Our idea of progress must change

…We’ve raised our standard of living to record heights — so high, in fact that, if everyone lived like we do in North America, we would need three or four earths. To keep our way of life rolling along, we need to make more things. As the satirical newspaper The Onion put it, quoting a fictional Chinese worker: “Often, when we’re assigned a new order for, say, ’salad shooters,’ I will say to myself, there’s no way that anyone will ever buy these . . . One month later, we will receive an order for the same product, but three times the quantity . . I hear that [North] Americans can buy anything they want, and I believe it, judging from the things I’ve made for them. And I also hear that, when they no longer want an item, they simply throw it away. So wasteful and contemptible.”

But such is our personal measure of progress: whoever has the most stuff when they die, wins.

But having stuff is also how we measure the progress of civilization: more antibiotics, more books, more electricity to more people, more MRI machines, more people in space, more doctors, more lawyers (OK, maybe not more lawyers). How incredible is the earth’s bounty. There seems no end, either to her resources or to our progress.

Except there is. Scientists at MIT, in 1972, determined that the growth of populations and material goods cannot be sustained. If our material growth were not halted soon, they said, the world as we know it would be over by 2042. The IEA puts the date at 2020. That’s the date that the International Energy Agency — the world’s most trusted name in energy analysis — predicts we will have reached peak oil, when we will have burned half of the world’s oil reserves.

Owen Sound SunTimes