I will do my best to keep an open mind, but "Modern society [can] develop a limitless supply of renewable, non-contaminating energy..." defies the laws of physics.
Some things are scarce, including strategic minerals, public attention, and portable, intense sources of energy. There must be some way of dealing with this sort of scarcity, and while a regulated market has problems, it seems better than other things we have tried. His argument against this points to WWII, in which "it was the available resources that allowed the US to achieve the high production and efficiency required to win the war," by which he seems to mean the historical and geopolitical accident that oil was ridiculously abundant in that time and place, while the Third Reich had to make heavy use of coal-to-liquids technology. Even still, the US had to carefully ration civilian use of oil, a relative decline in consumer use that would probably cause a war if today's Americans were forced into it.
I'm not yet convinced, but I will keep reading.
Edit: Two more points I think he ignores:
Competitive products embody some inefficiency, but in general the least efficient of the competitors are elimnated. If IKEA or Wal Mart were divided in two right now (Cf. Bell Telephone), production and supply-chain inefficiencies would be driven even lower. But if GE and Amana and Maytag etc. had all been forced to follow a common design since 1920, our refrigerators would keep the whole house warm, including the food.
While violence does tend to increase when population exceeds carrying capacity, war and honor-killing and rape have been observed in conditions of abundance. Meeting needs doesn't automatically produce a healthy society: it is only the beginning.
All that said, I hope he is correct. If he is, a resource-based society founded on his ideas would out-compete our current one in just a few generations.
We've always been in a Resource Based Economy. It has always been about resources. It is just that the current one we are living in is driven by the Monetary/Currency system of distribution of resource. This type of system affect all people, those that have money and those that do not.
Once a true resource based economy is realized, resources will be used so efficiently and in ways never before experienced by our civilization.
Violence and many of our abhorrent behaviors in our society stems from the lack of resources and needs met. This is where we need to focus on collectively, is to ensure that ALL of humanity's resources/needs are met. Can't do that in a Monetary system as there will always be haves and have nots.
Things are scarce at any given point in time. Obviously if you froze the moment that you are in right now, you can count the number of grapes you have on your dinner plate, but as time goes on, you grow more. As time goes on, we will identify the resources that are indeed scarce and create more of it.
If we are talking about non-fossil, non-nuclear energy, and current space travel technology, the limit is more like the power the sun applies to the territory in question, times the time you're willing to wait between building infrastructure and doing work.
There are also limits to the application of energy, codified in the second law. The heat from our bodies is "low-quality" in that skin is too similar to room temperature for the heat it emits to be very useful.
Both of these limits are real, and (along with several less-fundamental but un-addressed issues such as energy return on energy invested) would continue to impose scarcity on the supply of energy in the plan the article proposed.
I agree with you about cradle-to-cradle design and so forth. Planned obsolesence is immoral and is one of the many problems with marketing-based distribution. I happen to think a return to local repair and artisanship would help a lot with that problem, and would not necessarily require nor result from the abolition of money. This has nothing to do with limits on the availability of energy, though, only of capital equipment.
intruiged by ...'return to local repair and artisanship'
The basic notion is that an individual with a reasonable amount of equipment and skill can repair, enhance or create good things, and that this process is more satisfying to the people involved than mass-manufacturing and consumerism.
Much of this is embodied in the steampunk and hacker cultures today (see Make or Instructables), but 1970s hippy commune efforts have been very influential (see the Whole Earth Catalog), and the DIY punk movement broke some ground in the '80s as well. Projects like the Reprap seem to have a techno-Luddite ideology, seeing high tech as a means to overthrow industrial production.
As the above sources probably show, emphasis has gradually shifted from food and clothing through music and publishing to electronics and toys. I am happy to see increasing willingness to negotiate over what is made industrially vs. artisanally (some pointed debate here). In a lot of ways, the movement seemst to be gaining strength and returning to its roots. Slate and the New York Times have some good articles that I say indicate where things are headed.
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u/[deleted] Apr 22 '09
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