RE: carrying capacity and crisis

["Mark Jones" <jones118@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

Ken Hanly:
>
>
> Mark Jones sees the coming crisis as based upon lack of oil
> caused not just
> by limited reserves but alos a capital shortage so great as to hinder
> development of those reserves because of an accumulation crisis.

It's the form which an accumulation crisis takes which defines what happens
next, ie what kind of crisis you are gonna get. For example, you can have a
situation where promising new technologies offer alternatives to consumption
of the dininishing resource: telephones made expensive travel sometimes
unnecessary. But, as the Jevons Paradox showed, energy-saving technigques
which, when sufficiently generalised to be generally effective, also help
stimulate growth, so that a form of energy conservation  may only lead to
increased absolute energy consumption. That has definitely been happening
and the talk of 'virtualiosatioon' and 'dematerialisation' is mostly wrong.
Costanza & Cleveland seem to think that most of the productivity gains on
the recent past have resulted from the switch from less to more efficient
energy systems (oil to gas to electricity). In the end, the process has not
proved conservationist for the capitalist economy as a whole. So it doesn't
hold of the Liebigin determining limit and you will still get your resource
crisis, so Human Ingenuity will have to find another way (no signs yet). So
you are left with a different kind of conservation thru crisis (multiple car
passengers, better sites and built housing etc, altho none of this makes
more than a marginal difference).

And from the point of view of accumulation, this failure means recession,
capital contraction, and loss of the scientific and technical base from
which innovations arise and can be generalised. This makes decline a vicious
spiral full of amplifying positive feedbacks.

Where a crisis is completely general (as was for instance, the Malthusian
crisis in 18th c Europe) it is ncessary to reconstruct your system on a
wholly new basis (steam, iron coal, not wood, animal and water power) but
you then have a situation where most of the economy is declining and
unprofitable, and the whole social capital must be revalorised by the,
initiall small, growth sector which is your New Economy. Eventually, with
luck, the old system and the old overhang of unprofitable capital *will* be
liquidated thru crisis and the new sector will come to stand on its own fate
and will reshape the whole mode of production in its own likeness. Where
this doesn't happen, your bout of historical griowth, cultural extravagance
etc will end in tears and recriminations if not in Mayan-style obliteration.
But this is *in all cases* bound to be a wrenching period full of social
stress (Britain 1780-195) and you can only succeed if your New Economy is
viable in itself and if it can perform the larger task (saving the whole of
capitalism's bacon) into the long term future. Coal, oil and electricity all
did this but can the Internet and biogenetics do the same in today's world?

As for ecological economics, there's a lot in there in terms of empirical
work, but the whole concept of 'natural capital' strikes me as little better
than idiocy. They have no concept of capital to begin with; they are
dragging across some half-baked  numeraire straight out of NC economics and
applying to ecosystems. NC is bad enough but at least money does change
hands in places in the social world so it has some kind of contact with the
real world, however fictionalised it routinely is in it aaccounts-dept.
Renaming natural processes 'natural capitalism' and then arbitrarily
applying numbers to them strikes me as hubristic lunacy.

Mark Jones