I have already written here about the idea of degrowth, and not in a positive fashion. While the idea is unrealistic, and its proponents are generally supporting it for intellectually and morally questionable reasons, it is a far different thing to say that, at least for substantial portions of the citizenries of the higher-income, more developed countries (and to differing degrees, well beyond these strata), people could easily be living better while consuming less. The reason is not because consumption levels make no contribution to human happiness, or consumer comforts are somehow pernicious, but because our lives are organized--indeed, organized for us--so that we are forced to consume a great deal in ways that, on balance, do not make us happier, and make many of us less happy.
I do not deny that the "manufacture of wants" by marketers, shopping-as-entertainment, and the rest, contain much that is unhealthy and hollow--and compel people to make choices they otherwise would not have, whether due to their manipulation by business, or the social pressure to fit in. However, that seems to me secondary. More significant is the fact that, to refer back to John K. Galbraith, public squalor forces people to pursue private affluence; that, partly because of that squalor (the costs of auto ownership, child care, etc.), two-income families are prone to fall into the two-income trap of which Elizabeth Warren wrote; and the design of consumer goods of all kinds for short lives and disposal rather than repair.
Considering those matters it seems to me that, as David Graeber observed, we are working bullshit jobs--to pay for what I will call "bullshit consumption," consumption that brings us no pleasure or benefit (consumption that, like many a bullshit job, amounts to "duct-taping"), and this, largely for the sake of keeping ourselves in bullshit jobs, while our expenditures keep other people in bullshit jobs in an economy that, in the end, has bullshit for an organizing principle.
Tuesday, May 28, 2019
Why We Really Consume As We Do
Neoliberal environmentalists, befitting their essentially misanthropic, right-wing outlook, and its tendency to reduce major problems to matters of individual failure (as their counterparts in other areas do when discussing poverty, substance abuse, obesity, etc.), make much of the depravity of people's spending and consumption habits. "Oh!" they say, "isn't it horrible! All that money they spend and that gas they burn and all those things they buy and throw away! What horrid self-indulgence! What appalling personal irresponsibility!"
I totally agree that our current consumption patterns are far from ideal. What I have taken issue with in the past, and continue to take issue with now, is their characteristically neoliberal explanation for why it is that people consume as they do. I take the position that there is a good deal of consumption which has nothing to do with the consumer's "choices" in any meaningful sense of that term, and everything to do with choices made by persons far more powerful than they, with a focus on three aspects of this--the private-public balance in our economic lives; the consumption directly required by the fact that it is required of people who work; and finally, the production priorities of manufacturers, who virtually eliminate consumer choice in many key areas.
1. The most basic reason why we consume so much is, to borrow from the ever useful John Kenneth Galbraith, the reality of public poverty, which makes high private consumption necessary to meet any given need. There is no public transport--and so people have no choice but more expensive, more polluting, private cars. There is no national health care system--and so they must buy health care as a commodity sold in the marketplace by a profit-seeking enterprise, which also entails great costs (with the result that the U.S. spends twice per capita what France does per capita, while achieving poorer outcomes, almost half the adult population uninsured and underinsured).
The average annual cost of car ownership is $8,500 per vehicle, and a typical household has two, suggesting a figure of $17,000. At the same time the price of health care for a family of four under a typical employee-sponsored insurance plan will run $28,000. Already this swallows up most of a median household budget (some $56,000 a year), while the pattern continues through every area of life--such as housing (which has contributed to those long commutes in which people burn up so much gas in their cars) or education (private schools, especially at the post-secondary level, demanding vast fees).
2. Much of our consumption is not a matter of indulgence, but a necessity due to our working lives. White collar workers are expected to purchase costly, formal work attire. The manner in which cities have been planned, people housed and work distributed means that each is apt have little choice but to drive a privately owned car long distances each day if they are to work at all. The long hours involved in preparing for work, getting to work, on the job, and then coming back from work, leave little time for meal preparation--and so they have to eat out, or buy pre-prepared frozen meals, simply because they are harried. The long hours, the lack of maternity and paternity leave rights mean that parents of even very young children have little choice but to turn to child care services, using which entails still more driving. (Indeed, the way extra clothes, transport, eating out and child care eat up a two-income household's second income was the basis for Elizabeth Warren's study The Two-Income Trap.) And of course, this taxing, grinding schedule, entails considerable physical and mental stresses, and physical and mental problems that run up their already burdensome medical bills.
3. In addition to the reality that so much consumption is a matter of individuals doing for themselves privately and less efficiently what might be done collectively at lower cost; and the bills, ironically, paid simply for the sake of being able to have a job which will pay the bills; there is the question of the goods that are made available for purchase. Orthodox economic theory imagines the consumer as king, but the reality is entirely different. Especially in an oligopolistic marketplace, consumers buy what business is willing to sell within their price range, and for most the range of choice simply does not include much that is sensible. Many a consumer would love to be offered a choice of goods that includes items which will be durable and long-lasting; and which it will be within the power of a non-specialist to repair more cheaply than replacing them outright. They would love to be able to not pay for the arms race among competing advertisers, love to not pay for features of which they know and understand nothing and which they are unlikely to never use, love to not pay extra for new versions that really offer no advantage over the old versions.
By and large, they do not get such choices. Instead they get goods which will last a short time, which it is extremely inconvenient and expensive to repair so that replacement is the more practical option, which are heavily advertised and loaded with unwanted and unneeded extras and modifications and the rest of what the term "product differentiation" covers. And when they throw out the old goods of this type, because they have been so short-lived and unrepairable, the companies do not exactly make it easy for them to minimize the cost to the environment as they do so. American cities recycle paper and plastic and glass; they do not recycle electronics the same way, dumping the responsibility on the individual consumer who must, yet again, pay a private company out of pocket for something that could be (and should be) a public service--which, inevitably, means less recycling of what can be recycled. When they throw out what cannot be recycled, the companies have not exactly worried about its doing as little damage to nature as possible.
One could imagine the situation being quite different. One could picture a situation where public affluence means that people can live decently with less overall and less private expenditure; where shorter work weeks and decent leave periods translate to less commuting and the rest and therefore less consumption; where people, able to buy even technologically advanced items designed to last, and which they can repair, buy less; and at every stage and in every way, less damage. That so many fail to acknowledge the possibility, indeed reject it vehemently the moment it is mentioned, says less about modern life than it does about their inability or unwillingness to imagine modernity on any other terms--their passionate belief in neoliberal capitalism or nothing, and determination to not proceed from their valid, correct awareness of its ecological sustainability to the social questions inextricably bound up with it.
I totally agree that our current consumption patterns are far from ideal. What I have taken issue with in the past, and continue to take issue with now, is their characteristically neoliberal explanation for why it is that people consume as they do. I take the position that there is a good deal of consumption which has nothing to do with the consumer's "choices" in any meaningful sense of that term, and everything to do with choices made by persons far more powerful than they, with a focus on three aspects of this--the private-public balance in our economic lives; the consumption directly required by the fact that it is required of people who work; and finally, the production priorities of manufacturers, who virtually eliminate consumer choice in many key areas.
1. The most basic reason why we consume so much is, to borrow from the ever useful John Kenneth Galbraith, the reality of public poverty, which makes high private consumption necessary to meet any given need. There is no public transport--and so people have no choice but more expensive, more polluting, private cars. There is no national health care system--and so they must buy health care as a commodity sold in the marketplace by a profit-seeking enterprise, which also entails great costs (with the result that the U.S. spends twice per capita what France does per capita, while achieving poorer outcomes, almost half the adult population uninsured and underinsured).
The average annual cost of car ownership is $8,500 per vehicle, and a typical household has two, suggesting a figure of $17,000. At the same time the price of health care for a family of four under a typical employee-sponsored insurance plan will run $28,000. Already this swallows up most of a median household budget (some $56,000 a year), while the pattern continues through every area of life--such as housing (which has contributed to those long commutes in which people burn up so much gas in their cars) or education (private schools, especially at the post-secondary level, demanding vast fees).
2. Much of our consumption is not a matter of indulgence, but a necessity due to our working lives. White collar workers are expected to purchase costly, formal work attire. The manner in which cities have been planned, people housed and work distributed means that each is apt have little choice but to drive a privately owned car long distances each day if they are to work at all. The long hours involved in preparing for work, getting to work, on the job, and then coming back from work, leave little time for meal preparation--and so they have to eat out, or buy pre-prepared frozen meals, simply because they are harried. The long hours, the lack of maternity and paternity leave rights mean that parents of even very young children have little choice but to turn to child care services, using which entails still more driving. (Indeed, the way extra clothes, transport, eating out and child care eat up a two-income household's second income was the basis for Elizabeth Warren's study The Two-Income Trap.) And of course, this taxing, grinding schedule, entails considerable physical and mental stresses, and physical and mental problems that run up their already burdensome medical bills.
3. In addition to the reality that so much consumption is a matter of individuals doing for themselves privately and less efficiently what might be done collectively at lower cost; and the bills, ironically, paid simply for the sake of being able to have a job which will pay the bills; there is the question of the goods that are made available for purchase. Orthodox economic theory imagines the consumer as king, but the reality is entirely different. Especially in an oligopolistic marketplace, consumers buy what business is willing to sell within their price range, and for most the range of choice simply does not include much that is sensible. Many a consumer would love to be offered a choice of goods that includes items which will be durable and long-lasting; and which it will be within the power of a non-specialist to repair more cheaply than replacing them outright. They would love to be able to not pay for the arms race among competing advertisers, love to not pay for features of which they know and understand nothing and which they are unlikely to never use, love to not pay extra for new versions that really offer no advantage over the old versions.
By and large, they do not get such choices. Instead they get goods which will last a short time, which it is extremely inconvenient and expensive to repair so that replacement is the more practical option, which are heavily advertised and loaded with unwanted and unneeded extras and modifications and the rest of what the term "product differentiation" covers. And when they throw out the old goods of this type, because they have been so short-lived and unrepairable, the companies do not exactly make it easy for them to minimize the cost to the environment as they do so. American cities recycle paper and plastic and glass; they do not recycle electronics the same way, dumping the responsibility on the individual consumer who must, yet again, pay a private company out of pocket for something that could be (and should be) a public service--which, inevitably, means less recycling of what can be recycled. When they throw out what cannot be recycled, the companies have not exactly worried about its doing as little damage to nature as possible.
One could imagine the situation being quite different. One could picture a situation where public affluence means that people can live decently with less overall and less private expenditure; where shorter work weeks and decent leave periods translate to less commuting and the rest and therefore less consumption; where people, able to buy even technologically advanced items designed to last, and which they can repair, buy less; and at every stage and in every way, less damage. That so many fail to acknowledge the possibility, indeed reject it vehemently the moment it is mentioned, says less about modern life than it does about their inability or unwillingness to imagine modernity on any other terms--their passionate belief in neoliberal capitalism or nothing, and determination to not proceed from their valid, correct awareness of its ecological sustainability to the social questions inextricably bound up with it.
Monday, April 22, 2019
Don't Believe the Trolls; 100 Percent Renewable Energy is Our Best Bet
One reality too little acknowledged is that the debate about the manner in which we produce and consume energy is dominated by those who can fund research and advocacy. By and large, it is the businesses supplying energy from fossil fuels and atomic fission, and those broadly sympathetic to their political agenda, who have such means, and use them, skewing the debate through the innumerable propaganda outlets which pass for "think tanks" and "news media." And they, of course, have been relentlessly hostile to renewable energy (with the nuclear sector lobbying governments hard to make life as difficult as possible for wind and solar producers, and trying equally hard to discredit those sources of energy in the eyes of the public).
At the same time much mainstream environmentalism tends toward extreme (and often, perversely gleeful) pessimism about technological possibilities for saving modern civilization--inclined to ignore the benefits and emphasize the costs of any development.
Making matters worse, popular science reporting, dependent as it is on sourcing, cannot avoid being affected by these tendencies. This is all the more so due to the conventional and uncritical outlook of mainstream journalists; the reality that many of those who work as science journalists do so with surprisingly little scientific knowledge, and still less understanding of the methods, economics, politics, sociology of science; and the reality that profit-minded news outlets cater to the appetite of some for "disaster porn," and generally seek attention through shock. All of this drives them to frequently use for their headlines the most negative possible reading of a given situation--and then, down in the text of the article, which fewer people will actually see, while those who will see it have already had their first impression of the piece formed, back off the extreme claim that the analysis does not actually support (for instance, this claim that wind farms may make global warming worse rather than better through their effect on wind flows).
In this post I address the arguments made by proponents of expanded fossil fuel or nuclear use (and collapse-besotted doomsayers) against the possibility of renewable energy sources becoming the principal providers of electricity in the near future, and especially the potentials of wind and solar energy in this regard. In particular this post examines the common claims that renewables are "too expensive," whether in price terms, or the inconvenience to consumers through their being "too unreliable"; the related charge that they offer "too little Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI)"; and their being "too resource-intensive," whether due to the pollution they cause, their land area requirements, or the raw materials they consume, to such a degree as to render them a "cure worse than the disease"; and debunks each of them in turn. Finally it turns to the prospects for renewables becoming still more rather than less favorable in the years ahead.
"Too Expensive--and Unreliable"
A longtime objection to renewable energy has been its reputed high cost, historically declining due to technical progress and rising production volumes, but still higher than fossil fuels in the area of electricity production until very recently. The last few years, however, have seen the levelized, unsubsidized cost of wind energy, and even utility-scale photovoltaic solar energy become a cheaper source of power than coal ($29-$56 per megawatt-hour for wind, $36-$46 for solar depending on type, versus $60-$143 for coal according to a by-no-means-bullish report from Lazard Asset Management). Indeed, we have reached the point where constructing new wind and solar is cheaper than running existing coal facilities. The same goes for wind and solar relative to nuclear energy ($112-$189), while the price of these renewables is edging below that of combined cycle gas ($41-$74). Community, and rooftop commercial and industrial photovoltaics ($73-170 per megawatt-hour), are also producing electricity at prices comparable to nuclear power, while their price range also overlaps that of coal power; and even pricier concentrated solar thermal has begun to prove economically viable in particularly favorable locations.
Subsidies
Impressive as these figures are, one can argue that they still underestimate the progress renewables have made, and perhaps grossly--because of subsidies not to them, but to their competitors. Much as free-market pietists bemoan the measure of government support that enabled the enlarging scale of production and continued research and development that let renewables attain their present level of productivity (such as feed-in tariffs), the fact remains that this pales next to the extremely long and continuing history of far more massive subsidy of fossil fuels. This is all the more striking if one counts the tolerance of the massive externalities of fossil fuel production and consumption--its negative effects on health and the environment, the bill for which is paid by other people in other ways. Reasonably conservative calculations indicate that the total may run as much as $1 trillion a year for the U.S. alone, and over $5 trillion globally--such that were oil companies actually expected to pay for rectifying the associated market failures (the solution libertarians always advocate in theory and somehow always oppose in practice), they would swiftly go bankrupt. Nuclear energy, too, has been a massive recipient of subsidies, with colossal externalities (the bill for the cleanup after the Fukushima disaster already at $200 billion, and still counting).
The renewables-bashers typically ignore that side of the balance sheet entirely. However, no plausible calculation of the scale of public support to renewable energy production, or tolerance for any externalities that its production may entail, comes close to such figures, not for recent years, and cetainly not for the full history of the two kinds of energy production. In short, renewables have been competing and winning in spite of the government's distribution of subsidy, not because of it, and would likely be doing even better today were fossil fuels not so heavily backed, and as a result the price of oil, coal and gas would be so much higher.
Reliability
All that is very well the renewables-basher may acknowledge, but renewables simply cannot do what those more established energy production methods can with regard to continuity and flexibility of output, can they? One needs "baseload" power supplying a high minimum of electricity round the clock. Renewables cannot provide that, for the wind does not blow all the time, and the sun does not shine all the time. Therefore we can expect to see traditional, baseload sources such as coal and nuclear continuing to operate around the clock, and we could expect to see such traditional sources remain the mainstay of the grid (maybe eighty percent of it), reducing renewables to a supporting player. And so in the end not much has changed.
The Problem of "Baseload"
The characterization of the need for baseload electricity is increasingly questionable, not only hypothetically in light of evolving technology, but large-scale, real-world practice. First and foremost, that word "baseload" that renewables-bashers love to use to browbeat their opponents in debate "really means . . . too much power when you don’t want it, and not enough when you do." In an age of "smart grids" affording more detailed monitoring and control, this wasteful practice has increasingly given way to an emphasis on "flexibility"--the ability to direct power where it is needed, when it is needed, in line with fluctuations in supply and demand. Operative of a sufficiently wide area, such grids let areas generating power surpluses supply electricity to other areas capable of making use of that power, and vice-versa as conditions change--as has already been lengthily demonstrated in northern Europe. Dense, urbanized, highly industrialized Denmark and Germany have, despite being on the cutting edge of wind and solar investment, displayed superior grid reliability to other nations utilizing more traditional power sources and methods. Germany's performance actually improved (its already low 21 minutes lost per year in 2006 falling to just 15 minutes in 2017, even as the share of renewable-generated power in its electricity mix nearly tripled from 12.5 to 36.5 percent of the total). For its part, Denmark is doing about as well with an even higher share (deriving 44 percent of its electricity from wind in the latter year). Indeed, a recent estimate holds that the current technical state of the art may enable the problem to be managed in a grid deriving even 60 percent of its electricity from variable wind and solar.
Complementary Power Sources
The fact that flexible, connective grids can do much to compensate for the intermittency of renewables, however, falls far short of the palliatives, one of which is suggested by the claim that the wind does not blow all the time and the sun does not shine all the time. This could be usefully corrected to read "the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine all the time everywhere at the same time." One can derive considerable advantage from using the two in a complementary fashion, with solar power generating electricity when wind cannot, and the reverse also operative. Indeed, hybrid wind/solar farms combining both forms of production at the same site have already been demonstrated--and the practice been shown to provide a good deal of stability, even at local levels, while further enhancing the stability of grids over wider areas in favored regions.
Energy Storage for the Sake of Dispatchability
In addition to the advantages of a flexible grid incorporating a mix of different energy sources, there are a range of options for storing energy for the sake of its "dispatch" at need later. The cost of batteries admittedly remains high (even the cheapest option, the use of lithium batteries with photovoltaic solar power wiping out its cost advantage), but older, proven alternatives exist. One is the pumped hydroelectric storage which has complemented nuclear power generation for a half century. Another is the storage of excess heat in water, ice and underground rocks, which can when needed be released to drive steam turbines. Concentrated solar thermal lends itself particularly well to such storage, solar towers with storage now price-competitive with nuclear power, and even coal, in many locations ($98-$181 per megawatt-hour). While the spread of cheaper photovoltaic solar has far outpaced the development of solar thermal power, this enables its round-the-clock operation, and its more generally contributing to grid stability.
"Too Little Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI)"
Of course, the matter of price and reliability does not entirely settle the issue. Apparent cheapness can obscure a much more complex and problematic picture--and there may be other ways of calculating costs and benefits, with subsidy payouts only one of the factors skewing the matter.
Accordingly some prefer to speak in terms of Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI)--simply put, the ratio between the energy output of a system, and the energy it took to build and operate it. The EROEI concept can also be analyzed "macroeconomically," with the EROEI of a given society calculated, which has led to arguments that a given level of such return may be minimal for a society to maintain a given level of complexity.
A favorite tactic of renewables-bashers is to claim a particular EROEI figure as essential for modern life to go on, then present figures for renewable energy's output well below that mark--then smugly stand back and gloat over the dashed hopes of this energy form's proponents.
Alas, while the term EROEI sounds intimidatingly scientific, the reality is that EROEI calculations are highly unstandardized. They can be computed in as many ways as there are people to perform the computation, with the result that they vary enormously. Moreover, the factors entering into the calculation are subject to change over time, with rapid change especially likely to skew the estimates. (It appears plausible that the higher-performing wind turbines or photovoltaics of today have a higher EROEI than those of several decades ago, while as oil and gas production relies on less inaccessible supplies and more costly extraction methods, the EROEI of fossil fuels may be going in the opposite direction.) And with renewable energy sources the calculation is trickier because, compared with other sources, siting can make so much difference (the EROEI on solar in equatorial desert very different from that in the polar regions).
All of this leaves much room for the play of analysts' prejudices, enabling anyone to cherry-pick statistics that appear to support their argument, which even a specialist would need a good deal of time and effort to pick apart in detail. (The calculations regarding that far more established, prolific and technologically stable source, nuclear energy, have produced figures ranging from 60 to less than one, meaning that nuclear energy production actually uses up more energy than it produces.)
The question of how high an EROEI we must have to go on with modern life is even more complex and confusing. Clearly an energy source must "pay back" more than it takes to be worthwhile, but the question of how much more would be required to provide a satisfactory base for modern civilization is exceedingly uncertain, and no less contentious and clouded by prejudices. (Some say an EROEI as low as 5-7 would be adequate, while others cite far higher figures, suggesting 40 and more.)
In the absence of deeper explanation and context, any one such claim does not mean very much--and indeed, some go so far as to question not only the value of most such analysis (even its originator Charles Hall acknowledging the problematic nature of its application in these debates), but the value of the concept as such (for example, because EROEI is not the end all and be all of the gross and net energy actually made available).
Still, it seems worth noting that considerable meta-analysis of the subject, endeavoring to critically assess the available body of study, indicates that EROEI for many renewable energy sources is at least as good as many established sources in this regard. A 2010 "meta-analysis" examining fifty different studies conducted between 1977 and 2007 concluded that, according to even the more conservative operational studies, the average EROEI of a wind turbine was in the vicinity of 20 to 1. The figures for photovoltaic solar tend to be less impressive, but impressive nonetheless, another such meta-analysis providing figures ranging from 8 to 34. Solar thermal power, in spite of its high cost, tends to be rated more highly than solar photovoltaic power, with one 2013 study--notorious for its pessimistic estimates regarding renewable energy and very high estimates regarding established sources--placing it at 19 (in contrast with 16 for wind, and under 4 for photovoltaics).
By contrast, the EROEI on fossil fuel and nuclear production in North America is commonly reckoned as running in the 10-15 range.
At the least, this offers significant grounds for the position that--to the extent that we are getting anywhere in calculating these matters at all--actually existing wind and solar do no worse than traditional power sources (with this especially going for the less conventional oil production, as with fracking and tar sands exploitation, on which expanding fossil fuel production relies).
Of course, it must be acknowledged that where renewable energy is concerned, the combination of production with storage costs cuts into their return. Still, where solar thermal was concerned, at least, the aforementioned 2013 study reported an EROEI of 9 for the practice, above the threshold of economic viability set by the authors themselves.
"Too Resource-Intensive"
A certain sort of renewables-basher, trolling advocates of the technology, brings up, as if it were a profound revelation, "Did you know that building wind turbines and solar panels actually requires stuff? Stuff they dig out of the ground and process in factories? How horrible! Did you know that it actually takes energy to do all that? And you know where energy comes from, right? Fossil fuels! Horribly polluting! And you realize they have to put them somewhere, on actual land! Ugh! Besides, we'll run out of the resources we need before they can make a difference anyway. So, totally a deal-breaker."
The implication is that the proponent of renewables thought these items appeared by magic--and it is more insulting than intimidating. Yes, producing these technologies does involve the consumption of resources, which may be more or less polluting. No one imagined otherwise. However, the question is not whether energy production from renewable sources is ecologically perfect. The question is whether it is significantly preferable to the other options available--and when we are discussing climate change, whether the production, installation and operation of the required systems generates less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.
Pollution
Where pollution is concerned, it is indisputable that wind turbines and solar panels do not release pollutants into the air in the manner of coal and gas plants. In fact, when in operation wind turbines and photovoltaics produce no greenhouse gas emissions whatsoever. Emissions are involved in their production, installation, and disposal, but the evidence is that this is only a minute fraction of what is generated by fossil fuels. Coal produces almost a kilogram (980 grams) of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour, and natural gas nearly half that much (465 grams). By contrast all the costs associated with wind-energy amount to 99 percent less carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt-hour than coal, and 98 percent less than natural gas (11 grams). Comparisons with nuclear energy seem more variable, given the variety of grades of uranium ore and the methods of their enrichment, among other factors, but it is safe to say that wind is a rough match with nuclear energy at its cleanest, and an order of magnitude or more better than nuclear energy at its dirtiest (130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour according to one estimate, with others running higher still).
As this goes to show wind power is not, for the time being, carbon-free--but this is a far different thing from implying (or outright declaring), as its detractors so regularly and vehemently do, that its present (comparatively minor!) fossil fuel requirement makes it no better than a coal or gas plant. The same goes for solar power in both its photovoltaic and thermal forms, which in even relatively critical assessments similarly represents an improvement over coal and gas. Moreover, one can envision even this slight footprint being further reduced--if the manufacture and transport of such systems itself becomes increasingly based on renewable sources (as would increasingly be the case as the transition away from fossil fuels advanced).
Land Use
All right, the renewables-basher concedes, maybe renewables do mean less pollution. But they require vast amounts of land area. Just look at those colossal wind farms and solar arrays! Think of how this would diminish our wilderness areas! The sacrifice of all that land we could be reforesting! (Suddenly oil industry shills become tree-huggers. Convenient.) Compare that with that wonder of efficient land use, a compact, little, nuclear power plant . . .
As it happens, calculations which show nuclear energy to be an efficient land user consider only the power plant, not the surrounding exclusion zone, nor the land use required by the rest of the fuel cycle, from uranium mining to waste disposal, creating a false picture. Not only does this sharply cut into any claims for nuclear energy's efficient land use, but there is the very different manner in which wind farms use their land. Far from placing all of their territory off-limits, other than that on which towers actually stand--over 99 percent of it--remains free, and has been successfully used for such activities as farming, with the land "cropped up to the base of each tower." The result is that, correctly utilized, they may be markedly more efficient land users than nuclear power plants.
Solar arrays (both photovoltaic, and concentrated solar, comparable in this respect) may likewise be a more efficient use of land than nuclear facilities (or coal production). They also have the potential to be more efficient still in practical terms, because they can with relative ease be deployed on otherwise unusable land, like contaminated areas, salt-affected land, and the surfaces of water reservoirs.
Raw Materials Sufficiency
Very well, the renewables-basher may grant, but a 100 percent renewable energy economy will still be out of the question regardless, because there is simply not enough material for the job. It is, for example, common for those attacking renewable energy to point to the steel requirements of wind turbines. However, the extent to which this is a genuine obstacle is, at the very least, debatable. One calculation recently posited that were the world to rely on 2-megawatt wind turbines for 100 percent of its electricity production, it would need 4 million such turbines, each averaging 260 tons, for a total of some 1 billion tons of steel.
Staggering as this sounds, it is worth remembering that the world produced 1.8 billion tons of steel in 2018. A billion tons is a bit over half of that. This would indeed be an intimidating figure--if someone was seriously considering switching to a 100 percent reliance on onshore 2-megawatt turbines for the world's electric power in a single year. To my knowledge, no one has suggested either such a complete reliance on this one source, or such a timeline for making such a complete transition to renewables.
It is worth noting, too, that any ambitious program of wind turbine construction would not come on top of existing steel production, but substantially represent a shift in the end of use of existing steel output to this from the fossil fuel industry--whose pumpjacks and derricks, pipelines and tankers, storage facilities and power plants, make it a colossal user of steel. (I have found comprehensive figures elusive, but Russia alone shipped four million tons of steel just for pipe for the oil and gas industry in 2018.)
In short, the idea that steel requirements singlehandedly doom any 100 percent renewable project to failure wildly exaggerates the issue. Indeed, serious study of the prospect of bottlenecks generally pays it little heed, instead focusing on the far more germane question of securing sufficient rare earth metals. However, examining the literature one quickly finds that the problem is less one of the scarcity of such resources in nature, or the technical impossibility of exploiting them, than the fact that demand for them could outstrip the world's productive capacity, and the concentration of some of these resources in a few countries, and above all, China--the vagaries of power politics, rather than natural abundance or the technological state of the art, the issue. This is not to be dismissed, but it is a very different thing from saying that the problem is intrinsically intractable, let alone that palliatives are unavailable (with quite modest recycling rates perhaps sufficing to redress even the more serious problems).
The Scope for Improvement
As demonstrated here, renewables, wind and solar included, even without subsidy, have become cheaper than established energy production sources. They demonstrate great reliability in practical operation, when a suitable mix of them is incorporated into a properly connective and flexible grid. Where pollution, and especially greenhouse gases, are concerned, they are, by orders of magnitude, superior to coal and gas use; their land area requirements are less exorbitant than their detractors claim, and perhaps superior to those of nuclear energy; and it appears that, at the least, the question of raw materials sufficiency has been overstated.
It would be excessive to claim that every problem on the road to a 100 percent renewable energy future has been solved. It seems plausible that the challenge of keeping the grid reliable will rise as renewable energy production expands in scale, and it is far from clear that every technology and practice required for the task has been fully worked out. (Indeed, this has been by far the most contentious issue in the debate sparked by Mark Jacobson's highly welcome plan for shifting the world to a 100 percent renewable energy economy by 2030.) It is equally true that the expanded production of wind and solar-generated electricity will require some mix of expanded mining efforts, recycling, and substitution far from clear or certain at the moment.
Yet, that not every detail has been worked out is an odd basis for vehement denial that a sharp expansion in renewable energy-based electricity production can be viable. A measure of uncertainty is always part of significant action in the world, the more so as that action is large-scale and deeply directed, while the alternatives appear even more doubtful. An expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption is already ecologically unacceptable in light of the persistent, massive failure to protect the environment from their massive pollution, and problematic in light of its falling return on investment by every measure (not least, because of the high reliance on unconventional oil to increase output). Similarly the expansion of nuclear power to meet our electrical needs, even were it deemed desirable, is a highly problematic endeavor given the technology actually at hand. That this does not usually concern the advocates of those technologies much reflects the double standard to which they tend (whether discussing subsidies, materials consumption, or anything else), and the fact that not only misinformation and shoddy reasoning, but bad faith, commonly underlies their arguments.
Moreover, it is clearly the case that technologists are only beginning to exploit the vast potentials for improvement in every one of the areas discussed here. The building of taller wind turbines with longer blades and higher capacities, and the optimization of wind farm layouts, can increase their yield appreciably. (Indeed, the increasingly tall towers on which the turbines are mounted is opening up the possibility of siting wind farms in new locations, not least inside forests.) At the same time, increasingly high-output units, as well as the possibility of reducing the carbon footprint of steel production with existing methods, hold out the hope of further economizing the emissions, land use and materials consumption of every kilowatt-hour of energy generated by this means.
It is much the same story with solar power, where the fuller utilization of individual photovoltaic cells through the use of more of their surface area, and the denser packing of panels with more cells, among other developments, show great promise of continuing the increase in their productivity and the drop in their cost--which will extend the cost-effectiveness to increasingly dispersed, small-scale residential production that could take much of the burden off of centralized production and extensive grids. Technologists are only beginning to properly explore the possibilities for enhancing grid efficiency and flexibility (the electrification of car fleets may actually be a help rather than a hindrance), and storing electricity from any and all sources, with the cost of what is perhaps the most flexible option, battery storage, plunging with much the same rapidity as the price of renewable energy production. Meanwhile, efforts to increase the recycling of rare earth metals, already underway because of the broad interest in the matter (the electronics sector relies on them heavily), offer some grounds for optimism in regard to materials requirements.
Any and all of this will mean cheaper and more reliable electrical power from renewables, considered in monetary terms, EROEI terms or anything else. It also holds out considerable hope of further lightening such burdens as the production of electricity from these sources seems likely to place on the natural environment.
None of this is cause for complacency--the pressure to move even faster than we already are too great for that. Accordingly these potentials are grounds not to calmly await the play of market force, but to back the swiftest and fullest development and deployment of all these technologies--not least, through "moonshot" efforts aimed at resolving the storage and raw materials problems that may lie ahead--to the end of deriving 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy at the earliest feasible date in a national and ultimately global Green New Deal.
At the same time much mainstream environmentalism tends toward extreme (and often, perversely gleeful) pessimism about technological possibilities for saving modern civilization--inclined to ignore the benefits and emphasize the costs of any development.
Making matters worse, popular science reporting, dependent as it is on sourcing, cannot avoid being affected by these tendencies. This is all the more so due to the conventional and uncritical outlook of mainstream journalists; the reality that many of those who work as science journalists do so with surprisingly little scientific knowledge, and still less understanding of the methods, economics, politics, sociology of science; and the reality that profit-minded news outlets cater to the appetite of some for "disaster porn," and generally seek attention through shock. All of this drives them to frequently use for their headlines the most negative possible reading of a given situation--and then, down in the text of the article, which fewer people will actually see, while those who will see it have already had their first impression of the piece formed, back off the extreme claim that the analysis does not actually support (for instance, this claim that wind farms may make global warming worse rather than better through their effect on wind flows).
In this post I address the arguments made by proponents of expanded fossil fuel or nuclear use (and collapse-besotted doomsayers) against the possibility of renewable energy sources becoming the principal providers of electricity in the near future, and especially the potentials of wind and solar energy in this regard. In particular this post examines the common claims that renewables are "too expensive," whether in price terms, or the inconvenience to consumers through their being "too unreliable"; the related charge that they offer "too little Energy Return on Energy Invested (EROEI)"; and their being "too resource-intensive," whether due to the pollution they cause, their land area requirements, or the raw materials they consume, to such a degree as to render them a "cure worse than the disease"; and debunks each of them in turn. Finally it turns to the prospects for renewables becoming still more rather than less favorable in the years ahead.
"Too Expensive--and Unreliable"
A longtime objection to renewable energy has been its reputed high cost, historically declining due to technical progress and rising production volumes, but still higher than fossil fuels in the area of electricity production until very recently. The last few years, however, have seen the levelized, unsubsidized cost of wind energy, and even utility-scale photovoltaic solar energy become a cheaper source of power than coal ($29-$56 per megawatt-hour for wind, $36-$46 for solar depending on type, versus $60-$143 for coal according to a by-no-means-bullish report from Lazard Asset Management). Indeed, we have reached the point where constructing new wind and solar is cheaper than running existing coal facilities. The same goes for wind and solar relative to nuclear energy ($112-$189), while the price of these renewables is edging below that of combined cycle gas ($41-$74). Community, and rooftop commercial and industrial photovoltaics ($73-170 per megawatt-hour), are also producing electricity at prices comparable to nuclear power, while their price range also overlaps that of coal power; and even pricier concentrated solar thermal has begun to prove economically viable in particularly favorable locations.
Subsidies
Impressive as these figures are, one can argue that they still underestimate the progress renewables have made, and perhaps grossly--because of subsidies not to them, but to their competitors. Much as free-market pietists bemoan the measure of government support that enabled the enlarging scale of production and continued research and development that let renewables attain their present level of productivity (such as feed-in tariffs), the fact remains that this pales next to the extremely long and continuing history of far more massive subsidy of fossil fuels. This is all the more striking if one counts the tolerance of the massive externalities of fossil fuel production and consumption--its negative effects on health and the environment, the bill for which is paid by other people in other ways. Reasonably conservative calculations indicate that the total may run as much as $1 trillion a year for the U.S. alone, and over $5 trillion globally--such that were oil companies actually expected to pay for rectifying the associated market failures (the solution libertarians always advocate in theory and somehow always oppose in practice), they would swiftly go bankrupt. Nuclear energy, too, has been a massive recipient of subsidies, with colossal externalities (the bill for the cleanup after the Fukushima disaster already at $200 billion, and still counting).
The renewables-bashers typically ignore that side of the balance sheet entirely. However, no plausible calculation of the scale of public support to renewable energy production, or tolerance for any externalities that its production may entail, comes close to such figures, not for recent years, and cetainly not for the full history of the two kinds of energy production. In short, renewables have been competing and winning in spite of the government's distribution of subsidy, not because of it, and would likely be doing even better today were fossil fuels not so heavily backed, and as a result the price of oil, coal and gas would be so much higher.
Reliability
All that is very well the renewables-basher may acknowledge, but renewables simply cannot do what those more established energy production methods can with regard to continuity and flexibility of output, can they? One needs "baseload" power supplying a high minimum of electricity round the clock. Renewables cannot provide that, for the wind does not blow all the time, and the sun does not shine all the time. Therefore we can expect to see traditional, baseload sources such as coal and nuclear continuing to operate around the clock, and we could expect to see such traditional sources remain the mainstay of the grid (maybe eighty percent of it), reducing renewables to a supporting player. And so in the end not much has changed.
The Problem of "Baseload"
The characterization of the need for baseload electricity is increasingly questionable, not only hypothetically in light of evolving technology, but large-scale, real-world practice. First and foremost, that word "baseload" that renewables-bashers love to use to browbeat their opponents in debate "really means . . . too much power when you don’t want it, and not enough when you do." In an age of "smart grids" affording more detailed monitoring and control, this wasteful practice has increasingly given way to an emphasis on "flexibility"--the ability to direct power where it is needed, when it is needed, in line with fluctuations in supply and demand. Operative of a sufficiently wide area, such grids let areas generating power surpluses supply electricity to other areas capable of making use of that power, and vice-versa as conditions change--as has already been lengthily demonstrated in northern Europe. Dense, urbanized, highly industrialized Denmark and Germany have, despite being on the cutting edge of wind and solar investment, displayed superior grid reliability to other nations utilizing more traditional power sources and methods. Germany's performance actually improved (its already low 21 minutes lost per year in 2006 falling to just 15 minutes in 2017, even as the share of renewable-generated power in its electricity mix nearly tripled from 12.5 to 36.5 percent of the total). For its part, Denmark is doing about as well with an even higher share (deriving 44 percent of its electricity from wind in the latter year). Indeed, a recent estimate holds that the current technical state of the art may enable the problem to be managed in a grid deriving even 60 percent of its electricity from variable wind and solar.
Complementary Power Sources
The fact that flexible, connective grids can do much to compensate for the intermittency of renewables, however, falls far short of the palliatives, one of which is suggested by the claim that the wind does not blow all the time and the sun does not shine all the time. This could be usefully corrected to read "the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine all the time everywhere at the same time." One can derive considerable advantage from using the two in a complementary fashion, with solar power generating electricity when wind cannot, and the reverse also operative. Indeed, hybrid wind/solar farms combining both forms of production at the same site have already been demonstrated--and the practice been shown to provide a good deal of stability, even at local levels, while further enhancing the stability of grids over wider areas in favored regions.
Energy Storage for the Sake of Dispatchability
In addition to the advantages of a flexible grid incorporating a mix of different energy sources, there are a range of options for storing energy for the sake of its "dispatch" at need later. The cost of batteries admittedly remains high (even the cheapest option, the use of lithium batteries with photovoltaic solar power wiping out its cost advantage), but older, proven alternatives exist. One is the pumped hydroelectric storage which has complemented nuclear power generation for a half century. Another is the storage of excess heat in water, ice and underground rocks, which can when needed be released to drive steam turbines. Concentrated solar thermal lends itself particularly well to such storage, solar towers with storage now price-competitive with nuclear power, and even coal, in many locations ($98-$181 per megawatt-hour). While the spread of cheaper photovoltaic solar has far outpaced the development of solar thermal power, this enables its round-the-clock operation, and its more generally contributing to grid stability.
"Too Little Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI)"
Of course, the matter of price and reliability does not entirely settle the issue. Apparent cheapness can obscure a much more complex and problematic picture--and there may be other ways of calculating costs and benefits, with subsidy payouts only one of the factors skewing the matter.
Accordingly some prefer to speak in terms of Energy Return On Energy Invested (EROEI)--simply put, the ratio between the energy output of a system, and the energy it took to build and operate it. The EROEI concept can also be analyzed "macroeconomically," with the EROEI of a given society calculated, which has led to arguments that a given level of such return may be minimal for a society to maintain a given level of complexity.
A favorite tactic of renewables-bashers is to claim a particular EROEI figure as essential for modern life to go on, then present figures for renewable energy's output well below that mark--then smugly stand back and gloat over the dashed hopes of this energy form's proponents.
Alas, while the term EROEI sounds intimidatingly scientific, the reality is that EROEI calculations are highly unstandardized. They can be computed in as many ways as there are people to perform the computation, with the result that they vary enormously. Moreover, the factors entering into the calculation are subject to change over time, with rapid change especially likely to skew the estimates. (It appears plausible that the higher-performing wind turbines or photovoltaics of today have a higher EROEI than those of several decades ago, while as oil and gas production relies on less inaccessible supplies and more costly extraction methods, the EROEI of fossil fuels may be going in the opposite direction.) And with renewable energy sources the calculation is trickier because, compared with other sources, siting can make so much difference (the EROEI on solar in equatorial desert very different from that in the polar regions).
All of this leaves much room for the play of analysts' prejudices, enabling anyone to cherry-pick statistics that appear to support their argument, which even a specialist would need a good deal of time and effort to pick apart in detail. (The calculations regarding that far more established, prolific and technologically stable source, nuclear energy, have produced figures ranging from 60 to less than one, meaning that nuclear energy production actually uses up more energy than it produces.)
The question of how high an EROEI we must have to go on with modern life is even more complex and confusing. Clearly an energy source must "pay back" more than it takes to be worthwhile, but the question of how much more would be required to provide a satisfactory base for modern civilization is exceedingly uncertain, and no less contentious and clouded by prejudices. (Some say an EROEI as low as 5-7 would be adequate, while others cite far higher figures, suggesting 40 and more.)
In the absence of deeper explanation and context, any one such claim does not mean very much--and indeed, some go so far as to question not only the value of most such analysis (even its originator Charles Hall acknowledging the problematic nature of its application in these debates), but the value of the concept as such (for example, because EROEI is not the end all and be all of the gross and net energy actually made available).
Still, it seems worth noting that considerable meta-analysis of the subject, endeavoring to critically assess the available body of study, indicates that EROEI for many renewable energy sources is at least as good as many established sources in this regard. A 2010 "meta-analysis" examining fifty different studies conducted between 1977 and 2007 concluded that, according to even the more conservative operational studies, the average EROEI of a wind turbine was in the vicinity of 20 to 1. The figures for photovoltaic solar tend to be less impressive, but impressive nonetheless, another such meta-analysis providing figures ranging from 8 to 34. Solar thermal power, in spite of its high cost, tends to be rated more highly than solar photovoltaic power, with one 2013 study--notorious for its pessimistic estimates regarding renewable energy and very high estimates regarding established sources--placing it at 19 (in contrast with 16 for wind, and under 4 for photovoltaics).
By contrast, the EROEI on fossil fuel and nuclear production in North America is commonly reckoned as running in the 10-15 range.
At the least, this offers significant grounds for the position that--to the extent that we are getting anywhere in calculating these matters at all--actually existing wind and solar do no worse than traditional power sources (with this especially going for the less conventional oil production, as with fracking and tar sands exploitation, on which expanding fossil fuel production relies).
Of course, it must be acknowledged that where renewable energy is concerned, the combination of production with storage costs cuts into their return. Still, where solar thermal was concerned, at least, the aforementioned 2013 study reported an EROEI of 9 for the practice, above the threshold of economic viability set by the authors themselves.
"Too Resource-Intensive"
A certain sort of renewables-basher, trolling advocates of the technology, brings up, as if it were a profound revelation, "Did you know that building wind turbines and solar panels actually requires stuff? Stuff they dig out of the ground and process in factories? How horrible! Did you know that it actually takes energy to do all that? And you know where energy comes from, right? Fossil fuels! Horribly polluting! And you realize they have to put them somewhere, on actual land! Ugh! Besides, we'll run out of the resources we need before they can make a difference anyway. So, totally a deal-breaker."
The implication is that the proponent of renewables thought these items appeared by magic--and it is more insulting than intimidating. Yes, producing these technologies does involve the consumption of resources, which may be more or less polluting. No one imagined otherwise. However, the question is not whether energy production from renewable sources is ecologically perfect. The question is whether it is significantly preferable to the other options available--and when we are discussing climate change, whether the production, installation and operation of the required systems generates less carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases than fossil fuels.
Pollution
Where pollution is concerned, it is indisputable that wind turbines and solar panels do not release pollutants into the air in the manner of coal and gas plants. In fact, when in operation wind turbines and photovoltaics produce no greenhouse gas emissions whatsoever. Emissions are involved in their production, installation, and disposal, but the evidence is that this is only a minute fraction of what is generated by fossil fuels. Coal produces almost a kilogram (980 grams) of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour, and natural gas nearly half that much (465 grams). By contrast all the costs associated with wind-energy amount to 99 percent less carbon dioxide emissions per kilowatt-hour than coal, and 98 percent less than natural gas (11 grams). Comparisons with nuclear energy seem more variable, given the variety of grades of uranium ore and the methods of their enrichment, among other factors, but it is safe to say that wind is a rough match with nuclear energy at its cleanest, and an order of magnitude or more better than nuclear energy at its dirtiest (130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt-hour according to one estimate, with others running higher still).
As this goes to show wind power is not, for the time being, carbon-free--but this is a far different thing from implying (or outright declaring), as its detractors so regularly and vehemently do, that its present (comparatively minor!) fossil fuel requirement makes it no better than a coal or gas plant. The same goes for solar power in both its photovoltaic and thermal forms, which in even relatively critical assessments similarly represents an improvement over coal and gas. Moreover, one can envision even this slight footprint being further reduced--if the manufacture and transport of such systems itself becomes increasingly based on renewable sources (as would increasingly be the case as the transition away from fossil fuels advanced).
Land Use
All right, the renewables-basher concedes, maybe renewables do mean less pollution. But they require vast amounts of land area. Just look at those colossal wind farms and solar arrays! Think of how this would diminish our wilderness areas! The sacrifice of all that land we could be reforesting! (Suddenly oil industry shills become tree-huggers. Convenient.) Compare that with that wonder of efficient land use, a compact, little, nuclear power plant . . .
As it happens, calculations which show nuclear energy to be an efficient land user consider only the power plant, not the surrounding exclusion zone, nor the land use required by the rest of the fuel cycle, from uranium mining to waste disposal, creating a false picture. Not only does this sharply cut into any claims for nuclear energy's efficient land use, but there is the very different manner in which wind farms use their land. Far from placing all of their territory off-limits, other than that on which towers actually stand--over 99 percent of it--remains free, and has been successfully used for such activities as farming, with the land "cropped up to the base of each tower." The result is that, correctly utilized, they may be markedly more efficient land users than nuclear power plants.
Solar arrays (both photovoltaic, and concentrated solar, comparable in this respect) may likewise be a more efficient use of land than nuclear facilities (or coal production). They also have the potential to be more efficient still in practical terms, because they can with relative ease be deployed on otherwise unusable land, like contaminated areas, salt-affected land, and the surfaces of water reservoirs.
Raw Materials Sufficiency
Very well, the renewables-basher may grant, but a 100 percent renewable energy economy will still be out of the question regardless, because there is simply not enough material for the job. It is, for example, common for those attacking renewable energy to point to the steel requirements of wind turbines. However, the extent to which this is a genuine obstacle is, at the very least, debatable. One calculation recently posited that were the world to rely on 2-megawatt wind turbines for 100 percent of its electricity production, it would need 4 million such turbines, each averaging 260 tons, for a total of some 1 billion tons of steel.
Staggering as this sounds, it is worth remembering that the world produced 1.8 billion tons of steel in 2018. A billion tons is a bit over half of that. This would indeed be an intimidating figure--if someone was seriously considering switching to a 100 percent reliance on onshore 2-megawatt turbines for the world's electric power in a single year. To my knowledge, no one has suggested either such a complete reliance on this one source, or such a timeline for making such a complete transition to renewables.
It is worth noting, too, that any ambitious program of wind turbine construction would not come on top of existing steel production, but substantially represent a shift in the end of use of existing steel output to this from the fossil fuel industry--whose pumpjacks and derricks, pipelines and tankers, storage facilities and power plants, make it a colossal user of steel. (I have found comprehensive figures elusive, but Russia alone shipped four million tons of steel just for pipe for the oil and gas industry in 2018.)
In short, the idea that steel requirements singlehandedly doom any 100 percent renewable project to failure wildly exaggerates the issue. Indeed, serious study of the prospect of bottlenecks generally pays it little heed, instead focusing on the far more germane question of securing sufficient rare earth metals. However, examining the literature one quickly finds that the problem is less one of the scarcity of such resources in nature, or the technical impossibility of exploiting them, than the fact that demand for them could outstrip the world's productive capacity, and the concentration of some of these resources in a few countries, and above all, China--the vagaries of power politics, rather than natural abundance or the technological state of the art, the issue. This is not to be dismissed, but it is a very different thing from saying that the problem is intrinsically intractable, let alone that palliatives are unavailable (with quite modest recycling rates perhaps sufficing to redress even the more serious problems).
The Scope for Improvement
As demonstrated here, renewables, wind and solar included, even without subsidy, have become cheaper than established energy production sources. They demonstrate great reliability in practical operation, when a suitable mix of them is incorporated into a properly connective and flexible grid. Where pollution, and especially greenhouse gases, are concerned, they are, by orders of magnitude, superior to coal and gas use; their land area requirements are less exorbitant than their detractors claim, and perhaps superior to those of nuclear energy; and it appears that, at the least, the question of raw materials sufficiency has been overstated.
It would be excessive to claim that every problem on the road to a 100 percent renewable energy future has been solved. It seems plausible that the challenge of keeping the grid reliable will rise as renewable energy production expands in scale, and it is far from clear that every technology and practice required for the task has been fully worked out. (Indeed, this has been by far the most contentious issue in the debate sparked by Mark Jacobson's highly welcome plan for shifting the world to a 100 percent renewable energy economy by 2030.) It is equally true that the expanded production of wind and solar-generated electricity will require some mix of expanded mining efforts, recycling, and substitution far from clear or certain at the moment.
Yet, that not every detail has been worked out is an odd basis for vehement denial that a sharp expansion in renewable energy-based electricity production can be viable. A measure of uncertainty is always part of significant action in the world, the more so as that action is large-scale and deeply directed, while the alternatives appear even more doubtful. An expansion of fossil fuel production and consumption is already ecologically unacceptable in light of the persistent, massive failure to protect the environment from their massive pollution, and problematic in light of its falling return on investment by every measure (not least, because of the high reliance on unconventional oil to increase output). Similarly the expansion of nuclear power to meet our electrical needs, even were it deemed desirable, is a highly problematic endeavor given the technology actually at hand. That this does not usually concern the advocates of those technologies much reflects the double standard to which they tend (whether discussing subsidies, materials consumption, or anything else), and the fact that not only misinformation and shoddy reasoning, but bad faith, commonly underlies their arguments.
Moreover, it is clearly the case that technologists are only beginning to exploit the vast potentials for improvement in every one of the areas discussed here. The building of taller wind turbines with longer blades and higher capacities, and the optimization of wind farm layouts, can increase their yield appreciably. (Indeed, the increasingly tall towers on which the turbines are mounted is opening up the possibility of siting wind farms in new locations, not least inside forests.) At the same time, increasingly high-output units, as well as the possibility of reducing the carbon footprint of steel production with existing methods, hold out the hope of further economizing the emissions, land use and materials consumption of every kilowatt-hour of energy generated by this means.
It is much the same story with solar power, where the fuller utilization of individual photovoltaic cells through the use of more of their surface area, and the denser packing of panels with more cells, among other developments, show great promise of continuing the increase in their productivity and the drop in their cost--which will extend the cost-effectiveness to increasingly dispersed, small-scale residential production that could take much of the burden off of centralized production and extensive grids. Technologists are only beginning to properly explore the possibilities for enhancing grid efficiency and flexibility (the electrification of car fleets may actually be a help rather than a hindrance), and storing electricity from any and all sources, with the cost of what is perhaps the most flexible option, battery storage, plunging with much the same rapidity as the price of renewable energy production. Meanwhile, efforts to increase the recycling of rare earth metals, already underway because of the broad interest in the matter (the electronics sector relies on them heavily), offer some grounds for optimism in regard to materials requirements.
Any and all of this will mean cheaper and more reliable electrical power from renewables, considered in monetary terms, EROEI terms or anything else. It also holds out considerable hope of further lightening such burdens as the production of electricity from these sources seems likely to place on the natural environment.
None of this is cause for complacency--the pressure to move even faster than we already are too great for that. Accordingly these potentials are grounds not to calmly await the play of market force, but to back the swiftest and fullest development and deployment of all these technologies--not least, through "moonshot" efforts aimed at resolving the storage and raw materials problems that may lie ahead--to the end of deriving 100 percent of our electricity from renewable energy at the earliest feasible date in a national and ultimately global Green New Deal.
Thursday, April 18, 2019
Societal Slack and Progressive Taxation: A Second Look (Part II-Income Tax)
When revisiting my old post "Societal Slack and Progressive Taxation" I decided to enlarge upon the matter, specifically considering how corporations have paid steadily less in tax since the end of World War II (from 4-5 percent of GDP, down to 1-2 percent in recent years).
In this post I turn to the distribution of the personal income tax burden.
According to recent data from the Tax Foundation, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers took home 9.52 percent of all Adjusted Gross Income back in 2016. Some 141,000 people receiving some $2.1 million a year or more, they collectively got about $970 billion, and paid some $260 billion of that in tax.
As is often noted, the rate in the top tax bracket is far lower than it used to be. In 2016 it was 39.6 percent. By contrast, between the end of World War II and the early 1960s it was 91 percent, levied on, if one adjusts for inflation, roughly that level of income.
What would the '50s-era tax rate on the earnings of the top 0.1 percent above that $2.1 million level (such as was the case in 1950) raise? One can take the $970 billion figure and deduct from it the aforementioned income (the first $2.1 million made by that 141,000 persons). They would wind up with about $675 billion. Ninety-one percent of that sum would amount to over $610 billion--over twice that strata's entire tax contribution in 2016.
And of course, one could extend this pattern down through the rest of the 1 percent (1.4 million taxpayers with roughly $500,000 in income). Simply taxing everything between a half million dollars and $2.1 million at the 73 percent rate prevailing in 1950, one would wind up with another $460 billion--over $1 trillion in income raised on earnings above the half million dollar a year level, in contrast with the $500 billion actually paid by the top 1 percent. As this implies the practice does run into diminishing returns fairly quickly, but extending the approach down through the rest of the top 10 percent (with anything above $200,000 taxed at 53 percent, anything above $140,000 at 48 percent), would raise the tax collected on marginal income above $140,000 a year alone into the $1.7 trillion range, roughly $700 billion more than what the top 10 percent actually paid in 2016.
Moreover, there are respects in which these figures can be considered conservative. One is that the above, rough calculation did not take into account the intricacy of the bracket structure, which would have captured more wealth from each strata of taxpayer. (Income between $500,000 and $2.1 million would not all have been taxed at the 73 percent rate but, as income rose from the low to the high end of this range, been subject to seven progressively higher rates, with 1950 seeing anything above $1.65 million or so taxed at 90 percent.) Another is the way in which inflation and "bracket creep" translated to more people paying at higher rates (so that by 1963 anything above that $1.65 million, roughly speaking, was now subject to the maximum rate, and similar creep evident down the line). Still another is the fact that higher rates extended down somewhat below that most affluent tenth. (In 1963 anything above $14,000--$117,000 in today's terms--was taxed at 41 percent, higher than the maximum rate today.) The result is that a 1950s-like tax rate structure could raise still more than suggested above. Perhaps another trillion dollars a year would not be out of the question.
However, there is also another side to the issue, namely that nominal tax rates are one thing, and effective tax rates another. The exemptions built into the system, the possibilities for legal avoidance, the recourse to illegal evasion, doubtless translated to a lower effective rate, though by just how much is a highly contentious matter. Writers abiding by the libertarian "conventional wisdom" of the economics field are quick to insist, and vehement in insisting, that the '50s did not see the rich actually paying the extravagant rates the nominal figures imply.
The idea that effective tax levels are not really much lower than they were before strikes me as implausible in light of the sharp cuts in rates for which conservatives fought so long and hard; by the reality of the growing share of income (more on which below) enjoyed by the most affluent, which is very plausibly a function of their being more lightly taxed; and changing conduct on the part of corporations whose stockholders, inhibited from taking out as much in dividends as they theoretically could by high personal income tax rates, shifted to treating corporations like ATMs after the tax cuts (payout rates 50 percent in the '60s, dipping in the '70s and exploding to a whopping 94 percent by the turn of the century).
Moreover, there is a point that those dismissive of the significance of the higher rates overlook--namely that in the '50s the rich were less rich, absolutely and relatively, and therefore relatively less of their income, and everyone's income, subject to higher marginal rates. In 1950 scarcely 20,000 of 55 million taxpayers, 0.036 percent of the population, reported making $100,000 or more, qualifying for those top three brackets. Where the larger picture is concerned the share of income enjoyed by the most affluent 1 percent ran at 8-9 percent of the total during the decade, the top 10 percent about 30-35 percent of the total figure.
By contrast, hundreds of thousands now report making twice the equivalent of $100,000 in 1950s-era dollars (about $1 million), while that top 1 percent now commands 19 percent of the nation's income, and the top 10 percent, 45-50 percent of the total. Had the richest been so rich then, and the income distribution as skewed then as it is now, then the '50s-era system would have meant much more income subject to the highest rates. All others things being equal, the effective rates would have reflected this--and it can only be expected that, were such a rate structure in place today, we would also see that.
Still, as the large sums discussed here suggest, the additional revenue that could be generated by even an effective rate considerably below the nominal rates, capturing only part of the income discussed above, would be far from trivial. (Were new higher, nominal, rates to raise the effective rate on just the richest 0.1 percent by half from the current 27 percent to 40 percent as a whole, which may not be unprecedented--all the caveats about changing methods for calculating AGI over time notwithstanding--this would still translate to an extra $130 billion a year, $1.3 trillion in ten years.)
Additionally, there are grounds for thinking that the effective rates of the 1950s do not necessarily represent some theoretical maximum. Per capita income is three to four times what it was in the 1950s, and the reality is that much of our economic trouble has come not from there being to little capital available, but too few profitable opportunities for its investment. (The ultimate cause of slow growth and asset bubbles, it is why financial institutions were so willing to buy crummy mortgage-based securities back in the early 2000s, with the horrid implications with which we are all still coping.) There is also the reality that the data on household income, as Thomas Piketty argued, tend to underestimate rather than overestimate how much the wealthiest have, indicating hidden potentials, the proportions of which are hinted at in the multi-trillion dollar "black hole" in the world's balance sheets.
Consequently, the bottom line is that if it had to be done the obstacle to raising substantially more revenue by way of the income tax (even just raising it on the narrow stratum of the most affluent taxpayers) would not be the means to pay, but the political obstacles to changing tax rates.
1. IRS data indicates that in 1980 0.2 percent of taxpayers were paying 40 percent or more. Below that level another 7.5 percent paid between 30-40 percent.
In this post I turn to the distribution of the personal income tax burden.
According to recent data from the Tax Foundation, the top 0.1 percent of taxpayers took home 9.52 percent of all Adjusted Gross Income back in 2016. Some 141,000 people receiving some $2.1 million a year or more, they collectively got about $970 billion, and paid some $260 billion of that in tax.
As is often noted, the rate in the top tax bracket is far lower than it used to be. In 2016 it was 39.6 percent. By contrast, between the end of World War II and the early 1960s it was 91 percent, levied on, if one adjusts for inflation, roughly that level of income.
What would the '50s-era tax rate on the earnings of the top 0.1 percent above that $2.1 million level (such as was the case in 1950) raise? One can take the $970 billion figure and deduct from it the aforementioned income (the first $2.1 million made by that 141,000 persons). They would wind up with about $675 billion. Ninety-one percent of that sum would amount to over $610 billion--over twice that strata's entire tax contribution in 2016.
And of course, one could extend this pattern down through the rest of the 1 percent (1.4 million taxpayers with roughly $500,000 in income). Simply taxing everything between a half million dollars and $2.1 million at the 73 percent rate prevailing in 1950, one would wind up with another $460 billion--over $1 trillion in income raised on earnings above the half million dollar a year level, in contrast with the $500 billion actually paid by the top 1 percent. As this implies the practice does run into diminishing returns fairly quickly, but extending the approach down through the rest of the top 10 percent (with anything above $200,000 taxed at 53 percent, anything above $140,000 at 48 percent), would raise the tax collected on marginal income above $140,000 a year alone into the $1.7 trillion range, roughly $700 billion more than what the top 10 percent actually paid in 2016.
Moreover, there are respects in which these figures can be considered conservative. One is that the above, rough calculation did not take into account the intricacy of the bracket structure, which would have captured more wealth from each strata of taxpayer. (Income between $500,000 and $2.1 million would not all have been taxed at the 73 percent rate but, as income rose from the low to the high end of this range, been subject to seven progressively higher rates, with 1950 seeing anything above $1.65 million or so taxed at 90 percent.) Another is the way in which inflation and "bracket creep" translated to more people paying at higher rates (so that by 1963 anything above that $1.65 million, roughly speaking, was now subject to the maximum rate, and similar creep evident down the line). Still another is the fact that higher rates extended down somewhat below that most affluent tenth. (In 1963 anything above $14,000--$117,000 in today's terms--was taxed at 41 percent, higher than the maximum rate today.) The result is that a 1950s-like tax rate structure could raise still more than suggested above. Perhaps another trillion dollars a year would not be out of the question.
However, there is also another side to the issue, namely that nominal tax rates are one thing, and effective tax rates another. The exemptions built into the system, the possibilities for legal avoidance, the recourse to illegal evasion, doubtless translated to a lower effective rate, though by just how much is a highly contentious matter. Writers abiding by the libertarian "conventional wisdom" of the economics field are quick to insist, and vehement in insisting, that the '50s did not see the rich actually paying the extravagant rates the nominal figures imply.
The idea that effective tax levels are not really much lower than they were before strikes me as implausible in light of the sharp cuts in rates for which conservatives fought so long and hard; by the reality of the growing share of income (more on which below) enjoyed by the most affluent, which is very plausibly a function of their being more lightly taxed; and changing conduct on the part of corporations whose stockholders, inhibited from taking out as much in dividends as they theoretically could by high personal income tax rates, shifted to treating corporations like ATMs after the tax cuts (payout rates 50 percent in the '60s, dipping in the '70s and exploding to a whopping 94 percent by the turn of the century).
Moreover, there is a point that those dismissive of the significance of the higher rates overlook--namely that in the '50s the rich were less rich, absolutely and relatively, and therefore relatively less of their income, and everyone's income, subject to higher marginal rates. In 1950 scarcely 20,000 of 55 million taxpayers, 0.036 percent of the population, reported making $100,000 or more, qualifying for those top three brackets. Where the larger picture is concerned the share of income enjoyed by the most affluent 1 percent ran at 8-9 percent of the total during the decade, the top 10 percent about 30-35 percent of the total figure.
By contrast, hundreds of thousands now report making twice the equivalent of $100,000 in 1950s-era dollars (about $1 million), while that top 1 percent now commands 19 percent of the nation's income, and the top 10 percent, 45-50 percent of the total. Had the richest been so rich then, and the income distribution as skewed then as it is now, then the '50s-era system would have meant much more income subject to the highest rates. All others things being equal, the effective rates would have reflected this--and it can only be expected that, were such a rate structure in place today, we would also see that.
Still, as the large sums discussed here suggest, the additional revenue that could be generated by even an effective rate considerably below the nominal rates, capturing only part of the income discussed above, would be far from trivial. (Were new higher, nominal, rates to raise the effective rate on just the richest 0.1 percent by half from the current 27 percent to 40 percent as a whole, which may not be unprecedented--all the caveats about changing methods for calculating AGI over time notwithstanding--this would still translate to an extra $130 billion a year, $1.3 trillion in ten years.)
Additionally, there are grounds for thinking that the effective rates of the 1950s do not necessarily represent some theoretical maximum. Per capita income is three to four times what it was in the 1950s, and the reality is that much of our economic trouble has come not from there being to little capital available, but too few profitable opportunities for its investment. (The ultimate cause of slow growth and asset bubbles, it is why financial institutions were so willing to buy crummy mortgage-based securities back in the early 2000s, with the horrid implications with which we are all still coping.) There is also the reality that the data on household income, as Thomas Piketty argued, tend to underestimate rather than overestimate how much the wealthiest have, indicating hidden potentials, the proportions of which are hinted at in the multi-trillion dollar "black hole" in the world's balance sheets.
Consequently, the bottom line is that if it had to be done the obstacle to raising substantially more revenue by way of the income tax (even just raising it on the narrow stratum of the most affluent taxpayers) would not be the means to pay, but the political obstacles to changing tax rates.
1. IRS data indicates that in 1980 0.2 percent of taxpayers were paying 40 percent or more. Below that level another 7.5 percent paid between 30-40 percent.
Societal Slack and Progressive Taxation: A Second Look (Part I-Corporate Income Tax)
Like my old piece on "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security" it seems that a post I wrote a decade ago on "Societal Slack and Progressive Taxation" is getting some new attention.
The essentials are simple. The piece notes that while the highest earners' share of tax has risen markedly in recent decades, it has not risen so markedly as their share of income, so that their burden is lighter relative to their means, not heavier. At the same time corporate income tax fell as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product and Federal revenue. By contrast, the share of payroll taxes held steady in the 30-40 percent range from the 1970s forward. All this meant that the rich paid less, the poor more, in a more regressive system.
Checking the numbers again recently--in this case, those in the Historical Tables of the latest edition of the Budget of the U.S. Government (Table 2-2)--suggests that for the past decade the situation did not change very much until the current administration, though clearly this is happening with corporate income tax. After 1945 the trend in its share of Federal revenue was downward, from 35 percent that year to around 15 percent in the 1970s, then generally the 8-12 percent range after Reagan, sometimes dipping a bit below, sometimes rising a bit above. In 2018, following Trump's tax cut (knocking the corporate income tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, while the loopholes remain), it hit a historic new low--a mere 6.1 percent of the total.
As a share of GDP (see Table 2-3) corporate income tax has also fallen. Generally in the 4-5 percent range in the 1950s, and the 3-4 percent range in the 1960s, 2-3 percent in the 1970s, it has generally been 2 percent or less since Reagan, save in periods of exceptional profits (the Clinton-era boom, the heady years just before the crash of 2008). The Trump tax cut similarly knocked corporate income tax down to a mere 1 percent of GDP in 2018, a level seen in only one previous year--2009, after the crash.
The decline in the amount of corporate income tax paid has generally gone alongside rising after-tax corporate profits. According to Federal Reserve data, after-tax corporate profits generally ran in the 5-7 percent of GDP range in the 1950s, the 6-7 percent range in the 1960s, and 7-8 percent in the 1970s (despite a sharp dip amid the 1974-1975 recession). They collapsed in the '80s, bottoming out in 1986 at around 3.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product before beginning a fitful upward climb, approaching 7 percent again in the '90s, and then despite ups and downs, in the early 2000s ascending toward heights unscaled since the Korean War era. In 2004 profits hit 8 percent of GDP, the next year 10 percent, roughly the level at which they have stayed ever since.
It is worth noting that in the much higher-tax 1950s private investment levels were roughly equal to what we have now (in the 15-18 percent of GDP range), and arguably the investment directed more fully toward substantive economic activity.
This suggests that corporations could pay much more than they have generally been doing, without any harm being done to investment. Moreover, were they paying that higher but clearly quite tolerable '50s-era proportion of tax, that would be 2-4 percent of GDP more than they have generally been doing to date--an additional $400-800 billion a year. And of course, the figure was still higher in the war years--more like 7 percent of GDP in 1944-1945 at the height of the war effort (another $400 billion, bumping us up to the $1 trillion a year range).
I suspect it might also be easier to administer such a tax on a handful of large corporations than to raise an equivalent sum from individual households, though one should also remember that this would not at all rule out a higher income tax rate--those years when corporate tax rates were so high in the 1950s also years in which the top income tax bracket was 91 percent.
You can expect me to say something of that matter in another post, to appear shortly.
The essentials are simple. The piece notes that while the highest earners' share of tax has risen markedly in recent decades, it has not risen so markedly as their share of income, so that their burden is lighter relative to their means, not heavier. At the same time corporate income tax fell as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product and Federal revenue. By contrast, the share of payroll taxes held steady in the 30-40 percent range from the 1970s forward. All this meant that the rich paid less, the poor more, in a more regressive system.
Checking the numbers again recently--in this case, those in the Historical Tables of the latest edition of the Budget of the U.S. Government (Table 2-2)--suggests that for the past decade the situation did not change very much until the current administration, though clearly this is happening with corporate income tax. After 1945 the trend in its share of Federal revenue was downward, from 35 percent that year to around 15 percent in the 1970s, then generally the 8-12 percent range after Reagan, sometimes dipping a bit below, sometimes rising a bit above. In 2018, following Trump's tax cut (knocking the corporate income tax rate from 35 to 21 percent, while the loopholes remain), it hit a historic new low--a mere 6.1 percent of the total.
As a share of GDP (see Table 2-3) corporate income tax has also fallen. Generally in the 4-5 percent range in the 1950s, and the 3-4 percent range in the 1960s, 2-3 percent in the 1970s, it has generally been 2 percent or less since Reagan, save in periods of exceptional profits (the Clinton-era boom, the heady years just before the crash of 2008). The Trump tax cut similarly knocked corporate income tax down to a mere 1 percent of GDP in 2018, a level seen in only one previous year--2009, after the crash.
The decline in the amount of corporate income tax paid has generally gone alongside rising after-tax corporate profits. According to Federal Reserve data, after-tax corporate profits generally ran in the 5-7 percent of GDP range in the 1950s, the 6-7 percent range in the 1960s, and 7-8 percent in the 1970s (despite a sharp dip amid the 1974-1975 recession). They collapsed in the '80s, bottoming out in 1986 at around 3.7 percent of Gross Domestic Product before beginning a fitful upward climb, approaching 7 percent again in the '90s, and then despite ups and downs, in the early 2000s ascending toward heights unscaled since the Korean War era. In 2004 profits hit 8 percent of GDP, the next year 10 percent, roughly the level at which they have stayed ever since.
It is worth noting that in the much higher-tax 1950s private investment levels were roughly equal to what we have now (in the 15-18 percent of GDP range), and arguably the investment directed more fully toward substantive economic activity.
This suggests that corporations could pay much more than they have generally been doing, without any harm being done to investment. Moreover, were they paying that higher but clearly quite tolerable '50s-era proportion of tax, that would be 2-4 percent of GDP more than they have generally been doing to date--an additional $400-800 billion a year. And of course, the figure was still higher in the war years--more like 7 percent of GDP in 1944-1945 at the height of the war effort (another $400 billion, bumping us up to the $1 trillion a year range).
I suspect it might also be easier to administer such a tax on a handful of large corporations than to raise an equivalent sum from individual households, though one should also remember that this would not at all rule out a higher income tax rate--those years when corporate tax rates were so high in the 1950s also years in which the top income tax bracket was 91 percent.
You can expect me to say something of that matter in another post, to appear shortly.
Sunday, April 14, 2019
Review: Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution, by Thorstein Veblen
C. Wright Mills has celebrated Thorstein Veblen as "The best critic of America that America has produced," but Veblen did at times turn his attention to the life of other nations, notably Germany, to which he applied the considerably body of theory he had amassed (most pointedly in his Theory of Business Enterprise). He read Germany as something of a paradox--in respects the most modern of states (as in its industry), in others among the most backward of the major powers (in its dynastic, war-like character). How could the two characteristics be present in the same country? Veblen asked.
In trying to answer that question Veblen relied on a comparison of Germany with that first scene of the Industrial Revolution and, in conventional thinking, counter-example to Germany, un-Germany, England, comparing the two countries. (Indeed, rather than "Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution" he would have done well to title the book "England, Germany and the Industrial Revolution.") He began that comparison by probing deep into the historic past, devoting his first two chapters to the racial heritage and early history of the "North Sea-Baltic peoples" from whom both England and Germany derive their ancestry--essentially, to rule out the idea that this was a matter of race (he debunks the idea of race purity, and in any event, shows that with regard to heritage Englishman and German are pretty much the same), or of very early cultural antecedents, before turning to the real heart of the matter, more recent, and more economic and political, history.
Veblen argues that in England the Medieval heritage was less strongly rooted than elsewhere in Europe, and from the sixteenth century began to wither with the increasing mercantile-industrial turn of English life, a process enabled by England's insular position sheltering it from the wars raging across the continent, and the country's combination of peacefulness and backwardness relative to other parts of the continent (England less advanced than, for example, the Netherlands, while its stability made it attractive to skilled continental emigrants). Altogether these factors (and only these) created a culture that was more materialist (in the philosophical sense of the term), empirical, "matter of fact," individualist and modern-liberal, a trend accelerated and deepened by the rise of a machine industry in that part of the world.
By contrast Prussia was essentially the product of the Teutonic Knights' secularization in comparatively underdeveloped and turbulent northeastern Europe. The Medieval heritage, and especially the predatory ethos of that earlier era, with its stress on war-like values, hierarchy and personal subordination (exalted as "duty" and a cult of the State), was stronger to begin with, and endured longer--and with them the turn of thought in the opposite direction from England's, away from the materialistic and matter of fact toward the "transcendental," the "ideal," the "Romantic." Subsequently, Prussia's unification of Germany transmitted this ethos to the rest of the German Empire (in particular through its education system and compulsory military service, the latter in his analysis a powerful inculcator of subordination).
Still, if Germany's ethos was more Medieval than "modern," the country's leaders saw the necessity of development, and the country was far from unequal to the task. As Veblen explains it Germany's resource situation was mediocre but not unworkable, especially given the advantage it had in a large supply of cheap but capable labor with a scarcity of alternative outlets for its energies. (Where the well-born, well-educated Englishman might become a leisured "gentleman," or perhaps go to the City, and in either case exist as simply a charge on his nation's economy, in Germany he was apt to become an engineer instead and contribute to its industrial development.) Germany also had the advantages of backwardness--the fact that where in Britain industrialization was, due to its being first, ad hoc and relatively impure, mixed up with much pre-industrial practice that held it back; and at the same time was also suffering from its own maturity (like a capital that became obsolescent; rising, wasteful consumption; the inefficiencies entailed by a hyperdeveloped financial sector); Germany was starting from scratch, quite deliberately, and so could build its plant along the most thoroughly industry-oriented lines, minus unnecessary encumbrances.1
However, Veblen did not see this arrangement as somehow enduring forever. As Britain's economy had matured, so was Germany's already doing. As he noted, the costs of labor and the fixed charges of capitalization rose; while as the country became more thoroughly industrialized the share of capital investment inevitably declined, to the cost of Germany's hugely important capital goods sector. At the same time Germany's industrial output outstripped both the growth of foreign demand, and the locally available natural resources, forcing it to look abroad for more expensive foreign supplies to sustain that production. Meanwhile, Germany's plant became obsolescent in its turn as its equipment appreciated and its own growth and development meant that its earlier arrangements were becoming suboptimal from the standpoint of efficiency and growth.
Veblen also argued that as Germany developed industrial life would erode its Medievalism, but that this had been slowed by the country's intensive militarization, and so as of the early twentieth century the process had not gone so far as it might have done. Indeed, he holds that basically World War I was a matter of a Medieval dynastic state equipped with extraordinarily modern industry and military forces threatening the peace of the world.
With the hindsight of a century it seems to me that Veblen's analysis definitely has its shortcomings. The most obviously dated feature is the long discussion prompted by the racialist pseudoscience of his day, which will try many a contemporary reader's patience. However, there were other ways in which his discussion struck me as less convincing than it might have been. Certainly he underrates the natural assets that enabled Germany to industrialize so speedily and robustly--its coal and iron riches, water transport and the like less ample than Britain's, but still rather more impressive than those of any other continental state, while the country occupied a unique position in the heart of Europe (between east and west, north and south) at a moment when Europe was fast becoming the center of world economic life. (You can see my case here.) It struck me, too, that he overrated the modernity of the German economy, especially in comparison with the United States.2 (As Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction points out, for all Germany's very real cutting-edge achievements, the Fordism that would change everything was not born there, but across the Atlantic.) Finally Veblen goes too far in chalking up Germany's aggressive behavior to irrational dynastic aggrandizement when much else was at fault--not least, economic imperialism driven by stresses that Veblen himself discusses so ably, and which Fritz Fischer was, a half century later, to provide such robust coverage of in his classic diplomatic history, Germany's Aims in the First World War.
Still, as is often the case when great thinkers ask large questions and provide answers that do not fully satisfy us, Veblen managed to produce a great many compensating insights--not least into that question of the contrasts between German and English culture and history, and the economic stresses that helped put Germany on the path to war. Moreover, the principal reason for the book's still enjoying status as a classic, its pioneering treatment of the matter of the "advantages of backwardness"--those ways in which less-developed countries manage to achieve faster rates of industrial expansion and economic growth, or develop more thoroughly their industrial bases, than more developed countries--is lucid and robust, justly essential reading for students of the subject. And in the end what was worthwhile greatly outweighed what has lost its interest.
1. German industrialists, as Veblen noted, did not enter business by way of "the training school of a country town based on a retail business in speculative real estate and political jobbery managed under the rule of 'prehension, division and silence' . . . [but] under the selective test for fitness in the aggressive conduct of industrial enterprise." Nor were they "committed to antiquated sites and routes for . . . industrial plant; the men who exercised the discretion were free to choose, with an eye single to the mechanical expediency of locations for the pursuit of industry." German industrialists "were also free to take over the processes of the new industry at their best and highest efficiency, rather than content themselves with compromises between the best equipment known and what used to be the best a few years or a few decades ago," while finance was not yet in a position to divert them from "the production of merchantable goods and services."
2. Veblen, identifying American business with his reading of the country town ethos, seemed much more oriented to what he called "business" (the pursuit of "net gain in dollars," and above all speculative "pecuniary strategy" founded on "patiently wait[ing] on the chance of getting getting something for nothing") than "industry" (the technical problem of enlarging output). Indeed, he specifically characterized as averse to innovation with "untried, unstandardised industrial projects and expedients . . . anathema" to such a degree that it "rejects such candidates as are endowed with technological insight or . . . aggressive curiosity in matters of industrial innovation." For a fuller discussion of his thought on these matters, see his Theory of Business Enterprise and his later Absentee Ownership.
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In trying to answer that question Veblen relied on a comparison of Germany with that first scene of the Industrial Revolution and, in conventional thinking, counter-example to Germany, un-Germany, England, comparing the two countries. (Indeed, rather than "Imperial Germany and the Industrial Revolution" he would have done well to title the book "England, Germany and the Industrial Revolution.") He began that comparison by probing deep into the historic past, devoting his first two chapters to the racial heritage and early history of the "North Sea-Baltic peoples" from whom both England and Germany derive their ancestry--essentially, to rule out the idea that this was a matter of race (he debunks the idea of race purity, and in any event, shows that with regard to heritage Englishman and German are pretty much the same), or of very early cultural antecedents, before turning to the real heart of the matter, more recent, and more economic and political, history.
Veblen argues that in England the Medieval heritage was less strongly rooted than elsewhere in Europe, and from the sixteenth century began to wither with the increasing mercantile-industrial turn of English life, a process enabled by England's insular position sheltering it from the wars raging across the continent, and the country's combination of peacefulness and backwardness relative to other parts of the continent (England less advanced than, for example, the Netherlands, while its stability made it attractive to skilled continental emigrants). Altogether these factors (and only these) created a culture that was more materialist (in the philosophical sense of the term), empirical, "matter of fact," individualist and modern-liberal, a trend accelerated and deepened by the rise of a machine industry in that part of the world.
By contrast Prussia was essentially the product of the Teutonic Knights' secularization in comparatively underdeveloped and turbulent northeastern Europe. The Medieval heritage, and especially the predatory ethos of that earlier era, with its stress on war-like values, hierarchy and personal subordination (exalted as "duty" and a cult of the State), was stronger to begin with, and endured longer--and with them the turn of thought in the opposite direction from England's, away from the materialistic and matter of fact toward the "transcendental," the "ideal," the "Romantic." Subsequently, Prussia's unification of Germany transmitted this ethos to the rest of the German Empire (in particular through its education system and compulsory military service, the latter in his analysis a powerful inculcator of subordination).
Still, if Germany's ethos was more Medieval than "modern," the country's leaders saw the necessity of development, and the country was far from unequal to the task. As Veblen explains it Germany's resource situation was mediocre but not unworkable, especially given the advantage it had in a large supply of cheap but capable labor with a scarcity of alternative outlets for its energies. (Where the well-born, well-educated Englishman might become a leisured "gentleman," or perhaps go to the City, and in either case exist as simply a charge on his nation's economy, in Germany he was apt to become an engineer instead and contribute to its industrial development.) Germany also had the advantages of backwardness--the fact that where in Britain industrialization was, due to its being first, ad hoc and relatively impure, mixed up with much pre-industrial practice that held it back; and at the same time was also suffering from its own maturity (like a capital that became obsolescent; rising, wasteful consumption; the inefficiencies entailed by a hyperdeveloped financial sector); Germany was starting from scratch, quite deliberately, and so could build its plant along the most thoroughly industry-oriented lines, minus unnecessary encumbrances.1
However, Veblen did not see this arrangement as somehow enduring forever. As Britain's economy had matured, so was Germany's already doing. As he noted, the costs of labor and the fixed charges of capitalization rose; while as the country became more thoroughly industrialized the share of capital investment inevitably declined, to the cost of Germany's hugely important capital goods sector. At the same time Germany's industrial output outstripped both the growth of foreign demand, and the locally available natural resources, forcing it to look abroad for more expensive foreign supplies to sustain that production. Meanwhile, Germany's plant became obsolescent in its turn as its equipment appreciated and its own growth and development meant that its earlier arrangements were becoming suboptimal from the standpoint of efficiency and growth.
Veblen also argued that as Germany developed industrial life would erode its Medievalism, but that this had been slowed by the country's intensive militarization, and so as of the early twentieth century the process had not gone so far as it might have done. Indeed, he holds that basically World War I was a matter of a Medieval dynastic state equipped with extraordinarily modern industry and military forces threatening the peace of the world.
With the hindsight of a century it seems to me that Veblen's analysis definitely has its shortcomings. The most obviously dated feature is the long discussion prompted by the racialist pseudoscience of his day, which will try many a contemporary reader's patience. However, there were other ways in which his discussion struck me as less convincing than it might have been. Certainly he underrates the natural assets that enabled Germany to industrialize so speedily and robustly--its coal and iron riches, water transport and the like less ample than Britain's, but still rather more impressive than those of any other continental state, while the country occupied a unique position in the heart of Europe (between east and west, north and south) at a moment when Europe was fast becoming the center of world economic life. (You can see my case here.) It struck me, too, that he overrated the modernity of the German economy, especially in comparison with the United States.2 (As Adam Tooze's Wages of Destruction points out, for all Germany's very real cutting-edge achievements, the Fordism that would change everything was not born there, but across the Atlantic.) Finally Veblen goes too far in chalking up Germany's aggressive behavior to irrational dynastic aggrandizement when much else was at fault--not least, economic imperialism driven by stresses that Veblen himself discusses so ably, and which Fritz Fischer was, a half century later, to provide such robust coverage of in his classic diplomatic history, Germany's Aims in the First World War.
Still, as is often the case when great thinkers ask large questions and provide answers that do not fully satisfy us, Veblen managed to produce a great many compensating insights--not least into that question of the contrasts between German and English culture and history, and the economic stresses that helped put Germany on the path to war. Moreover, the principal reason for the book's still enjoying status as a classic, its pioneering treatment of the matter of the "advantages of backwardness"--those ways in which less-developed countries manage to achieve faster rates of industrial expansion and economic growth, or develop more thoroughly their industrial bases, than more developed countries--is lucid and robust, justly essential reading for students of the subject. And in the end what was worthwhile greatly outweighed what has lost its interest.
1. German industrialists, as Veblen noted, did not enter business by way of "the training school of a country town based on a retail business in speculative real estate and political jobbery managed under the rule of 'prehension, division and silence' . . . [but] under the selective test for fitness in the aggressive conduct of industrial enterprise." Nor were they "committed to antiquated sites and routes for . . . industrial plant; the men who exercised the discretion were free to choose, with an eye single to the mechanical expediency of locations for the pursuit of industry." German industrialists "were also free to take over the processes of the new industry at their best and highest efficiency, rather than content themselves with compromises between the best equipment known and what used to be the best a few years or a few decades ago," while finance was not yet in a position to divert them from "the production of merchantable goods and services."
2. Veblen, identifying American business with his reading of the country town ethos, seemed much more oriented to what he called "business" (the pursuit of "net gain in dollars," and above all speculative "pecuniary strategy" founded on "patiently wait[ing] on the chance of getting getting something for nothing") than "industry" (the technical problem of enlarging output). Indeed, he specifically characterized as averse to innovation with "untried, unstandardised industrial projects and expedients . . . anathema" to such a degree that it "rejects such candidates as are endowed with technological insight or . . . aggressive curiosity in matters of industrial innovation." For a fuller discussion of his thought on these matters, see his Theory of Business Enterprise and his later Absentee Ownership.
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What is Complexity?
We often hear the word complexity, now more than ever because of the way in which our lives are bound up with systems of extremely high complexity--social, technological, ecological, and indeed all three, as an issue such as climate change reminds us. However, if asked people usually have a hard time explaining what "complexity" means--partly because complexity and simplicity are properties of systems, which they find they have to explain also.
Systems are sets of parts or things that work together. As for complexity, here is what I had to say about the matter in my article "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security."
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4/12/19
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4/12/19
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Systems are sets of parts or things that work together. As for complexity, here is what I had to say about the matter in my article "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security."
According to one definition, complexity refers to "asymmetric relationships that reflect organization and restraint" between the parts of a system. As such, the characteristic features of complex systems are their composition from a large number of components with a dense web of connections between them; a high degree of interdependence within them; an openness to outside environments, rather than their being self-contained; "synergy," meaning that the whole is more than the sum of its parts; and nonlinear functioning, so that changes in these systems have effects disproportionate to their size, either larger or smaller. Such nonlinearity and synergy come with an exponentially increased range of possible interactions, including unplanned interactions, making an incomplete understanding of at least some processes also an aspect of complex systems.
My Posts on a Green New Deal
4/12/19
My Posts on Neoliberal Environmentalism
4/12/19
New Readers for my International Security Piece, Fifteen Years On?
3/31/19
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Saturday, April 13, 2019
The Passing of the European Dream
Reading Adam Tooze's Crashed, which treats the 2008 crisis as the trans-Atlantic (rather than American) phenomenon it most assuredly was, I found myself thinking again of that "European Dream" long since ended. Back when social critics thought that perhaps Europe would present a more egalitarian, more sustainable socioeconomic model than the United States, no astute observer imagined, for example, that the continent's power elite has become confirmed socialists, or even social democrats. One took them for conservative bourgeois capitalists like any others, who would always rather have more than less, and like nothing better than a tax-free, union-free, unregulated business environment.
Yet, there was the hope that in a less atomized culture which had a longer and more turbulent history that included substantive experience of challenges from below, a more long-term, enlightened version of self-interest, somewhat less simple-minded "libertarianism," a touch more paternalism, would leave them inhibited about pushing too far; and that a more conscious, cohesive and organized labor movement and left, behind a more elaborately developed state, would similarly moderate their expectations.
Anyone who hoped that has been disappointed, Europe's elite having proven as myopic, greedy and ideological; as stupid and rapacious and vicious; as their counterparts anywhere else. Thus did they create their own banking crisis and tie themselves into the American crisis to boot; thus did they strive to impose yet more of the neoliberalism that had already proven such a disaster in the aftermath of the calamities they wrought for themselves and the world. As might be guessed given that all this had come to pass, Europe's working people also proved far less successful in standing up to those elites than their sympathizers hoped. The CEOs and oligarchs may not have remade their continent's institutions and laws and social understandings in the image of the reddest of American red states, but they had long had the momentum on their side before the crisis, and only continued to make headway after it, as the social democratic parties proved complicit, and right-wing populists and other fraudsters the principal beneficiaries of the electoral shakeups rather than new parties of the left or center.
Indeed, remembering my comment on the death of the European dream back in 2012, I remark my mention of Neo-Nazis in the streets of Greece, with the tolerance of the police. This year Neo-Nazis went on the rampage not in Europe's southeastern fringe, but in its supposedly chastened center, Germany, and not merely with the tolerance of the police, but the Interior Minister's publicly expressed sympathy--Horst Seehofer disgustingly declaring that he would have been with the "protestors" were it not for his position, while in mealy-mouthed fashion downplaying their politics. In that I am reminded yet again of how fast and how far the situation has deteriorated, the end of the European Dream hinting at a European Nightmare that might not be so different from previous European Nightmares in which an American speculative bust and global economic downturn empowered fascists across the continent.
Yet, there was the hope that in a less atomized culture which had a longer and more turbulent history that included substantive experience of challenges from below, a more long-term, enlightened version of self-interest, somewhat less simple-minded "libertarianism," a touch more paternalism, would leave them inhibited about pushing too far; and that a more conscious, cohesive and organized labor movement and left, behind a more elaborately developed state, would similarly moderate their expectations.
Anyone who hoped that has been disappointed, Europe's elite having proven as myopic, greedy and ideological; as stupid and rapacious and vicious; as their counterparts anywhere else. Thus did they create their own banking crisis and tie themselves into the American crisis to boot; thus did they strive to impose yet more of the neoliberalism that had already proven such a disaster in the aftermath of the calamities they wrought for themselves and the world. As might be guessed given that all this had come to pass, Europe's working people also proved far less successful in standing up to those elites than their sympathizers hoped. The CEOs and oligarchs may not have remade their continent's institutions and laws and social understandings in the image of the reddest of American red states, but they had long had the momentum on their side before the crisis, and only continued to make headway after it, as the social democratic parties proved complicit, and right-wing populists and other fraudsters the principal beneficiaries of the electoral shakeups rather than new parties of the left or center.
Indeed, remembering my comment on the death of the European dream back in 2012, I remark my mention of Neo-Nazis in the streets of Greece, with the tolerance of the police. This year Neo-Nazis went on the rampage not in Europe's southeastern fringe, but in its supposedly chastened center, Germany, and not merely with the tolerance of the police, but the Interior Minister's publicly expressed sympathy--Horst Seehofer disgustingly declaring that he would have been with the "protestors" were it not for his position, while in mealy-mouthed fashion downplaying their politics. In that I am reminded yet again of how fast and how far the situation has deteriorated, the end of the European Dream hinting at a European Nightmare that might not be so different from previous European Nightmares in which an American speculative bust and global economic downturn empowered fascists across the continent.
Why I Do Not Support Degrowth: Postscript
As I made clear in a recent post, I am not in favor of "degrowth." The benefits of modernity have been vast, the world remains a place where most people need more rather than less in the way of material comfort, and if anything, we will need more wealth and technology, not less, in order to combat and reverse climate change, along with our other problems, environmental and otherwise.
None of this, however, is to deny that there is much that we would be better off without. I am well aware that our diets are not so healthy for us (let alone the planet) as they might be. I am not convinced that personal transport has no part to play in our future, but there is much that is wrong with our car culture, our consumer culture, our advertising culture.
However, I find myself remembering Uncle Ben's famous words to Peter Parker: "With great power, comes great responsibility."
That piece of wisdom is, I think, indisputable--but society lives by the opposite principle, each and every day, in each and every way. Those who have all the power declaim responsibility for anything; while those who have no power are held responsible for everything. White collar criminality on a global, genuinely supervillain scale is shrugged off, while a bank teller who cannot account for a five-dollar bill finds her low-paying job at risk, and very possibly her life destroyed.
Thus does it go with neoliberal environmentalists. They condemn the environmental impact of animal product consumption--rather than the producers of these goods, who have taken so little interest in alleviating or eliminating that impact (let alone thinking of the stressful lives that drive them to stress eat so much of them, generally chosen for them by those who set the terms of work and the mechanisms of support for the disadvantaged, people far richer and more powerful than they). They condemn motorists for driving gas-guzzling cars--rather than condemning the business interests that fight against sane urban planning and the provision of walkable cities and decent public transport, while on top of that, holding back alternatives to the internal combustion engine and insisting on selling more and more vehicle per consumer. They condemn consumers for shopping so much--rather than condemning the corporations that opt for built-in obsolescence and throwaway goods rather than their refusal to produce durable, low-maintenance goods that non-specialists can cost-effectively repair themselves. Condemn consumers for responding to pointless product differentiation, advertising and the innumerable pressures business places on them to buy new goods when the old ones are still working--rather than the businesses that engage in those practices.
At every point, they condemn those who had the least say in the matter for their choices--while letting those who had far, far more say off the hook. I have discussed where this comes from in the past enough times and in enough ways to feel no need to enlarge on it here, but I do not think the essential point can be overstated enough. What we need is not to deprive the millions and billions of comfort and choice, but rather to give them real choices--the choice of more leisure rather than more things, the choice of a walk or transit instead of a car, the choice to not keep buying throwaway items--while taking sustainability into account when determining the production methods by how which industry meet their needs, as they and not an elite telling them "You don't need that!" in the tone haves have always used with have-nots, determine them.
None of this, however, is to deny that there is much that we would be better off without. I am well aware that our diets are not so healthy for us (let alone the planet) as they might be. I am not convinced that personal transport has no part to play in our future, but there is much that is wrong with our car culture, our consumer culture, our advertising culture.
However, I find myself remembering Uncle Ben's famous words to Peter Parker: "With great power, comes great responsibility."
That piece of wisdom is, I think, indisputable--but society lives by the opposite principle, each and every day, in each and every way. Those who have all the power declaim responsibility for anything; while those who have no power are held responsible for everything. White collar criminality on a global, genuinely supervillain scale is shrugged off, while a bank teller who cannot account for a five-dollar bill finds her low-paying job at risk, and very possibly her life destroyed.
Thus does it go with neoliberal environmentalists. They condemn the environmental impact of animal product consumption--rather than the producers of these goods, who have taken so little interest in alleviating or eliminating that impact (let alone thinking of the stressful lives that drive them to stress eat so much of them, generally chosen for them by those who set the terms of work and the mechanisms of support for the disadvantaged, people far richer and more powerful than they). They condemn motorists for driving gas-guzzling cars--rather than condemning the business interests that fight against sane urban planning and the provision of walkable cities and decent public transport, while on top of that, holding back alternatives to the internal combustion engine and insisting on selling more and more vehicle per consumer. They condemn consumers for shopping so much--rather than condemning the corporations that opt for built-in obsolescence and throwaway goods rather than their refusal to produce durable, low-maintenance goods that non-specialists can cost-effectively repair themselves. Condemn consumers for responding to pointless product differentiation, advertising and the innumerable pressures business places on them to buy new goods when the old ones are still working--rather than the businesses that engage in those practices.
At every point, they condemn those who had the least say in the matter for their choices--while letting those who had far, far more say off the hook. I have discussed where this comes from in the past enough times and in enough ways to feel no need to enlarge on it here, but I do not think the essential point can be overstated enough. What we need is not to deprive the millions and billions of comfort and choice, but rather to give them real choices--the choice of more leisure rather than more things, the choice of a walk or transit instead of a car, the choice to not keep buying throwaway items--while taking sustainability into account when determining the production methods by how which industry meet their needs, as they and not an elite telling them "You don't need that!" in the tone haves have always used with have-nots, determine them.
The Moral Equivalent of War
Originally posted at RARITANIA on July 17, 2013.
In 1977 President Jimmy Carter declared the energy crisis the "'moral equivalent of war'--except that we will be uniting our efforts to build and not destroy."
This seems a plausible outlook given the sheer scale of the task of moving beyond fossil fuels, and the broader ecological crisis more generally. Yet this challenge has consistently failed to draw forth such an intensity of response--or anything close to it--among either the public, or its "leaders." Hurricane Katrina, which left some eight thousand dead and missing, evoked no analogies with Pearl Harbor in the press--and nor did the more recent Hurricane Sandy.
One does not have to search very far to find explanations for the gap between such rhetoric, and what actually followed it. There is, for instance, the character of the problem, a process apprehended only with the capacity to connect numerous manifestations with a vast, complex process unfolding over decades and centuries, and doing so largely outside the view of the comfortable--such that there is room (however minute or rapidly shrinking) for doubt about its even existing at all. As the bombs fell on London during the Blitz, no one doubted that Britain was at war. But watching hurricanes careen like pinballs about the Gulf of Mexico, or ravage Manhattan twice in as many years, some still find it possible to dismiss such events as "weather" rather than evidence of climate change.
There is also something about a struggle with a human opponent, however simplistically given a human face and conceived as "evil" and made a socially sanctioned target for aggressive and hateful feelings that engages the passions in a way that other, more impersonal problems do not, least of all our environmental problems, which are far too complex to be convincingly presented as a simple tale of heroes and villains.1
And of course, the familiar reward of an epic battle against such a villain is absent. In modern times wars have been fought with the promise of a better life afterward--a world safe for democracy; a country fit for heroes; broad, sunlit uplands. (Even the "New World Order" of which Bush the First spoke after Cold War and Gulf War, while hardly on a level with the soaring rhetoric which gave the world the phrases listed above, reflected the tendency.) The "and then what?" of grappling with our environmental problems is far less clear than any of these. "Sustainability" may be the only sane principle for our relationship to the environment, but it leaves much to be desired as inspiration.2 And what some hold sustainability to require, learning to live on less, is certainly uninspiring, especially to the vast majority who have never had very much. One might in fact say that environmentalism has lacked a sense of the utopian (in that term's best sense).
And of course, there is the sheer "inconvenience" of the truth, meeting an ecological challenge less than congenial to innumerable vested interests. It is certainly the case that there are plenty of opportunities to make money in the course of rebuilding the world's energy base--but old, established, powerful parties would see accustomed activities changed or curtailed, and the short-term profits on which they focus to the exclusion of nearly all else threatened.
At any rate, such a response to the problem is a challenge to the premises of business in general given the implicit subordination of the forms of growth business values (of firms, of incomes, of markets), and the autonomy and prestige it enjoys now as in few other eras, to other goods and imperatives. It is worth remembering, too, that growth has long been a solvent for social tensions, one which has not been perfectly satisfactory but nonetheless effective to a considerable degree (even as it has become increasingly illusory), and that the prospect of the disappearance, or even diminution, of that solvent can only raise fears about seeing those tensions intensify.
Naturally there is not only resistance to acceptance of the problem's existence, but active effort on the part of powerful groups to obfuscate it, to minimize it, to trivialize it--something all the easier to do given the issue's ambiguities. And so in the end we have wound up in a position where there is widespread anxiety about the prevailing state of affairs, but the expectation of meaningful action on the problem all too often seems like wishful thinking.
1. Of course, that is not to deny the culpability of vested interests and the responsibility of numerous personally powerful individuals in causing avoidable damage and thwarting efforts to solve the problem. As C. Wright Mills observed, the idea that "we all possess equal powers to make history . . . is sociological nonsense and political irresponsibility." Yet the problem deeply involves a whole way of thinking about the world, and a whole system for dealing with it, far bigger than any one individual.
2. Economist Herman Daly defined sustainable use as one's not consuming a resource at a greater rate than that that at which it might be renewed (in the case of renewables); substitutes found for it, which would themselves be subject to that same consumption standard (in the case of nonrenewables); or "recycled, absorbed or rendered harmless" (in the case of pollutants). See Donella H. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, Dennis Meadows, The Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update (White River Junction, VT: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2004), p. 54.
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