TRANSITION MILWAUKEE

Asking an economist to evaluate the work of Nicole Foss is a bit like asking a Baptist Minister to evaluate the work of a secular, agnostic theologian or philosopher of religion, for we are dealing with two competing belief systems and Foss (along with Richard Heinberg, John Michael Greer, Juliet Schor, Wendell Berry, and to some extent Bill McKibben, along with countless others) is, among other things, challenging the economists unquestioned belief in a very specific view of the world, as well as numerous elements of faith.
[Foss is speaking in Madison and Milwaukee this coming week.]

Just as the growth-based prosperity that our broader culture has liked to attribute to its own good virtues can easily be seen as a product, first, of colonial expansion and then of the unleashed abundance of coal, oil, and natural gas, so also have our chief political beliefs developed under similar circumstances. Individual liberalism, and thus freedom as we have largely known it, are also the products of abundance, often an ill-begotten sort of abundance. Individual liberalism’s main dictum, that you can do whatever you want, up until the point where it does harm to another, made sense as a principle political good only in a world of relatively unlimited space, whether geographical space for migration and resource exploitation, or the less defined space that appeared available to unlimited economic expansion and all the waste and destruction that goes with it.

To the extent that liberals cling to the notion of demand as the source of all economic problems, their thinking will become increasingly irrelevant to future debates. In a way that is equally alarming, conservative economics, even it its most naïve and populist forms, are more likely to find a prominent place in serious discussions about the economy in this future. The conservatives have ventured on to the near side of the supply and demand equation, though in a highly troubling way.

Infrastructure spending creates temporary jobs and a great big debt, rather than permanent growth, dividends, and increased and self-sustaining economic growth. The reason is that the multiplier effect works when there is an overabundance of real-economic potential—natural resources waiting to be turned into useful stuff, especially the sort of stuff that might make future production even more efficient. In this case a clogged circulatory system may in fact be the only thing preventing economic growth. Without this abundance laying in wait, the notion that a stimulus will cause the money invested in the system to multiply, rather than just be added in, has in fact been a form of voodoo economics.

There is a way in which The Tea Party’s uncompromising stance does make sense. Perhaps they are willing to crash the economy not just or only out of ignorance of basic economics—or basic economics as, importantly, it is articulated by liberal academic economists and Wall Street analysts alike. Perhaps they see this crisis as an opportunity to make their stand against a system that cannot continue along its current path. The path to a sustainable future, they seem to suggest, will involve some changes to our expectations about what we deserve and what we can expect.

All this gives credence to the popular story among many sustainability activists that in the 70s we were heading down the right path, a path that may not have been diverging far enough from the main-stream consciousness in its first steps, but that was nevertheless a good start, a missed opportunity nonetheless. According to this view, we were at a sort of fork in the road, and that a good part of the nation, if given the proper leadership or if bolstered by enough committed activism, could have put us on a sustainable path.

This is a peak oil story. Or maybe a story about what happens when peak oil activism collides with peak oil itself. It is a tale about that punch in the stomach announcement that reality has arrived.

This, we are told, is part of "the war on the middle class." But a way of seeing is a way of not seeing, and when we hear this phrase over and over again, we are turning away from the longer and more violent war on the poor.

In a report meant to be both inspiring and reassuring, the WWF ambitiously declares that the world can switch to 95% renewable energy sources by 2050. The Scenario depends largely on increased efficiency and regulated flows of energy through a great system of interconnection. People are remarkably absent. The ostensible reason is that the report is focused on what is “technically possible,” which is more about joules and btus than about human behavior.

But this post-peak oil revolution in expectations will not begin with any of our mainstream political parties, nor even according to familiar political values. With only minor differences about how the spoils of the oil age might be dispersed, cutting across political lines is the master-belief that if we have the right to anything we can afford. Whether liberal or conservative, progressive or reactionary, nearly all inhabitants of North Atlantic democracies lavish themselves with as much of the looted splendor of the age of cheap energy as they can seize. There is so little room outside of this hegemony of entitlement that this marginal space, until now perhaps, has been reserved only for an impractical fringe unaware of the democratic needs of a mass-society in the industrialized world.