Tom Friedman's editorial this weekend may be an historic on. He suggest that the financial crash of 2008 is more than a correction in the market - that it may be the end of the consumer - corporate - market society.
That nature is catching up with our mad idea that we could have infinite growth and that we could find "happiness" in stuff. Most importantly that we could have a business model based on only one thing - shareholder value where all the main costs are externalized to society.
If he is right, then all our business models based on scarcity, centralization and scale are wrong. For they serve only the elite and not the larger pool of people and the planet. This is not a moral issue. Nature does not care about moral issues. But she does punish those that break her laws. If we allow them to persist, they will take us all down.
We have been getting rich by depleting all our natural stocks - water, hydrocarbons, forests, rivers, fish and arable land - and not by generating renewable flows.
"You can get this burst of wealth that we have created from this rapacious behavior," added Romm. "But it has to collapse, unless adults stand up and say, 'This is a Ponzi scheme. We have not generated real wealth, and we are destroying a livable climate ...' Real wealth is something you can pass on in a way that others can enjoy."
Over a billion people today suffer from water scarcity; deforestation in the tropics destroys an area the size of Greece every year - more than 25 million acres; more than half of the world's fisheries are over-fished or fished at their limit.
"Just as a few lonely economists warned us we were living beyond our financial means and overdrawing our financial assets, scientists are warning us that we're living beyond our ecological means and overdrawing our natural assets," argues Glenn Prickett, senior vice president at Conservation International. But, he cautioned, as environmentalists have pointed out: "Mother Nature doesn't do bailouts."
Let's take how electrical power is distributed as a test case. Later we can talk about food or even schools! Here is a short post by a smart man Matthew Klippenstein and his partner Noordin Nanji
The way electric power is generated and distributed will change substantially over the next two decades. Power will be democratized, as small-scale production at the individual and community level moves from niche to normal. The resulting “electron-democracy” will still have centralized power plants, but power grid activity will increasingly be dominated by innumerable incremental energy flows between small producers and consumers. This is likely to happen whether or not public policy mandates a shift away from dependence on fossil fuels.
Most centralized plants (hydro excepted) cannot easily adjust to demand fluctuations, leading to steeply discounted off-peak rates and the need to acquire additional plants for high-demand periods. More broadly, an expansive transmission grid dominated by a few central power plants is vulnerable to disruption from both natural phenomena and human malevolence.
In contrast, smaller-scale power generation can respond more nimbly to market demand, in a shorter time frame, with lower capital costs. Filling supplemental power needs with niche supplies rather than primary power facilities creates new generation options that that otherwise would be impractical. Finally, a grid fed by a broad, physically dispersed heterogeneous mixture of power sources would provide robust protection against disruption.
Putting these strands together and looking forward, the distributed grid might look like this: intermittent wind and solar power generation would be complemented by load-supplementing fuel cell plants, in much the same way that peak power and base load power plants interact today. Electric vehicles (EVs), plug-in hybrid electric vehicles (PHEVs), and batteries would serve as grid energy storage when excess energy is being produced. The latter is analogous to the role of pumped-storage hydroelectric in current utility systems, where water is pumped from a lower reservoir to a higher one for later use in generating hydroelectric power.
Considering the intensifying pace of climate change, governments should play an ambitious role in the transition from today’s grid to tomorrow’s electron democracy. Governments could coordinate with local business to develop centers of excellence for distributed power in targeted industries. Mechanisms such as feed-in tariffs—which grant favorable rates for those generating power from renewables and clean-tech sources—could facilitate the development of these regional technology clusters. They would bring ancillary economic benefits as well.
We are hopeful that by 2030, our energy system will be considerably less dependent on fossil fuels, particularly for electric power generation. Supported by a diverse array of renewables, our energy needs could be met with an overlapping set of complementary clean technologies. In doing so, we would strongly curb our global warming emissions. We would then be poised not only to stabilize the climate, but to transcend the Fossil Fuel Age entirely and open a new “Age of Sustainability” in our human story.
This is no tweeking of the existing system. It is indeed a Great Disruption. (Please see Paul Gilding's outstanding analysis here) A big hurdle in the way - as with food - is of course regulation. The power holders will fight to the death to prevent this from happening.
So for me the emerging issue is not new technology - in power or food - or education - or anything. It is how do we get through the defences of what Jay Rosen calls the Curmudgeons? They own the existing systems and the lobbying power to get their way?
It took the fall of France in 1940 to kick the curmudgeons out of power in England - even though it had been obvious for years that war was coming.
I fear that we will have to pay a terrible price yet before we get rid of all the curmudgeons that stand int he way of progress
