Post
Oil: Zero Money and Zero Growth
by
Carl Carlson.
It will be a very good life. We will retain our collected knowledge,
wisdom, and technology to develop a lifestyle that requires very little
of what we currently perceive as work
while enjoying vastly expanded
opportunities to socially interact at a much more engaged level. Only
two things are required to
achieve this lifestyle.
1) Zero population growth. 2) Zero money.
In sixth grade Paula Sawyer was our social studies teacher. She asked
us to do some fun stuff like figure out how old we would be in the year
2000 (34). She entered the class in a national essay writing
competition about what we would do in the event of a nuclear war. I won
some kind of award for my story about grabbing my family and stealing
snowmobiles to drive to the North Pole to escape the fallout even
though there’d be no food or heat for us there. I won an
award
for that and something in my brain snapped.
In one of Paula’s texts there was a section on world
populations.
It showed a polymorphic picture of the average human once all the races
merged. The poly-person in the book was very Asian in appearance and
although innately racially terrifying, the look and concept was
alluringly attractive in a novel, seductive kind of way. In the same
chapter the authors predicted that we would grow smaller and hairless
as we spent more time indoors and population increases put pressure on
physical space. In 2040 they figured we’d be down to about 35
square feet per person on the worlds’ inhabitable surfaces.
To a sixth grader these were some pretty heavy-duty concepts to grapple
with. It is not that I really understood the nature and meaning of the
concepts and numbers. What was understood but not fully acknowledged
was that we weren’t going to get there (2040). It was
obviously
just not feasible. So when I say I snapped, I mean I changed. My family
probably knows better than me how those changes manifested themselves.
I just know that after that point in my life I looked at our lives and
everything about them with a certain underlying sense of sarcasm in the
bitter fallacy of it all.
So for thirty years these thoughts were pretty much shelved although
the certainty that I was on the last train of this epoch led to some
fairly risky lifestyle decisions. I’ve literally had
something
like three hundred employers from dish dog to Fortune 1000 business
consultant. I’ve driven everything from a ’61
beetle to a
‘01 BMW. I’ve been around the world three times on
business
and pleasure. My son is half-Chinese and I’m bald now (thanks
Paula!). Last fall, I filed for bankruptcy and decided to just ditch
the house and car instead trying to refinance or sell. I got fired
somewhere back there too.
Oddly enough none of that makes me unhappy or bitter. It was really
great to fully enjoy last summer and have time to reflect, which I did.
It seemed time to start doing something with some positive social merit
– and then I happened to hear Bill Ryerson speaking on
VPR’s Switchboard. I’d never heard of him or his
organization, the Population Media Center, but my sixth grade thoughts
clicked in and I decided to ask Mr. Ryerson if he knew if any papers or
journal articles existed that proved that an expanding economy was
dependent upon an expanding population. Mr. Ryerson sent me some links
to articles posted on Populationmedia.com but they were all related to
developing third world populations and economies.
That was not too much of a surprise or disappointment; Mr. Ryerson and
I maintain a regular dialogue and are planning to meet this summer to
see what contributions I might be able to make to the Population Media
Center’s efforts. I really look forward to meeting with Bill
and
in the interim I continue to research population and peak oil issues.
‘Ah,’ you say – finally he gets to peak
oil. How it
happened is this. A good friend of mine had been watching me plot Excel
graphs of population growth and oil depletion. I had no idea what peak
oil was; I was concerned about at what point the expanding population
would run out of fuel but didn’t know it was already an
established theory and movement. Joe (my friend) suggested I look up
“Hubberts’ Peak” and I landed on a Prius
blog which
pointed me to www.hubbertspeak.com.
After a few days of visiting this website I found Hubberts’
“Matter, Energy and Monetary Systems” and it was
kind of
like finding the Holy Grail. Finally, here was a paper that definitely
linked an economy’s requirement for economic expansion to
exist,
and an economy’s dependence upon an expanding population to
sustain the requisite economic expansion. In addition to population
expansion, Hubbert also stated that an economy is equally dependent
upon expanding matter and energy supplies to be processed and consumed
by the expanding population in support of the expanding economy.
If we step back for moment and look at Hubberts’ work here,
there
are only really four components. Three of them are real and one is
artificial. They are 1) population, 2) matter, 3) energy, and 4)
economics. Hubbert states clearly that an economy demands
ever-increasing supplies of energy and matter to exist. Hubbert implies
the requirement of an ever-expanding population to process and consume
the ever-expanding supplies of matter and energy. Although this makes
perfect sense, matter-energy alone was inflammatory enough in his time
so it is no wonder he veiled it a bit.
Hubbert’s proposed solution is simple enough, abandon money
(economics) and the rest will take care of itself.
Why? Because every time we do something that adds value to a good or
service, we have effectively created money (we expect to get paid for
that right?). If the money supply was finite and we all kept making
value, no one would ever get paid because the fixed supply of money
could never keep up with the expanding amount of value. This is why
economies must always expand; we keep creating value and therefore keep
creating more money. This money wants to go somewhere. It looks for
places to make more money by investing in something that consumes more
resources to make more money. We go along with the prosperity and
opportunity for richness and produce more and more people to process
and consume the resources needed to make more money.
This is why we must abandon money, thoughts of richness, and the
endless manufacture of disposable goods. Even a stable, non-expanding
population will consume to depletion any available non-renewable
resource. I’m not really a granola type of guy. I liked my
BMW,
big house, and a huge stockpile of gadgets and gizmos. But
they’ve really got to go. All of it.
Applying the Sherlock Holmes’ theory of deductive reasoning,
if
we take away money, we take away industry and commerce. That pretty
much leaves us with nuts and berries and a little Iron Age ingenuity on
the side to keep us in nails, plowshares, cauldrons, and horseshoes.
If we’re really smart, we’ll also give up
money’s
evil little stepchild, barter. Ultimately we should found communities
where each individual produces enough of a food or service to meet
their own requirements and the requirements of other members of the
community that produce a different good or service. At a macro level,
clustered communities will exchange goods and services under the same
model.
It will be a very good life. We will retain our collected knowledge,
wisdom, and technology to develop a lifestyle that requires very little
of what we currently perceive as work while enjoying vastly expanded
opportunities to socially interact at a much more engaged level.
Only two things are required to achieve this lifestyle. 1) Zero
population growth. 2) Zero money.
If you doubt this consider Einstein’s relativity theory
E=MC2.
You just can not break it down further than energy, mass, and the speed
of light. Same is true for the basis of an economy; it needs expanding
matter, energy, and populations to exist. We cannot just strike out a
component of E=MC2 because it is wholly a natural equation. But we can
strike out the economic factor in the matter, energy, population
equation as it is an artificial element, and in fact we must if we ever
want to live in a sustainable fashion.
The hard truth is that our current population is far in excess of any
sustainable level. We are artificially supporting our current
population with the incredible amount of energy available from a barrel
of oil. A barrel of oil is eight people working at hard labor for a
year. Right now the world consumes 82 billion barrels of oil a year.
When the numbers get that big, I get lost but I think that’s
the
human equivalent of 6.4 trillion people working at hard labor each
year. Currently we’ve got 8 billion souls so we’re
just a
wee tad short there.
When oil is no longer readily available, we will never be able to
supply the manpower required to substitute for the agricultural work
that a barrel of oil provides and billions are going to die. There is
going to be a very difficult period while we readjust and hopefully
achieve a zero growth, zero dollar way of life.
Another hard truth is that we don’t have much time to talk
about
or prepare for this. Outside of the Peak Oil community, last week there
were two significant developments in the media regarding faltering
economies and food supplies. The first was a report from the OECD
stating the United States’ current trade deficit and deficit
spending at 80 billion a month are clearly unsustainable and will
result to an overnight economic collapse mimicking the recent collapse
of the former Soviet Union in the very near term. The second was an
equally authoritative report announcing that all of the
world’s
fisheries are radically over harvested in a manner that is destroying
the environment our staple fish exist in while at the same time
harvesting them to the point of extinction.
So whether it is Peak Oil, food stock depletion, or just general
economic collapse that triggers the end of this epoch, it is certainly
coming very soon. The method of collapse is not really much of any
importance. What is important is that the survivors of the collapse
relay the message of zero money and zero growth to the coming
generations so that we may finally live lives of content and happiness.