Peak globalization

Wishful thinking or apocalyptic doom forecasting? Fred Curtis, an economist at Drew University, has put together a mashup of peak oil, global warming, and patterns in global trade liberalization and arrived at the principle of “Peak Globalization.” A double whammy of higher energy costs and extreme climate events will disrupt global transportation patterns, reversing the historical trend towards greater and greater levels of global trade and forcing a process of “relocalization” — “The major implication is that supply chains will become shorter for most products and that production of goods will be relocated closer to where they are consumed, although this will happen neither quickly nor easily.”
Curtis doesn’t come out and say so directly, but given the fact that his paper appeared in the journal “Ecological Economics” and ecological economists, as a rule, tend to take a dim view of globalization and its assorted capitalist depredations against the environment, one assumes that he’s not all that unhappy about the prospect of relocalization. When Curtis writes that “The economic logic of the comparative advantage of global supply chains will be overcome by both increasing transportation costs and interruptions and delays in the transit of freight,” he doesn’t sound too broken up about it.

But there are some fairly mighty assumptions in his opening paragraph, not least being the imminence of peak oil, the certainty of catastrophic climate change, and human inability to do anything meaningful about either or both of these threats. Additionally, Curtis sees climate change and peak oil working in concert — but they could just as easily work at cross-purposes.

Salon