Our Economic Black Hole

The following is an excerpt from Richard Heinberg’s Museletter, viewable in full at richardheinberg.com. Reprinted with permission from Post Carbon Institute, where Heinberg is a Senior Fellow.

…We’re at a crossroads. Up to this point, cheap and abundant energy has fueled consistent economic growth. The only real discussion among the managerial elite was how to grow the economy—whether in planned or unplanned ways, whether with sensitivity to the environment or without.

Now the discussion must center on how to contract. Sadly, that discussion is radioactive—no one wants to touch it. It’s hard to imagine a more suicidal strategy for a politician than to base his or her election campaign on the promise of economic contraction. Instead, discussions in policy circles tend to turn on how to maintain the illusion of growth. Denial runs deep, but sooner or later reality will make itself known.

And sooner or later we must make conservation the centerpiece of economic and energy policy. The term conservation implies “efficiency” in the usual sense—building cars and appliances that use less energy. But it also means cutting out non-essential uses of energy. Rather than continuing to increase economic demand by stimulating human wants, we must begin to think about how to meet basic human needs with minimum consumption of resources, while discouraging extravagance.

This is of course amounts to a profound change of course for our economic system, and it will not be undertaken except by necessity. But necessity is inevitably approaching. We will have less energy, like it or not. And with less energy, we will no longer be able to operate a consumer society. The kind of society we will be able to operate will almost certainly be as different from the industrial society of recent decades as that was from the agrarian society of the 19th century.

As we move toward renewable and intermittent energy sources, a larger portion of society’s effort will have to be spent on processes of energy capture. Energy production will require more land, and a greater proportion of society’s total labor and investment. We will need more food producers, but fewer managers and salespeople. We will be less mobile, and each of us will own fewer manufactured products—though hopefully of higher quality—which we will re-use and repair as long as possible before replacing them.

The transition would go much better if we were to plan for it, pre-adapting to a low-energy global economic regime. However, little of that planning is likely to occur, simply because nearly everyone—from investors to policy makers to ordinary consumers—wants the fossil fuel-fed fiesta of manic consumption to continue as long as possible. So we are most likely in for a wrenching shift.

Still, wherever it is possible for households and communities to pre-adapt, and wherever clever people are able to show innovative ways of meeting human needs with a minimum of consumption, there will be advantages to be enjoyed and shared. Eventually, as we begin to measure success not by the amount of our consumption, but by the quality of our culture, the beauty of our built environment, and the health of our ecosystems, we could end up being significantly happier than we are today, even as we gobble up far less of Earth’s bounty. But the road from here to there hasn’t yet been built.