(This is Part 30 of a series. Go back to Part 29.)
Conservation will be crucial during this period and after. Things like replacing incandescent bulbs with fluorescent ones, installing greater insulation in homes, achieving higher efficiency in power plants, legislating higher gas mileage for vehicles and so on. These actions and others can help a great deal.
Typically, though, investments in energy efficiency yield diminishing returns. The easy and inexpensive methods being tried first, further returns become more costly and more difficult to achieve. Though conservation will be helpful, it cannot prevent the coming net energy decline.
This coming net energy decline will be a comprehensive secondary effect resulting from the primary effect of using large amounts of cheap, one-time, energy-dense fossil fuel to throw an enormous Industrial Age economic party.
In all probability this global net energy decline will be severe because industrialism, built upon the premise of easy, cheap oil and natural gas, is riding the crest of an Energy Bubble.
Bubbles don't just occur in stocks, bonds, real estate and credit. We're also seeing one in energy. We're living in a one-time universe—a period when humanity has been given, for a brief time, a non-renewable gift of energy.
Like the financial bubbles, the energy bubble has to burst because it has expanded too far. It's like a balloon that's been blown up excessively: it becomes fragile. It's liable to burst or collapse upon touching almost anything.
As the global energy bubble collapses the collapse will be blamed upon a host of things—the oil companies, OPEC, terrorism or what have you. But the real reason will be simply that all bubbles must eventually collapse.
As with the financial bubbles, the collapse of the energy bubble will be a painful but ultimately constructive event. It will wake us up like nothing else could to the need to construct a sustainable economy, that is, one that is sustainable from the viewpoint of energy and ecology.
Human society rests upon a foundation of energy wealth. But that energy in turn rests upon the ecological web. We've been accustomed to think of the ecology as a part of the economy: in this view, the exploitation of nature is simply part of the cost of having a thriving economy. But this view is leading us to destruction.
It's one thing to live off the interest from our principal. But human society in the industrial age has been eating its seed corn. We're consuming not just the interest but the principal too, in terms of energy and the web of nature.
A global society that goes through a period of declining net energy will also be a society that is experiencing a declining standard of living. This most likely means not just declining quantity of various things but a declining quality of life as well, expressed in such symptoms as unemployment, unrest and shortages of necessities.
But this very period will also be a profound awakening for human society and lead to the transformation of our current unsustainable excesses into a future time of sustainable energy, agriculture, ecology and population.
We'll learn to live with less and that will be a good thing. Rampant consumerism has hurt us more than it's helped us; as Richard Heinberg says in a pithy statement, "Our consumptive lifestyle damages communities, families and individual self-esteem."
As Lester Brown says, instead of thinking of the ecology as part of the economy we'll begin to think of it the other way around—the economy as part of the ecology. Indeed, the global economy is built upon, embedded within, rests upon the global ecology.
It would be very helpful to harness the immense power of markets in making the transition to a sustainable global economy. The problem now is that markets are sending false signals because the ecology isn't taken into account; prices don't currently reflect the fact that we're consuming the principal which mother nature bequeathed to us.
As Oystein Dahle put it, "Socialism collapsed because it did not allow prices to tell the economic truth. Capitalism may collapse because it does not allow prices to tell the ecological truth."
What would be helpful, in our transition to a sustainable world, would be a really good set of feedback signals.
For instance, a carbon tax could be placed on fossil fuels while generous credits could be given for the construction of renewable energy sources. Additionally, credits could be given for the purchase of vehicles, appliances, business equipment, etc. with a high energy efficiency.
By injecting conscious taxes and credits into the system, the power of markets could work for us instead of against us. As we went about our daily lives, making ordinary decisions in the marketplace, we would automatically be lifting up society's ability to reside in a sustainable world.
(This is the end of Part 30. Go to Part 31.)
—jim sloman, 10.24.04 for Mar 26
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