Environmental Engineering Reference
In-Depth Information
To summarize this already brief summary: Due to energy limits, overwhelming debt burdens, and
accumulating environmental impacts, the world has reached a point where continued economic
growth may be unachievable. Instead of increasing its complexity, therefore, society will—for the
foreseeable future, and probably in fits and starts—be shedding complexity.
General economic contraction has arguably already begun in Europe and the United States. The
signs are everywhere. High unemployment levels, stagnating or declining energy consumption, and
jittery markets herald what some bearish financial analysts describe as a “greater depression” per-
crisis because it focuses only on its financial and social manifestations while ignoring its energy
and ecological basis.
Whether or not the root causes of worldwide economic turmoil are generally understood, that
turmoil is already impacting political systems as well as the daily lives of hundreds of millions of
people. Governments and central banks anxious to avert a contagious deflationary destruction of
global capital have bailed out banks that innovated their way into insolvency in the years leading
up to 2008. Meanwhile, governments that borrowed heavily during the last decade or two with the
expectation that further economic growth would swell tax revenues and make it easy to repay debts
now find real growth hard to achieve.
In a few instances, the very financial institutions that some governments temporarily saved from
insolvency are now undermining the economies of other governments by forcing a downgrade of
their credit ratings, making debt rollovers more difficult. Those latter governments are being given
an ultimatum: reduce domestic spending or face exclusion from the system of global capital. But in
many cases government spending is all that's keeping the national economy functioning. Increas-
ingly, even in countries recently considered good credit risks, the costs of preventing a collapse of
the financial sector are being shifted to the general populace by way of austerity measures that res-
ult in economic contraction and general misery.
A global popular uprising is the predictable result of governments' cuts in social services, their
efforts to shield wealthy investors from consequences of their own greed, and rising food and fuel
prices. In recent years, recurring protests have erupted in Africa, the Middle East, Asia, Europe, and
North America. The long-range aims of protesters are in many cases unformulated or unarticulated,
but the immediate reasons for the protests are not hard to discern. As food and fuel prices squeeze,
poor people naturally feel the pinch first. When the poor are still able to get by, they are often reluct-
ant to risk assembling in the street to oppose corrupt, entrenched regimes. When they can no longer
make ends meet, the risks of protest seem less significant—there is nothing to lose; life is intoler-
able anyway. Widespread protest opens the opportunity for needed political and economic reforms,
but it also leads to the prospect of bloody crackdowns and reduced social and political stability.
Scenarios for Societal Simplification
If the above premise is correct, then two scenarios can easily be envisioned:
A. Continued (ever-more desperate) pursuit of business-as-usual.
In this scenario, policy
makers try restarting economic growth with stimulus spending and bailouts; all efforts are directed
toward increasing, or at least maintaining, the complexity and centralization of society. Deficits are
disregarded.
