New times need new ideas

AUSTRALIA – All but the wilfully ignorant now know that civilisation faces a challenge of unique proportions. The profligate consumption of fossil fuels over the last century has polluted the atmosphere to the point where it is changing the very climate, while that consumption has used up most of the easily available oil. As realisation that Peak Oil is imminent and the climate models become more alarming (as the underlying mechanisms are better understood), the future looks more and more difficult.

Quite clearly, drastic and immediate action is called for if disaster is to be averted. But there are no signs that such remedial action is at hand: instead, economic growth and terrorism dominate world politics.

The reason for this is that the core ideas of mainstream politics have not been challenged. In essence these ideas view society as a collection of individuals interacting through free markets, with the state just tidying up around the edges. In other words, they are the basic ideas of classical (or neo-classical) economics.

These big ideas never had much to say about human beings other than they were consumers and less important, producers. They never had much to say at all about the ongoing incidence of war. And they never had much to say about the costs of economic growth on the natural world. Nevertheless, because they arose with mass industrialisation, they seemed to be the best way of explaining the manifest material changes that occurred, and which transformed the daily lives of all. That phase, short by historical standards, is now concluding due to the end of cheap oil and the impact of industrial pollution on the environment.

Online Opinion