Heading Over a Cliff: The Consumption/Conservation Paradox

It's very natural to think that things tomorrow will be about like things today, that life next year will resemble life this year, that I can expect what the world will look like in six years when my son graduates from high school and we finally get to experience that "empty nest syndrome" we've heard so much about. Not so fast...

That used to be the case, but in a time of rapid change, none of those assumptions are anywhere near true any more. What we used to know as fact no longer holds true. Everything You Know Is Wrong - my favorite Firesign Theater LP from 33 years ago - so absurd and surreal back then (and today) - now describes the way I actually look at the world. These days, it seems that everything I know is wrong - nothing seems to hold true any more.

A key challenge we face is that our underlying assumptions about Consumption, Consumerism and our Economy have been systematically challenged by recent events. Fact is, we can't depend any more on consuming to bail us out: buying from and selling to each other - the very definition of our modern economy - just won't cut it anymore. For all of our lives, consumption and economic growth has always been the solution - we grow, accelerate, deal with positive growth, slowdowns in growth.

Now, as we approach this CO2 horizon, consumption itself has become the problem - economic shrinkage has become the solution. Conservation, not consumption, is how we all need to think now. And that, my friends - as John McCain would say - is a very different mindset, an altogether different way to look at things.

But most people would see such change in a negative light. Bummer. This means bad times ahead for all. A New Deal or a War Footing? Thinking Through Our Response to Climate Change does the best job yet at explaining and exploring this paradox.

What do we need? Well, there are strategies for dealing with climate change that don’t require a massive investment of fossil energies. They are, of course, unsexy in a legislative sense, mostly because they are enacted by ordinary people, and focus heavily on conservation. On the other hand, as we have seen with the shifts people are making for economic reasons, they provide immediate, dramatic paybacks, with fewer dangers. It is obviously not possible to reduce our energy usage to 0 - we will still need investment in renewable infrastructure, in insulation, and we will still need companies, perhaps car companies, to build rail cars and windmills. But the difference between a gradual build out, that takes into account the ecological and economic costs of this shift, and takes the New Deal, rather than the war as a real model - ie, it emphasizes what ordinary people can do with human energies and small-to-moderate investments and a massive build-out that attempt to keep business as usual.