A New Deal or a War Footing? Thinking Through Our Response to Climate Change
Sharon November 11th, 2008
In a sense, could anything be more heartening? Al Gore, playing up rumors he’ll have a powerful role in the Obama administration, and writing his dream list up for the New York Times, amid a growing Democratic consensus that what is needed is an environmental New Deal to deal with the climate crisis, volatile energy prices and most of all, the economy. I mean yes, we’re still throwing money at a problem that defies money hurling, but instead of subsidizing Wall Street bonuses, hey, at least we’re doing something good for the people and the planet, right?
Well, let’s slow down a little bit. Al Gore in many ways has a great laundry list, and I’m going to consider it as an example of what an ambitious ecological New Deal might look like. Here’s the list – and I think what’s not on it is as important as what’s on it:
First, the new president and the new Congress should offer large-scale investment in incentives for the construction of concentrated solar thermal plants in the Southwestern deserts, wind farms in the corridor stretching from Texas to the Dakotas and advanced plants in geothermal hot spots that could produce large amounts of electricity.
Second, we should begin the planning and construction of a unified national smart grid for the transport of renewable electricity from the rural places where it is mostly generated to the cities where it is mostly used. New high-voltage, low-loss underground lines can be designed with “smart” features that provide consumers with sophisticated information and easy-to-use tools for conserving electricity, eliminating inefficiency and reducing their energy bills. The cost of this modern grid — $400 billion over 10 years — pales in comparison with the annual loss to American business of $120 billion due to the cascading failures that are endemic to our current balkanized and antiquated electricity lines.
Third, we should help America’s automobile industry (not only the Big Three but the innovative new startup companies as well) to convert quickly to plug-in hybrids that can run on the renewable electricity that will be available as the rest of this plan matures. In combination with the unified grid, a nationwide fleet of plug-in hybrids would also help to solve the problem of electricity storage. Think about it: with this sort of grid, cars could be charged during off-peak energy-use hours; during peak hours, when fewer cars are on the road, they could contribute their electricity back into the national grid.
Fourth, we should embark on a nationwide effort to retrofit buildings with better insulation and energy-efficient windows and lighting. Approximately 40 percent of carbon dioxide emissions in the United States come from buildings — and stopping that pollution saves money for homeowners and businesses. This initiative should be coupled with the proposal in Congress to help Americans who are burdened by mortgages that exceed the value of their homes.
Fifth, the United States should lead the way by putting a price on carbon here at home, and by leading the world’s efforts to replace the Kyoto treaty next year in Copenhagen with a more effective treaty that caps global carbon dioxide emissions and encourages nations to invest together in efficient ways to reduce global warming pollution quickly, including by sharply reducing deforestation.
Quick – what’s not on this list? I bet you noticed, too - there’s no mention of consumption, either as an economic issue or at the personal level. Rather like coming out of “An Inconvenient Truth” we’re left with the message that there’s nothing for us to do other than lobby our fearless leaders.
What’s wrong with that? Addressing climate change manifestly requires policy solutions – but again we see ourselves trapped in the false dichotomy I discuss in _Depletion and Abundance_ between public and private. There is no question in the world that consumption is a policy issue – 70% of our economy depends on consumer spending and personal consumption. Yet again we are being told that “personal action” is something you do in the dark that makes no difference, while the really important stuff happens at the government tables.
In fact, in reality, we know differently. At US government tables we’ve seen exactly 0 major policy shifts so far – yes, we had the worst president imaginable, but that doesn’t change the fact that under Clinton, when Gore was vice-president, we saw the same zippo. At the same time, as consumers have slowed their spending, we’ve seen projections of world oil use fall dramatically – for the first time in decades, we are expecting an actual contraction in the use of oil. Earlier this year, actual driving miles fell dramatically – as much as 6% year over year. Now these things were in reaction to high prices – but they were consumption decisions made by private households that in the aggregate made more real difference in the impact of our emissions than all the treaties we’ve violated or refused to sign.
The assumption, of course, is that we make changes for economic reasons, but that we’d never make them for ecological reasons. My answer to that is simply this – no one has tried asking Americans to make major shifts in their lifestyle for the good of their country and their ecology in 30 years. We assume we know that this would never succeed – in practice, we don’t have the slightest idea what would happen.
Consumption is not simply accidentally left off the table by people who underestimate its power or prefer only to focus on legislation, it is left off because thinking about consumption undermines some of the presumptions of wholly technical and policy solutions. In fact, if we addressed consumption, we might have to change our basic assumptions about what we can accomplish.
Think about Gore’s list above in relation to consumption. The first thing, of course, that jumps out at you is the claim we have to bail out the car companies, even though, as Deutsche Bank announced, GM is worth nothing - its stock is worth absolutely nothing. Think about that one for a second, and consider what has to underly our presumptions that we should bail out a car company – underlying it is the assumption that we will all be buying cars again fairly soon – shiny new electric ones.
That is, underlying the assumptions of a Gore-style New Deal is the idea that we can do temporary bail outs because our consumption is going to go back up – only this time we’ll be consuming green products, including our electric cars. There are several problems with this – the obvious one being that it isn’t clear what will fund our ability to buy these new cars in the coming years. The assumption is that the new green jobs will do so – and perhaps that’s true, but there’s a “turtles all the way down” quality to this analysis – the new deal will give us the ability to make these shifts, and the money will then only be spent for good (despite the fact that historically, the more we spend, the more we consume)….I’m not convinced anyone knows how that might happen.
The less obvious problem is this – investment and purchase of all these things includes an enormous front-load of fossil fuels. And as far as I know, no one knows whether a comprehensive investment in these resources might not actually push us over the edge of a climate tipping point.
In order to understand this, I think we have to divide the kinds of changes we make into two categories – the first are those that require a large initial investment, usually of both money and fossil energies, and that provide a later payback of those investments. Think of it as the mortgage-model of addressing fossil fuel usage – the bank pays a lot of money upfront to the house seller, and then you gradually pay back the investment over time. We assume that the investment is a good one if, in the long term, we get more out of it than we put in.
But consider this in the context of Al Gore’s proposal, and James Hansen’s observation that we have less than a decade to make significant inroads into addressing global warming. What Gore is proposing is a massive investment of fossil fuels – these are used at every stage of the manufacture of wind turbines, concentrated solar thermal plants and geothermal plants. Most insulations are made from fossil fuels, with fossil fuels. Cars use tons of fossil fuels in manufacturing at every stage from mining of metals to welding of materials.
In the very long term, we can imagine having enough fossil energy to use wind to weld the cars and run the mining equipment – but we’re a very, very long way from that kind of payback – at this point, we’ll be using enormous quantities of fossil fuels across the board to piggyback us to renewable energies. And we’ll be using them to meet all of our other needs in the meantime. The assumption is that it is a good idea to have one long, last party, if that gets us to lower energy usage in the first place – but the question is, does it get us to the lowest total energy usage we could get to? Or are there are other approaches that have less risk of long term harm, and that ultimately reduce our fossil fuel usage further – such as getting out of private cars altogether and focusing heavily on energy consumption.
What scale is the risk of the Gore approach? It is probably wrong to use the term “New Deal” here at all – the New Deal, for the most part, and with the exception of some dam building and a few other projects, was a comparatively low input project. That is, facing massive unemployment, the New Deal concentrated on the use of abundant human energies – they put people to work doing things that didn’t require large scale technical build outs – in the Civilian Conservation Corps building trails and draining swamps, largely by hand, in social programs and at picking crops. The investments were large by the standards of the day, but mostly the goal was to pay people a living wage.
The kind of project Al Gore is describing has much less to do with the New Deal, and much more to do with putting the nation on a war footing – that is, what we’re really talking about is a build-out on the scale of WWII. The idea of getting 100% renewable electric in 10 years is probably not possible, but if it is, it will be done, as Bohr put it, by turning the nation into a factory.
And a particular kind of factory – Gore is proposing that most of our energy resources be located in the dry, rural and desert west, in mountain and flat areas that haven’t historically supported large populations. That is, he’s proposing that we build energy boomtowns – which means that not only are we imagining frontloading an enormous quantity of fossil fuels into the cars and insulation and generating plants themselves, but into the places that we are building and installling them. Now we’ll be adding roads, and schools for kids, as well as huge concrete and metal facilities. Now we’ll be moving our population into an area that manifestly cannot support a huge industrial population sustainably – ie, we are talking about moving the population temporarily into these boom areas, straining their water resources, providing industrial jobs but probably destroying a lot of farming and agricultural jobs that had relied upon ranching water systems. And then we’re going to move them again – because they won’t be able to stay there. There are reasons that the southwest deserts are already struggling with their present growth.
And most of these projects will take many years to complete – let’s say that Gore is right, and we can do it in a decade, that there won’t be the cost overruns and deadline failures that are usually inevitable, and that it is possible to shift our generating capacity that quickly (both of which are unlikely), and that we can borrow the money and pay it back later, and our kids won’t mind (unbelievably unlikely). And, let’s assume that this is enough to bring the economy out of a depression. Even if all these things are true, we will also have just burned an unbelievable quantity of fossil fuels in a massive build out. Many of the projects, including the asphalt for roads and the concrete needed for the building of power plants will have been tremendously fossil fuel intensive. We will have spent an enormous amount of money, much of it transferred to other nations whose manufacturing capacity we have relied on and who produce the fossil fuels needed.
At an absolute minimum, in order to do this without pushing the world over into a tipping point, we’ll have had to radically regulate everyone else’s other carbon usage. More likely, we’ll find we can’t do that – because we need consumption in order to keep the economy going enough to keep this build out funded. Remember, WWII was funded with a combination of loans from countries who had no choice but to lend to us, and investment by ordinary Americans who paid what was essentially a voluntary additional tax in the form of War Bonds (yes, eventually they paid off, but there was no certainty that they would, particularly if the US lost the war). It is not impossible to imagine Americans in a recession giving the government a big chunk of their change to use for a while, but rather harder than to imagine discussing consumption radically.
Any response to climate change is going to have to take seriously the costs of that response – the costs in terms of long term economic security, and the environmental costs. It may well be that we are close enough to our tipping point that we can’t afford a decade of massive, intensive industrialization that raises our use of fossil fuels, even for a big payoff on the other side.
And the payoff is the real question – Keynesian investment presumes a later boom. What will the next boom be, after we’ve done our environmental retrofit. The assumption is that we’ll be leaner, better, doing more with fewer resources. But we’ve never done that before – what we’ve seen many times over the years is Jevons’ paradox – that as we refine our energy usage in one sense, we expand it in another. Thomas Princen, author of _The Logic of Sufficiency_ does a remarkable analysis of the problem of an efficiency focus, and comes to the conclusion that simple streamlining doesn’t have the power to resolve our ecological dilemma – it can’t, in the end, lead us to what we need.
What do we need? Well, there are strategies for dealing with climate change that don’t require a massive investment of fossil energies. They are, of course, unsexy in a legislative sense, mostly because they are enacted by ordinary people, and focus heavily on conservation. On the other hand, as we have seen with the shifts people are making for economic reasons, they provide immediate, dramatic paybacks, with fewer dangers. It is obviously not possible to reduce our energy usage to 0 – we will still need investment in renewable infrastructure, in insulation, and we will still need companies, perhaps car companies, to build rail cars and windmills. But the difference between a gradual build out, that takes into account the ecological and economic costs of this shift, and takes the New Deal, rather than the war as a real model – ie, it emphasizes what ordinary people can do with human energies and small-to-moderate investments and a massive build-out that attempt to keep business as usual.
A New Deal model of ecological adaptation would consider what we could do with the least possible increase in long-term indebtedness. It would ask our population to make short term, radical sacrifices in order to ensure a better world for their children and grandchildren, to make real the words “for ourselves and our posterity” enshrined in the Constitution. Instead of building out all at once, we’d prioritize our cutbacks, dropping our energy consumption both radically and rapidly – 50% in 5 years is probably feasible. Meanwhile, our investments in renewable energy *and* in people would enable not just short term jobs in boomtowns, but a long term renewable economy – shifting our focus to food, health care, education. Instead of tax incentives that apply mostly to those rich enough to pay substantial taxes, we’d focus on low input, often human powered improvements to our lives – putting people to work building basic storm windows and helping people retrofit their homes.
In order to do this, we would need to address the size of the economy, and the growth paradigm. And if we do that, we can’t leave future generations large debts – period. The reason for that is that instead of a boom-bust cycle, we will have a smaller economy, one that probably won’t produce enough money to pay lots and lots of interest, as well as meeting needs. The good news is that stable smaller economies are possible – instead of removing large chunks of the population from the workfoce into hellacious unemployment, we could encourage voluntary departure for people willing to do the ordinary work of reducing energy usage – homeschooling their kids and keeping them off the buses, growing food, tending the elderly and disabled in their homes and communities, rather than shipping them to nursing homes, cooking meals instead of driving to restaurants, mending and fixing things instead of throwing them out. Reducing our consumption is likely to be impossible as long as we insist that we need everyone in the workforce, serving the larger public economy and commuting to their jobs while stopping at McDonalds on the way home.
The thing is, the odds are that in a world of energy decline, we’re facing a smaller economy anyway. But we have a choice of how we face it – we can manage its decline (and my next post will explore how we might manage its decline) and we can manage our roles in it. We can acknowledge that it seems impossible to have a sustainable economy and endless pressure for growth – and that it is morally unjust to force future generations into a boom and bust cycle to pay off the debts of their parents. We can restrain ourselves, emphasize radical shifts in consumption, while also gradually and carefully using our remaining energy resources to build out renewables that can bootstrap us to a sustainable economy – and a sustainable culture.
Or we can do what we’re doing – borrow like there’s no tomorrow, ignore the reality that tomorrow does always come, and ignore the vast elephant taking up all the space and air in our room, instead of talking about consumption.
Sharon
- climate
- Comments(82)
Well reasoned!
Well said Sharon. But of course, hard to swallow for those who are thinking only in terms of what we can build that is “green” to replace the nasty fossil fuels. What you are suggesting, and what is urgently needed is a radical change in thought in terms of lifestyle; it calls into question our whole ‘American” way of life. And just as Cheney famously said that the American way of life is not negotiable, so thus do the “greens” although they substitute plug-in cars and organic cotton etc. But in all cases their way of life doesn’t require cutbacks in consumption nor a recognition that unlimited growth is not an option anymore.
What Gore, and others aren’t doing is confronting the whole need of a steady-state economy to replace what we’ve got now, departure from the GDP as the sacred cow, and a willingness to rethink how we live and work and play. They aren’t doing this, thus they are just proposing to substitute greener alternatives for what we already have and act as if we’ll just keep chugging along as we have been just spewing less carbon as we do.
The prospect that we need to totally rework how we live on this earth is too daunting for those in control plus probably most of our society; at least here in the U.S. You know, one of the things I wonder about is the whole “jobs” thing- is it really such a good thing to have full employment when that means that all sorts of people must leave their kids in day care, serve take-out for dinner and have little time for a home life? What if we reworked the way we view work? Lots of people hold down full-time jobs either because they can’t afford to otherwise or because they need the benefits. A good p/t job is hard to find- that is if working at Wal-Mart isn’t your thing. Wonder how we could provide more p/t meaningful employment to people…..
Sharon,
You may know of the work of Michael Vandenbergh at Vanderbilt University. A focus of his work is on the role of individual decisions in mitigating climate change. See http://law.vanderbilt.edu/academics/academic-programs/environmental-law/climate-change-network/publications/index.aspx under his name for some of his papers on this topic. Some of his colleagues also write on this topic.
Also, Boulder is the first “Smart Grid City” in the country. Implementation is happening now. See a description at http://denver.bizjournals.com/denver/stories/2008/03/10/daily26.html .
I hear you on the fossil fuel costs to do a build out and I suspect the answer will turn out to be somewhere in the middle. Time will tell-my own personal strategy is to invest in energy efficient or renewable energy systems as I am able and conserve through behavior at the same time.
Sharon, I hope you will send this as an op-ed submission to the NY Times, or to huffingtonpost.com, so more people will read it.
Yes, there is so much low-hanging fruit that can ge gathered through simple conservation measures – I agree that 50% is doable with simple changes.
While I couldn’t agree with you more about consumption being the beast that must be wrestled to the ground, I see the transitional time being the last chance to put in critical infrastructure upgrades, and am so glad Gore got it right on that front. The money will not be there in the future. I wonder if the burden of debt placed on the individual in a society that has had key elements of resiliency built into it the infrastructure might *feel* like less of a burden, because the houses remain livable longer in climate extremes, and the energy infrastructure is functioning well-enough.
The US grid is in a terrifying state – even here in Canada, it’s better, but not much. 400 billion is a lot of cash, and would never get the nod in normal times, but seizing the crisis and placing such priorities in the crisis budget spending is really excellent news.
As for the insulating and retrofitting of homes, again, in our experience, this is easier said than done, but it is absolutely part of the low-hanging fruit! You would think it would be a no-brainer, but in our business, it’s amazing how many people prioritize a new kitchen with new gas stove etc, etc over the improvement of their housing envelope. Deep subsidies are needed to push people into action. In Canada, the national EnerGuide for Houses program which then morphed in the EcoAction program has some hefty $ on the table, and when it’s matched by Provincial incentives, it’s particularly effective.
Bear with me, this is not a gripe session, but you should understand my frame of mind. I am officially now “a discouraged worker.” I am 48 years old and “overqualified” for the jobs I have available where I live and no money, car, etc. to look in some distant place for a job. I have a degree that isn’t worth much in the corporate/business world. My last fulltime job was in 2006. I had enough savings to exist for two years but that is gone now. I do not own a car, house, stocks etc. to sell or draw on. Because I resigned (due to health and family issues) I did not qualify for unemployment. My spouse now has a permanent, chronic condition that effectively precludes employment.Since then although I have applied to many jobs, in this town, state, and even a few nationwide, I’ve only had three interviews and did not get any of those jobs. Now I teach one community college course in the fall semester and two in the spring; one online course in the summer. When I teach two courses, I can make rent but not food or utilities. Forget about health care. I am not interested in being dependent on the state relief systems and their degradation of people who do want to work. I am learning herbalism and self-care, and if worse than that happens, well, tough luck for me I guess. I scrounge and work for food from friends and relatives. I tell stories and find scrap to sell to pay utilities.
Now comes the point of all this pissing and moaning. There is no way in hell I can pay my student loans let alone those of my disabled spouse. Together, we owe about 100 K, and minimum payments monthly are about 1 K for both of us. We have run out of all the deferments and hardship allowances, and so are in the default process as I write this. Really, as sad as that is, it is, and the things that can happen as a result -bad credit, wage garnishment- well, the credit is already shot (I laugh at identity thieves- who wants to be me) and WHAT wage do I have to garnish, let alone any tax refunds (I am well below poverty level). So, pardon me if I shake my head at people who commit suicide over losing some stocks or a house. Quitters.
But if Obama REALLY wants to make a difference, why not make a New Deal sort of like the Peace Corps, VISTA, or those medical programs like on “Northern Exposure” where you can work off your school debts doing national service? Lots of 25 year olds face a bleak future with 50 K over their heads and working as office temps, and being 25 year olds, still out buying beer and trying to forget reality.
Getting unemployed kids or oldies like me to use their talents and abilities for national service (ala WPA) while working off unpayable/deferred student debt would do a helluva lot more for our economy, infrastructure, and hope as a nation than bailing out Wall Street schmoes, CEOs for the auto industry, or people who bought too much house for their accounts to handle. You bring down debtedness, increase the ability to buy goods and services, and build the nation if you do some kind of student loan – work program. Us oldies will figure out a way to keep stealing chickens and dumpster diving (just an expression!) but the young people need to have some hope for the future.
Lance, one of Michelle Obama’s pet projects is AmeriCorps – http://www.americorps.org/Default.asp . Some student loans can be worked off this way.
Lance-
I believe that Teach for America also has a student loan forgiveness option as part of its program.
Sharon-
I agree with everything you said. I support wind and Thermal solar. The grid really isn’t talked about much in the US, I think, because it is not up to the job of what the greens want it to do. We can change that with a New Deal.
I would prefer that we use the car factories that are already built for re-tooling to build other things that are needed OR to use them to convert already existing cars to electric hybrid plug ins. If we use currently existing cars, we use far fewer raw materials and produce a fraction of the green house gasses.
Sardine, that is indeed a wonderful program, and I am glad Mrs. Obama has adopted it. My wife worked in Americorps in the mid-1990s and it was a very positive experience for her at the time.
A glaring omission from the list: food production, distribution and infrastructure.
Boy, Gore sure does wear his love of technology on his sleeve.
I’ve long taken a dim view of this belief we can continue to have all the plane trips and flat screens we want, so long as they’re powered by the right, “green” power. Is Al Gore really that incapable of envisioning a world that is saved, not by shiny new technology, but by people re-localizing their lives and learning how to do with less?
Sharon, what does “turtles down” mean?
Great post Sharon!
Lance,
I agree with you regarding some sort of program that allows people to work off debt. I also believe that we need to pull most of our highly trained military out of the world and put them to work here converting us to a green infrastructure (GI).
My family joke about how we wish the homesteading act was still in effect, as we would be willing to do something like that to help get us off our arses and fix things. This would include farming, building the GI, etc.
To me, what you’ve said is perfectly logical and reasonable – we have to accept that in the future, we’re going to have to have a different economy. Not only for financial reasons, but also in the best interests of the environment, and required by the decreasing energy that will be available every year.
Most people still have their heads in the sand. Unfortunately that appears to include our favorite former V.P, Mr. Gore! These people will NOT accept the prospect of a different lifestyle. They want to do the same things, just with “clean, green” electricity.
I agree that this may be the last chance to invest in renewable energy. I feel like our money would be much, much better spent elsewhere, but only if you accept that peak oil will be happening soon and will result in a future where electricity and gas is expensive and not always available.
Money would be better spent on: Insulation. Solar water heating. Community centers with solar power to provide electrical needs (such as community kitchens and fridges for medications) to an entire neighborhood. Public transport or a hybrid Smart Jitney system. Rebuilding local agriculture by implementing a large scale organic farming training program.
So many things that could be done to REALLY help soften the descent. I fear that we’ll do none of them.
[...] Casaubon’s Book » Blog Archive » A New Deal or a War Footing? Thinking Through Our Response to C… In a sense, could anything be more heartening? Al Gore, playing up rumors he’ll have a powerful role in the Obama administration, and writing his dream list up for the New York Times, amid a growing Democratic consensus that what is needed is an environmental New Deal to deal with the climate crisis, volatile energy prices and most of all, the economy. I mean yes, we’re still throwing money at a problem that defies money hurling, but instead of subsidizing Wall Street bonuses, hey, at least we’re doing something good for the people and the planet, right? [...]
RE: Lance
all the “national service to work off debt” sounds fine if you don’t consider it carefully….
But – you are in a truly desperate situation and still want to pay off your debt – hats off to you.
But, being noble and all, you are ready to submit essentially to “debt slavery” – I say “F..k it !”
Why should “your” credit card bill spent on big screen tv and vacations in Bahamas be dismissible through bankruptcy but not your student loan ? Does that make sense to everyone else – and I am the only one having an issue ?
So screw the bank, screw the student loan. Yes to sensible development programs that give people work/food/life – but not debt slavery!!!
got me all excited for a minute here.
TJ
Hey thanks.
A few points I’d like to make:
“no one has tried asking Americans to make major shifts in their lifestyle for the good of their country and their ecology in 30 years. We assume we know that this would never succeed – in practice, we don’t have the slightest idea what would happen.”
Um, yeah, I think we pretty much know what would happen. The same thing that happened last time Carter asked us to conserve. Not much. He was lambasted for his sweaters and the audacity of asking Americans to slow down. Americans are much more consumeristic than they were in the 70s so the “price” is a lot higher. You are asking for a cultural shift, one that is something that few people are willing to take on. Those that even contemplate reducing their consumption will be faced by the majority who are not limiting their consumption and wonder why they should even bother. Politicians don’t propose this because they know it’s not going to fly.
You also need to think of consumption as being not only goods, but in services as well. Not all consumption has a negative impact in terms of the environment and oil expenditure.
Regarding the auto industry bailout, I’m sure there would be some caveats to which companies get assistance and how much. You can only put so much effort and money into a sinking ship. I find it heartening that the smaller car companies, those actually doing the most work on plug-in hybrids, are called out here.
As for the large initial investment, what about carbon taxes? Money generated from carbon taxes could be used as the investment in a green economy. The carbon tax doesn’t need to be so high that it bankrupts the payers, but there’s sufficient carbon being generated that would jump start these projects.
“…encourage voluntary departure for people willing to do the ordinary work of reducing energy usage” – this throwback to 19th century life is really not going to be palatable to a significant number of people. Or should I say, sufficient number of people to make the alternative you propose even remotely feasible.
Furthermore, for those voluntarily departing from the workforce – how are they to survive without an income? How will they be able to afford heat, food, their mortgage? There are a lot of assumptions made here – I’m thinking of the huge population of people who live in urban settings where chopping down your own wood to heat your home isn’t reasonable and growing a few tomato plants on the balcony will result in sure starvation. The demographics just don’t play out.
Reduced consumption should, of course, play a role, but it will most likely be a small one.
Yes, the Teach for America program is also a really good option for many who are single or whose partners are not dependent:
“Teachers who work in low-income elementary or secondary schools may be able to cancel as much as $5,000 of their federal Stafford loan debt….The five grand gets eliminated from a teacher’s loan balance after he or she completes five years at a designated low-income school.”
Five years for 5 K helps, although if you even have a low-level clerical $25,000 a year regular job you can save $5000 in 2 years with no problem
Lance
Devin and TJ, I have come to be on the same page as you, after going through all the alternatives
A new urban homestead act would be great…how about if they had “urban homesteading”… target “urban blight” areas and the disaster zones where foreclosures have left houses targets for vandals and drug operations…for a filing fee and “proving up (improving)” your homestead over 5 years, it becomes yours. Lots of urban “green zones” and small farms near/within cities could be created that way, to supply cities with needed food
As for my situation, I see no hope for the long haul as far as being a “citizen in good standing” according to the present society, I have no illusions really, but I see hope in every day’s bowl of stew, homemade sauerkraut, a shared laugh, a walk in the fall sun, playing with my sisters’ kids, and of course the fine folks of this online community
Honestly, although there are a couple of things that could be better, like going to the dentist to replace some fillings, I did the career/debt slave treadmill for many years already…and, well, that wasn’t much better than this is anyways, if one really thinks about it. I have nothing left to lose, but I never really wanted all that crap anyways.
Lance
I am waiting to see what comes of the new Obama administration. I agree broadly with what you’ve said here, but I am optimistic that the actual situation will be more “complex” for lack of a better term (hm, hoping for complexity? Odd.)
First, I am waiting to see what Obama actually calls the public to do. I’ve been impressed already at his willingness to talk about the need to sacrifice, to pull together, etc. This may well translate into calls on Americans to begin genuine conservation measures–or, it may well not, we’ll have to see. As Crunchy points out, the last President to ask us to do these things got run through the shredder. But the one before him that asked famously was FDR, and that worked out pretty well. We’re also in a different economic and mental situation than in the late 70’s. Yes, we’re all more materialistic, by a long shot. But we’re also a lot more fed up with it; we’re more aware of the problems surrounding this lifestyle than we were in the 70’s. Whether the coverage is good or bad, the lifestyle changes we’ve been pushing here and on the Riot are making national news. Sure, we’ve hit the “ridicule” phase, but that means we’ve surpassed the “ignore” phase, so we’re making progress. People are getting hip to the disaster of our lifestyle; people in the 70’s were still looking forward to this mess with anticipation.
We’re also facing massive job losses and crumbling infrastructure. A New Deal-style program could help alleviate some of this. Furthermore, depending on the hoped-for outcome, it may or may not lead to increases in carbon emissions. Yes, we’ll be using fossil fuels for these new projects in factories, etc., but they may often be the same factories, using the same fuels, that would’ve been used for useless manufacturing jobs making bobble-head dolls that got mothballed 2 years ago. If the aim, as Gore seems to be pushing for, is 100% same lifestyle only “now it’s green”, we’re in trouble. If, on the other hand, Obama has a more moderate view of using existing factory infrastructure to improve our system, paired with calls for conservation and and retrofitting existing buildings with insulation, low energy tech, etc., maybe it won’t be so bad–probably at least not an immediate disaster. As I already said, I’m going to wait and see on the calls for conservation; there’s already evidence that he’s going to heavily back retrofitting, too.
Finally, two other points. One is that I’ve seen evidence that Obama is not oblivious regarding our food & agriculture situation. Some of this New New Deal stuff might get channeled into rebuilding our small local farms–how much “greener” can you get? Second, Obama discussed in an interview how one of the major concerns for our economy is that it is currently massively driven by consumption, rather than actual value creation. He is hoping to shift our economy to jobs & lifestyles that can enjoy economic prosperity without requiring us to buy an endless array of crap, which we can no longer afford even if we wanted to keep doing it. To me, this shows that (1) he has a deeper grasp of the underlying economic conditions than we might’ve supposed, and even goes somewhat against the grain of his own advisors, who are still very much wedded to the “just get credit freed up so the public can buy more stuff!” model. And (2) being able to remove some of the consumption pressure from our economy might have a very real psychic effect on the public. It may well result in the scaling back of constant advertising bombardment (because, gods willing, many of those companies will go under), and I’ve always thought that was the real source of our materialistic drive. It could loosen up TPTB that must ridicule our choices in order to satisfy their own masters.
Of course, for all that he also wants to bail out GM, and that does not bode well…. *waiting and seeing*
Lance-
I think you are bringing up a number of issues. One of course is just our cruddy employment scene. Second is ageism- a friend who is in her late 50’s has been job-hunting since being laid off(all the laid-off workers were over 50 at her company)- and she has been hearing the “over-qualified’ line the whole time.
Third is the student-loan deal- why on earth are people accumulating these monstrous loans anyway? They are not forgivable unless you are near death so far as I know- or totally and permanantly disabled- you can’t walk away from them- but you, your wife and countless others are accumulating them. If you still owe this much money you must have gone to school relatively recently too so it’snot like you were an innocent 18 year old when you did this- now I’m not trying to blame the victim- I’m guessing you both thought it would be worth it and lead to much better job prospects but I find it scary how much debt is still being taken out by students as we speak. So why can homeowners walk away from their mortgages but you can’t do this with a student loan; just mail the degree back to the bank??
Re: student loans – just a word to those considering them. THINK VERY CAREFULLY. How much will your payments be after graduation? How likely are you to get a job with your new degree? RESEARCH CAREFULLY.
If you are going to pharmacy school, then ok. Maybe if you’re going to nursing school. But even law school grads have trouble finding jobs that pay well enough to justify those six figure loans – if you went to Harvard maybe those top jobs are easy to find, but if you’re going to local Private Law U, a no-name brand, you might be lucky to get a 50K a year job starting out. 100K+ in loans will be hard to pay off on that kind of salary.
FORGET private culinary school, my friends. The numbers have never penciled out for those. Go to a community college culinary arts program for a tenth of the price.
And undergrad loans? I’m glad to see that folks are finally reconsidering those big-ticket private colleges. If you have the money, fine. If you don’t…. think very carefully!
I finished college in my late thirties and chose a lower-priced, lower-prestige state u so as to avoid loans. Then when I went to grad school I used a small inheritance. I would not have put myself or my family in debt to get a creative writing degree, forget about it. I got low paid teaching work after grad school that was more about doing what I love than about earning a decent living.
But we have no student loans to deal with – we bought a house just as I finished State U; now ten years later due to a health crisis I’m unable to work but at least I don’t have debt. (or credit card debt either)
Crunchy Chicken said, “Not all consumption has a negative impact in terms of the environment and oil expenditure.”
No, but all NET consumption does. In other words, if we live without adding usefulness to the future of the universe, then everything we do is consuming our future as a species, and probably the planet’s livable future.
The simplest solution is to pass the FairTax bill and double it. Most of the things we drive and buy and work at are useless when it comes to thinking even 50 years ahead. IT’s time to start over, look at how many mouths we can feed, and feed them all purposefully, THEN decide what kind of jobs need to be created to entertain the bureaucrats.
Creating jobs for the sake of creating jobs is stupid. People don’t need to be employed, they need to eat and live usefully and purposefully. They don’t need health insurance, they need to be healthy in order to be useful. Some are not going to be and they need to be cared for. That is useful work, for many reasons: especially the development of community and compasssion.
We really have to turn off all non-essential resource sinks RIGHT NOW in order to survi……
Hi Crunchy! I don’t think Sharon was suggesting (here, anyway) that everyone should stop working and farm. Rather, if one person per household drops out, while at least one earns enough income to keep the house, everyone can benefit. My husband (who did not contribute much to the household income anyway) is now working basically just enough to make his student loan payments, and we’re actually better off as a result of his having time to do housework. Example: I used to stop at the donut shop and get some fried junk in the mornings (over $1 per day); now he has time to bake a big batch of muffins every week for breakfasts (probably <$0.40 per day). If we had a kid whose daycare was costing $500 a month, you can imagine the savings. And you pay income taxes on the money you earn that has to be spent on goods and services to enable you to keep working!
I agree that in fact, most Americans will be unwilling to do this, but it is not because they really believe they’re happier as corporate tools. It’s because they rely on conspicuous consumption (yes, just read Veblen) for their place in the dominance hierarchy and are afraid of slipping. If you want people to use less, the first thing you have to do is reduce the social opprobrium and the legal dangers that face people who use less. If it is illegal to have a small house, a house occupied by more than one family, a clothesline, chickens, or an unmowed lawn, then people really do have NO choice but to keep running on the treadmill as fast as possible. I think a major reason that doomers (of the non-bigot variety) fantasize about societal collapse is that it is the only situation they can imagine under which they could stop running without being deluged with contempt by their neighbors and communities. So: We need an immediate nationwide push to repeal all regulations and zoning ordinances that coerce consumption above the minimum really needed for public health and safety. How’s that for a policy recommendation?
Auntiegrav wrote:
“We really have to turn off all non-essential resource sinks RIGHT NOW in order to survi……”
Snerk! Not the server farm! NoooOOOooo!
Leila is 100% right about the student loans. I have my smaller loans long paid off, but my hubby will be paying as long as he lives – and he could not even get a position in his field. If he had gone to a community college and learned to do plumbing, he would be far better off (even assuming you cannot actually make over $250,000 a year at that…).
I really wonder how we’re going to pay for this stuff, too.
http://www.oftwominds.com/blognov08/letter-to-obama11-08.html
Or do we just not care anymore? Are the numbers so huge we can’t even comprehend? Or is the plan just to keep the stuff and stiff the creditors? Tough luck, guys – we’re the U.S. of A.
In my state of Victoria in Australia, the government has just done a massive bail out of the automotive industry “so they can make green cars”. *sigh* It isn’t just happening in the USA.
Olympia,
About “turtles all the way down”:
This version of the story is from Stephen Hawking’s 1988 book _A Brief History of Time_, but a google search will turn up more versions, I would think–
“ A well-known scientist (some say it was Bertrand Russell) once gave a public lecture on astronomy. He described how the earth orbits around the sun and how the sun, in turn, orbits around the center of a vast collection of stars called our galaxy. At the end of the lecture, a little old lady at the back of the room got up and said: “What you have told us is rubbish. The world is really a flat plate supported on the back of a giant tortoise.” The scientist gave a superior smile before replying, “What is the tortoise standing on?” “You’re very clever, young man, very clever,” said the old lady. “But it’s turtles all the way down!”
Great post, Sharon. I have an ongoing conversation with my DH along these lines; he every now and then says that we will HAVE to get a Prius (or something else techie and “green”), and I usually reply that we need instead to find ways to use what we have, less.
So far, it’s a stand-off, but as the economy deteriorates I think I will “win” by default. We won’t have the money available to buy the shiny green thingies. Our national economy may find itself in a similar situation, at some point (I am not holding my breath on that one, since TPTB keep promising more (!) taxpayer money for all kinds of bailouts and programs that are pretty useless).
dewey,
Guess you’re not a “corporate tool”, just seem somewhat bigotted against real people who happen to work in corporate jobs to support real families. The corporate employees I know are also trying to live lower energy by using a clothsline, turning the heat way down and eating locally. Compassion and persistence works better than judgement and anger.
Hell, I’m a corporate tool. I like having a job. I do not own the tools of production, whether it’s land or capital, so my wealth is all in my work. And since i can’t find a part-time job that pays a living wage, or a meaningful job that has health benefits, I work full time doing boring office work – otherwise, I’m dependent on my partner completely in ways he is not dependent on me. That’s not healthy.
I would prefer to work 30 hours a week, and I suspect he would too, and put that time to unpaid productive labor. But one person working for wages and one doing subsistence labor is not going to work for most people – among other things, if family structure changes the unwaged worker is in a very, very bad place and we don’t have much of a social safety net to take care of that.
Kudos Sharon – You are pretty much right of course. It’s getting the rest of the country on board that is seemingly impossible. I am guessing of course, but I think that Gore probably gets the consumption thing, it’s just that if he puts it out there he will not be taken seriously, so he is doing what he can. Like another poster mentioned we have talked about reducing consumption in the past – Jimmy Carter, and he became a laughing stalk. It is ingrained in our culture that going forward is synonymous with growth. It is also part of our economic structure. If we reduce our consumption, the economy sags, people get laid off, it tanks more, on an on. When we talk to the nation about consuming less, it is like asking them to starve, to give up their future. Of course, individually we can come up with ways to reduce and we do when we have too, and they are not so bad, in many instances even better. But, with the system we have, when we reduce on a large scale, people suffer.
Whatever, team Obama comes up with it will be interesting – at least we have someone in charge now that is capable of grasping some of these issues. Please submit your proposal to them at Change.gov.
Sharon,
What you write is so important.
Why the heck aren’t you submitting a version of it to the NYT??
On the forum of your blog, I fear that you’re in large part preaching to the choir. Only you preach it a lot better than a lot of other people do, so please consider writing for the people (Gore included) who actually need to hear this!
-A reader
So how can we get you in Obama’s cabinet?
Sharon, I just hope Al Gore reads *your* column!
Thanks, from a daily reader in Missouri,
Rosalie
Mass transit, mass transit and mass transit. Also, rewriting zoning laws to favor compact, pedestrian friendly, mixed use communities and solar access, ie. correct orientation for new buildings in addition to energy efficient design. These are local issues but could be encouraged by tying federal and state funds to compliance and building permits to a set of environmental requirements. Walkable neighborhoods served by public transit? Didn’t we used to do that? And changing zoning regulations doesn’t actually cost anything.
@Ani:
“Third is the student-loan deal- why on earth are people accumulating these monstrous loans anyway? They are not forgivable unless you are near death so far as I know- or totally and permanantly disabled- you can’t walk away from them- but you, your wife and countless others are accumulating them.”
I think there are a few things that need to be understood about how student loans work, and how most of us (and boy am I in this group) are getting screwed by them. First, just to respond to part of what you said, you’re right that 18 year olds really are naive about such things, and our system does nothing to counteract this naivete. When I got my loans, I sat through the mandatory workshops on how to manage them. All they discussed was how to schedule payments, a little bit of how to budget, and how much a monthly payback for a $5,000 loan is (not nearly enough to get you through even the cheap 4-year universities these days). Nothing about interest, or compounding, or the whole “you can’t bankrupt yourself out of these.” Heck, I didn’t even know what bankruptcy was, even though my parents had gone through one when I was 12. We were just all woefully underprepared for understanding these things.
That said, there’s a more fundamental problem with our student loans that no one really understood–grown up non-naive adults included. At least until the advent of high-balance private SLs (which didn’t come around until at least the early 2000’s, and have now more or less disappeared), it was almost impossible to rack up more than about $25,000 in SLs. Now, that is a high amount, but if one believed, as we were told, that our college degree would result in a higher-paying job, and we’d be able to pay those loans off efficiently, it’s not a bad trade-off. But there’s the rub–the high-paying jobs were basically all gone for my generation. Us 25-40is year olds have seen a net DECLINE in real wages since the 80’s, and it’s halved from what was made in the 50’s. This has been a problem across the board, but it’s hit us particularly hard. So those well-paying jobs weren’t waiting for us once we got our piece of paper, and we couldn’t pay. Instead, because you can’t get out of SLs without just dying, we deferred, or forebeared, or hardshipped, or whatever we could, and the interest got compounded in, again and again and again. And those loans started to escalate, until we now owe between $50,000-100,000.
We might’ve started with a high-but-reasonable amount of loans for the worthwhile goal of pursuing a higher education, but it was predicated on an economy that no longer existed even once we were in college. It was always hopeless for most of us to pay off our loans, but no one understood that at the time. Ah well, debt slavery ain’t so bad.
Sharon-
Re: The college debt nondischaragbility in bankruptcy. The problem is, that during the late 1970’s there was a thriving cottage industry going on in people who would make serious future money- Read- Medical Doctors- defaulting on their student loan debt and declaring bankruptcy prior to finishing the residency programs. Be sure to thank all those specialists who did this, and did not take advantage of the federal medical degree assisitance programs then existing to help the poor by serving as an internist or family physician in places like Arkansas where you generally can’t get enough MDS. The federal bankruptcy code was amended in the late 1970’s to “cure” that abuse.
The medical community abuse resulted in the closing of that discharge option for people who today legitimately had/have a real reason for need to discharge their debt-you literally have to be half dead and totally disabled to get that discharge today.
jj – I am a “real person” myself and have a “real family,” and I work for a salary. I’m not generally bigoted or angry towards those who don’t deserve it, so since you made this personal, I’ll turn it back on you and ask you to think about what really inspired your apparent anger at me.
Under industrial capitalism, the non-rich are expected to provide for their families’ needs specifically by being “employed” [the very word means "used," as a tool is employed]. Employers enjoy such a power imbalance that it’s a joke to speak of employment conditions, hours, wages, etc. as voluntarily chosen; the “negotiation” involved is “Take it or leave it.” Corporations make sure you work too hard to make your own bread, then sell you bread at $4 a loaf. The large majority who are susceptible to peer and media pressure have often gone into debt to purchase the expected status-display or labor-saving goods and services, and may have no honorable way out of the vicious cycle of toil-and-consume. I have the greatest sympathy for the many millions of Americans who are in that position. But I don’t think that hostility towards those who question the paradigm is a useful response.
Rosa – You seem to be saying that the housewife could get dumped at any moment, therefore she’d better keep working so there are no deadly “gaps” in her resume. I acknowledge that this is a real problem. The availability of divorce has been good for women overall, but has also left them economically at risk. Since we are talking about grand reorganizations of society, surely we can find ways of mitigating this problem. Efforts can be made to provide opportunities to women who are discriminated against by corporate employers; a household need not consist of just one couple and offspring, and means could be found to compensate domestic labor (I think it’s called “alimony”) or formally acknowledge and value it.
By the way, I think that referring to household management as “subsistence labor” is needlessly negative. Modern housewives do not live like Third World peasant women. Nor am I talking about the late-20th-century model whereby the male breadwinner does intellectually stimulating tasks, while the poor dull housewife just buys finished products and dusts things. There is probably as much fun, variety, and intellectual challenge in really running a household – especially if you branch out to things like home gardening, medical care, brewing, sewing, etc, – as there is in an average office job, which you acknowledge to be “boring.”
Dewey, it is subsistence labor. Or you can call it “informal economy labor”, but that’s a little unweildy. Any labor that directly supports existence is subsistence labor. I do a lot of it myself, and so does my partner, but in the interstices of our cash work. If either of us could find a part time job, it would make it easier to balance subsistence and waged labor, but for me the job is not optional, not for very long.
This is not about divorce, it’s about change. Death, disability, abandonment, fraud (a friend of mine’s mother recently returned to the paid workforce after 30 years as a SAHM, because her husband defrauded a trust fund, his workers, his family, and the IRS.) Temporary separation for emotional reasons, even – I’m here by choice, not by compulsion. That’s important to me.
Families need multiple sources of income and benefits, as cushions against changed circumstances. If your family can buy productive equipment, for a business, a farm, or a property that can be rented out for cash or kind, that’s fine. Or if your extended family or close friend group is situated to help each other easily. Mine’s not, not to the extent of supporting me and my child if the need arose. All my little family owns is a mortgage, so we need cash income.
I just had to turn down the first full-time job I’ve been offered in forever that paid decent money. Why? Because they wanted me to commute 100 miles one-way and it was a high-pressure sales job. I can’t do either of those things. I’m another discouraged worked.
Sallie Mae just figured out I’m ot of school and wants me to start paying back my loans. Ha! They want me to pay them $300 a month. Um, yeah, that’s going to happen…
Another good post Sharon.
Excellent points, Sharon. I hope you will consider forwarding this post to President Elect Obama’s office at change.gov.
“Since consumption is merely a means to human well being, the aim should be to obtain the maximum of well being with the minimum of consumption.”
Buddhist Economist
Warm Wishes
Deanna, I think the Carter example actually has a lot of problems. The idea that Carter was voted out primarily because he advocated energy conservation and putting solar panels on the white house roof strikes me as a rhetorical oversimplification that does more harm than good. It is certainly possible that a call to sacrifice and conservation (and both words have been uttered by Obama) might undermine his presidency. It is also the case that up until now, all our efforts at conservation and refinement of energy use have always resulted in net economic growth and net increases in energy usage – the only thing that has ever cut our total energy use is a shrinking of economic activity. Even services come with energy intensity – most of us aren’t walking to the dry cleaners and restaurants, and we’re not using money we made raising our backyard chickens – it was money we made working for AIG or GM or whatever. We have no evidence whatsoever that we can decrease our energy usage without dealing with the economic and consumption issues. If you have compelling evidence that *this* time the better cars won’t just get us driving more miles and using more energy, great – but I’ve not seen any so far.
The reason I didn’t spend more time on the voluntary removal from the workplace issue is that it will be the subject of my next post – but the only hope we have of imagining an increase in wages in the coming years is to have fewer workers to spread the money around. And in order for households to reduce consumption and also live decently, they are going to need time and resources to do informal economic/subsistence work. I don’t think there’s any real question that a lot of laborers are going to be leaving the workplace and pretty soon – even if we bail the car companies, the best estimates suggest we will lose a couple million jobs just there, because they won’t be able to keep production up. The question is whether we can make leaving the workplace more graceful than the hideousness of unemployment. But more on that tomorrow or Thursday.
I appreciate the kind words about my writings – the New York Times Op-Ed pages take only unpublished material – I do republish at Grist and a few other places, but quite honestly, I don’t have a lot of time to chase around resubmitting my stuff. Sure, I’d be glad for larger venues, but I’m too busy writing the stuff – and the books – to shift focus to other sites and places all the time. So I’ll keep writing here, and if other stuff opens up, great. But I’m in no rush.
Lance, more on the student loans soon, but I’m really sorry that things suck so badly, and I do think that default is not the greatest tragedy of all time.
Sharon
Robyn M-
Yup- I do get the student loan deal. I just don’t know why it keeps going on- so many students are taking on so much debt believing they will get really high paying jobs and be able to easily pay it back. As someone pointed out, the high-priced culinary schools are an especially egregerious example, imho- most jobs in culinary work are NOT highly paid and these schools are pricey. But now so many employers insist on college degrees for jobs which could(and used to be) done by HS grads with on-the-job-training. Why this is happening I don’t know….
I do feel really bad for all those with big student loans to pay back. If you’re a parent/grandparent and have a HS student in your family I would urge you strongly to discuss reality with them. Eighteen year olds have no clue what paying back this sort of money is like..
Someone I know has a child that received a full scholarship to our state university- but he turned it down to go to a private college which he has had to take out full loans for as his mom is low-income and single. I just couldn’t believe he did this- he has no idea what a dumb move this likely was….. Unless the school in question is one of the top ones- Harvard, Columbia etc and the prestige factor can help with job hunting, I don’t think most private schools are worth the $$. I got a perfectly good education at my in-state public university for undergrad work and then went to grad school for free while getting paid to teach and do research. I know this doesn’t work for everyone but I am worried how the students just keep taking on this debt with no idea of how it will constrain their future.
One of the reasons Carter failed with his initiatives was that a) the situation was not all that dire and, more importantly, b) Carter was NOT a powerful, charismatic, inspirational, and influential leader. That can and often has made all the difference in the past -imagine if it had been Truman or Carter in the White House instead of FDR during the worst days of the Great Depression. People listen to leaders who have the above qualities. Obama has them, and that’s one of the reasons I am holding out a bit of hope for his presidency -but it all depends on just who he is.
Here is what the Ehrlichs are proposing (taken from an article in the NY Times by Andrew C. Revkin – “More Earthly Advise for Obama):
“From the letter to the president-elect from Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University:
1) Put births on a par with deaths. …As been done in many family planning programs, the happy family should be promoted as one that limits its numbers. But the change should be in the motivation. Traditionally the small family was supposed to supply a higher standard of living — including more stuff for each individual. The new approach could be to promote it as a multi-generational unit that in each generation limits its size in order to maximize the chances of each following generations’ retaining a happy, sustainable life style.
To move in that direction, humanity must rapidly expand programs to educate and give job opportunities to women, make effective contraception universally available, and develop public support of population policies.
2) Put conserving on a par with consuming. At any given level of technology, there is a trade-off between how many people can be born into a society and the level of per capita physical affluence that can be sustainably supported. The more people there are, the smaller each one’s share of the pie. One way of dealing with this trade-off would be a cultural shift away from creating ever more gadgets to creating more appreciation and better stewardship for Earth’s aesthetic assets.
3) Transform the consumption of education. Education is what economists call a “non-rival good” — something that can be consumed without reducing the amount available to others — and as such it is an ideal consumption good for a sustainable society. More quality education could help us solve the human predicament — the combined crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, deteriorating life-support systems, declining resources, multiplying weapons of mass destruction, and widening inequity within and between nations.
4) Judge technologies not just on what they do for people but also to people and their life-support systems.
5) Rapidly expand our empathy. We’re a small-group animal, trying to live in large groups…. People are gradually gaining more empathy toward those others distant from us in skin color, gender, religion, class, culture or physical space, but our ability to inflict harm on them has also increased. Cultural evolution is not rapidly enough reducing this discounting by distance (caring less about situations the further away they are). The same can be said about discounting by time — not caring enough about the world we will leave to our children and our descendants in the more distant future.
6) Decide what kind of world we all want. What are the ultimate goals of our lives? Are Americans really happier traveling to work an hour or more each day wrapped in a few tons of steel and breathing smog that threatens their lives?
7) Determine the institutions and arrangements best suited to govern a planetary society with a maximum of freedom within the constraints of sustainability. …In the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens, states are a recent invention, existing for only a tiny fraction of our existence. In their modern form as nation states, they are only a little more than 200 years old. We need to look closely at possible alternatives that could combine greater awareness of the problems of living at a global scale while regaining family-style psychological comfort. More cooperation at a global level is clearly necessary for civilization’s long-term survival.
All seven of the steps could be written of as an exercise in Pollyannaism. “Totally impractical,” people will say, “not gonna happen.” Well, I tend to agree. But there is nothing more impractical than letting our global civilization go down the drain, with billions of people dying. Pundits seem to think we have choices, but they are wrong. If we don’t change our ways, they’ll be changed for us. “From the letter to the president-elect from Paul and Anne Ehrlich of Stanford University:
1) Put births on a par with deaths. …As been done in many family planning programs, the happy family should be promoted as one that limits its numbers. But the change should be in the motivation. Traditionally the small family was supposed to supply a higher standard of living — including more stuff for each individual. The new approach could be to promote it as a multi-generational unit that in each generation limits its size in order to maximize the chances of each following generations’ retaining a happy, sustainable life style.
To move in that direction, humanity must rapidly expand programs to educate and give job opportunities to women, make effective contraception universally available, and develop public support of population policies.
2) Put conserving on a par with consuming. At any given level of technology, there is a trade-off between how many people can be born into a society and the level of per capita physical affluence that can be sustainably supported. The more people there are, the smaller each one’s share of the pie. One way of dealing with this trade-off would be a cultural shift away from creating ever more gadgets to creating more appreciation and better stewardship for Earth’s aesthetic assets.
3) Transform the consumption of education. Education is what economists call a “non-rival good” — something that can be consumed without reducing the amount available to others — and as such it is an ideal consumption good for a sustainable society. More quality education could help us solve the human predicament — the combined crises of overpopulation, wasteful consumption, deteriorating life-support systems, declining resources, multiplying weapons of mass destruction, and widening inequity within and between nations.
4) Judge technologies not just on what they do for people but also to people and their life-support systems.
5) Rapidly expand our empathy. We’re a small-group animal, trying to live in large groups…. People are gradually gaining more empathy toward those others distant from us in skin color, gender, religion, class, culture or physical space, but our ability to inflict harm on them has also increased. Cultural evolution is not rapidly enough reducing this discounting by distance (caring less about situations the further away they are). The same can be said about discounting by time — not caring enough about the world we will leave to our children and our descendants in the more distant future.
6) Decide what kind of world we all want. What are the ultimate goals of our lives? Are Americans really happier traveling to work an hour or more each day wrapped in a few tons of steel and breathing smog that threatens their lives?
7) Determine the institutions and arrangements best suited to govern a planetary society with a maximum of freedom within the constraints of sustainability. …In the 200,000-year history of Homo sapiens, states are a recent invention, existing for only a tiny fraction of our existence. In their modern form as nation states, they are only a little more than 200 years old. We need to look closely at possible alternatives that could combine greater awareness of the problems of living at a global scale while regaining family-style psychological comfort. More cooperation at a global level is clearly necessary for civilization’s long-term survival.”
I thought this was pretty good, albeit it is very doubtful anything like this would ever be put into policy. But we can at least hope that we have some leaders that are aware of what is necessary, and push a bit in that direction. You can submit your own proposal to him at change.org
Teach for America
Nurse for America
Doctor for America
Farmworker for America
Envirotech for America
Architect for America
Physicist for America
Urban Planner for America
heck, Lawyer for America!
Pay off those student loans, yah!! Lift that hemostat — tote that hoe!
Before we tell ourselves no one will do these things, and use Carter as the whipping boy — Habitat for Humanity has built one heck of a lot of non-McMansions.
I say have a go!
And why shouldn’t GM have to build trolleys and grid-smart EVs in exchange for a handout?
Meanwhile, nobody’s stopping me from living simply … far as I can tell …
[...] program denies there are limits to growth November 11th, 2008 Sharon Astyk looks at the climate change program Al Gore has laid out in an op-ed at the New York Times: First, [...]
Sharon – I never suggested that “Carter was voted out primarily because he advocated energy conservation and putting solar panels on the white house roof”. I said he was lambasted for suggesting we conserve energy and generally ignored. The reasons he was voted out are far more complicated than that. What I’m arguing is that, no matter how engaging and inspiring a speaker the next president is (as someone else mentioned), when push comes to shove and people contemplate tightening their belts for the good of humanity, well, Americans ain’t exactly altruistic.
The only thing that seems to change our behavior is one that is based on economics. So, again, if we employ a carbon tax, you’ll see people lessen their carbon output. But it won’t be because they have a romanticized notion of cooking on a woodstove, sitting around in a rocking chair, sewing. Even if that’s what floats our boats. Most Americans will still want to do what they have been doing their whole lives – consume. So, they will change their behavior and make different choices if it affects them economically. And not just because of a motivational speech. If policy helps drive and direct those choices, then maybe we’ll see some improvement. But you can’t throw the baby out with the bathwater.
I’ll agree with you that not all services aren’t impact free – but we are making assumptions on both sides. If I walk to get my hair cut during my lunch break at work and visit the workplace onsite shiatsu massage therapist and work out at my onsite gym or take a yoga class that is part of my workplace insurance, then all those services are “carbon free” so to speak even if I did drive or take the bus to get to work. I would be there anyway. I suppose we could split hairs and say that all those services consume something (shampoo, water, weight machine lube, etc.), but then we are down to the fact that just plain ole living is energy expensive. And we aren’t talking population here in this post.
“…best estimates suggest we will lose a couple million jobs just there, because they won’t be able to keep production up…” One thing I wanted to point out here is that, if we are losing a couple million jobs due to a shift in a particular industry, then, keeping with the auto-industry analogy, you’ll see an uptick in jobs for service repair and keeping cars running well and on the road and/or retrofitting them to adhere to new carbon regulations. So, the shift isn’t exactly immediate, but it does occur. The same issue occurs every time we switch from one technology to another. The people who manufactured products for horse driven buggies didn’t just go home and stay there when the auto industry took a foothold. They acquired new skills and adapted. Mainframe programmers learned to do something different – they either learned new programming languages or went into management or got out of technology all together.
Anyway, I’m starting to yammer here.
I look forward to your next posts.
Nice post, sums up the dire strait we are in, you know, between the rock and the hard thingy.
I have so little faith in people to do the right thing, collectively humans haven’t behaved very well towards mother earth for, oh, 10,000 years or so.
One of Reagan’s first acts was to remove the solar panels from the roof of the White House.
That was the Kiss of Death for America, right there, in a nutshell.
That mentality hasn’t budged much in almost three Decades.
How many boomer Yuppies put solar panels on their McMansion and even super insulated them? Hardly any. They did not even do it when the “laissez les bon temps roulez.”
Why on earth would they do it now? And with what money? Funny Fiat money printed by Uncle Sam and dropped on an eager educated populous from helicopters?
And those so called ‘Conservatives’ didn’t then, don’t now and never will conserve Anything.
Period.
Pitching conservation to Americans is a non starter, then and now.
The boomer generation squandered forty years with consumption, not conservation. It is too late now. There is no solution to this. You can’t get that time frame back and even money won’t get it back.
I see not one iota of change in the majority of Americans attitude about using less. I see window dressing happy-speak pale green pseudo-sustainable rhetoric, but nothing to indicate the general public has the vaguest idea or grasp of the “consume VS conserve” big picture battle.
Gore’s new improved Power Point Presentation is simply a retread of the tragedy of previous investment Wolf dressed in Eco- cruelty free Sheep’s clothing. Amory Lovins must have been doing cartwheels when he hear Al’s Excellent New Adventure.
The one great lesson I have learned in life is that some situations have no solutions. They are to be endured, not solved.
Decades of priceless time have been wasted by a lazy greedy culture of conspicuous consumption and the eleventh hour is upon us.
Elvis has left the Building.
I see great suffering and very little solace or solutions in the cards.
This might sound nuts, but that’s ok at this point.
I had a clear and intense dream the night before Reagan’s re-election. Some kind of spirit, some angel perhaps, told me that a lot would depend on the next day’s election. The fate of our nation, and the world itself. That choice would close a lot of open doors, and start a lot of things moving in a way that would be unstoppable in a bad way. This election would say what we wanted as a people, as a nation. What we were really about; who we are choosing to be. If we re-elected Reagan, after seeing what he was about in his first term, then the die was cast.
So you know the rest of the story. I haven’t been surprised by anything that is going on in the world since that dream.
agwh- Thanks! That, I never could have guessed.
It’s interesting, how we’ve come to question, and not just here, the wisdom of EVERYONE going to college. For so long the stock advice has been to go to college, college graduates make so much more over their lifetimes than high school graduates, etc. What is the point of college, anyway? It seems that for all but a few fields, it’s not about gaining knowledge- it’s about gaining that prized degree, which is supposed to show people how smart you are and open doors left and right. Except when it doesn’t. I was talking to a woman tonight- she racked up $70,000 getting her Master’s. Now she’s employed full-time as a para educator, making not very much at all. She moonlights at the gym where I’m employed, and thus makes enough to pay the minimum on her student loan. I find her situation fiercely depressing.
Lance – Your dreams certainly are way more coherent than mine.
Mine usually end up where I’m trying to run, but I can barely move, and then I realize I am not wearing any clothes from the waist down. Then I realize that I haven’t studied or been to the Differential Equations class that I have a final for in 10 minutes and just realized I forgot to drop the class at the beginning of the quarter. But it doesn’t matter because just then there’s an enormous earthquake and Mt. Rainier blows up and I watch all this is slow motion.
I’m not sure how those dreams bode for the next presidency, but I sure hope they have no affect on it.
No need to worry about the consumption part. Deflation is taking care of it. Retail anecdote on Chris Martenson blog reveals that spending virtually halted in October ie: instead of selling the usual 700 cars a month at a Ford dealership in San Antonio, they sold 5 cars total. And the stock market continues to tank because everything is related to retail. It’s a good time to visit Iceland too—no crowds at any restaurants.
Amanda
I hope you enjoy that I have nominated you for an award
http://belindas-simple-life.blogspot.com/2008/11/thankyou-tag.html
I agree with Sharon’s analysis entirely, and with many of the comments, but unless I missed it, I would add the following: Gore focuses on centralized energy production, which on the public utilities model gives people zero control and makes profits for investors. Residential conservation is a decentralized approach with the quickest payback and lowest cost, and it also enhances individual empowerment and self-reliance. Weatherizing low-income homes is possibly the single most cost-effective investment that can be made. Low-income people don’t have the resources to do this for themselves, but the payback in energy savings is enormous, and like all residential conservation it is empowering, AND it has enormous impact in terms of job creation and stimulation of local economies. The federal government has had a low-income weatherization program in place since at least the late 1970s, but at present funding levels it will take centuries to complete. When I lived in Hartford on the third floor of a 3-story building, I weatherized the attic with help a friend who worked for the local community action agency. The next month, the price of heating oil doubled, and my family’s bill was cut in half! With funding, there is a network of local agencies that can gear up quickly to do more of this sort of thing. The Oregon Attorney General recently targeted some money from an antitrust settlement to augment such programs. As the lawyer who drew up the contract for the grant, I know the potential, but now retired, I no longer have the details handy. But it’s something to ask your Congressional representatives about. I will dig up details if Sharon or others are interested.
And, carrying this one step further, a small group in Portland, Ore. conducts small-scale conservation workshops, teaching low-income people how to take matters into their own hands to conserve energy & save on fuel bills. Enhanced by inexpensive kits of materials, these workshops take the bang-for-the-buck even a step further than low-income residential conservation generally, in that the first few, cheapest things that can be done are utterly the most cost-effective, AND empowering. Most states, perhaps every state has a department that conducts low-income weatherization. Within reasonable limits, we need only pour on the money for enormous paybacks. Also with a grant from the Oregon AG, that small entity I mentioned has been developing materials and a curriculum to train-the-trainers, so that program too can potentially be replicated elsewhere.
On an individual basis of course, those of us with the resources to do so should be having our homes energy-audited and taking advantage of tax credits and other incentives to invest in making our energy usage more efficient. For those who don’t have the funds, this should be an additional component of the federal program. States will be hurting for funds to keep these programs underway. This is one area where the feds should direct stimulus money.
For those who keep suggesting Sharon run her stuff in the New York Times, I’m with you in spirit, but although I’d love to be pleasantly surprised, I think there’s a culture of elitism at the NYT that wouldn’t find her criticism of Gore quite respectable. The same snobbishness that denigrated Sharon’s homestead, as she described in a recent post, puts as much emphasis on the source as on the content, and more on appearances than substance, so that mere merit alone has little or no weight — or chance of publication.
Going to have to sit down and have a serious read of your site but what Ive seen so far is very good. You have a clear perceptive outlook and an easy style, rather jealous really. You lot really seem to have got it together. Ill by the book when its out.
You’ve probably seen it but I found this link to a British report that I thought was rather instructive.
http://peakoil.solarcentury.com/
Good article on student-loan debt in today’s Alternet- link here(maybe)
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/106445/college_loan_slavery%3A_student_debt_is_getting_way_out_of_hand/?page=1
Deanna, I guess what I was trying to get at was that I think that Carter was lambasted for a failure of presentation, not as much the ideas themselves. And as someone else mentioned, we’re in a much more acute situation. FDR did pretty well on that front – and so have other leaders over time. For example, even before the war we were successful at boycotting British imports (Revolution – and boy was that a big deal, since most things came from Britain) and Southern cloth and sugar (before the Civil War). Other national examples exists as well.
I think Timothy Breen’s work on the ways that rituals of non-consumption replace rituals of consumption is important here – I think you are right that consumption itself has to be replaced with something, but I don’t think this is as hard as it sounds, if addressing the larger economy could be put on the table – and that I don’t know about.
Sharon
if not the nytimes, at least consider forwarding your thoughts to obama’s new website..
Robert Roth, the cold-weather states already have weatherization programs (or at least I know Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin and South Dakota do). It shouldn’t be that hard to make them national, though you’d need some engineering/design help for regionally-appropriate designs for areas where a wet cold winter isn’t the big issue.
The problem with ours (Minnesota) is that it’s a combined utility bill help/weatherization program and when the utility bill part gets bigger, the weatherization part loses out. I’ve been looking around for a weatherization charity or political lobby that is efficiency/clean energy only and includes landlords/renters and multi-unit buildings, but I haven’t found one yet.
The other awesome green-collar type job group I know of is a local group that hires “low-skilled” people to deconstruct homes before they are demolished. They resell the salvageable parts and have a lead remediation unit building owners can hire. It seems like you could pour an endless stream of money into lead/asbestos remediation, weatherproofing, adding hurricane-resistant features, and getting rid of mold in houses and apartment buildings. Those are all hard jobs, that need strict job safety regulation, but the work needs doing and the payoff in energy savings and public health would be tremendous.
@Ani–
“Yup- I do get the student loan deal. I just don’t know why it keeps going on- so many students are taking on so much debt believing they will get really high paying jobs and be able to easily pay it back.”
I think it keeps going on for two basic reasons. One, there’s a major timelag between making the decisions to get the loans, and finding out that the jobs aren’t there–namely, the time it takes to get through college. So the decision has been made before the hammer falls. But why can’t they figure out there’re no jobs before taking the loans? Well, now they probably can, given what’s in the news these days, but two years ago? I remember talking to my dad, who genuinely believed (given what he saw in the media) that my whole generation was graduating and landing $200k/year jobs out in Silicon Valley and as Executives du Jour for various companies. The radical income fall for everyone has been hidden by the overall statistics on income. It’s only now being revealed that incomes have been flat across the board for the better part of a decade. But even *that* stat hides the fact that incomes have been going up for the generation up from me (overall, until recently), and down for my own generation. So when we looked to our elders for advice, since they know all about this “loan” stuff, our elders genuinely believed based on their own experience and what they see in the media, that there really are great jobs waiting for us all, and certainly get the loans so that you can get the education and then get the jobs.
As far as I can see, it’s been one monstrous, ugly bait-and-switch routine, and one that’s not even organized or run by anyone. The media wasn’t hiding income reductions for my generation to keep us getting student loans–they had the “confidence of the broader market” at heart. It was never any particular entity’s goal to deceive us (well, except maybe for some of those really evil private SL issuers that popped up near the end of the credit bubble), that’s just how it worked out. But, that’s my opinion.
Thanks for the article, Ani
Basically I got out of my undergrad degree with only $3000 in debt, which I paid off in a year doing fieldwork and living out of my car. Then I got a summer job at a federal agency that said if I got my MA in the same field, I would be converted to a permanent position. So I did so, accumulating about 20 K in debt for that MA. Went back to work, then the fed began downsizing, along with office politics, and low man on the totem pole, I was out on my butt. Historic preservation is unfortunately a small and specialized field and I couldn’t get work. So back to school for another degree in a separate but affiliated field with more opportunity, and another 30 K in debt (I didn’t have some of the basic requirements so it took a little longer). Then out, worked for another fed agency for four years, all soft money, no permanent employment, etc. downsizing etc. So here I am 50 K in debt on my own.
My wife brought debt of her own and here we are at 100 K in debt.
Not complaining, just the way life worked out. Somebody really needs to have a talk with kids just going to college as a default choice, but people also gotta realize that college/education is its own industry that requires growth of consumers to exist, and it not only makes bank that way, it keeps kids out of the labor market for 4 years or so which helps the unemployment numbers, right?
So between kids automatically going to college because they think they should or they’ll be “losers” (ha!) and “discouraged workers” (aka us “layabouts”) who no longer are on unemployment nor working hard to find nonexistent jobs, who knows what the REAL unemployment numbers are??
Hey Crunchy, my dreams are usually more like yours, such as the one the other night where I was some Mafia guy’s elderly “Aunt Rose” he dropped off at a suburban airport, and I walked to the gates swigging some wine in a bottle.
That’s why the one over 20 years ago remains so clear and weird, because it was so different than the regular ones.
Speaking as a (currently) employed university educator, I really couldn’t agree more about reassessing the “EVERYONE GOES TO COLLEGE” mentality. I mean, yes, that will spell doom for mine and my husband’s careers, but they’re already doomed thanks to the recession and a few other factors (and really, I don’t fancy myself having a career in the first place). But all that being said, the pressure to attract and keep students is incredible at universities, the cost-cutting measures used to keep tuition low (which it isn’t), and the increasing lack of jobs out the other end…. it’s all such a sad show anymore. I don’t want to dump too much on higher education for it’s own sake; I got degrees in philosophy & french, neither have served me particularly well on the career path, but both have made me a vastly better person. But someone else observed that betterment of oneself is no longer the goal–just the piece of paper, and that is very true. Or worse, at some universities we’ve taught at, the goal isn’t even the paper, it’s the networking and getting your foot in early with the “good ole boys network”. Blah.
I really think we’d be better served by a population who went to college only if the WANT to go to college, but who also have job possibilities if they don’t. Admittedly, there are no longer good job possibilities even if you do, but hey, set that issue aside? I remember seeing a very interesting speech from then-President of Indiana University Myles Brand about changing the scholarship rules for university basketball players, and working to create a “minor league” for basketball. That way, if people really want to play basketball rather than go to college, they can enter the minors, rather like people do in baseball. They aren’t forced to continue schooling that they don’t want or need. On the other hand, if they DO want to go to college while playing basketball, that’s fine, and there will still be athletic scholarships available. This pointed to the problem that people are being forced into a college path for no good reason. It seemed so sane…. FWIW, he’s now president of the NCAA, so maybe others have taken him seriously, too.
Boy, there’s a lot of us aging Gen-Xers (can I put it that way, sorry!) who see the college/student loan folly. If the colleges weren’t already going to be in trouble b/c of the economy, I’d say they better watch out it ten years or so when our kids turn 18 and they’re not heading to college.
I came out of college with 16k in debt and grad school added another 14k to that. I’ve never worked in my field (teaching or ministry). Instead I got married to a man 11 years older than me, we wanted to have kids pretty quickly and lived in a small town where he was a high school teacher but there was little employment opportunity for me. Didn’t want to work at the gas station or Pizza Hut, opened a home child care instead and babysat until 22 months after the wedding when our first-born came along. It took me a while to adjuct to being dependent financially on my husband, but we worked it out and both learned the value of having someone at home most of the time. It was less stress on both of us!
Now yes, that sounds like I was just going for my M.R.S. degree, and I certainly was not. I loved school, loved learning, but that’s just the way my life worked out. I think for many young people unforeseen things happen that make it very difficult to pay those student loans, not the least of which is lack of good-paying jobs.
Robyn- I’d concur for sure re: many students don’t belong in college and are just there for the paper- I’ve been teaching as an adjunct and have mostly stopped due to burnout and disgust at teaching students who just want the degree but not the work that goes into earning it.
I was accepted at a school of Naturopathic Medicine and after 4 years would have become a licensed ND in my state, but I was looking at well over 100K of debt if I did this- I didn’t have a good feel for that,especially as ND’s in my state are not covered by insurance for the most part. I was dreading trying to establish a practice and pay back this huge loan which many ND’s in my state are doing by taking on other work. So I declined my admission. Had I gone I would have recently graduated into this mess, like someone I know who now owes I believe $180K. So although I would liked to have studied to be a ND and practiced as one, I think I made the right decision to not take this sort of debt on. The thought of carrying this sort of debt load makes me shudder. I don’t know, maybe I’m too cautious but I didn’t like what I saw coming down the pike 5 years ago and made this choice.
Wow! This post drew a lot of comments in a hurry.
I haven’t read all of the comments, but where is there any mention of reducing the size of our population to a more sustainable level? There is simply no way that our current population of 305 million can be sustained from renewable energy resources at anywhere near the standard of living we currently enjoy.
And beyond resources, Sharon lightly touched upon the issues of employment and per capita consumption, but she didn’t link the two because few people recognize the linkage. Advocating low levels of consumption is the same as advocating high levels of unemployment and poverty. Is that what we want? I think not. We can still enjoy a high standard of living sustainably, but not with the same number of “capitas” on earth that we have now.
Rampant population growth threatens our economy and quality of life. I’m not talking just about the obvious problems that we see in the news – growing dependence on foreign oil, carbon emissions, soaring commodity prices, environmental degradation, etc. I’m talking about the effect upon rising unemployment and poverty in America.
I should introduce myself. I am the author of a book titled “Five Short Blasts: A New Economic Theory Exposes The Fatal Flaw in Globalization and Its Consequences for America.” To make a long story short, my theory is that, as population density rises beyond some optimum level, per capita consumption of products begins to decline out of the need to conserve space. People who live in crowded conditions simply don’t have enough space to use and store many products. This declining per capita consumption, in the face of rising productivity (per capita output, which always rises), inevitably yields rising unemployment and poverty.
This theory has huge implications for U.S. policy toward population management. Our policies that encourage high rates of population growth are rooted in the belief of economists that population growth is a good thing, fueling economic growth. Through most of human history, the interests of the common good and business (corporations) were both well-served by continuing population growth. For the common good, we needed more workers to man our factories, producing the goods needed for a high standard of living. This population growth translated into sales volume growth for corporations. Both were happy.
But, once an optimum population density is breached, their interests diverge. It is in the best interest of the common good to stabilize the population, avoiding an erosion of our quality of life through high unemployment and poverty. However, it is still in the interest of corporations to fuel population growth because, even though per capita consumption goes into decline, total consumption still increases. We now find ourselves in the position of having corporations and economists influencing public policy in a direction that is not in the best interest of the common good.
The U.N. ranks the U.S. with eight other countries – India, Pakistan, Nigeria, Democratic Republic of Congo, Bangladesh, Uganda, Ethiopia and China – as accounting for fully half of the world’s population growth by 2050. The U.S. is the only developed country still experiencing third world-like population growth.
If you’re interested in learning more about this important new economic theory, I invite you to visit my web site at OpenWindowPublishingCo.com where you can read the preface, join in my blog discussion and, of course, purchase the book if you like. (It’s also available at Amazon.com.)
Please forgive the somewhat spammish nature of the previous paragraph. I just don’t know how else to inject this new perspective into the overpopulation debate without drawing attention to the book that explains the theory.
Pete Murphy
Author, “Five Short Blasts”
Pete-
Most of the population growth in the US is related to immigration and the immigrants having children, which they tend to do at a higher rate than the rest of the US population.
Why do students take out loans? Because without that bachelors degree, they won’t make the initial cut to the Human Resources Department.
From the HR point of view, with, say, 4 jobs open and over 500 applicants, when they restrict the applications to only those with a college degree, they only have to look at 250 applicants. It’s an easy first cut. The non-degreed are never even considered.
Jobs for which this restriction is not used by HR are much fewer than previously, most having been shipped overseas. The remainder generally have very low wages and zero job security or benefits. And buildings trades, which had a great many good-paying jobs requiring only technical traning, have suffered huge employment losses with the housing slowdown.
The next problem is that scholarships are nearly extinct. Gifted students used to make it through mainly on scholarships, but not now. Since wages are essentially flat while costs go up, parents seldom have the load of extra cash to subsidize their children’s education. That leaves nothing but loans.
People in school now and recently have suffered the worst for this: costs continually rising, scholarships and aid of various kinds disappearing, and at the other end, jobs few and hard to find.
This is going to be a very tough problem to solve. Where are the programs to help the unemployed with their student loans? Wouldn’t that be better than shoveling money into big banks so they can buy other big banks?
Reduce population? How, pray tell, can you do that in a time period of less than decades? Even if you were able to strictly enforce one child per woman (no exceptions for death or disability of child or remarriage) it would still take years and years to see a significant population reduction. I suppose you could be mathematical about it and line everyone up and shoot every tenth person but that method has real drawbacks. Or you could start enforcing mandatory euthanasia for anyone over 75 and any disabled persons of any age. Or you could release engineered viruses to kill a sizable percentage of the population.
It is easy to say “reduce population”; much harder to do in any amount of time less than generations.
How about the govt. selling “green bonds”? I’d buy ‘em. But… first they’d have to satisfactorily prove the monies are being used to invest in green technologies which will benefit all, not just private companies, and not for shiny new SUV’s for Green Bonds staff, either. Yet, there’s the rub. How do we trust our government to actually tell us the unvarnished complete truth, a “relative” commodity to our elected officials. Actual fudge has more substance, regardless of which butts occupy various official govt. chairs.
As far as falling petrol levels? Less consumption leads to fewer trucks on the roads delivering goods from overseas factories to fewer folks on the edge of loosing their jobs, homes, SUV’s, and crap. A layed-off friend keeps moaning, “I wish I wouldn’t have bought so many lattes when I was working. What I could do with all that money now!” I agree. Never mind the savings in styrofoam cups to your planet, too, aye? Silver lining.
Face it. We as a nation are just starting to actualize the sheer amount of this rich but deadly Consumption Overload Diet we’ve been trained to “need”, and the consequences are scaring the heck out of us. But the piper is at the door, waiting to be payed, and payed he must be.
Finally, even thought I’m typically a pretty positive outlook kinda person, I see an eventual third world environment within the next 100 years in the US. It’s gone too far for too long, and we just can’t seem to get it together. So… what would that make third world countries? Fourth world? Deserts?
Ani, you are certainly correct that most of our population growth is due to immigration. Approximately half of our annual growth of 3 million people is due to legal immigration (about 1.1 million) and illegal immigration (another half million). Much of the remaining growth in the native population is due to the high birth rate among foreign-born Americans. For this reason, my book calls for a huge reduction in immigration to match the rate of emigration, essentially removing immigration from the population growth equation for the U.S.
Currently, our fertility rate is approximately 2.1 births per female in the U.S. In order to attain a stable population, this needs to fall to approximately 1.79. Why less than 2.0? Because of the steady rise in life expectancy.
Teresa from Hershey: Yes, it would take a long time to reduce population significantly, although we could see some results in a relatively short time frame. So shouldn’t we get started? I certainly don’t advocate the kind of ridiculous approaches you mentioned (in jest, I’m sure). Nor do we need to adopt the heavy-handed approaches used in places like China and India. I believe that a system of economic incentives is all that’s needed. For example, tax policy could be used to reward people for choosing smaller families, instead of the current practice of paying people to have more children.
The United States is the third most populous country in the world. Already we are devouring resources at a rate far above what can be sustained. It’s time to face reality and start addressing the root cause of the problem.
Sharon,
Were you planning to post a follow up? I enjoyed the post, but thought you indicated a part two at least.
DD49
[...] 14, 2008 by Lee Sharon Astyk critiques Al Gore’s climate change wish list for the next administration on the grounds that, among [...]
Pete Murphy,
First of all, full disclosure: I’m a non-American currently studying mathematics in America, and planning on packing my bags when I’m done and thus contributing to America’s forthcoming brain-drain, which Drmitry Orlov has so eloquently written about. (If you haven’t read ‘Reinventing Collapse’, I strongly recommend that you do so asap.)
Now, to my point. Since you’re advocating closing the borders for people, I sure hope you’re also advocating closing the borders for products as well. Because you see, as it is, American consumers are using about a quarter of the World’s resources, which is far more than is (or could be) produced in the United States alone. So, essentially, Americans are stealing other people resources, and then, in the name of this or that, self-righteously demanding that those (mostly brown) ‘others’ go back to where they came from, without stopping to think that most of these people come from places that are heavily exploited or otherwise racked by the said Americans.
So, if you’re going to call for closing the borders for people AND products, then you and I will be more or less on the same page. But if you’re only calling for keeping the people out, while taking the products of their land bases, then, with all due respect, screw you.
Pete – you also write, “Advocating low levels of consumption is the same as advocating high levels of unemployment and poverty. Is that what we want? I think not.”
This seems to reflect the post-industrial American mindset that average people’s only choices are endless paid drudgery and endless consuming, or else miserable squalor. We probably consume twice as much per capita as our ancestors did in the 1950s, and we do not think of them as having been degraded by poverty. Many of us middle-class people now would be delighted to accept a 50% smaller house size and/or domestic energy usage, half as many consumer goods and services, etc., if it meant we could also cut our work hours in half (or let one family member leave the work force) and if there was no other societal coercion to prevent it. Nobody loves being “employed” for the sake of it; they do it because there is no other way for them to get the goods they’ve been told are essential. The fewer goods you find essential to your comfort, the less work you have to do. That’s great for the environment, but it’s not so great for business tycoons, which is why the very idea sends capitalists into hysterics.
Also – with regard to the supposed dichotomy between high consumption or else poverty – poverty does not mean just that you are not rich enough to get anything that you would like. Poverty means either absolute poverty, a lack of the basic needs and comforts of life (food, warmth, safe water and waste disposal, clothing, etc.), or relative poverty, a lack of goods and services that others in your society have and tell you that you must have in order to be socially approved. That definition of poverty is deliberately ratcheted upward under our system, but there should be no reason it can never be ratcheted back down a bit. If you would feel “impoverished” using transportation methods that are typical of the middle class in other countries, maybe what you need is not more toil and debt so you can have a new SUV, but an adjustment to the attitude of your community.
Sharon, you hit the point: it’s all about consumption, although Obama, Gore and the mainstream experts (and common people) believe it’s a question of legislation and businness policy.
On The Guardian today George Monbiot basically shares your view. He criticises though your relying on volountary abstinence as a mere wishful thinking, as well as leaving infrastructure mostly unchanged.
A major social collapse because of 10% annual shrinking of GNP for several years would be likely, if not certain, in his words.
Maybe.
But if volountary abstinence is based on a shifted mindset rather than on kind of franciscan poverty, then we still have got a chance.
The french economist, philosopher, anthropologist Serge Latouche argues we can get rid of our lifestyle by putting in question, deconstructing, forgoing the set of symbols, customs, values that built our affluent society throughout -say- the last century. He talks about the need for a *decolonisation of the imaginary*, since he thinks we westeners are as colonised by corporations and advertising industry boosting us to compulsive mass consumption just as non-occidental countries were invaded and their native culture deprived by foreign armies (and today re-colonised and re-dispossessed by IMF and World Bank policies).
It’s just a tip, in case you might find the *decolonisation of the imaginary* a useful tool to think it over.
As an unimportant personal note, I agree with your relying on volountary abstinence, and I don’t think it’s a wishful thinking, unlike the effectivity of a Green New Deal.
Population is the big problem – pardon the pun. I live in Australia, and although we have a ’small’ population of 20 million we are in fact the worst nation, so we are told, in terms of resources used per capita.
Unfortunately we have a global problem, and I feel that until the governments of the world address the steadily increasing, correction – exponentially increasing, world population, then any technological, or even any social based solution is a very temporary fix.
What is the point in reducing per capita connsumption by say 10%, if in a few years the population has grown by 10%! We are going no-where!
Of course we do need to act swiftly, and although bringing in ZPG could remove the human plague from the Earth in say 70 years, surely we could tackle the global warming problem on three fronts – improved technologies, reduced standard of living expectations ( of the ‘rich and carefree’ ), AND some sort of birth control on a GLOBAL scale.
The amount of carbon dioxide generated by every extra human planted on Earth, over their lifetime, will far outweigh the total reductions achieved by countless others!
[...] Author is Sharon Astyk. Read the whole piece and discussion here. [...]
I like that the post is discussing consumption issues, and that there seem to be lots of people out there even in America who are skeptical that the light-green agenda of big centralized technological investments to solve the systems inherent problems. You all know the drill – hybrid/electric cars, giant solar farms in the desert, 1 billion ton biomass programs for fuel etc. To give Al Gore some credit, his point #4 was a consumption reduction – reducing energy demand in buildings.
I mean, the technological solutions would, for sake of argument, halve the impact per unit of production, but if due to growth (in population and in affluence), you double the consumption, then you go nowhere, as 2.0 * 0.5 = 1.0.
So won’t we need to do both? I mean, if you halve consumption AND halve the negative impacts per unit of production, then 0.5 * 0.5 = 0.25 – you reduce impact by 75% – more than by how much you reduce consumption.
It’s not an either/or proposition – building wind turbines doesn’t have to cause a short-term carbon explosion as Sharon fears (I mean, more than we have already), because the investment money, steel, plastic and transport fuels to make and operate this hypothetical new wind turbine factory and its products will otherwise just be used to make a new plasma screen TV factory.
So, I think:
Yes to renewable energy for feeding into existing power grids (reduced long-term impact)
and
Yes to stricter efficiency (pollution) standards for houses, offices, shops, and manufactured goods like cars and appliances.
But also
Yes to mass transit and bicycles for transportation instead of more freeways, ring roads and cars (giving up your car for a bike to ride around town is I believe the biggest single positive action a typical first world citizen can do for the environment, which also saves money).
and
Yes to living within your means (as individuals and nations)
and
Yes to stopping the economic growth fetish
(a good start would be somehow fixing the monetary system so that the money supply is no longer created by private banks issuing loans and earning interest on the debt in order for rich investors/banks to be able to make more loans for an ever exponentially increasing debt – I’m not sure you could design a more destructive and unstable system if you tried!)
and
Yes to dropping the fertility rate to less than replacement
(Strictly no more than 2 babies per female is quite fair and reasonable for both human society and the planet – people still get to have children that have a chance to grow up healthy, fed and educated – and at least some parts of our planets’ awe-inspiring remaining wilderness and the non-human species they support get a chance to keep on existing).
[...] expenditures on new “green” technologies. See Sharon Astyk’s earlier analysis of Al Gore’s similar assumptions in a terrific posting from 2008, in which she explodes the [...]
Nice post. Looks like wind power is really starting to get some serious consideration in Australia now.
[...] Astyk: ”A New Deal or a War Footing? Thinking Through Our Response to Climate Change” (Casaubon’s Book, [...]