GN: Actually the argument in the piece is that there is enough natural gas to fuel a methanol fuel cell economy for several decades (at a minimum) and that (since resource depletion theorists want everything planned 200 years in advance) there are other sources available. You can consult sources in the bibliography (hydrogen and methane hydrate stuff is on the web).
The ECO fisk drilling platforms in the North Sea are the largest manufactured objects moved in one time in one place in human history (see the Scientific American article, way back when, late 70s, early 80s). If I had written North Sea offshore oil as a "possibility" back in 1950, Mark would have said: are you nuts?
I see nothing improbable about the drilling of methane hydrates in the 30-60 year time horizon, if conventional methan resrouces are such that they're needed. (Assuming, and this is a different literature, that global warming doesn't cause methane hydrates to evaporate very rapidly causing a methane-driven acceleration of the heating effect). One of the hydrogen journals (see bibliog) reported recently on sun-powered dissociation of hydrogen from water using a thermally driven process rather than an electrolytic one. And so it goes. I don't know which of these if any will pay off, nor exactly, when. But I think it is more naive to use static technological and resource based assumptions than it is to factor change into the scenario. On this Mark and I will simply have to agree to disagree. But it does not change the fact that the fundamental critique of MJ's position is that it relies heavily on more or less linear extrapolations of current technologies and their associated needs. The capitalist system is defined by the continuing clash of old and new technologies and their business class advocates.
I'm not trying to be rosy. What I'm saying is that "the system" is supple, powerful, resourceful, and adaptive, ruthless brutal here (Chile, Viet Nam, Indonesia, WWI and II, &c. &c.), and creative there (some things capitalism has made are just plain neat, like the Golden Gate Bridge; and the Apollo program was ultra cool, as is Hubble telescope). We won't be handed a neat crisis on a platter that will do it in. I think it quite likely that the evolution from capitalism-to-something else will occur in a gradual, uneven manner that we cannot anticipate, in much the same way that today's society would have been inconceivable based on any extrapolations from current trends in the 12th century. Here's a weird idea: we move from cell phones to ear-plug phones to ear implant phones (for convenience). You ahve to do this "to keep up" with what business colleagues are doing (don't want to be at a meeting without access to your back up advisors via the ear implant). Someone gets theidea that web access via a biogenic visualization chip in the brain would be useful. Bingo we're techno-organic. Through selective piping in of muzak and sexual stimuli, etc., via the ear phones we are made to feel "good" or "bad" and spending and savings are adjusted accordingly. Greenspan gets on the world net and makes us all spend to the oligarchs' desired wage/price/employment level. (And maybe this stuff is just nonsense like the pills instead of food that the Jetsons forecast for us back in the 60s)
What I'm saying here is, that even without going "far out into weirdness" to see that 50 years out things can be VERY different, and that possibilities for technological mutation are INCREASING, not decreasing or stable.
Final point: I share Mark Jones' concerns about the environment's carrying capacity as a potential fundamental limiting factor. I think this is of much graver concern than resource depletion. However, even here, there may be surprises. A straight-line linear extrapolation of the smog problem in California based on automobile emissions in 1950 would have made the current population and pollution carrying level of California impossible. Flat out impossible. Mortality would be too high. Nowadays $300 per vehicle gets you a catalytic converter that pushes the carrying capacity of the California environment from 3 million (or whatever) in 1950 to 30 million today. There was no push for the "perfect solution" because the sloppy one (a "cat" on your basic IC engine) worked sufficiently well to get us to this point. Now there *is* a push for something else. My point is: I know that I don't know what the future holds. I would also add, that to the extent that mandated investment on environmental projects occurs in a less than full employment environment, it makes the capitalist economy that much stronger, not weaker (as the right would suggest), just as any form of mandated investment would increase employment (absent full employment). -- Gregory P. Nowell Associate Professor Department of Political Science, Milne 100 State University of New York 135 Western Ave. Albany, New York 12222
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