Pointedstick wrote:
Now we're getting somewhere. If I'm understanding you correctly, you're saying that Catton's book can be distilled down to the idea that over the next few centuries, the idea of limitless growth will be revealed to be a dangerous sham that has ill-prepared us for reality without infinite cheap fossil fuels.
Yes, I think that's a good summary.
Basically, I accuse Catton of building a strawman argument by extrapolating the course that the USA was on in 1973 out into the indefinite future and declaring that we humans will not change course even if it leads to disaster or potentially even extinction.
I don't think it was just the 1973 course, but rather the entire 20th century course.
I think that Catton would say that humans WILL change course, but that it might happen later rather than sooner.
This is a ridiculous argument, and the reason why I feel comfortable dismissing it after only 43 years is because we have already made very meaningful changes to the problems Catton identified and altered our trajectory in that time. As I keep bringing up, solar and wind are now cost-competitive with gas.
Next up is the scalability problem. Even if solar and wind are cost competitive as niche applications, they would not be cost competitive if you tried to scale them up beyond niche applications because you would start to run into all sorts of problems like scarcity of rare earth materials, the environmental damage associated with wind turbines, the down time when the sun isn't shining and the wind isn't blowing, etc.
This is a titanic change from the world Catton inhabited. And we are already adding more solar and wind generation capacity than gas!
In Catton's time renewables were a niche segment of the energy market, and they are still a niche today. When electricity generation is 30% wind and 30% solar, the world you are describing will have arrived, but not when it's closer to 3% and 3%, which is where we are today.
Do you think that this process is going to stall out or something? To me, it really seems that this fundamentally challenges the fossil fuel leg of Catton's argument. If so, that leaves only the "infinite growth is impossible" leg, making it much more obvious and weak argument.
It won't stall out. It will simply start to bump into things like lack of suitable places to build more wind turbines and solar farms, the fact that battery technology still isn't all that great when it comes to using electricity for transportation, the fact that planes will always be fossil fueled, the need for fossil fuel inputs for modern agriculture, etc.
The bottom line is that I just don't think we will be able to concentrate solar energy as intensely as Mother Nature has done for us in the compacted ancient organic material that we know as fossil fuels. We think we can, and maybe we can, but I think it will be more like the comparison of a human hand and a prosthetic hand. The latter will never have the elegance of the former.
All I would suggest is that people put Catton's arguments on their short list of serious threats to our way of life that could present themselves within our lifetimes. If it turns out that energy isn't that big of a deal and solar, wind, nuclear, hydro, etc. can gradually replace fossil fuels, then good for us as humans. If, however, it turns out that an economic system premised on continual growth will eventually bump into hard ecological limits, then we are going to have some tough times to deal with at some point in the future.
Interestingly, von Mises touched on this topic in a very brief way in
Human Action. What he said was basically that he could imagine resource constraints pinching economic growth at some point in the future, but that it would be a long long time before anything like that happened, and basically left it at that.
Remember, too, that expensive oil is basically the same as expensive alternative energy sources. What the world needs is cheap energy for business as usual. In 2008, we found out how the world economy responds to expensive energy (e.g., $150 per barrel oil)--everything basically shut down until the price of energy fell to levels where things could function profitably again.
The relationship between energy prices and the financial markets is really fascinating. Basically, the premise behind all debt is that people and businesses will have more money in the future than they have today, but this premise has certain energy input assumptions built into it, and once those assumptions are invalidated through experience, the entire rationale for debt starts to fall apart as well. In a post-peak oil world, many believe that the only reasonable assumption will be that people will have less surplus in the future than they have today, since the cost of energy inputs will be higher at almost every level of production.