Feedback loops at the end of the era of growth
January 20th, 2010 by Jim JustArchitect and urban planner Andres Duany blames peak oil and global warming on the American lifestyle:
Seth Bauer at the Huffington Post quotes Duany:
It’s where we live, the size of our houses, the distances we drive for work, commerce, play–everything.
And goes on to summarize Duany’s rant:
And it’s all a vicious circle. The reason our houses are so big (and inefficient), he says, is because we have eliminated a healthy civic life. We build homes with giant foyers because we have no public squares. We need media rooms because it’s not easy or pleasant to drive to a multiplex theater, cross a parking lot through an ocean of cars, and pay a fortune for popcorn. We build bars in our basements because there are no neighborhood pubs. We have giant refrigerators and ever-growing storage needs because shopping is both far away and unpleasant (hello, Costco). The result? We heat and air-condition unused rooms in oversized unpleasant houses. And because our home bars and foyers are empty and our media experiences private, we’re lonely, to boot.
But the American lifestyle is really just a symptom of a larger disease – if not industrialization itself, certainly the ideology of growth that it has spawned.
Politicians and economists around the globe are focused on one thing: economic growth. When “the economy” falters, all efforts are towards returning the global economy to a path of growth. As Chris Martenson says in a piece titled Copenhagen & Economic Growth – You Can’t Have Both at the Energy Bulletin:
We need more jobs, we are told; we need economic growth, we need more people consuming more things. Growth is the ever-constant word on politicians’ lips. Official actions amounting to tens of trillions of dollars speak to the fact that this is, in fact, our number-one global priority.
Martenson is spot on in pointing out that any solution to global warming requires that carbon emissions be reduced by a vast amount over the next few decades. But economic growth and reduced emissions are mutually exclusive. You can’t have both.
Even if we can’t muster the moral fortitude do do anything to avert catastrophic global warming, we still may fail in our desperate efforts to maintain economic growth. The primary implication of peak oil is that the era of economic growth is over. The current recession is very much energy-related. The whole concept of recession as a temporary period where growth is briefly interrupted within a long-term trend of economic growth is likely to become irrelevant in a world where oil is becoming ever more expensive to extract and oil supplies are decreasing.
We’re seeing a feedback loop develop with oil eerily similar to the feedback loops operating in the global warming context. The global financial crisis has resulted in oil investment shrinking by 20%, which in turn will result in less oil and more expensive oil in the future, causing more financial turmoil in an ever-worsening downward spiral.
We already are seeing the future beginning to emerge. As the election results in Massachusetts show, that future will hold ugly surprises.