RE: Re: oil and socialism

["Lisa & Ian Murray" <seamus@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Yoshie:
> You must take into account the most scarce resource of all: time.  In
> the long run, we are all dead, as Keynes reminded economists of his
> day.  Can capital increase productivity, improve energy efficiency,
> and/or invent alternative energy sources (whose production does not
> depend upon fossil fuels) _in time_?  Here, you must consider the
> problem of path dependency, not to mention the question of hegemony,
> as well.

******

Could any system at this point? Anyone who's taken a look at Paul Ekins
projections in "Economic Growth and Environmental Sustainability" or the
work of Robert Goodland and Peter Vitousek among others, has some inkling of
the pickle we're in in this century.

A global growth rate of 2-3% a year leads to a quadrupling of output in 50
years [according to Ekins model]; combined with UN projections of population
growth, the reduction of environmental impacts per unit of consumption must
fall by 91% to achieve "sustainability" [no further damage of ecological
systems than we've already done]. Quadrupling the "South's" per capita
consumption over this period of time would result in it's being only 1/6th
of current levels in the North; thus the burden falls on the North to change
production/consumption regimes. Any takers?

The issue of time takes on a different form of nefariousness that touches on
both Yoshie's and Jim's ideas.  The critical issue in innovation is time to
market and how long one can hold the lead [via property rights etc.] before
competitors catch up. As the pace of innovation -product life cycle-
quickens, the level of investment needed to achieve economies of scale to
sustain an adequate level of demand in order to garner a decent rate of
return on investment rises enormously. In a macroeconomic context, the
system becomes addicted to the speed of innovation and the implications for
stagnation in output per man/woman hour becomes ever larger as the speed at
which one must keep ahead of ones competition quickens. The speed of market
saturation is reached more quickly etc...To increase, let alone sustain,
demand that would justify investment then eats into whatever energy
efficiency gains are made. What does it matter if cars average 50 miles a
gallon over the next decade if the number of drivers quadruples or greater
over the next 50? Contra Alan Greenspan, the rate of dematerialization in
the North is nowhere near offsetting growth in resource use. Hence the issue
becomes one of seriously putting sand in the gears of the path dependency of
the "speed economy" which paradoxically has become one [in the North] at
precisely the time when the middle class professionals that make it go are
increasingly complaining about gridlock in their transportation networks;
sclerosis. Thus cell phones! Soon everyone will work in their cars :-)!

So, if oil is the "computational substrate" of contemporary capitalism;
what's the next computational substrate?

Ian














>
> Even discounting the finiteness of any physical entity (including
> fossil fuels), which is not likely to become a problem in the
> foreseeable future, we may still encounter a quite interesting
> supply-side crisis, depending upon political developments in
> oil-producing regions which have remained as volatile as ever (hence
> the imperial insistence upon the expansion of the NATO & focus on
> Yugoslavia & Columbia in recent years).
>
>
>