Actually, there are physics issues underlying the course chosen, so the owners really had no choice on the chosen. Many people claimed that there was a way to avoid disaster with answers ranging from (a) wind turbines and solar panels, (b) drill for more oil, or (c) learn to live with less. None of these were real choices, unfortunately.
Artleads says:I hope (c) can be explained more clearly. It’s often repeated that the system must grow or collapse. Lay people for whom money is a mystery may be stumped by this, and attempt to understand it as follows: The system has to grow in order to pay debt with interest. This is because people want to make a profit through lending. Paying debt with interest seems like an exponential growth process that must end when it’s clear that, over time, the prospect of getting repaid loses credibility. If the debt system is simply allowed to run out of steam, computers shut down, trucks stop running, and there is universal mayhem.A lender looking at this looming catastrophe might consider a different line of business long before the end is due. A catchy phrase I recently heard was, “low profit, high volume.” Finance a lot more things that ensure industrial society keeps working (whatever kind of political or economic system it requires to do so). If medicine, computers and trucking can keep on going, the top 30% of income earners might not even notice if they had to live on half of what they earn now. Just as the New Deal required the rich to take a cut for the good of the economic/industrial system, why would strategic cuts that don’t kill anybody not work now?What people need is very different from what they want. The money-greed dominant system doesn’t seem workable long term, or to be fixable. If the resources it requires to maintain it for so many billions operate by abstract, digital numbers, 90% of what is actually out there to sustain life is overlooked. It would otherwise require assessment of resources at a much more intimate level than is possible in a top-down, hyper complex global system.- Artleads says:(c) In other words, living with less could grow the economy. Some that have too much could “invest” in the lagging potential economy–greatly expanding the volume of economic players. At some point, rational thinking–the kind of thing that’s missing in my neck of the woods but could help expand economic activity–has to be tried..
- The reasons for needing growth go beyond needing to repay debt with interest.One issue, since the world is finite, it that there is a need to work around depletion. Thus, it becomes more and more expensive to extract resources of any type that are needed. For example, fresh water from wells may be adequate, as long as aquifers are not depleted. But once aquifers are depleted, some other approach must be used. For example, water must be piped in from a distance, or desalination must be used.A second issue is that world population is constantly rising. This means that there is less and less arable land per person. We must work around this problem in one way or another. A popular way is through irrigation. Of course, this runs into limits as well.A third issue is that we have a huge amount of built infrastructure such as electric transmission lines, roads, bridges, water pipes, sewer pipes, sewage treatment centers, and hydroelectric dams that must be maintained and repaired. In fact, the amount of required maintenance goes up each year, just to stay even.Needless to say, energy limits are tied into all of this as well. We need more and more energy resources to fix issues of both of these types. And as the EROEI people tell us endlessly, it takes increasing amounts of energy to extract energy. This is one (smallish) piece of our overall need for growth, or the system will collapse.
- Artleads says:Damnable complexity. As the drawings show in the link, replacing the flood control with the water recycling paradigm is alarmingly dependent on complexity, much of it hidden. At least, in the proposed model.
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