Friday's Top 10: PowerdownKiwi offers his selection, including Kurt Cobb, Annie Leonard, Kevin Carson, Al Bartlett, and George Mobus; Dilbert & more

Today's Top 10 is a guest post from Murray Grimwood, who comments on this website as Powerdown Kiwi and has his own blog. His is the fourth Top 10 in our new Friday series from a range of different contributors. (If you read nothing else, watch the Al Bartlett videos in #8. Ed.)

As always, we welcome your additions in the comments below or via email to david.chaston@interest.co.nz. And if you're interested in contributing the occasional Top 10 yourself, contact gareth.vaughan@interest.co.nz.

See all previous Top 10s here.

This Top 10 is unashamedly about the unsustainability of the quest for the unattainable: Endless Growth. No point in advocating anything based on something what can’t be had ...

1. Kurt Cobb looks at the implications of Fukushima, and suggests where we ought to be going ...

All this suggests that we ought to have a bias toward energy supplies that cannot decline in the long run, namely renewables - and that cannot create environmental havoc with just one accident.

Strangely, this is a surprisingly tough sell in a world that has already been sold on the idea that we have precise knowledge of our energy future - when, in reality, all we have are risks, many of which cannot be even be remotely quantified.

2. Annie Leonard has a look at the difference between ‘more’ and ‘better’.

To economists, there’s no distinction between money spent on Stuff that makes life better and money spent on Stuff that makes life worse.

GDP treats both the same.

If GDP goes up, we’re told we’re golden - even though it doesn’t actually tell us a thing about how we’re really doing as a society.

In what I call the ‘Game of More’, politicians cheer a steadily growing economy at the same time as our health indicators are worsening, income inequality is growing and polar icecaps are melting.

But what if we changed the point of the game? What if the goal of our economy wasn’t more, but better - better health, better jobs and a better chance to survive on the planet? Shouldn’t that be what winning means?

It’s aimed at kids, but that works: most of us are not being very grow’d up ourselves. 

3. Kevin Carson argues for a different approach to infrastructure and manufacturing.

One reason the framing of “catabolic collapse” is so misleading, in today’s technological environment, is that distributed technologies are reducing the need for the old legacy infrastructures.

Because they’re an extremely high overhead business model that depends on cost-plus markup and guaranteed profit, any reduction in demand entails a vicious circle that will eventually result in their implosion. Even a 5% reduction in consumer demand for output will result in a drastic increase in unit costs from overhead, which in turn will mean an increase in the rates utility payers have to pay to guarantee a profit, which in turn will lead to further rate-payer flight to alternatives, which in turn will result in further idle capacity and overhead, and so on, and so on.

So in this scenario, progress looks an awful lot like catabolic collapse.

And “maintaining/rebuilding our infrastructure,” that shibboleth of much of the greenwashed “Progressive” Left, requires strangling the successor society in its grave.

Metaphorically speaking, we live in the early days of an emerging economy in which peasant villages - with a Star Trek molecular replicator in each cottage - lives in the shadows of the decaying aqueducts.

The dead hand of Rome is trying its best to maintain the old system and its infrastructures, even at the expense of destroying a world without want. But I don’t think it can.

Not sure I agree with all of it, but food for thought. 

4. Nor does John Michael Greer in his rebuttal: 

It’s at this point that the real downside of dependence on nonrenewable resources cuts in; the abandonment of excess infrastructure decreases one set of costs, and frees up some resources, but the ongoing depletion of the  nonrenewable resource base continues implacably, so resource costs keep rising.

Instead of bottoming out and setting the stage for renewed prosperity, the aftermath of crisis allows only a temporary breathing space, followed by another round of political and economic failure as resource costs continue to climb.

This is what drives the stairstep process of crisis, partial recovery, and renewed crisis, ending eventually in total collapse, that appears so often in the annals of dead civilizations.

5. Kunstler is always a good read. Agree with him or not, all or sometimes, he’s a supreme wordsmith: 

The merits of the case for or against Obamacare are almost impossible for even well-informed and educated citizens to parse.

You start with a law roughly 2,000 pages long, cobbled together largely by lobbyists for the insurance and medical industries, both of them hideous rackets, and move to a labyrinth of 50 different state’s systems for administering the darn thing, and then consider the supposed beneficiaries, namely young people so burdened by college loans in an economy that only offers minimum wage scut-jobs that, from one day to the next, they probably don’t know whether to shit or go blind.

They don’t even have the scratch to pay the opt-out tax, let alone purchase an insurance policy.

And:

Some observers think a government shutdown would be salutary, the beginning of a wholesale house-cleaning of federal agencies and pain-in-the-ass public employees who get paid too much, enjoy too many benefits, and work strenuously to impede honest enterprise. There may be something to that.

But the current actions in Congress are more likely to produce a kind of epileptic seizure of all economic activity, public and private.

Like him or loathe him, he entertains.

6. Worth the watch. 

Carmen Lawrence lays it down clearly; Sustainable Growth is an oxymoron. (Wonder where we’ve heard that before…..)

7. I’ve long respected Professor George Mobus, as indeed I respect anyone who thinks in whole systems (as opposed to specialising, or worse, cherry-picking). 

He mentions Steve Keen:

Keen's book is a worthy read. And, as I said above, I can't find fault with his arguments as far as they go.

Unfortunately he missed the real elephant in the room by ignoring the true role of energy in the economy. Most economists treat energy (e.g. fossil fuels) as just another kind of commodity.

And he finishes with:  

I wish I could say that the days of neoclassical economics domination are waning and that a new theory such as biophysical economics will rise and that we will be able to fix everything as a result, but I can't.

Nevertheless I think that neoclassical economics and its proponents should be dismantled.

The theory is corrupt and reinforcing bad thinking in nearly everybody. The people who push it are intellectually dishonest at best and possibly criminally malicious at worst. But it is also the case that the citizens who continue to swallow their BS because it sounds good are partially culpable as well. We are a minimally sapient species. We are too influenced by ideological thinking. Most of us don't comprehend the facts or the principles that operate on reality.

So what hope exists? Evolution in the long run, I think.

8. Speaking of Professors, one of my favourite ones died recently, putting paid to the GBH posit that the fact that you’re alive now, somehow means you will live forever.

The Prof in question is Albert Bartlett, famed for his classic ‘Exponential Function’ lecture. This one, though, is pertinent to us, here, now. Starting with the fact that there are two possible states; sustainable or unsustainable (no third option), this wee gem: http://www.openfuture.co.nz/unsustainability/meaningofsustainability.html points out that our much maligned/soon to be watered-down RMA wasn’t capable of producing sustainability, even in its most restrictive form.

... leads us to the First Law of Sustainability: Population growth and/or growth in the rates of consumption of resources cannot be sustained.

The First Law is based on arithmetic so it is absolute. Science is not democratic, so the First Law of Sustainability is not debatable; it cannot be modified or repealed by professional societies, by congresses or by parliaments. The First Law implies that the term "Sustainable Growth" is an oxymoron.

This is true when this term is used by an untutored person on the street, by an economics professor, or by the President of the United States.

Or the odd commentator on Interest.co……

The Problem Stated: Stopping population growth and stopping the growth of rates of consumption of resources are both necessary, but are not sufficient, conditions for sustainability. 

Ouch.

9. Mobus would shake his head at this fellow.
Ramez Naam seems to think that we can think our way onwards and upwards. Presumably forever. Nothing a good grounding in physics, chemistry and biology wouldn’t fix.

Depleting natural resources – if we don’t invest in innovation to multiply them – will eventually shrink the pie, until we have no choice to live more humbly, until we see poverty rise and our wealth and freedoms shrink. That’s not the path we want to go down. We find ourselves in a race. On the one side is depletion of resources that we need. On the other side is our rate of innovation. If depletion wins, we all suffer. If innovation wins, we can both solve the problems depletion has brought and grow the size of the global pie, increasing the wealth of everyone on the planet.

Reading that stuff is fine, it keeps your appraisal-scope wide. But – and it’s a fatal ‘but’ as far as I’m concerned – “if we don’t invest in innovation to multiply them” is a cranial-appraisal failure of both ‘growth’ and ‘finite’. He should have listened to Bartlett ... (click photo to view)

10. What to do, then? Not sure if we’ve had it here before, but here’s one list:

What will tip the economy and markets? What will shock the collective conscience of all peoples?

Get across the message that Eternal Growth is a fantasy: Global pandemics? Terrorist nuclear wars? Poverty, starvation? Or some other unpredictable Black Swan that we deny, we refuse to prepare for?

We don’t know what will shock the world, finally bankrupt America and wake us up. But we do know that it’s dead ahead.

11. And finally, a Clarke classic ...