A Stitch in Haste

Via Crooks and Liars comes this piece of Malthusian gobbledygook:

One day affordable luxuries like overseas vacations and meals out will become unattainable, and even basic necessities like energy, electricity, water, and food are likely to become less plentiful and more expensive. This global austerity will produce great hardship for the poor and will force even lower-middle class families to choose between long car trips, restaurant meals, air-conditioning in summer, and high thermostats in winter.

Lying behind this historic shift in global fortunes is a fundamental reversal in the balance between resource supply and demand. For most of the 20th century, global stockpiles of vital materials like oil, natural gas, coal, and basic minerals expanded as giant multinational corporations (MNCs) poured billions of dollars into exploring every corner of the Earth in the drive to locate and exploit valuable deposits of extractible [sic] materials. This permitted consumers around the world to increase their consumption of virtually everything, safe in the knowledge that even more of these commodities would be available next year and the year after that, and so on infinitely into the future.

But this condition no longer prevails. Many of the world's most promising sources of supply have been located and exploited, and all of the additional billions spent by MNCs on exploration and discovery are producing increasingly meager results.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

First off, there are two kinds of poor people in the world: poor people in rich countries and poor people in poor countries. The former are generally poor because either they or their parents made poor life choices. The latter are generally poor because their politicians (or, more often, their dictators) made poor central planning choices. "Exploitation" and "depletion" of resources by global capitalism (as opposed to local collectivism) have little or nothing to do with it.

Yes, production inputs such as wood, water, minerals -- and energy -- have supply and demand curves and determine, in part, retail prices for consumption goods. But if there is one thing that centuries of pre-modern, modern and post-modern capitalism have demonstrated, it's that there is rarely, very rarely, such a thing as a "fixed quantity" of an input or a scarce resource that does not have substitutes. Even land, once thought to be the ultimate "fixed input," can be increased (e.g., by a skyscraper).

The assumption that tomorrow's economic capacity will be exactly identical to today's, and that if today's inputs are depleted then the "global economic factory" will shut down, belies a fundamental ignorance of the way the world works. Factories can retool and resize, supermarkets can change their selection, homes can switch from natural gas to heating oil, and so on. "That's all folks!" is cartoon economics, not reality.

Second, and related, note that the word "technology" appears nowhere in the Alternet piece. The inability to acknowledge the consistent capacity of humanity across the centuries to:

(a) do more with less, and
(b) do different with different

has been the (non-depleting) error of such thinkers ever since Malthus.

(One quick sidebar: "increasingly meager results" -- like this?)

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If you really care -- in a central planner wannabe sense -- about America's dependence on fossil fuels generally and foreign oil specifically, then here's all you need to do:

1. Go nuclear.

2. Eliminate every single agricultural subsidy, tariff, quota, cartel and other interventionist measure (most of which, recall, make food more expensive, not less). Let a wave a bankruptcies and foreclosures come sweeping down the plain, and turn all that excess farmland into wind farms. Clean, renewable, and no cow flatulence. But if you're not willing to allow the first part, then don't bemoan the lack of the second part.

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One last digression: If you really care about what the poor and the lower middle class can and cannot afford, then perhaps you should look not at oil production rates, but tax rates. It's somewhat hard to "get ahead" when one-eighth of your paycheck is confiscated to fund a zero-return Ponzi scheme (or, to borrow a phrase, a program "safe in the knowledge that even more would be available next year and the year after that, and so on infinitely into the future").