The Political Voices of Women

The following is a great post by Political Voices of Women Community member Bobbie Woods.

When we stop reeling from the overwhelming fact that our economic system just spun out of control (though it will probably come back) we’ve all got to ask ourselves the big questions: How did this happen? Did I personally contribute? Can I live my life in accordance with my values of environmental sustainability and still function in our capitalist system? Yeah, so I know that last question just sent 99% of readers clicking away to Perez Hilton…

If you’re still with me, here’s the thing that I’ve been thinking about: macroeconomics shows us that our capitalist system requires continual growth. Continual consumption of natural resources and environmental degradation as a result. Some authors even call it carbon-based growth to differentiate between a petroleum based economy and… something else. What else?? Here’s a chunky quote about our petroleum-based economy:

Research by the McKinsey Global Institute and McKinsey’s Climate Change Initiative finds that reconciling these two objectives means that “carbon productivity,” the amount of GDP produced per unit of carbon equivalents (CO2e) emitted, must increase dramatically. To meet commonly discussed abatement paths [to stop global climate change], carbon productivity must increase from approximately $740 GDP per ton of CO2e today to $7,300 GDP per ton of CO2e by 2050—a tenfold increase. This is comparable in magnitude to the labor productivity increases of the Industrial Revolution. However, the “carbon revolution” must be achieved in one-third of the time that economic transformation took in the Industrial Revolution if we are to maintain current growth levels while keeping CO2e levels below 500 parts per million by volume (ppmv), a level that many experts believe is the maximum that can be allowed without significant risks to the climate.

What this means is that it may be impossible to correct global warming using our current economic system. We need to examine our economic system in order to support sustainability, living within the means available to us without further damaging our environment. The financial meltdown, global climate change, they’re both symptoms of one REALLY BIG problem: capitalism without sustainability.

We kind of already knew that, but somehow no one seems to ever just say it outright. Back to the finance world, aka the witch’s brewpot of capitalism.

The “did I personally contribute” question is valid when we look at how we can change. Do you invest in mutual funds that in turn own stocks from companies you cannot support? How about your 401K? Those greedy-ass investment bankers who tanked our economy were leveraging something: YOUR money. Do the due-diligence and examine your investments to ensure they’re in line with your values. You may own Exxon stock and not even know it. Do you buy too much plastic on a daily basis? Lord knows I do, and it drives me crazy! I hate plastic, but even Trader Joes wraps their veggies in it! (yup, time to go write that email to TJs corporate office…) Okay, so we get it on the environmental impact of daily habits. We’re saving up for the Prius or better yet, the Aptera. But we still participate every day in an economic model that demands continuous expansion to sustain it’s health. We’re hurting now because of shrinkage. Everything we’ve been taught tells us this shrinkage is BAD. People are losing jobs and houses. We haven’t even BEGUN to see the impact on retirement savings that have now evaporated. Life is getting harder.

But the pain is necessary. Until we find a widespread and sustainable form of energy production (beyond resource depletion), the world cannot support a western lifestyle for everyone on earth. What does a sustainable economic model look like?

Maybe socialism, and definitely with a LOCAL emphasis. For us Americans, rugged individualists that we are, there’s always the pain-threshhold question associated with socialism: how much pain would you like to subject your neighbors to before you’ll pay more taxes to help them? How about someone else’s neighbors? How about rude people? How about lazy people who just lie and don’t work? Yup, gets us every time. We cringe at socialism. But I guess my argument is that it provides a cushion against economic contraction, which we need if we are going to try for zero-sum growth, meaning some periods of expansion balanced against some periods of contraction. We need to pull back from globalism and back to local self-sufficiency. My mind reels at how Luddite this starts to sound, but we really do need to stop consuming plastic crap from overseas, and support local economies. Green Party style.

Here’s a quote (my emphases added) from an excellent article on no-growth economics by Stephen Stoll in Har…:

“Our trouble lies in a simple confusion, one to which economists have been prone since the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Growth and ecology operate by different rules. Economists tend to assume that every problem of scarcity can be solved by substitution, by replacing tuna with tilapia, without factoring in the long-term environmental implications of either. But whereas economies might expand, ecosystems do not. They change—pine gives way to oak, coyotes arrive in New England—and they reproduce themselves, but they do not increase in extent or abundance year after year. Most economists think of scarcity as a labor problem, imagining that only energy and technology place limits on production. To harvest more wood, build a better chain saw; to pump more oil, drill more wells; to get more food, invent pest-resistant plants. That logic thrived on new frontiers and more intensive production, and it held off the prophets of scarcity—from Thomas Robert Malthus to Paul Ehrlich—whose predictions of famine and shortage have not come to pass. The Agricultural Revolution that began in seventeenth-century England radically increased the amount of food that could be grown on an acre of land, and the same happened in the 1960s and 1970s, when fertilizer and hybridized seeds arrived in India and Mexico. But the picture looks entirely different when we change the scale. Industrial society is roughly 250 years old: make the last ten thousand years equal to twenty-four hours, and we have been producing consumer goods and CO2 for only the last thirty-six minutes. Do the same for the past 1 million years of human evolution, and everything from the steam engine to the search engine fits into the past twenty-one seconds. If we are not careful, hunting and gathering will look like a far more successful strategy for survival than economic growth. The latter has changed so much about the earth and human societies in so little time that it makes more sense to be cautious than triumphant.”

James Surowiecki of the New Yorker called the US economy the provberbial shark. If it doesn’t keep swimming it dies. That can’t be good.

originally posted on www.duhpookie.com