one is the absolute material
> >>limit on certain resources--oil, coal, gas, fresh water, arable
> >>land. There is just so much of that that exists or could exist.
>
James H said:
>Fortunately the findings of the Limits to Growth from which the
>contemporary sense of limits arises, and the dire warnings based upon
>them were readily disproved. In error, authors Forrester and the Meadows
>had taken the existing level of known resources as a constant, and
>simply projected the rate of consumption into the future, reaching their
>date of 2100 as depletion. However, reserves of mineral wealth are,
>perhaps surprisingly, not a constant at all. On the contrary, with the
>passage of time, reserves tend to increase. . . . . . Rather 'what limits
>there may be come from man's
>economic and technological ability to exploit these resources' (p37).
>
Well, then, it's perfectly OK to waste resources, just as long as we open wildlife refuges to oil exploration. James, you really do have a botha charmingly naive faith in what the energy industry tells us is truw--and by the way, I did not cite the Club of Rome's Limits to Growth!--as well as that industry's cheerful indifference to the consequences of exercising Man's manly economic and technological ability to exploit those resources.
The point about the limits imposed by material scarcity is not just taht we might run out of petrol or water land, or go broke trying not to, or poison ourselves using them up at the rate and in the way we do. It is that unless we are willing to take those risks (as you are), there are choices we have to make about what we will devote thise resourcesto and the way we will use them. Investing in roads and SUVs means we can't have other things, for example. That is what material scarcity means. And that is not a capitalsi plot, as Gordon suggests; it is a reality that any economic system must face.
Btw, Gordon suggests that there are no biologically imposed scarcities any more. That is not true, although the specific counterexamples vary with what you mean by "biological." If by "biological" you mean "absolutely independent of human social relations," so that you can't say, as you might to (say) the depletion of the seas, "Oh, that's capitalism," there is still the key example of ehat I have unhappily called "temporal scarcity," meaning the inherent scarcity of human effort. This ultimately derives from human mortality, which is a fact that is independent of social relations. Vita brevis, so it is a crime to expend our efforts on enterprises that help no one. If, however, biologically imposed scarcities include those taht pertain to biology, agriculture and the like, we are very far from having overcome them, and indeed are multiplying them everywhere.
I myself do not think it is good or smart to call for austerity in response to scarcity. I think what is called for is another word that horrifies the conventional left: _efficiency_, which at the bottom is (from a left point of view) about avoiding waste. We no doubt need to change our consumption patterns, but we can all live well if we don't waste our time and resources.
--jks
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