Scientific American's Path to Sustainability: Let's Think about the Details  

PART 1

I've read through this Scientific American (SA), cover to cover, a week ago and have been wondering when it would hit the Peak Community fan.

Scientific American, Gail the Actuary and Kiashu all make good, valid and debatable theoretical points on paper, however we live in a world of harsh, indifferent and implacable realities not debatable theories.

Three glaringly obvious problems with their combined rhetoric are political, economic and historical.

Before continuing along these lines, I think it's important to clarify my understanding of "political" which derives from one of my must-read recommendations, "Politics for human beings, 2nd edition", by Ralph Hummel and Robert Isaak (1980).

Hummel and Isaak defined politics as:

"[A] social act that attempts to resolve the tension between human needs and social facts"

They define a "social act" as:

"[A] joint action by two or more people undertaken for similar reasons or with the same intention. It is political if the people involved are aware of a shared need and join in an arrangement to satisfy that need."

They define "human needs" as:

"[W]hat it takes for your body to be human and what it takes for your head to feel human. There are physiological and psychological requisites for human existence. The failure to satisfy needs can result in death or in becoming less than human--that is, in illness or pathology of the mind or body.

"Many people want more than they need. Values are what people want, whether they need it or not. Values include things such as refrigerators, new cars, glass-bead games, and chess sets; they include feelings such as love, revenge, joy, and pain; they include ideas such as freedom, order, truth and salvation."

And, they define "social facts" as:

"[O]ld social acts that have become conditions. Social facts often frustrate human needs. For example, although people set up a corporation to satisfy their own needs and wants, as soon as their act becomes a condition, it frustrates the needs of others who share more in the pollution than in the profits created by the firm. Thus the social acts of one group of people to satisfy their own needs often frustrate the fulfillment of needs perceived by other groups."

[CONTINUED BELOW]
(assuming this gets posted)

PART 2

I make this clarification because, a) it's paramount to understand that a lot of human interaction is "political" (in fact, what we're most often taught to regard as "political"--in the United States, for example, the dog and pony show of a false dichotomy between "Left" and "Right" Capitalist parties--is not effectively political as it most often has no intention of resolving tensions between human needs and social facts, it's about maintaining the status quo); and b) even though I've listed "economic" as a separate point of contention, it's clearly part and parcel of resolving the tension between human needs and social facts. Economics is political by definition.

To return to my original proposition, perhaps the most glaringly obvious social fact which stands in the way of the "Ecotechnic Revolution" optimistically espoused by SA and Kiashu (which appears to tacitly assume the existence of potentially helpful and functional, "free market capitalism") is a blatantly obvious social fact which has been addressed by NakedCapitalism.com and John Michael Greer, among others. This fact is the reality that, again using the United States as the example, we don't live in a free market, capitalist system. I have taken to calling the actual system, "plutocratic lemon socialism" (PLS) [1] but no matter what you call it, the fact remains that free market capitalism is nowhere to be found.

PLS works to the overwhelming advantage of a tiny minority at the expense of the vast majority. As retired physicist, Manuel García, Jr. has observed in, The Purpose is Pork:

"But wait, doesn't the failure to produce the better combat airplane, or fix the economy for the general population, or devise credible defense systems diminish the power of the government and the prosperity of the people? Yes, but so what; the targeted pockets were lined, and that's all that counts in the psychology of me-first immediate satisfaction of pure individualized greed, which is championed as 'the free enterprise system.' Consideration for others is necessarily a limiting factor to any personal agenda, and the economic friction it introduces is resented as 'socialism' or 'communism' by those intent on economic exploitation. The root cause of our difficulties is that this attitude is quite popular. So, we dismiss many technical inefficiencies, like a costly yet ill-suited military establishment, defective economic, health-care and educational systems, and wasteful and polluting energy systems, because the services they are intended to provided are not actually their primary purpose -- since those services are 'socialist' -- but instead they are designed, jury-rigged and gerrymandered into a division of spoils, a consensus of pork barrel, and a careerist network of cronyism."

Those who benefit from PLS will not go quiety into that good night.

These pigs love their pork and will violently resist any real and substantive attempts to close their slaughterhouse, let alone regulate it (in case you're wondering, the so-called attempts by Barack Obama and company to corral these pigs are anything but real or substantive).

[CONTINUED BELOW]
(assuming this gets posted)

PART 3

Regardless of the relative merits and potential feasability of an "Ecotechnic Revolution"--as Bill Rees, the originator of the "ecological footprint" concept and co-developer of the method, says, "there's no particular virtue in becoming more efficiently unsustainable" (MP3)--its goals speak to the needs of the many (life on Earth in general) instead of the needs of a few (plutocratic lemon socialists) and as such will never come to pass within the current, dominent socio-political and -economic paradigms.

Two subsets of PLS are Planned Obsolescence and Perceived Obsolescence [2], both of which have apparently ensorcelled Kiashu.

Planned Obsolescence and Perceived Obsolescence are not natural or necessary and Kiashu's repeated insistence, in various snarky guises, that, "Things become obsolete, that's life in a technological society", reflects lazy thinking, counterproductive and childish technophilia, and a callous indifference to the exponentially increasing pool of human have-nots.

In the United Status--where a "Third-World"-style gap between the haves and have-nots ranks above only Turkey and Mexico [3]--millions of already unconscionably marginalized and at-risk Americans may well soon be faced with the burden of being forced to pay for "healthcare" insurance whether they can afford to pay for it or not (not to mention they may be financially penalized for not being able to afford it).

This ever-growing population of artificially created and maintained-by-force have-nots will simply not be able to keep up with the Joneses in Kiashu's dystopia of too-expensive-for-many, Jim-fine-and-dandy, technologically-obsolete-progress.

[FINISHED BELOW]
(assuming this gets posted)

PART 4

As for the historical context, as I witness the voluminous, well-meaning cyber-chatter, spoken words and essays about the inevitable, seamless "Ecotechnic Revolution" or our glorious anarcho-primitivist future, I repeatedly return to these two quotes:

"The values to which people cling most stubbornly under inappropriate conditions are those values that were previously the source of their greatest triumphs over adversity."
- Jared Diamond [4]

"The best-run and most successful businesses are precisely the ones that are least able to change when change becomes necessary."
- Clay Christensen [5]

They both speak to a reality which Jim Kunstler likes to call, "the psychology of previous investment".

Which is to say, regardless of your particular brand of pie-eyed-optimism about the future, the past is a profoundly influential partner during the actual journey.

Contemporary reality does not remotely augur well for a utopian, sustainable future. And if history is any guide, the tidal wave of sea change on our immediate horizon--imposed by the reality of this finite planet on our myth of infinite growth--will leave tremendous damage, pain and suffering it its wake.

Regardless of our best efforts.

Perhaps John Michael Greer has expressed it best:

"We are not going to have a future better than the present: not in our lifetimes, and not in those of our grandchildren's grandchildren. We collectively closed the door on that possibility decades ago, and none of the rapidly narrowing range of choices still open to us now offers any way of changing that. If this sounds like fatalism, it may be worth remembering that once a car goes skidding off a mountain road into empty air, it requires neither a crystal ball nor a faith in predestination to recognize that nothing anybody can do is going to prevent a terrific crash.

"We do no one a favor, least of all ourselves, by trying to sugarcoat that very unpalatable reality." [6]

--

Endnotes:

I have purposely avoided addressing two more obvious obstacles to a utopian "Ecotechnic Revolution"--psychology and human nature--because I'm just trying to make the significant but more often than not dismissed, ignored or denied point that the theoretical is light years from the real. I see no need to write a book about it when this relatively short story will do.

[1] A plutocracy is a government or state system ruled by the wealthy.

Lemon Socialism is the privatizing of profits and the socializing of losses (all of the recent bank bailouts are a textbook example).

[2] The Story of Stuff

[3] Growing Unequal? Income Distribution and Poverty in OECD Countries

[4] Culled from, Imperial Entropy

[5] Culled from, The Media's Broken Business Model

--

If this gets posted, I thank Peak Energy for its work and indulgence.

If not, I still thank it for its work.

--

David Emanuel

lonerphrique, I think you missed the part where I said, with British-style understatement, that we may have trouble persuading people to stop burning fossil fuels.

Gail's article told us that nothing can be done, so we shouldn't even try. I assume she has shares in oil companies, I do know oil companies have flown her to foreign countries to write friendly articles promoting them.

I say that something can be done, and we should try to make it happen, but whether it will be done I don't know.

My general view of peak oil is in Peak Oil, Mad Max and Me, but a sketch of future scenarios for the world as a whole is in What about the Third World?, and for the West in particular in The Oily Smudge on the Future of the City-State.

Essentially, I think the most likely future for the world is much like the Third World today: a wealthy core in the big cities, surrounded by millions living in misery in slums and desperate poverty on the land. The only difference is that the wealthy elites will be renewably-powered.

It doesn't have to be this way, and we should try for something better, rather than just clutching onto our oil shares until the last possible moment.