For the last 150 years or so there has been an ongoing quasi-religious debate between economist and environmentalist. Unfortunately this process generated far
more heat than light because each side mistakenly believed that between their respective camps they encompassed all the material relevant to the debate. Both side realized that 'Technology' was a
complex enigma of promise and pitfalls. But neither side seem fully cognisant of the extent that Energy (mode, forms & sources) amplified Technologies' beneficial or detrimental ramifications.
In 1776 with the publication of " An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations"
{now commonly called "The Wealth of Nations"}Adam Smith (1723-1790) defined the foundation of Classical Economics (along with David Ricardo). Among the other principal
contributors to classical economic theory is the maligned demographer Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834), who in 1798 in publishing his "Essay on the Principle of Population"
soberlycontradicted optimism of human progress bubbling from the daily excitement and novelty that was the Industrial Revolution. Smith & Malthus's fine work of the18th century, is
conceived in a time when humanity fantasies were still constrained by climate and animal muscle power. Thus informed by natures limitation there is no haemorrhage yet between ecological and
economic disciplines. |
Unfortunately from the Industrial Revolution with humanity's first large scale utilization of hydrocarbons as
concentrated energy stores for mechanical power, a critical but unrecognized fissure gapes within economics' systematic soundness. Economic analysis began to concentrates on ever more
arcane minutiae of money, forgetting the importance of environmental capital, while totally failing to perceive the calorific value and implications of finite hydrocarbon resources. Despite;-
neo-classical economics, macro-economics, Keynesianism & Monetarism, all the impressive later names for schools or movements in economics after the Industrial Revolution, the
whole discipline of economics would be better termed 'Bunny Rabbit Economic';- open system, ever expanding horizons, growth for the sake of growth. In the 19th century the
Industrial Revolution gathered steam, then broke-out of Britain in the world's first taste of globalization. Intoxicated by the technological wonders of progress, entrepreneurs, industrialists,
politicians, economists even! soon forgot Malthus's cautionary words. Swallowing their own propaganda the bunnies were off at full hop to their futuristic Shangri-la. Malthus's careful pre-industrial
era analysis was carelessly extrapolated in time and space to a world that Thomas could never had imagined. The political Left attacked Malthus seeing in his theory's postulation that, poverty would
always arise as population outstripped agricultural potential, a negation of their campaigns for the social betterment of the masses. Simultaneously the political Right stigmatized Malthus as false
prophet-of-doom, for daring to imply that mankind's (women folk then still legally chained in the background) potential thence profit should have any moral or ethical restrictions. Also to
a lesser extent Adam Smith's work was dismembered, then misconstrued. Smith's support of "laissez faire" economic arrangements morphed from, Smith's justifiable opposition to government
interference in a market for the advantaging of government enterprises, to modern business desire for unrestricted activity free of any any moral or ethical consequence ( something obviously
repugnant to Adam Smith's convictions). |
The slight of hand in the miss-named "Green" Revolution, was the discovery how a fraction of oil's energy value could be transmuted into food
stuffs needed by the human physiology for its metabolism's energy source. So the Fat Black (Pseudo-green) Revolution is a more accurate description of what was being done. Oil was
converted into fertilizers to feed the crops, herbicides to kill the weeds that flourished in the fertilizer enriched soils, then pesticides to kill the bugs whos numbers multiplied with the move to
broad-acre monoculture facilitated the mechanisation of farming with the first steam tractors, then the internal combustion engine and finally diesel motors. In the June 2004 article "The End of
Cheap Oil" National Geographic in the USA reported that to grow one pound of beef requires the consumption of three quarters of a gallon(US) of oil! The direr implication of this is as the
oil dwindles so does most of the extra food production attributable to the Pseudo-green Revolution. Without that bounty of extra food a lot of people will simply starve, Malthus's unheeded
warnings will have acquired a monstrous over-bite. Put another way in effect most of the world's current population is surviving because it is eating reformed hydrocarbons. Dale Allen Pfeiffer more
pointedly terms this "
Eating Fossil Fuels"
which is his must read article for everyone now alive ( on-line at
http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/100303_eating_oil.html (first published 2004 by
FromTheWilderness.com
)). Dale does a scholarly examination (with excellent in-depth links ) of why agriculture inevitably is the most frightening aspect of our future world. Danielle Murray's resent Earth Policy Institute paper
"Oil and Food: A Rising Security Challenge"
, concentrates other aspects of the agriculture, especially energy wastage once food leaves the farm gate. While Daniell's paper is dryer in tone it has some very good policy positions for what
promises to be a painful transition to the Post Peak Oil agricultural scene. more.......
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