today knows that her political survival depends upon stealing from the future to give to the present.
Overturning this calculation is the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. We need to reverse not only the fundamental presumptions of political and economic life, but also the polarity of our moral compass. Everything we thought was good - giving more exciting presents to our children, flying to a friend's wedding, even buying newspapers - turns out also to be bad. It is, perhaps, hardly surprising that so many deny the problem with such religious zeal. But to live in these times without striving to change them is like watching, with serenity, the oncoming truck in your path.
Man, I'm tellin' ya. It's been all downhill since 1974!
Yes, business cycles and other technicalities make it difficult to gauge real prices and their direction. Difficult, but not impossible.
We have skyscrapers because cheap land in major cities is simply unavailable. Resorts which were pristine only a few years ago are now trashed and over-crowded. Water is expensive and getting more so. What evidence will convince you?
Location, location, location. We've not yet run out of good cheap land but we're exploiting it at an incredible rate and - as real-estate agents like to point out when they're selling beach-front property - noone is making any more of it.
And yet, some forms of pollution were worse in 1968, 1958 or 1948. No one getting killed by smog in London now. No rivers burning in Ohio any more. Toxic dumps getting cleaned up, rather than created. Asbestos getting removed, not installed. So, just how does Monbiot come up with his statistics?
It's possible that as things get more crowded quality of life decreases. If populations double in a generation, one could say that the quality of life has suffered. Mass immigration could also have a negative effect on the elusive "quality of life" for the majority.
But in the end such calculations become subjective. If Italian or Japanese or Danish populations are halved over the next century, will that really improve the quality of life? Maybe it's the perceptions and pyschological strains that growth or decrease bring that matter, not the actual growth (or decline) and its physical effects.
A couple decades ago, the best typewriter was an IBM. And it cost $3-400 in that decade's dollars. Today, we can buy a computer for about that in today's dollars, and yes, they are assembled in the US.
And with the cheap internet connections, we are all far better off.
So when the world's population levels out (before the end of the century, at current estimates), why will we need more land? And for a more detailed rebuttal to your position, read the chapter on over-population in P.J. O'Rourke's All the Troubles in the World
It does bring a question up about the idle rich though. Perhaps this generation won't be that way, but pretty soon, what happens when wealthy people are mostly happy to sit on their laurels.
If Bill Gates' kid takes the $105 billion, Bill G gives em and just puts the 5 billion in petty cash, grows the rest at 5% compound interest, in 100 years, that is $13 trillion dollars. No risk taking, just banks using that money for loans that hopefully pay off. Sure in 100 years 13 trillion won't be what it is now. But even estimating 2.5% annual inflation.. the real value of that money would be 10 times greater than now, just for doing absolutely nothing.
What nonsense! .. Strawman alert. nobody claims that capitalism is based on 'unlimited' anything, in fact the essense of classical economic thinking is that resources are limited. But with free enterprise, resources are allocated most efficiently ('highest and best use') and innovation can take place based on freedom and 'pursuit of happiness'.
For example, since 1973 we have doubled GNP in the US but oil consumption is only slightly higher. The 'energy efficiency' of our economy is markedly higher than it was. We are more efficient users of other resources as well (like steel etc.)
Last good year for the Datsun Z-car series, too. Nissan went to the ZX in 1979. Oh, what I'd do for a brand-new 1975-1978 280Z.
You see, even the radical-Left Guardian paper says that we should go back to leaded gas, 8 liter V-8 engines, no catalytic converter gas guzzlers such as those being driven prior to 1968...
< GRIN! >
The poor Lefties simply have no honest arguments "left". They have to cry that the air is fouler, the water dirtier, and life more miserable; yet who would go back to the days of total smog over Birmingham and cars that would kill you in minutes if left running in your garage?
Any intellectually honest person who reads the Skeptical Environmentalist will instantly admit that our air and water are both cleaner today than in 1968, even though we have more people driving more cars and producing more goods today than back then.
Thus, the Left feels compelled to simply...lie.
OSHA, EPA, Arab Oil Embargo...
The kook isn't far off with his timing, but his "remedy" is pure poison.
THE "URBAN SPRAWL" AND SOIL EROSION SCAM
Quote;
...the long-run trend in the decades up to 1970 was about one million acres of total land urbanized per year - not increasing but rather constant or slowing
The jist of the article was that much of the U.S. was still not urbanized and that many were exagerating the rate at which it was being urbanized. But the rate which he accepts as valid is clearly unsustainable in a finite world. It must slow or stop. And not just in the U.S. but in the rest of the world as well.
I could attempt to refute you point by point - for example, your contention that skyscrapers were built for reasons of pride rather than economics - but I think it would just detract from the main argument.
Many point out that fertility in the developed world is below the sustainable level. True. Whether that trend will continue in the face of undiminished birth-rates in the third world (and ever-increasing immigration) is questionable.
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