JOHN MICHAEL GREER

One of the most rarely used resources for relocalization projects is the fact that our species has been this way before -- the twilight years of many other civilizations featured the breakup of centralized economic arrangements and the rise of a new localism. Can insights from past examples offer us guidance in the present case?

The claim that market forces will inevitably take care of energy shortfalls due to peak oil is common enough these days. Unfortunately for such optimistic notions, there's reason to think that in an environment of economic contraction caused by geological limits to energy, market forces may well push money away from any investments that could help the situation.

Plenty of voices on one end of the peak oil scene, and far more outside it, insist that the most effective response to peak oil -- or any other problem you care to name -- depends on unleashing the free market. There is only one problem with this prescription: free markets are mythical beasts.

For more than half a century, neoclassical economics has provided the basis for the vast majority of economic advice offered to governments by their paid advisers. A great deal of that advice has been disastrously misguided, and the problems with the neoclassical synthesis that feed into that torrent of bad advice make the same outcome all but unavoidable in dealing with peak oil.

Social critics have pointed out with some justice that today's industrial states are troubled, corrupt, and dysfunctional. It's too often remembered, though, that as the pressures of resource depletion come to bear, what replaces them need not be an improvement.

...A technic society, by contrast, relies primarily on nonfood energy. Modern industrial civilization is simply a form of technic society that gets its nonfood energy from fossil fuels and maximizes production of goods and services in the usual R-selected way at the cost of vast inefficiency. At the other end of the spectrum is the climax community, the ecotechnic society, which gets its nonfood energy from renewable sources and maximizes the efficiency of its energy and resource use in the usual K-selected way at the cost of more restricted access to goods and services.

Speculative bubbles have become an increasingly common feature of modern economies, as concrete wealth has been replaced by its abstract representations. Behind the ever more fictive finances of an industrial world caught in the trap of trying to meet concrete needs with manufactured money lies a vaster speculative bubble focused on money itself. When it pops, as it will, the detonation may echo for a very long time. The third and last post of a series.

The ubiquity of money is very nearly as much a defining feature of today's industrial economies as the ubiquity of fossil fuel energy -- and more than happenstance connects these two features. The third installment in a series.

Plenty of people think of metaphysics as one of those abstruse topics that give otherwise unemployable academics something to do with their time. Meanwhile the industrial world lurches toward disaster along a trajectory marked out, in part, by a common metaphysical error. The Archdruid explains, in this second post of a series.

In any group of pundits assembled to denounce the suggestion that there's a problem pursuing infinite growth on a finite planet, economists are sure to be well represented. Given that economists have also been well represented among the cheerleaders of the last half dozen disastrous speculative bubbles, this is not exactly comforting. What lies behind the repeated failures of contemporary economics to provide a timely warning of predictable dangers?