There have to be limits. If we project “housing starts” ninety-nine years forward at current rates, there… — James Howard Kunstler
There have to be limits. If we project “housing starts” ninety-nine years forward at current rates, there wouldn’t be a single buildable quarter-acre lot left in the world. Not a few economists would rationalize this outcome by declaring that [in] ninety-nine years from now we will have colonies on the moon or Mars or under the . Or that technology coupled with human ingenuity will solve the problem some other way, […] by genetically reengineering human beings to be one inch tall or booting all our consciousnesses into computer servers where unlimited numbers of virtual people could dwell in unlimited virtual environments of endless cyberspace.
More likely, we will remain confined to the planet Earth. Economic growth that has appeared normative and desirable during the story of industrialism is already becoming pathogenic in an economy showing more… signs of positive feedback and accelerating positive entropy manifesting as damage to the biosphere. High entropy becomes particularly problematic in an economy utterly dependent on a few… commodities […]. It becomes especially relevant when the limits to those commodities become tangible, as is now the case as we approach the global oil production peak and the actual depletion (thirty years past peak) of the North American natural gas endowment. But the collective imagination of the public cannot process the notion of a nongrowth economy, even though the limits to growth are visible all around us in everything from the paved-over suburban landscapes to the steeply rising gas prices, to played-out aquifers, to the death of the Atlantic cod fishery. We are not capable of conceiving another economic way. We are hostages to our own system.
p. 192Source: Wikiquote · CC BY-SA 4.0
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At the start of the oil glut, a climactic set of economic relations took shape led by Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher (and joined eagerly by President Reagan and his advisors) that would be called “globalism.” It was not so much a new idea as the logical and inevitable result of mature self-organizing systems elaborating themselves under the influence of renewed, immense energy inputs—the ultimate cheap-oil way of doing business in the closed system [in respect to matter] that is the planet Earth. It entailed the maximization of short-term profit and the minimization of care for future generations. It was the ultimate generator of entropy.
p. 219
Globalism was operated by oligarchical corporations on the gigantic scale, made possible by cheap oil. By “oligarchical” I mean that power was vested in small numbers of people running large organizations who were not accountable for their actions to many of the people who were subject to those actions. By “corporation,” I mean a group enterprise given the legal status of a “person,” with “rights,” but in fact devoid of any human qualities of ethics, humility, mercy, duty, or loyalty that would constrain those rights. As Wendell Berry put it, “a corporation… is a pile of money to which a number of persons have sold their moral allegiance… It can experience no personal hope or remorse. No change of heart. It cannot humble itself. It goes about its business as if it were immortal, with the single purpose of becoming a bigger pile of money.
p. 186
It is assumed now that human beings, prompted by the market, will employ ingenuity to discover a substitute for oil and gas, once the price starts to ramp up beyond the “affordable” range. This assumption is apt to prove fallacious because it ignores the fact that the earth is a closed system [for matter], while the laws of thermodynamics state that energy can’t be created out of nothing, only changed from low entropy to high entropy, and that we have already changed the half [or perhaps a fraction] of our [planet's] oil endowment that was easiest to get into dispersed carbon dioxide, which is now ratcheting up global warming and climate change, which might well put the industrial adventure out of business before human ingenuity can come up with a substitute for oil. The [fraction of] solar energy [that was] stored for millions of years in oil [and was easy to extract] will now be expressed in higher temperatures, more severe storms, rising sea levels, and harsher conditions for the human species, which, despite its… technological [and scientific] achievements, remains a part of nature and subject to its laws.
p. 194