Leigh Meyers leighcmeyers at yahoo.com
----- Original Message ----- From: Eubulides To: lbo-talk at lbo-talk.org Sent: Sunday, September 26, 2004 10:04 AM Subject: Re: [lbo-talk] anti-Suburban snobs, was petro-thusians
----- Original Message ----- From: "Chuck Grimes" <cgrimes at rawbw.com>
It is not energy that is scarce, but knowledge. Ian
----------
I can't believe it, but I actually disagree. Scarcity is not the problem.
===================
Scarcity of knowledge about what to do regarding the ecological consequences of modernization is quite large. People in OECD countries have spent so many decades theorizing within the parameters of modernity they have epistemic spasms when it is asserted that the ecological problems of modernity cannot be solved using yet more of the methods, policies and collective action strategies that are the products of modernity itself. This is what Ulrich Beck is trying to get at with his claim of zombie categories and Robert Cox has been saying [see his quote in the Dialog between Patrick Bond and James Heartfield] and many others have been saying as well. With regard to nature-society dynamics in the 21st century, antagonizing polarities engaged in by partisans of the modern/postmodern binary as they relate to this issue are beside the point.
The first part of the problem is composed of processes that are only correctible through profit feed back loops. And these sorts of self-regulating systems are totally immune to any other form of stimulus.
Scarcities arise internally which eventually impact the profit feed back loop and the system corrects. The interesting problem with scarcities is they are assumed to be the slow to develop kind that allow time for impact and correction. But scarcities are not necessarily all of the same quality. Some develop slowly, some have periodic patterns, while others reach steep thresholds that put the system into a dead stop. No amount of correction can overcome the latter. Scarcity has turned into a null. There is no more, period.
===================
Well, in the context you are writing, unless you specify what scale defines *internally* I can't tell if you're writing about a firm, an industrial sector and/or the global macroeconomy. Obviously, the possibilities of substitution, technical change via ubiquitous feedback loops are possible with varying degrees of difficulty depending on which scale and time frame you select for analytical consideration.
The problem with petrochemical energy supplies is that they are finite, although we do not know the cardinal total. These supplies should follow the slowly developing scarcity model, but due to various causes they are of the periodic variety. The system has adapted to the periodicity and presumes that down turns will be followed by up turns. But there will come a day when the down turn is not followed by an up turn. At that point because of supply and demand, the profit feed back loop will react to this stimulus and petrochemical energy will increase in value, generating a system reaction to maximize demand. This development will be the exact opposite of the externally understood need to conserve, hence the supply threshold will become asymptotic and completely stop the system. This will occur at a much faster rate than if some external rational command system effectively slowed down consumption prior to reaching the threshold of exhaustion.
====================
Right but at the same time that faction of the capitalist class has figured this out and the rush is on for substitutes that at the same time allow for the denizens of black gold to get their returns for quite a while longer. Obviously they have a price theory and a macromodel that is hard for the rest of us to assess. See, scarcity of knowledge is far more pertinent a problem on this score alone as we can't critique that model on its own terms in order to bring to bear different price and accounting models that compel them to change at a pace consistent w/IPCC recommendations. This goes far beyond the problems of intellectual property rights in patents and copyrights. It's about secrecy and huge negative externalities, which is why mainstream enviros. jumped all over the infopolitique of the Cheney energy task force. Post-Iraq nightmare, they look prescient and should have been given a lot more support.
Climate change is another problem all together. Given that market systems only react to changes in the profit feed back loops, however climate change effects those loops, will determine the system reactions. As in the petrochemical problem, profit loops are disjoint from the physical casual chains of climate. The system reactions to climate change will only effect the society, not the climate.
===================
I've got some disagreements with the above. The macrodynamics are now of such a scale that we are always effecting the climate. We've always been in a co-evolutionary dynamic with gases and liquids and solids, new technologies-theories won't change that parameter at all; we'll either come up with better adaptations based partly on better accounting and calculative techniques that allow us to secure and produce a surplus at current and projected population levels or our current/future knowledge won't be able to overcome a significantly large number [can we even calculate what they are at this point? see, knowledge scarcity again] of the unintended consequences of the knowledge and knowledge instantiating technologies and organizations we've created thus far.
Theoretically, while there was still some form of political command over the economic system it might have been possible to re-configure parts of the economic system to adapt to physical casual chains in petrochemical supply or changes in climate. But under the neoliberal order all such command institutions have been eliminated or are tied to the direct and immediate needs of the economy and are completely immune to any other stimulation or need arising from outside the economic sphere. Under the existing neoliberal order all needs external to the economic system are irrelevant. There is simply no such thing as a non-economic input or need.
=================
Yes, in the short run ecosystems have been [utterly] inadequately internalized as "natural capital", even as neoliberal theorizing doesn't want to come to terms with the forms of environmental accounting/modeling that has evolved in its various institutional interstices. Indeed for the neolibs. to begin to internalize and further elaborate on said know-how would compel them to jettison the entire semiotic framing of ecosystems and technology and monetary valuation they've been using for the past 30 years since the first price crises related to oil hit the macroeconomy. I can't imagine what Stanley Fischer or Alan Greenspan would do with the below even as funding for the work came from the IMF and WB and OECD:
http://unstats.un.org/unsd/environment/seea2003.pdf
Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting 2003
The Handbook of National Accounting Integrated Environmental and Economic Accounting 2003, referred to as SEEA 2003, is a satellite system of the System of National Accounts. It brings together economic and environmental information in a common framework to measure the contribution of the environment to the economy and the impact of the economy on the environment. It provides policy-makers with indicators and descriptive statistics to monitor these interactions as well as a database for strategic planning and policy analysis to identify more sustainable paths of development.
``... One wonders whether the great contemporary corporations...every year have the knowledge to...[recycle]...the almost infinite waste stream they [and we] spew into the planet's diverse ecologies without rendering asunder the very forms of contract and property that have brought our species to the current conjuncture...''
The answer is no. And the reason is, there is no knowledge beyond profit and loss, and there is no means to gain knowledge outside the feed back loops of profit and loss. The system reacts to only this feed back loop and no other.
Another way to say the same thing is to note that the only form of knowledge the economic system can recognize are forms translated into the binaries of profit and loss. Some external understanding that a catastrophe is pending means nothing until it hits. At that point, then the reactions follow and may or may not conform or adapt in an appropriate manner since there is no rational connection between the physical cause of the catastrophe whatever it is, and the system response.
Meanwhile we shop til we drop.
CG
===================
Well given the title of the lead story in the latest Business Week, capital needs a much better set of bean counters just to maintain public confidence in the financial markets.
As for the assertion that there is no means to gain knowledge outside of the P-L monetary frame, well that's a tough one. I think it behooves us to continue to assert and demand that there is such an outside as the history of science shows all too well and that the bean counters need to dump the fuzzy math they've been using [of course we'll need to dump a bunch more epistemic baggage as well, but that's a topic for another day].
The nineteenth century radicals' techniques for critiquing the macro and micro accounting tricks used by capital to conceal the exploitation of Workers has tragically failed to convince in a world filled with economic and ecological illiteracy even as the neoliberal paradigm of production/distribution/valuation of the surplus is failing us in a big way. And simply trying to retread old ground on those debates, useful as they have been since Sraffa et al, in order to come up with knock down proofs of the claim is time not spent by Workers-Citizens on coming up with production/distribution/valuation techniques that will allow us to make the kinds of organizational and technological changes that can adapt us to the planet and the unintended consequence of modernity itself. That means different questions and different vocabularies.
Htbw,
Ian http://oae.sagepub.com/cgi/content/refs/16/2/137 The Value Problem in Ecological Economics Lessons from the Physiocrats and Marx Paul Burkett Indiana State University [just click on through for the full piece]
___________________________________ http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/mailman/listinfo/lbo-talk