DO "LIMITS OF GROWTH" CRIPPLE THE GOOD SOCIETY?
Carpenter, Luther
Since 1945, rapid growth of gross national products has been the chief goal of Western governments. It has been the basis of the welfare-state compromise, the answer to class tension and to...
...A hard-liner would argue that there's no evidence that conciliatory acts 462 would moderate Third World jealousy...
...466 Placing the emphasis on abstinence approaches energy conservation from the wrong direction...
...If RIO, Leontieff, and Mesarovic and Pestel are right, maximum growth can no longer be the Western ideal...
...5 Herman Kahn, et al., The Next 200 Years (New York: William Morrow & Co., 1976), pp...
...4 "Cf...
...This process would reduce the population of the U.S...
...A person who commutes to work by car can only save energy by quitting, unless he or she can use public transport or move closer to work (and only then if our urban policy provides decent housing near work...
...There will be much resistance to direct federal investment...
...However, industrial democracy cannot be offered as an alternative to growth or a motive for reducing growth...
...It is not clear in the book whether "organic growth" is a euphemism for nogrowth in industrialized countries...
...If such a coalition isn't formed, it will be easy for capital-intensive, energy-intensive corporations to continue to dominate our energy policies, by claiming that growth in their industries is necessary to provide jobs...
...23R/O, p. 16...
...37 But this is not true, if the consumer can increase her or his income—if she or he is a middle-class employee of a major corporation...
...Western corporations have already begun to transfer jobs in industries such as textiles and shoes—and, naturally, trade unionists and socialists have objected...
...I 2See Peter Grose, "Report at U.N...
...We should cure these side effects but not oppose the cause, the authors of RIO say: "This spectre can be exorcised by manpower training and retraining programmes combined with industrial development and financial incentive policies...
...But these middle-class survivors would need more than land, canned goods in the basement, and survival skills...
...5 This estimate of conditions appears to be based on a single S-curve covering the period from 1776 to 2176...
...In addition to the jobs created directly, these groups argue that if high-energy production is restricted, consumers will have to buy goods and services that use less energy and thereby need more labor per unit of output...
...the real problem was the interaction between the variables that imposed limits...
...The U.N...
...Thus the Sussex report only restored room for human action...
...to each person...
...Western nations would also have to change their industrial structure to permit these Asian exports to be sold: Scenario five—the only way to avert unprecedented disaster in South Asia—requires the emergence of a new global economic order...
...91-97...
...To get higher domestic output of oil and copper, Americans would end up paying to American corporations the same high prices that they were unwilling to pay to foreigners...
...What is needed, they argue, is a radical transformation, a social revolution...
...United Nations (pamphlet), "The Future of the World Economy" (New York, 1976), p. 7. 14Jan Tinbergen (coordinator), RIO: Reshaping the International Order (New York: Dutton, 1976), p. 93...
...These short-term limits include the time needed for construction of new nuclear plants, coalburning plants, and strip mines...
...massive transfers of goods would disrupt the economies of both the recipients and the industrialized nations...
...and the GNP at about $300 trillion, give or take a factor of five...
...27 Robert L. Heilbroner, An Inquiry into The Human Prospect (New York: W. W. Norton, 1974), p. 43...
...It must be made clear that the Third World is not demanding massive redistribution of the past income and wealth of the rich nations...
...The wealthy will pay lip-service to their rhetoric but use their economic power to go on consuming...
...apply it to solar and other forms of renewable energy...
...But it is really a fantasy...
...Building and installing solar energy collectors also will create jobs in metal fabrication and construction...
...27 But Moss and Tucker try to minimize Western vulnerability by pointing out that the U.S...
...To come anywhere near this goal, developed countries would have to permit the transfer of industrial jobs...
...But the point is valid, nonetheless...
...There is an immense risk to this policy...
...A new priesthood changing the world through exhortation...
...This argument is even weaker and more desperate than it would seem...
...Carter chose to give individuals and corporations a greater self-interest in saving energy by raising the prices of oil and natural gas...
...Instead, we should concentrate our efforts more at home, trying to develop and invest in the low-energy, lowcapital technologies that can create more jobs here and in the Third World...
...and I don't believe that any one of the limits discussed above is an adequate guide by itself to acting on our problems...
...Rapid growth allowed workers' real incomes to increase and social services to expand, without a head-on challenge to the economic privileges of the corporations...
...32 Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment, p. 4. 33 David Dickson, The Politics of Alternative Technology (New York: Universe Books, 1974), p. 99...
...This "postindustrialist" speculation is of interest, because some of the believers in balanced growth also share it...
...Kahn's "Bicentennial and/or Realistic Perspective on Prospects for Mankind" seems a pure guess: "The earth-centered perspective assumes that the world population flattens out at least for a while at 15 billion people, give or take a factor of two (that is, a range of 7.5 to 30 billion...
...If any of these limits were reached, the world's economy would collapse...
...Without safeguards for workers' opportunities, we can't afford to encourage the transfer of jobs...
...These imbalances might be cured by more radical changes, such as work sharing, but it is unlikely that we could mobilize enough support to obtain such adjustments in the short run...
...would be 100 million...
...The oil companies claim they need larger profits for new exploration—and then turn around and spend their profits to acquire such non-energy companies as Marcor to assure their corporate immortality...
...Consequently, government will have to guide the necessary investments and will have to make some of them directly...
...12 Both reports•rely on expanded investment, much higher prices for raw materials, liberalized trade, and the like...
...It would be more decentralized and less dominated by giant corporations—if (and only if) the federal government prevented the energy and steel corporations from starting subsidiaries or buying up the companies that survived the first competitive stage of the industry...
...We will have to turn to other studies to clear up this ambiguity...
...and they warn that, if we fail to respond, the third world will take revenge by forming new cartels, raising the prices of raw materials, reneging on debts and expropriating Western companies...
...Consequently, Western countries have to turn homeward to find additional values for controlling growth...
...Not surprisingly, this led to some modification of the predictions concerning the collapse of the world economy...
...and there are social and political limits to growth that may prove more important than purely physical limits...
...It usually works after we have done something offensive and often leads to useless symbolic gestures...
...They rely on principles of equity...
...Western countries would also benefit from the proposal suggesting they should guide their research efforts into low-energy, low-capital technologies...
...Each new high-technology energy source also requires new investment in the transport and use of that energy...
...7 Independence, to the Ehrlichs, starts with reducing commuting and use of energy and culminates in preparing a refuge for disaster...
...28 This argument is vague...
...In a coalition, environmentalists can help plan a limited growth that will create jobs and restructure society instead of devastating it...
...He equates pollution control with spending money on cleaning up, wheras the biologists emphasize natural habitats and fragile interrelationships among species that are disrupted by dredging, land fill, strip-mining, and other forms of development, as well as by the emission of pollutants...
...If we follow this argument, it will be important to locate much of the production in the old steel valleys of Ohio, Pennsylvania, and West Virginia, where steel-mill closures have left behind unemployed workers and vulnerable towns...
...The Next 200 Years hasn't impressed anyone...
...These groups are not at all homogeneous in their recommendations, but at least their disagreements revolve around basic points...
...Among these groups are Environmentalists For Full Employment and the Midwest Academy.'" The Midwest Academy is acting as catalyst for a national energy coalition...
...33 This places Dickson in a double bind...
...This has the effect of bringing down the average growth rate of gross product in the developed countries to 3.6-4 per cent in the final three decades of this century from the long-term trend of 4.5 per cent...
...According to The Limits to Growth, the only viable option was a prompt reduction in growth rates...
...It smacks a little of a desperate search to fill a vacuum, and a little of the selfinterest of social-service professionals...
...2This sentence contains two necessarily sloppy words: "Growth" and "our...
...Since the world is a system, such catastrophes will be felt profoundly throughout the entire world...
...But the final verdict was "Not Proven," rather than "Not Guilty...
...An expansion in the services of government, in the administration of justice, in the provision of better health and education, arts and entertainment, would not only rescue the system from a fatal encounter with the environment but might produce enough "growth" to ease the income distribution problem...
...I will 459 have much more of an incentive to try to raise my income—using economic and political power—as scarcity reduces my purchasing power, so that I can hold on to what I have...
...Surprisingly, Kahn and Beckerman swerve away from a complete defense of unrestricted growth...
...It is not seeking charity from the prosperous nor equality of income...
...They recommend that individuals should work within corporations and government for energy savings, better public transportation, changes in products, etc...
...perhaps Moss is fighting against a sense of guilt that he knows is justified...
...Other examples in which the industrialized countries have a comparative advantage include most metal-working industries, the electronics industry, and research-intensive industries...
...Two authors try to make this point: Wilfred Beckerman, in Two Cheers for the Affluent Society, and Herman Kahn, in The Next 200 Years...
...In seconding this proposal, I would argue for mandatory trade-union involvement in the planning, and also for a role for local antipoverty agencies...
...26 Despite his crude closing sneer, Kahn has a point...
...estimates of population growth that incorporate a feedback effect leading to lower rates of increase as incomes rise...
...The authors of RIO, in particular, believe that the West's spectacular growth has depended on unstable international mechanisms: To many it became increasingly apparent that the economic crisis which plagued the Western world was more than a temporary phenomenon, a pocket of economic turbulence along the route towards even greater riches...
...Their target is to reduce the ratio between average incomes in the two regions to a maximum of 7:1 (Leontieff) or a minimum of 3:1 (RIO), as compared with the current 13:1...
...Rather than collapse of the world system as such, catastrophes or collapses on a regional level could occur, possibly long before the middle of the next century, although in different regions, for different reasons, and at different times...
...Such criticisms have had an effect...
...But there are too many problems inherent in defining human needs for it to become a widely used standard at this time...
...As Hugh Stretton points out, I don't have control over the energy I "save" or the meat I don't eat...
...At the U.N...
...there are many flaws in that assumption, including the fact that markets tend to discount the future...
...there will also be many efforts to subvert it into a corporate boondoggle, like Rockefeller's proposal of a $100 billion fund for research into exotic capitalintensive projects such as nuclear fusion and coal gasification...
...In Willem L. Oltmans, ed., On Growth (New York: Putman/ Capricorn, 1974), p. 301...
...The world's economy is delicately poised, and shocks travel quickly— as was demonstrated by the Russian grain purchases of 1973—and we have already seen Mesarovic and Pestel's prediction that famine could spiral into a regional collapse...
...The argument for industrialization is that it might yield lower costs...
...In contrast to pleas for a new ethic, the "quality of life" argument is not purely a negative plea to stop doing things...
...Suburban sprawl must be contained...
...20036...
...The most immediate of these is that world oil reserves might be nearing depletion in about 50 years, depending on the rate of growth of oil consumption...
...It would obviously have to be a pliant earth, a managed earth...
...25Nathan Keyfitz, "World Resources and the World Middle Class," Scientific American, July 1976, pp...
...These investments of time, labor, and resources are often left out of the account by those who believe that there are no limits to energy use...
...As often as possible, I will talk about the growth of energy use and of jobs, whose growth or declines are not rigidly connected to the growth of GNP...
...41 Environmentalists for Full Employment (pamphlet), "Jobs and Energy" (Washington, D.C., 1977), p. 7. 42If these taxes aren't replaced by rationing, which could be made more equitable than using price increases to discourage consumption...
...My "savings" may simply allow someone else—someone greedier, nastier, or richer—to consume more at a lower price...
...As we have seen, the true believers in stopping growth, such as Herman Daly, the Ehrlichs and the Meadows, often take a purely negative stance...
...And this requires more precise and effective tools than both the U.S...
...Both Kahn and Beckerman fail on another critical account...
...Free" markets rig the terms of trade in favor of the rich nations...
...There would be a permanent reduction in the world's population and in the wealth available For notes to this article, see pp...
...Deny it to new industrial capacity that is energy-intensive, such as aluminum, and perhaps to plastics and chemicals that are based on petroleum...
...42 Instead of investing in solar water heating, which has been shown to be technologically and economically feasible, Carter's 1979 budget cuts outlays and leaves the development of this technology to private enterprise...
...Much of the improvement in the quality of people's lives over the last half-century has come from the expansion of social services...
...it starts with slow growth, escalates to verticality around 1976, and returns to a virtual plateau in 2176...
...RIO's target, on the other hand, would require a more conscious holding-down of Western growth...
...Where consumers have little choice, industries can simply pass along higher costs while refusing to change their use of energy...
...Equality and democracy will not solve the problems of limited growth by themselves...
...Both the ecological ethic and the plea for a new ethics of restraint are essentially negative—a guide to what not to do, rather than what to do...
...21 Goals for Mankind does not attempt to make "human need" the cornerstone of a comprehensive structure of goals...
...what growth is generated in poor countries doesn't trickle down to the real victims of poverty...
...Our values cannot replace or overshadow the argument from necessity...
...Consequently, I will have very little economic incentive to reduce my consumption...
...To make the argument for restraint compelling, these facts must interlock with moral values that can guide people's choices...
...Investment: Reconciling Limits and Jobs ONE OF the main reasons for emphasizing investment is that it offers us a chance to reconcile slower growth of energy use and GNP with our urgent need for full employment...
...29 There are two problems with this analysis...
...It does oblige the industrialized world to refrain from straining the outer limits of the earth's carrying capacity, and from monopolizing scarce resources where there is a direct conflict with Third World development...
...21 Ervin Laszlo et al., Goals for Mankind (New York: Dutton, 1977), p. 303...
...government and most ecologists have put forward...
...The report cited is Conservation as a Gas Utility Supply Option (Washington, D.C.: Federal Energy Administration, 1976...
...470 9Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, Mankind at the Turning Point (New York: New American Library/ Signet, 1974), p. 55...
...Have the initial assertions of The Limits to Growth been disproved, so that we may continue to base our economic and social policies on rapid economic growth...
...30 Despite these misgivings, I feel that the argument of international equity provides a strong moral basis for controlling growth that interlocks with the projection of limits...
...In Social Limits to Growth, Fred Hirsch points out that the spread of higher education, for example, has created frustration as well as satisfaction...
...Kahn says, ". . we do not expect economic growth to continue indefinitely...
...Leontieff makes this slowing down a basic assumption: It was assumed that, as individual developed regions achieve higher levels of gross product per head of population, their growth rate of product per capita would decline...
...The weaknesses of that argument are obvious...
...The fact that there is unused capital in existing plants becomes an additional deterrent to raising new capital for conservation or solar energy...
...I"The End of Affluence, p. 81...
...Descriptions of limits to growth divide into two rough groups...
...The real defense of the affluent will be their corporations and their political institutions...
...One group would drastically revamp Western society to comply with physical limits to growth...
...It is often called "the Club of Rome report," because that body of industrialists and professional people commissioned it from an MIT team headed by Dennis and Donella Meadows...
...6 Thus the most optimistic arguments concerning the availability of physical resources lead to the discussion of political and institutional limits, rather than to no scarcities at all...
...The world would have to curtail industrial growth as well as population increases, reaching a steady-state economy before the year 2000...
...35 The Poverty of Power, p. 73...
...Not only would these technologies be easier to apply in poor countries...
...Even if conservation were to yield lower costs, a 467 company could decide that conservation didn't offer a high enough return on the capital required...
...The Ehrlichs desire behavioral and technical changes while leaving the power structure and value system largely intact...
...Western nations cannot go on importing an ever-increasing amount of Arab oil for fear of the economic and political consequences...
...but they can interlock with the facts that scientists and economists provide...
...Its authors, Mihajlo Mesarovic and Eduard Pestel, are members of the Club of Rome...
...26-27...
...This slogan has a certain plausibility...
...Sweden and West Germany have standards of living comparable to America's while using a third less energy...
...On a yearly basis, Revelle's calculation requires $30 billion—equivalent to 1 percent of the current gross world product, or to 25 percent of yearly physical investment in the U.S...
...They are largely unaware of the impact of individual abstinence on the economy as a whole and on class tensions...
...Job preservation and the distribution of income would still be contentious political issues...
...Large sections of the working classes are nowhere near this inflection point, while America's wealthy seem capable of consuming all-but-infinite amounts of goods...
...USING THESE democratic values in conjunction with the projections of physical limits to growth, we can begin to identify the most pressing problems and to design solutions...
...3 Technological innovation is not a constant...
...Eliminating it will require a drastic rebuilding of the physical fabric of the U.S., changing the physical layout and use of space as well as reconstructing existing buildings and erecting new ones...
...In the process, they had to consider questions of equity and the distribution of benefits and sacrifices...
...46"Jobs and Energy," p. 10...
...The polite segregation established by the distance from the cities wouldn't prevent starving people from invading countryside and suburbs...
...This point applies to energy, where optimistic observers anticipate a short-term policy emphasizing coal and a long-term use of renewable sources such as solar, geothermal, and fusion-reactor installations...
...but until there is a better measurement of the production of useful goods and services, I can't avoid talking about growth of GNP...
...Models of Doom, p. 91...
...Investing to Live Within Limits THE KEY to whether this rebuilding will take place is investment...
...This assumption does not deal with the prospect of all resources being consumed at rates that make substitutions harder to make, and it minimizes the dislocations that make it hard to shift from one material to another...
...Energy is the prototype of these shortages...
...Nor can a new ethics magically make limiting consumption desirable in itself...
...The Ehrlichs believe that self-interest will lead people to reduce their use of energy and resources...
...but it becomes clear that the Third World cannot catch up at all without an actual slowing-down of the growth of Western incomes...
...It is hard to believe that this postindustrial transformation of values is actually taking place...
...Critics asserted that this failure to propose different policies for developed and underdeveloped nations revealed a basic flaw in the computer model used by Jay Forrester and the Meadows' team...
...We could amend the investment tax credit, making it selective...
...As we found in the 1960s, unplanned growth doesn't automatically reduce domestic tension, and growing wealth doesn't necessarily get diverted to foreign aid and pollution control...
...Many believers in balanced growth say that the West should make an improved quality of life their basic goal...
...31/In Inquiry into the Human Prospect, p. 87...
...report believe that ideas of equity are not only important in themselves, but that they have consequences...
...Equity requires a sacrifice only where it confers a meaningful benefit on the less fortunate party...
...Western countries must assist the Third World through the transfer of investment funds, the acceptance of higher prices for oil and other raw materials, and global allocation of scarce resources...
...Instead, public policy must find ways of living within these limits...
...These investments must be planned, using the federal budget for direct investments and changing indirect subsidies such as the investment tax credit...
...It can be encouraged or discouraged...
...Many observers, such as L. S. Stavrianos in The Promise of the Coming Dark Age, feel that a less growth-ridden society would offer more room for industrial democracy...
...It follows that a relative slowdown— even if it is desired by wealthy people—must be carefully planned...
...the other, to factor them into the choice of and discussion of political and economic issues on which we take strong positions...
...This is not an academic question...
...Barry Commoner makes two different assumptions: no growth in American consumption of oil, and higher estimates of potential American reserves, drawn from A. D. Zapp...
...This approach puts the whole burden on the ultimate consumer...
...Fine, an orthodox economist would say...
...39 Many energy-saving technologies require strong, reasonably dense cities...
...Second, the popular acceptance of attacks on social services suggests that there are real limits to most people's desire for them...
...34 Models of Doom, pp...
...We have analyzed earlier the limits of individual selfrestraint and the consequences of widespread abstinence in a market economy...
...It is ineffective, because the final consumer usually cannot adjust his or her consumption to reduce waste that is built into the social structure...
...Instead, the quality of life and balanced world development are the values that believers in social and political limits hope to make into effective guides...
...But I think it would be psychologically, culturally, and, in the broadest sense of the word, humanly, profoundly at variance with socialist ideas of emancipation...
...There are 463 real limits to the amounts of aid and trade that Third World countries can absorb without displacing native producers...
...It is asking for equality of opportunity and insisting on the right to share in future growth...
...Old manufacturing areas decline...
...The recent works discussed above indicate that there is enough time to revamp our economy in less drastic, more complex and pluralistic ways than to simply putting a clamp on all growth...
...Several left-tending environmentalists contend, for example, that choosing solar power over nuclear power would strengthen forces working for decentralization of decision-making...
...The consequences of accepting this negativism are catastrophic...
...19 The facts presented by the Meadows and the Ehrlichs alone do not force individuals to reduce their consumption...
...Paul R. and Anne H. Ehrlich, The End of Affluence (New York: Ballantine 1974), p. 256...
...23-35...
...In The End of Affluence, the Ehrlichs don't ignore social change completely...
...The Club of Rome commissioned a new study to remedy one of the methodological shortcomings of the Meadows' report, its use of global totals and averages...
...They view it as a crisis in the very international structures and mechanisms which the Western world iself has largely created...
...It tries to change people's behavior without changing their morals...
...The Limits to Growth argued that "five major trends of global concern— accelerating industrialization, rapid population growth, widespread malnutrition, depletion of non-renewable resources, and a deteriorating environment . . ."I would encounter absolute limits within the foreseeable future...
...10 However, Mesarovic and Pestel cannot agree that the opposite of exponential growth is a steady-state economy...
...The examples assembled by David Jenkins in Job Power show that wages are almost always increased when work is redesigned, both to obtain workers' confidence and to distribute the increased productivity...
...Deny it to new plants and offices that don't meet certain standards of energy engineering...
...If Western growth would slow down naturally, there would be little sacrifice (as long as democratic planning prevented the sacrifice from falling exclusively on the unemployed and poor...
...If the inexorable workings of market forces have helped create the problems, it is clear that they, if left to their own devices, will not be able to solve them...
...they lecture us on our moral obligation to atone for the supposed crimes of colonialism and capitalist exploitation...
...Second, if we were to reach this "inflection 455 point"—either because of postindustrialism or because of the need to restrict growth— Keynesianism would be outmoded...
...Criticisms of alienation logically lead to the belief that increased democracy, especially industrial democracy, would improve the quality of life...
...The rest of Kahn's book gives no support to the curve, but merely pushes back physical limits to resource availability...
...Even Moss doesn't argue for complete selfishness...
...These estimates seem more in line with the actual growth of world population since 1970...
...2 Or do there appear to be real limits to growth that must be considered in framing economic policies...
...They lead to exhortations to "sacrifice" more than to discussions of who should sacrifice what...
...Scale economies in solar collection systems that can track the sun, and in energy storage units, are among the clear benefits of such community-level scaling...
...Says Rich-Poor Gap Can Be Narrowed by The Year 2000," New York Times, October 14, 1976...
...It used worldwide aggregates, leaving 453 out immense regional differences in wealth and in the consumption of energy and resources...
...Yet, if they waited until shortages developed, they would be too late...
...Yes, guilt is not a good guide to action...
...With insurance, social security and welfare for all, there will be protection against most of the vagaries of life, and this should produce a shift in priorities and values...
...Kahn, for example, makes calculations based on the percentage of each mineral in the earth's crust, thus ignoring the other uses of the earth's surface (such as farming and living space...
...In this context, RIO believes that the West has more to gain from accepting the demands of Third World countries than from pursuing unlimited growth...
...He has subordinated investment to other policies...
...One should learn a trade that others will have to purchase to survive, and one should get as far away from the cities as possible...
...26 7 he New 200 Years, p. 40...
...but he can't offer any hope for a social revolution...
...They leave the reader very unsure of the nature of the opposite of limits to growth...
...To avert the catastrophic collapse of the world's carrying capacity described by the Meadows, these "true believers" argue that Western life styles must change drastically...
...Mesarovic is a systems analyst and Pestel an engineer...
...They counsel people to store up stocks of food and clothing and to learn survival skills...
...It is important to note that neither the RIO report nor Goals for Mankind use the arguments of guilt and exploitation that Moss and Taylor find so offensive...
...Bilateral swaps of goods are more compatible with some concepts of national planning, and these might be more stable in a world of limited growth...
...Many of these limits are familiar to us from debates over underdevelopment...
...This estimate follows M. King Hubbert, who estimates that if oil use continues to grow at a rate of 7.8 percent a year, half of the world's oil will be used up by 1990-2000, and a decline of world production of oil would set in...
...Should we leave the investment mechanism unfettered, on the assumption that there are no limits to growth and all growth helps everyone...
...30 Bilateral trade might be less feasible for European nations than for the U.S., because Europe is more dependent on international trade for raw materials...
...Increased productivity can be taken as extra leisure time, at least in part...
...IT Is relatively easy to conclude that limits to growth must be taken seriously...
...9 This conclusion does no damage to The Limits of Growth...
...But their central assumption is that it's already too late for effective public action...
...Therefore, there is a limit to the amount of resources that can be diverted away from consumption in the West and turned over to the welfare state and to international equity...
...but this "international macho" looks a little silly when it is applied to such issues as the formation of international buffer stocks of food-stuffs, in order to dampen price swings and guard against famine...
...From these (questionable) assumptions, he predicts that the U.S...
...39Peter Kihss, "Metropolitan Area Relatively Efficient In Its Use of Energy," New York Times, May 2, 1977, p. 1. 40 Leonard Rodberg, "Solar Energy: Is There A Public Option," Conference on Alternative State and Local Public Policies, #10, January 1978, p. 5. Rodberg's emphasis...
...International free trade need not be an article of faith for democrats and social democrats...
...instead, they would have to obtain full employment by non-Keynesian methods...
...It could encourage energy-saving investments and discourage energy-intensive projects...
...2'R/O, p. 15...
...First, RIO, Leontieff, and Mesarovic and Pestel emphasize a shorter time frame in which questions of ultimate limits will not arise...
...Democratic concepts of participation and equality remain valid...
...No one has yet demonstrated that limiting growth is desirable in itself...
...Many commentators have pointed out that GNP contains anomalies...
...Allowing these industries to move has led to imbalances in the West...
...44 He recommends full federal funding for solar installations, with local planning of the actual installations...
...But these doomsayers beg for a new ethic that would be pragmatically better suited to the world's situation...
...These are political limits to the same variables that The Limits to Growth discussed—food, energy, and resources...
...in addition, energy will have to be taken into account in every public and private investment decision, from urban policy to defense spending...
...Local assembly might mean using more labor in manufacturing, and less energy in transportation...
...The believers in democracy and full employment must also reassess their policies in the light of limited, balanced, or organic 469 growth...
...The variables that define this overconsumption are basic human needs and the outer limits of the planet's carrying capacity...
...as a result, it calls for sacrifices that can be avoided...
...Using factory methods would make the industry more capital-intensive, but on the whole workers would get a higher proportion of the money spent on conservation and renewable energy sources than they do in conventional energy generation and petrochemicals...
...It rests on a voluminous critical literature establishing that growth doesn't automatically create happiness and that there are social costs that "growthmania" hasn't taken into account...
...Both approaches are individualistic and largely apolitical...
...37Not necessarily...
...the result is both ineffective and unfair...
...As it stands, these industries are not producing enough jobs to give everyone the opportunities they need...
...The greatest barriers to living up to these values will occur internationally, where even the new economic order demanded by Third World nations wouldn't come close to ending disparities in income and resource consumption...
...Avoiding such energy-wasting errors in new buildings of all types, and repairing them in old ones, could save ". . . 12.5 million barrels of petroleum per day (equal to one-third the current national energy use...
...24 Nonetheless, there would be a conflict over Western desires for raw materials produced in the Third World...
...When Mesarovic and Pestel study the variables that the Meadows' team studied, they do not reach the conclusion that there are absolute physical limits to growth that will result in a collapse of the world's economy...
...Corporations often can pass on energy costs to their consumers...
...Then one can work for immediate changes that would work in a democratic direction...
...This growth is necessary for humanitarian reasons, to allow Third World peoples to develop habits that will lead to slower population growth, and to prevent international turmoil...
...has never recommended devoting more than I percent of an industrialized nation's GNP to international aid...
...according to the American Institute of Architects.'" Another essential dimension of the rebuilding and reorganizing of the American economy to save energy is the substitution of solar and other renewable energy sources for petroleum...
...The one piece of evidence that suggests we are nearing the "inflection point" is the amount of alienation and frustration that accompanies our consumer society...
...But large numbers of people will simply be eliminated as they lose their jobs...
...We will have to demand that the federal government provide some of the investment in using renewable energy sources, rather than restricting it to long-range research...
...In terms of pollution, Beckerman in particular fails to grasp the problem that the ecologists have pointed to...
...it is an indeterminacy...
...The Leontieff study in particular ends with 2,000, wheras the earliest crisis graphed out in The Limits to Growth might occur around 2,025...
...22 Robert Moss, "Let's Out for No...
...Kahn asserts that ". . . there are very few peasants, workers or even businessmen in developing nations who care much about gaps (whether arithmetic or geometric), no matter how much intellectuals, academics and some businessmen may profess to...
...The industrialized countries overconsume in relation to the Third World...
...Priority should be given to fulfilling needs as against satisfying demands for nonessential goods...
...These anxieties were raised to new intensity by the publication of a thin paperback book in 1972, entitled The Limits to Growth...
...Consequently, I will search through the various descriptions of limits to growth, first for values and then for economic and political mechanisms that should be factored into our short-term politics...
...23 Nor do they explicitly use the conservationists' argument that the West is bloated or overdeveloped...
...But even if we accept the premise of economic rationality there is a crucial weakness to individualism...
...Growth cannot be slowed down properly by Keynesian tools, or allowed to slow down as a result of changes in demand within a Keynesian economy...
...Instead, he denies that there is a conflict between Western and Third World growth: free-market orthodoxy will benefit both...
...34 As far as coal is concerned, the outer limits of resource availability are far enough away to be discounted, but environmental factors may prevent a complete substitution of coal for oil...
...We can use it to give extra encouragement to lowcapital investments as well, investments in the decentralized technologies that Third World countries can adopt.45 Another immediate objective should be to remove anomalies in the tax structure that penalize solar energy and other energy-saving technologies...
...the per capita product at $20,000, give or take a factor of three...
...If they do, then there is no obligation to assist high-technology forms of development—especially if they lead to social dislocation or waste...
...Their scenario for preventing famine in South Asia, for example, requires massive foreign investment aid to permit South Asia to build up export 456 industries and to produce fertilizer, machinery, and other support services for agriculture...
...q Notes I would like to thank Marilyn Nelkin and David Bensman for their help and encouragement, and Horst Brand, Robert Heilbroner, and Robert Lekachman for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article...
...q 471...
...In equity, one cannot oppose this, as long as the sacrifices of nonessential goods don't disrupt Western economies so that people cannot depend on them for their livelihood...
...Much of the money generated by tax cuts has ended up in personal and corporate expenditures—such as the current boom in expensive suburban housing—that will make it harder to save energy and live within limits in the future...
...Internationally, Beckerman and Kahn are reapplying the "trickle-down" theory that has so often been a cruel disappointment to the poor...
...Neither provides a convincing answer to the question of who is to act, and with what powers...
...I cannot conclude that limits to growth ought to be the sole determinant for democratic politics...
...6 The Next 200 Years, p. 60...
...6, 131, 10...
...it should continue to prevent serious class conflict in the West...
...It doesn't provide the bold new motive they are looking for...
...is a major producer of several raw materials and can use its output to resist the formation of cartels...
...19Hugh Stretton, Capitalism, Socialism and the Environment (London and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1976, p. 16...
...But these conclusions, and the substitution of "balanced growth" or "organic growth," for "limits to growth," must not mislead us into believing that there are no real limits to growth...
...They propose a new slogan: "balanced, differentiated growth" or "organic growth...
...18 Individuals would have to acquire enough resources to hold out while some 125 million people died...
...As far as conservation is concerned, companies will often choose to invest instead in expanding production...
...15 RIO conveniently summarizes these constraints under the heading of "outer limits," as contrasted with the "inner limits" of political and international organization...
...Some observers have proposed federal subsidies, but Leonard Rodberg of the Public Resource Center argues that subsidies would be ineffective and restricted to relatively wealthy consumers...
...Rebuilding houses, apartment buildings, offices, and public buildings to conserve energy would generate thousands of new jobs...
...It takes people as they appear to be and doesn't ask them to become more public spirited...
...A coalition has already been created to push for Solarcal, a public authority whose purpose would be to create a solar energy industry in California...
...The most effective use of labor and capital, and the availability of resources, will have to be assessed on a global, long-term basis...
...Yet, this argument doesn't make internationalism and the expansion of social services irrelevant...
...22 Moss's hostile tone is revealing...
...Direct federal funding must be used so that a fair share of the work is directed to urban areas, and to antipoverty agencies, workers' cooperatives, and small contractors that agree to hire a high proportion of unemployed youths...
...However, one scenario, in which the developed world accepts an "optimal" price for oil (some 50 percent higher than the 1973 price, apparently, although the base price is not explicitly stated), projects a quadrupling of the gross regional product of the developed world between 1975 and 2025 (from $2 trillion to $8 trillion...
...20 Rufus E. Miles Jr., Awakening from the American Dream (New York: Universe Books, 1976), p. 203...
...There is no current physical shortage of energy...
...If wealthy people were really curtailing their purchases because they had changed their values, Keynesian pumppriming would be ineffective...
...The critics of this position are often more explicit, although their precision leads 460 to caricatures of the argument for limits...
...The first thing that a reader notices about the "true believers" in absolute physical limits to growth is their moralistic tone...
...Should we pump money into the investment mechanism, because any slowing of growth in the affluent countries intensifies social conflict...
...they don't have a new ethic to present...
...changing the ratio between per capita income in Third World countries and in the developed world isn't meaningful...
...unemployment rises for unskilled workers and new entrants into the labor market...
...RIO does attack the levels of automobile use, grain consumption, and waste of resources found in the industrialized world, but not in the puritanical manner of the Ehrlichs...
...For Moss, people who accept the idea of limits are suckers for international bureaucrats and third-world dictators .. . They appeal to the guilty conscience of the wellfed with images of starving millions...
...Take, for example, David Dickson's book The Politics of Alternative Technology...
...Their main argument essentially restates the position of economic growth in present-day Western societies...
...Balanced growth" and "social and political limits" are less ambiguous than they first appeared...
...As we saw above, the Leontieff-U.N...
...we need positive values that can help plan a transition to slower growth...
...First, it isn't clear that all social services consume fewer resources than industrial production...
...The achievement has been remarkable...
...Here, the investment issue is the balance between industrialization and local manufacturing by small contractors and workers' cooperatives...
...Western nations are vulnerable to pressure on their sources of raw materials, especially if they were to continue to make growth their primary goal...
...research can succeed or fail, and the targets chosen for research are crucial...
...This doesn't mean that industrial democracy should be abandoned as a goal...
...The issue must be taken seriously...
...The probability of shortages is the firmest, most objective standard for convincing people that changes must be made and for defining the issues that must be faced first...
...At the same time that these progrowth writers were finding it difficult to imagine the indefinite pursuit of growth, the proponents of the limits to growth were reassessing their predictions, in the wake of criticisms of the Meadows' assumptions and methodology...
...Both say that their targets can be reached...
...Unlike orthodox Marxists, he can't identify a social class that would make the revolution...
...Without such a coalition, both environmentalists and democrats who desire full employment and greater equality will suffer from intellectual and political weaknesses...
...Yet, Moss and Tucker are focusing on guilt to avoid facing what is making them guilty—the real moral issues of equity and equality...
...But then he argues that "An alternative technology can . . . only be successfully applied on a large-scale once an alternative form of society has been created...
...Leontieff hoped that this leveling out would occur naturally, as Westerners became satiated and capital was transferred to less developed countries...
...Beckerman ultimately takes refuge in the abstract capacity of a market economy to substitute one material for another...
...As soon as The Limits to Growth appeared, critics challenged its "doomsday" conclusions and its methodological bases...
...Prices will rise as supplies dwindle...
...it appeals to values that many people don't hold very deeply and haven't put into effect in prosperous times...
...The need to consider limits to growth in planning oil production and consumption comes from the fact that social and political limits overlap with ultimate physical limits, as they will in other issues like food production...
...The Sussex report made three crucial concessions to the proponents of limits to growth...
...Keynesianism is too crude to guide the growth that is possible toward the creation of the maximum number of jobs...
...Either way, the American economy will face a major adjustment that is likely to limit real growth...
...People are far less likely to revolt to curtail production and consumption than they would to get their share of Westernstyle growth...
...If the world waited until 2000 to introduce policies leading to a steadystate economy, no equilibrium could ever be established...
...These conclusions were too shocking to accept at face value...
...He argues that no proposal for "community science" or for assessing the social and environmental impact of new technologies could possibly yield results without a social transformation...
...I ," New York Times Magazine, May 1, 1977, p. 31...
...46 These jobs won't go automatically to unemployed teen-agers...
...Even in a labor-intensive field such as medicine, the tendency in America is to emphasize capital-intensive procedures (open-heart surgery, kidney machines), new hospitals, and the pharmaceutical industry (which consumes petroleum both as a fuel and a raw material...
...Many proponents of limited growth, such as the Ehrlichs, ignore these energy savings because of antiurban bias...
...Because the outer limits affect the same variables as the social and political limits, we cannot devote all our attention to removing or pushing back social and political limits to growth...
...Many of these jobs will not require extensive training...
...Connecting these political limits to the debate over limits to growth is a common trend in recent works...
...They are often puritanical, with an undertone of glee at the difficulties that "spoiled," "overdeveloped" Americans and Europeans have gotten into...
...4Models of Doom, pp...
...But, as we have seen, there is little reason to believe that a perception of these side effects of growth will generate a spontaneous transition to a postindustrial value structure...
...24The issue of the appropriate models for non-Western growth has a sizable impact on Western obligations to provide aid...
...The writers who foresee social and political limits have been more aware of the role of values...
...Limits of growth perspectives must enter the discussion of such basic problems as how we get full employment, what we invest in, and what our urban policy looks like...
...In these ways, we could stop subsidizing forms of development that make the problem worse, and start rigging the existing tax and investment structure in favor of new energy sources and conservation...
...The success of business's tactic was shown graphically by the NAACP statement on energy and jobs in January 1978...
...This scenario discounts the tremendous waste involved in building up the powerhouses and transmission systems needed for one form of energy, only to discard them within a generation...
...Or should investment be tightly controlled to achieve "balanced growth" and remove specific shortrun shortages of energy and food...
...it is the job of rebuilding industrialized societies, not just slowing their growth...
...Many people have already realized that energy is the most immediate 465 issue, the prototype of other limits to growth in the future...
...Here we can see that the political limits to which attention has shifted are every bit as harsh as the absolute physical limits that the Meadows dealt with...
...Most of it is built into the economic and social structure, and is enshrined in the physical shape of our country...
...These efforts deserve support...
...Since 1972, many writers have sought to challenge them, revise them, or extend the argument...
...This unemployment is unfairly dumped onto workers, so that they pay the whole cost of slowing down, while the overconsumers (especially those protected by corporations) are relatively untouched...
...others demand a change of heart...
...they include investment, international aid, and terms of trade...
...This life style would emphasize a new low-energy 458 technology and a value structure based on restraint and ecological balance...
...This scenario is not particularly likely, but the obstacles to its success lie in political rather than absolute physical limits...
...4 Can the indeterminacy established by the Sussex group and other critics of the Meadows' report be used to argue that there are no practical limits to growth...
...with the advance into the superindustrial era there is likely to be a diminution in the marginal utility of wealth and production...
...There are two broad possibilities: one is to base our whole democratic politics on them...
...the rest of the population will have to ignore these environmentalists to survive from day to day...
...It would be pointless to let our justifiable feelings of guilt about these inequalities steer our efforts toward massive aid programs...
...8 Kahn, somewhat nervously, thinks we are at the "inflection point" for this shift of values in the U.S., Canada, and Western Europe...
...Individual human desires tend toward more consumption, not less...
...These observers feel that Third World governments (not just intellectuals) will back up their demand for equity with actions...
...We have seen that most current analysts don't share the Ehrlichs' prediction of a disastrous collapse that would entail class warfare...
...Both Kahn and Beckerman exaggerate the extent to which indeterminate estimates of the earth's resources justify making no explicit provisions for the future...
...Thus, the growth rate of 4 per cent per capita would apply to regions in the $3-4,000 income per capita range (in 1970 constant prices), a 3 per cent growth rate in the $4-5,000 range, 2.5 per cent in the $5-6,000 range, and so forth...
...two examples are mass transit and the use of waste heat from power plants and industry to heat homes and offices...
...If the true believers persist in these views, they will not get the social changes that might avert the disasters they predict...
...For these reasons, I feel that the role of social services in postindustrial speculations may be exaggerated...
...Industrial Development Organization Conference in 1975, Third World countries announced the goal of producing 25 percent of world industrial output by the year 2000...
...Where does the argument stand now...
...in either case, the result is more unemployment...
...The need to act on energy has been apparent at least since the 1973 oil boycott...
...The Midwest Academy, 600 West Fullerton Ave., Chicago, Ill., 60614...
...The Next 200 Years, p. 4. 'The Next 200 Years, p. 50...
...This price rise will encourage some people to turn to resources whose use isn't banned—for example, solar power...
...These ratios are a pretty abstract basis for policies of limited growth, even though the ratios do suggest relationships to the economic satisfactions available in different societies...
...Only one component of this commitment, the program of energy conservation in buildings outlined by the American Institute of Architects, would require $415 billion through 1990...
...13 RIO calculated that their target of 3:1 could only be reached if incomes grow less than "1.7 percent a year in the industrialized countries (approximately half the existing growth rate so as to attain zero growth in about 40 years...
...Self-sufficient villages would require less imported technology and materials, such as artificial fertilizers made from petroleum, than villages transformed by the market and the high-technology green revolution...
...It occurs in the third report to the Club of Rome, RIO: Reshaping the International Order, and in The Future of the World Economy, Wassily Leontieff's report for the United Nations...
...44"Solar Energy: Is There a Public Option," p. 5. 45 See L. S. Stavrianos, The Promise of the Coming Dark Age (San Francisco: Freeman, 1976...
...Thus there is a real conflict between our need to create full employment in the industrialized world and the policies RIO proposes for balanced international growth...
...16 Since it isn't likely that such investments will be made, the effective social and political limit to the world's population is significantly smaller than the outer limit of 40 billion people...
...A Federal Energy Administration report ". . stressed that employment associated with energy conserva468 tion techniques is local, low- to moderately skilled, and concentrated in or near urbanized areas which are experiencing the most acute unemployment problems...
...More generally, absolute physical limits in any sector can be widened if enough capital and expertise are combined...
...they plan to convene a national conference in the summer of 1978 to draft a national energy program...
...This projection implicitly limits survival to those middle-class people who could afford to obtain land and materials...
...Organic growth" differs most clearly from a steady-state economy by assuming that the Third World must experience growth in both industry and agriculture...
...In pursuing international balance, RIO's policies may create unacceptable imbalances in the West...
...the results would vary significantly if relatively small rates of technological change and resource discovery were included...
...I believe that this argument is a trap, ending up in immobility...
...About 25 percent of our total energy consumption takes place in transportation...
...report aimed at reducing the ratios by a factor of two (from 13:1 to 7:1) and RIO envisaged a fourfold reduction (to 3:1...
...And industrial democracy itself is worth demanding...
...They thus reach the same conclusion as did the Meadows, but for a totally different reason...
...E. F. Schumacher, Small is Beautiful (New York: Harper & Row, 1973...
...exponential growth must level out...
...It has been the basis of the welfare-state compromise, the answer to class tension and to demands for social justice in the distribution of wealth and power...
...Taking these limits into account, one sees that there is no real alternative to controlling the growth of demand for energy...
...It will take a huge commitment of labor, resources and money to make the transition to an economy that can fill our need for jobs and goods without exhausting the world's diminishing reserves of fossil fuels...
...This widely repeated exhortation contains—and often conceals—two difficult sets of issues: what changes are necessary, and who should change...
...Kahn himself notes 454 "that in fact the shift to coal has been slow, one reason being that it takes about 15-20 years to amortize major new coal investments if they include much infrastructure such as ports and railroads...
...My remarks pertain more to the U.S...
...Neither author advocates investment planning, which makes Beckerman's repeated assertion that the only problem is the allocation of resources and products into a trivial cop-out...
...Western governments would "only" have to refrain from inflating their economies artificially to keep up full employment...
...They would need force, to protect their possessions against the hungry urban masses...
...Robert Heilbroner succinctly states the argument for continuing to expand the welfare state: It is possible that growth could be permitted to continue for an indefinite period, provided that it were confined to outputs that consumed few resources and generated little heat...
...Second, if Western countries invest heavily in these areas, they will evolve deeper into the high-capital, highenergy economy that the "limits to growth" writers have been criticizing...
...478-79...
...he was even willing to return to the public the proceeds of any taxes levied to reduce demand, when the proceeds of these taxes could appropriately be used for investment and research...
...This individualism looks like pure common sense...
...This second report, Mankind at the Turning Point, was published in 1974...
...We have seen that recent studies tend to use more ample estimates of potential supplies of nonrenewable resources and to 457 give wider ranges of uncertainty...
...Continued rapid growth should generate wealth that can be diverted into pollution control and investment aid to the developing nations...
...Keynesianism is not a useful technique for slowing down an economy, because it only deals with aggregate demand...
...The idea of giving highest priority to satisfying human needs is attractive, and at times useful in planning investment...
...The cost of the unit should be subtracted from the assessed valuation...
...The ecologists in particular are in a radically negative frame of mind, ready to stop new nuclear plants and drilling for offshore oil, but not ready to undertake "ecological engineering...
...This figure gives an impression of the energy we waste, which goes far beyond personal sloppiness...
...Education cannot be separated from the economic expectations people bring to it and turned into a form of mass entertainment to take people's minds off material goods...
...The federal government now provides a substantial part of America's new physical investment through tax expenditures, notably the investment tax credit...
...These measures aren't even sacrifices...
...The political implications of a no-growth world were very crude: Third-World countries would be left in permanent poverty unless a radical redistribution of wealth took place...
...What are we to make of it...
...43 This decision inevitably will delay the application of solar heating...
...Since their arguments suggest that growth must be controlled rather than eliminated, they had to develop ways of determining which forms of growth should be permitted and which ought to be discouraged or even prohibited...
...There are, however, short-run political, social, and economic limits to expanding industrialized nations' uses of energy...
...Most writers on energy, for example, now use M. King Hubbert's estimates of world oil resources, which are nearly three times as large as those that the Meadows used...
...The Ehrlichs' rugged individualism is a misleading fantasy, because what they are really predicting is social welfare along class lines...
...They develop scenarios for averting crises as a result of world oil shortages and food shortages in South Asia...
...For example, a solar unit adds to the cost of a house or apartment building, and therefore increases its assessed valuation and real estate taxes...
...Their italics...
...In the course of this search, I will tangentially indicate some of my reasons for concluding that limits to growth cannot become the sole basis of political action...
...Second, these new, reports use estimates of basic variables that provide more leeway for growth...
...These social and political limits now take precedence because they appear to be harsher than the revised estimates of outer limits...
...If pushed, they might argue that new technologies like solar heating will require people to spread out...
...Many critics said that the Meadows' pessimistic conclusions were the mechanical result of unrealistically pessimistic assumptions...
...The ineffectiveness of price increases here overlaps with their unfairness— low-paid workers and the lower middle class will have to curtail their consumption more, along with people on various forms of public assistance, if public benefits continue to lag behind energy prices...
...3 H. S. D. Cole, et al., Models of Doom: A Critique of the Limits to Growth (New York: Universe, 1973), p. 132...
...It attempts to offer some positive directions for human activity that might yield more satisfaction, at a lower cost in energy and resources...
...DoneIla H. Meadows et al., The Limits to Growth (New York: New American Library / Signet, 1972), pp...
...24R10, p. 113...
...Industrial diversification will have to be worldwide and carefully planned with special regard for regional specificity...
...These investments cannot be obtained through existing capital markets and corporate retained earnings...
...To increase investment in both nonrenewable and renewable sources to a level that would permit energy use to grow at 5 percent a year seems out of reach...
...Sheet metal workers and contractors insist that they have the capacity to do the job...
...But to push the outer limit on population back to that figure, $700 billion must be invested in agricultural modernization in Latin America, Africa, and Asia between now and the year 2000...
...Quality of Life INCREASED INTERNATIONAL TRANSFERS, changes in international trade, and other restraints imposed by international equity can only determine a small portion of an industrialized nation's production...
...Both are democratic values—along with industrial democracy and equality—which we must use in deciding what savings or reductions to make...
...For example, Roger Revelle guesses that 40 billion people could be accommodated on earth...
...Furthermore, if one limit were pushed back, another would come into play...
...A postindustrialist shift in values cannot change society by itself...
...There is still room to expand those social services that use much labor and relatively few resources...
...Instead of appealing to guilt, Jan Tinbergen and other authors of RIO draw heavily on the democratic values of such Western social democracies as Sweden and the Netherlands...
...to deplete its resources more rapidly...
...Keynesianism operates by increasing the money in circulation so that people may buy more goods...
...If total demand drops in a market economy, the result is increased unemployment...
...32 Clearly, it is important for democratically minded people to insist on the egalitarian solution to environmental issues—for example, to demand gas rationing rather than let higher prices choke off consumption by the poorest motorists...
...Ultimately, of course, we need national investment planning or a national investment bank that can carry out these policies systematically...
...43Steven Rattner, "Sharp Rise in Outlays Reflects Carter Stress on Fossil Fuels," New York Times, January 24, 1978, p. 17...
...It is hard to believe that Western countries would slow their growth merely because of abstract principles of international equity...
...In addition, both RIO and Leontieff used U.N...
...than to Western Europe...
...The behavior of America's rich and the working classes both seem to contradict it...
...A nerve has been touched...
...Many people will disagree with this conclusion...
...If we remove that prediction, can individualism be vindicated as an adequate guide for controlling growth...
...Some of these limits could be pushed back, by massive new investments, if there were not also clear-cut outer limits...
...The unstated premise for this belief is probably a faith that people act rationally in market situations...
...The West would gain stability...
...36Total world consumption of energy grew at 5 percent a year between 1950-68, as compared with the 7.8 percent rate of growth in oil consumption given above...
...Moss and Kahn argue that the only conceivable, meaningful benefit is the increase of the per capita output of the Third World countries...
...Thus negative, apolitical values lead to disaster...
...For Daly and the Ehrlichs, all governments are equally suspect...
...Calculations like this reduce the likelihood of an absolute shortage of raw materials within the next century...
...Making this argument brings us back to using democratic values in conjunction with projections of objective limits to growth...
...Consequently, we need to explore some of the mild forms of investment planning that do exist...
...Ironically, there might be less direct conflict between the needs of Third World citizens and the consumption patterns on which Western economies are based if Third World countries follow Chinese and Tanzanian models of autarchic village development instead of Moss's freemarket ideology...
...Increasing the availability of higher education has increased the credentials needed to get a good job and lengthens the queue of people waiting for jobs...
...These conclusions need not demoralize us...
...The consumer's shift in expenditure may mean that very little energy is saved, if the consumer saves on a low-energy good or service to purchase energy directly or to purchase a high-energy good...
...home service for sick people is a good example...
...all, socialist as well as capitalist, are committed to growth, and therefore make the situation more desperate...
...An ecological elite...
...properly designed row houses require less energy for heating and cooling than detached houses...
...Among their answers are a new kind of internationalism—world control of investment and resources that will permit growth in the least developed nations and restrict it in the industrialized world...
...The failure to plan for these investments is a major deficiency in Carter's energy program...
...Leonard Rodberg says this isn't true: Cost analyses suggest that solar heating and electricity units are most efficient on a community scale where they can serve hundreds or thousands of people, not on the scale of the individual home...
...However, a group at Sussex University in England asserted that the Meadows' model did not yield such categorical results...
...Western society will have to make these investments, knowing that their use is limited, while simultaneously investing in solar energy and other renewable sources that might take their place...
...Much of it is wasted in journeys that can be shortened by building houses closer to work and shopping...
...Limiting growth is not a negative but a positive task...
...Robert Heilbroner raises another chilling possibility: nuclear blackmail...
...On the other hand, if it were necessary to restrict consumption, Kenesianism would be inappropriate...
...The Carter administration's policy also depends heavily on forcing people to abstain...
...The disaster that the Ehrlichs expect would create a situation in which the optimal population of the U.S...
...Other nonrenewable energy sources are available, but they too have shortterm political and economic limits...
...Without a national effort to create jobs in ways that are ecologically sounder and that provide more jobs for the capital invested, workers in those industries will have little choice but to support management's demands...
...Mesarovic and Pestel had to agree that the kind of growth described by Meadows' team, "exponential growth," could not continue indefinitely...
...they would fit the needs of unskilled people...
...Heilbroner's argument applies best to those social services that use large amounts of labor and few resources...
...51-57...
...There are two reasons for the shift of emphasis from absolute physical limits to social and political limits to growth...
...On the surface, Kahn and Beckerman seem to be arguing for a combination of the first and second alternatives—unrestricted, undifferentiated growth stimulated by the state...
...It asserted that there are more adaptive mechanisms in Western economies than the Meadows' team had allowed for, and it reduced sharply the likelihood of a catastrophic collapse of the earth's carrying capacity...
...If one simply prevented further utilization of resources, the resources that are in use will gradually be exhausted...
...Landlords and corporations have designed buildings that require the tsimultaneous use of heating and air conditioning, in which windows don't open and a single room cannot be illuminated without turning on all the lights on a floor...
...Michael Harrington's comment: ". . . people have tried to argue that a spaceship earth forced to ration all of its resources would be a socialist earth...
...They show that the most desperate policies—triage or international transfers of food—ought not to be necessary...
...The proponents of "balanced growth" continue to believe that there are absolute physical limits...
...It would lead the U.S...
...Kahn postulates that there are economic and psychological limits to human demands...
...40 Popular discussions of energy often concentrate on consumers and ignore industry and offices...
...Mankind at the Turning Point, p. 7. "Mankind at the Turning Point, p. 127...
...Apres moi le deluge" is a kind of economic rationality...
...unrestricted growth is not necessarily the best answer to these problems...
...instead, its recent exponential growth will probably slow to a low or zero rate...
...To study other moral values that might be used to direct a slowing down of economic growth, we need to turn away from the believers in absolute physical limits...
...To make their computer runs more sophisticated, Mesarovic and Pestel divided the world into ten regions...
...to the Ehrlichs' optimum of 100 million, but it must be unacceptable to anybody who cares about human suffering...
...both approaches will require massive public investment, not just changes in individual habits...
...People expect a reward for their investment in education and are frustrated when it doesn't arrive...
...14 To restrain growth in the industrialized countries, they propose a tax on undesirable consumption that could ultimately be determined and collected internationally...
...Hugh Stretton demonstrates that virtually all environmental issues can be faced either in a manner that furthers equality or one that furthers inequality...
...The equity issue must be balanced against the magnitude of the sacrifice that would be required to reduce the ratios...
...Two Cheers for the Affluent Society is a much more substantial book than Kahn's, but it also ends up with patently unrealistic arguments...
...Mesarovic and Pestel make several vague references to the need for changes in Western life-styles if organic growth is to occur...
...The Meadows had sought to anticipate the objection that their estimates were too low by saying that their computer runs indicated that doubling estimates of available resources would only buy a few years' time...
...The magic formula to avoid being drowned by the coming social tidal wave is: get involved in your own future and maximize your independence...
...They are more flexible and moderate, but nonetheless a version of "limits to growth...
...Our" refers to Western people sharing a belief in full employment and democratic values...
...Starving millions are obscene...
...The opponents of limits—Robert W. Tucker (in Commentary) and Robert Moss (in the Economist), for example—assert that the key issues are the success and moral responsibility of world capitalism...
...20 Both of these positions shrink from invoking power to plan a transition...
...This offends our value of equality...
...The authors of RIO and the Leontieff-U.N...
...To locate the industries in which new jobs could be created for displaced workers, they follow the theory of comparative advantage: "The industrialized countries, for example, have a comparative advantage in the manufacture of textile machinery but not necessarily in the manufacture of all textile goods...
...Other Third World demands that RIO includes in its program of balanced growth demand a real sacrifice that may be unacceptable...
...The second group—including Leontieff, RIO, and Robert Heilbroner—takes its cues from various social and political limits to growth...
...on it hangs the question of how societies are to grow—in other words, what we should invest in...
...These weaknesses come from their urge to be above politics...
...Leontieff refers to "the well-known constraints on growth, such as the availability of mineral reserves, the potential for food production, and the levels of industrial and commercial pollution of the natural environment...
...This optimistic conclusion has received more comment than the underlying challenge to growth concealed in the way that the ratios must be reduced...
...Clearly, there is no point in making sacrifices that only benefit a corrupt ruling elite or are frittered away by an incompetent regime—either in the West or the 461 Third World...
...7 Beckerman knows that extending any rate exponentially into the indefinite future yields ridiculous results...
...Entrepreneurs would have to obtain money and start construction ten years in advance of the need, before they got a signal from price increases...
...The fourth report commissioned by the Club of Rome, Goals for Mankind, summarizes the moral values used by most believers in social and political limits: ". . . growth can occur in many areas where human needs are truly served—where the quality of life within developed countries is enhanced, and where world development and justice are promoted...
...they would also help the wealthy countries adapt to high energy prices and slower growth...
...The alternative might be to abandon the theory of comparative advantage, and the large expenditure of resources on international trade that it implies, and to use the planning techniques RIO mentions in order to achieve internal balanced growth...
...The Keynesian tools on which we have relied to expand the economy and create jobs have serious deficiencies in a limited growth situation As we near the social and political limits to growth, we get less out of each successive priming of the pump...
...These two reports introduce a new theme, which is also drawn from the current demands of Third World governments—reducing the inequalities between average incomes in the developed countries and the developing nations...
...Dickson's paralysis may well reflect reality...
...the consumer will have to reduce some other expenditure, and that will still save energy...
...The difficult task is to work out what that means...
...The alternative policy is to restructure the economy to meet the real shortages that lie ahead...
...The moral values found most frequently in the writings of the "doomsayers" are a plea for a new ethics of restraint (such as E. F. Schumacher's Buddhist Economics) and the invocation of an ecological ethic...
...Several democratic action groups have now begun to build a politics around the proposition that conserving energy and using renewable energy sources can create jobs...
...38 The Poverty of Power, p. 155...
...It is more a feeling of fragility—a projection of recent monetary and energy shocks—than a fully reasoned list of international obstacles...
...International Equity IT ISN'T EASY to pin down the moral dimension of the argument that balanced world development requires major restraints on growth in the West...
...It is extremely important to preserve and renovate the older cities of the Northeast and Midwest, because city dwellers use significantly less energy for commuting and living...
...We need much more evidence on whether Chinese and Tanzanian models show that village-based, nonmarket development is possible...
...By the end of the 1960s, many observers had become concerned that pure "growthmanship" couldn't go on indefinitely...
...The combination of outer limits with shortterm political and organizational restrictions on energy, resources, and food production means that we cannot continue to make constant growth the motor of Western societies...
...That is true of other major social 464 democratic values—most notably equality...
...Energy, other natural resources, pollution, and food supplies still are problem areas...
...we will have to make choices...
...Although we must abandon our dream of a world without scarcity in which there would be a total transformation of the human personality, 48 there is still room for democratic action...
...could subsist for 50 years on its own domestically produced oil...
...To reach the level of investment needed to avert disaster, there will have to be a substantial direct investment in rebuilding the society...
...Apply it to rebuilding plants and office buildings to save energy...
...36 This implausibility is compounded by the notion that market forces could make these investments...
...Trade unions, environmentalists, consumer advocates, and civil rights groups have joined these coalitions, or are being approached by them...
...15 "The Future of the World Economy," p. 9. I6Roger Revelle, "The Resources Available for Agriculture," Scientific American, September 1976, p. 178...
...Dickson defines alternative technologies in terms of the values they serve: Self-actualization, low energy consumption, and the furtherance of community...
...47Environmentalists For Full Employment, Room 300, 1785 Massachusetts Avenue N.W., Washington, D.C...
...As long as there are outer limits to the availability of resources and energy, and as long as there are real limits to the speed with which Third World citizens can reach middle-income levels of consumption, 25 there is an unavoidable issue of equity...
...These writers—the Meadows, Anne and Paul Ehrlich, Herman Daly, and others—see limits to growth as the main determinant of a new life style...
...Such a system cannot be left to the mercy of narrow national interests, but must rely on long-range world economic arrangements...
...There is no single value that can provide a simple answer to our choices...
...Here we reach the heart of the argument that there are international limits to Western growth...
...Despite the problems that philosophers can find with them, they provide operational answers to "who should sacrifice" and "who should decide...
...But one may try to escape this paralysis by assuming a dialectical relationship between technology, the class structure, and values...
...The assumptions made by most ecologists, concerning the value of human life and the need for individuals to sacrifice for the survival of the species, don't help much...
...For example, shortages of water in the western United States pose limits to the idea of turning coal into gaseous and liquid fuels...
...Our energy policy must emphasize conservation and renewable sources...
...31 I agree with a large part of this argument, yet there are two major limits to our ability to make social services the answer to limits to growth...
...Barry Commoner, The Poverty of Power (New York: Knopf, 1976), pp...
...The lead time for energy projects is so long and the demand projections are so uncertain that we cannot wait for rising prices to cajole corporations into new investments...
...The projections of limits to come do not uniquely determine what our responses should be...
...Any argument based on international guilt won't get Westerners to change their behavior...
...Europeans have less room to implement the ideas outlined below, because they have less energy waste to reduce and because they are more dependent on imported raw materials...
...There may be no way to create a majority desire for radical changes in energy and resource consumption...
...This means that individual savings aren't necessarily real reductions in energy use or resource consumption...
...Traditional democratic socialist values, such as equality, are nowhere near as vague as "the quality of life" or "a new ethic...
...35 The presence of these outer limits means that investments in nonrenewable energy sources are transitional, not a long-term solution...
...Struggles over these points are likely to delay the necessary rebuilding of our physical fabric...
...It even permitted the transfer of small amounts of aid to underdeveloped countries...
...These assumptions included the use of proven reserves of basic nonrenewable resources, such as fossil fuels and minerals, without making any allowances for the discovery of new supplies...
Vol. 25 • September 1978 • No. 4
