Backatcha Bandit
is not taking your calls
Now that the debate regarding the reality of 'peak oil' is essentially over, I was wondering if I am alone in viewing the current 'economic' cluster-fuck as being a direct result of the rise in energy 'costs'.
I've long held the view that, since 'economics' is subsidiary to 'energy', to attempt to discuss 'energy' in 'economic' terms would be a category error, although this is what is commonly done:
Indeed, only an idiot (or an economist - which is pretty much the same thing) would ever attempt to do such a thing.
I don't believe the same to be true when discussing 'economics' in terms of 'energy', yet this (with a few notable exceptions) rarely ever occurs.
Viewed from this perspective, it seems fairly clear to me that the current 'financial crisis' is, at root, symptomatic of a rapidly declining ability to procure energy on the terms to which we are used.
With this in mind, it would appear that any talk of 'recovery' toward a state of 'business as usual' is at best a fairy story, if not utterly counter productive. The party's over. The 'infinite growth' paradigm is dead.
Reactions to this state of affairs range from an attempt from the right of the 'political spectrum' to blame everything on the feckless, scrounging poor (dismantle the welfare state, cut public services, etc.) to the lefts' - somewhat more valid - blaming of greed and corruption on the part of the ruling oligarchical kleptocracy, which manifests itself in the oppression, dispossession and disenfranchisement of the majority.
Having just gone through the recent House of Lords debate on energy and climate change, what becomes fairly clear is that the establishment is somewhat entrenched in a fantasy world-view that sees 'the market' as the solution to the problem, and that reduction of consumption is the way forward.
The 'free-market' solution of 'demand destruction' is a common euphemism for 'let the peasants freeze/starve, fuck them'.
At a time when it has becoming increasingly clear to even the most myopic Daily Mail reader that 'parliamentary democracy' is effectively dead, in that global corporate and financial interests have co-opted the process to the exclusion of mere mortals, yet I increasingly feel that, sadly, a traditional class-based analysis may fail to yield much in the way useful answers to the problem. Even less useful are the petty, divisive sectarian squabbles which appear to be the stock in trade of certain elements (here and elsewhere).
As recent events in London demonstrated, there is perhaps a real possibility of the country eventually sliding into what might reasonably described as 'civil war'.
My fear is that, once we manage to gatecrash the party, we find that there's no cake left. To put it another way; the music stops, only for us to find that the rich have already fucked off with all the chairs to use as firewood, leaving us to pay for the DJ and cucumber sandwiches.
Faced with diminishing access to the fuel, food and resources to which we have become accustomed - and without the option of re-appropriating them from elsewhere (the rich neither eat much more than the rest of us and probably don't taste any better than Lidl beefburgers), what are our options?
Looking to history for answers informs us that complex civilisations have a nasty habit of collapsing, once their strategy for appropriating energy and resources becomes subject to the law of diminishing returns.
Our very mode of existence is - and has been for some time - predicated upon appropriating resources from outside of our own 'landbase' - even food grown in the UK is largely dependent upon imported hydrocarbon energy.
There are various things we could probably do if we wished to change our current strategy, but I contend that trying to maintain the existing one is no longer an realistic option.
This brings up certain questions (land ownership/access, for instance) which I don't often see discussed.
Anyway... enough of my doom-mongering... What say you?
I've long held the view that, since 'economics' is subsidiary to 'energy', to attempt to discuss 'energy' in 'economic' terms would be a category error, although this is what is commonly done:
Indeed, only an idiot (or an economist - which is pretty much the same thing) would ever attempt to do such a thing.
I don't believe the same to be true when discussing 'economics' in terms of 'energy', yet this (with a few notable exceptions) rarely ever occurs.
Viewed from this perspective, it seems fairly clear to me that the current 'financial crisis' is, at root, symptomatic of a rapidly declining ability to procure energy on the terms to which we are used.
With this in mind, it would appear that any talk of 'recovery' toward a state of 'business as usual' is at best a fairy story, if not utterly counter productive. The party's over. The 'infinite growth' paradigm is dead.
Reactions to this state of affairs range from an attempt from the right of the 'political spectrum' to blame everything on the feckless, scrounging poor (dismantle the welfare state, cut public services, etc.) to the lefts' - somewhat more valid - blaming of greed and corruption on the part of the ruling oligarchical kleptocracy, which manifests itself in the oppression, dispossession and disenfranchisement of the majority.
Having just gone through the recent House of Lords debate on energy and climate change, what becomes fairly clear is that the establishment is somewhat entrenched in a fantasy world-view that sees 'the market' as the solution to the problem, and that reduction of consumption is the way forward.
The 'free-market' solution of 'demand destruction' is a common euphemism for 'let the peasants freeze/starve, fuck them'.
At a time when it has becoming increasingly clear to even the most myopic Daily Mail reader that 'parliamentary democracy' is effectively dead, in that global corporate and financial interests have co-opted the process to the exclusion of mere mortals, yet I increasingly feel that, sadly, a traditional class-based analysis may fail to yield much in the way useful answers to the problem. Even less useful are the petty, divisive sectarian squabbles which appear to be the stock in trade of certain elements (here and elsewhere).
As recent events in London demonstrated, there is perhaps a real possibility of the country eventually sliding into what might reasonably described as 'civil war'.
My fear is that, once we manage to gatecrash the party, we find that there's no cake left. To put it another way; the music stops, only for us to find that the rich have already fucked off with all the chairs to use as firewood, leaving us to pay for the DJ and cucumber sandwiches.
Faced with diminishing access to the fuel, food and resources to which we have become accustomed - and without the option of re-appropriating them from elsewhere (the rich neither eat much more than the rest of us and probably don't taste any better than Lidl beefburgers), what are our options?
Looking to history for answers informs us that complex civilisations have a nasty habit of collapsing, once their strategy for appropriating energy and resources becomes subject to the law of diminishing returns.
Our very mode of existence is - and has been for some time - predicated upon appropriating resources from outside of our own 'landbase' - even food grown in the UK is largely dependent upon imported hydrocarbon energy.
There are various things we could probably do if we wished to change our current strategy, but I contend that trying to maintain the existing one is no longer an realistic option.
This brings up certain questions (land ownership/access, for instance) which I don't often see discussed.
Anyway... enough of my doom-mongering... What say you?
