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Epicurean Simplicity
Post Carbon Fellow Bill McKibben was interviewed about challenging the growth economy in his recent book Eaarth.
From the article:
You must meet with considerable opposition from policymakers, academics, and press who are invested in economic growth.
Sure. It's very hard for any of us to take on the notion that the thing that's been central though the course of our whole lives, the political idea that whatever kind of ideology we've tended to embrace may no longer be serving us. It's especially hard to take on because it's an idea that, at some point, did serve us well. So yes, there's lots of resistance—an inability, almost, to hear or to understand the basic idea.
It's not really all that new, you know. When Limits to Growth was published in 1972 it got a really powerful hearing; millions of people bought the book and thought about the idea, and millions of them were convinced. But in the end I think the crucial moment was the election of Ronald Reagan; that was really a kind of debate about whether we were going to entertain the idea of limits. We decided not to, and we've never looked back.
Now we're reaching the point, I'm afraid, where it's no longer going to be an optional exercise. When the Arctic melts, that's a bad sign.
I can see the transition to a sustainable energy infrastructure based on solar panels on rooftops, mini-wind turbines in every yard, local food plots. It's harder for me to see the transition to a non-growth-based economy.
In a sense, they go hand in hand. The single most important part of that growth economy has been access to really cheap, plentiful fossil fuel. And if for a combination of the fact that we're running out of it and environmentally we can't afford to burn it anymore we switch off of that, then the fuels that replace them will come with more inherent limits and that they'll help reshape the world just in and of themselves. I don't think it's possible to have the kind of agro-industrial complex that we have at the moment without endless amounts of cheap energy...
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