Ready for Rationing? Why We Should Put the Brakes on Consumption If We Want to Survive

It’s not clear whether Stan Cox is a plant breeder with a penchant for politics, or a political provocateur who finds time to do science. Whichever aspect of his personality is dominant, Cox artfully draws on both skill sets to make the case for rationing, perhaps the most important concept that is not being widely discussed these days. The power of his new book, Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing, comes from his blending of scientific analyses of dire resource trends with a compelling moral argument about the need to reshape politics and economics.

The future of business: what are the alternatives to capitalism?

Evidence shows its very clear we have reached the safe limits to growth in terms of the most pressing threat to human civilisation – that of a stable atmosphere. Therefore, until we can find a way to decouple growth from carbon emissions and reach that mythical “dematerialised” economy, restarting global economic growth seems a dangerous folly. But what might the implications of this be for capitalism?

Social justice and solar equity

What is the relationship between social justice and resource sustainability? Many authors have tackled this subject from many directions, including Illich (1973), and O’Riordan (1976). In the developed world, freedom includes emancipation from nature, where freedom does not occur until we escape our limits. The spiritual is separate from the material, and energetic limits are not a consideration. Adequate society means that everyone else attains the first world countries’ level of development (Mies and Shiva, 1993).

Before the fall? Terminal Capitalism: Part 2

In the first part of this series about "terminal capitalism," we saw a collection of evidence that the global system of capitalism, the organized basis for most world trade, is in deep trouble. The situation has become so serious and the problems so self-evident that the polls show many average American citizens are questioning the viability of capitalism itself.

Terminal Capitalism: Part 1

But the doubts about the viability of capitalism as a system now extend far beyond its traditional critics. The U.S. economy has been in bad shape since about 2007 and the signs of recovery have not improved much since then. To give one example, Richard Heinberg of the Post Carbon Institute notes that the total economic growth in the United States is approximately equal to the annual government deficit. In other words, if the U.S. Treasury were not issuing bond debt, printing fiat currency in cooperation with the private Federal Reserve, which is in de facto control of the U.S. economy through creating new money and setting the prime interest rate, there would actually be negative U.S. economic growth and a severe recession:

How can we link monetary systems to the natural world?

Money may not grow on trees, but it does grow at a much faster rate – particularly when created by banks as interest-bearing debt. In modern economies, nearly all money is created in this way. To maintain a stable money supply, debtors must repay both the initial loan and the interest on the loan. This means we need either economic growth at a rate in line with the interest on the debt and/or inflation, both of which we’ve had a great deal of in the past century. But back in the real, natural world, there are limits to growth. The ultimate limit is energy, something all production requires. Humans require food to survive and re-produce. To create this food we need energy, energy that comes, ultimately, from the sun.