Scot McKnight just completed a great series on Adam Hamilton’s new book Seeing Gray in a World of Black and White: Thoughts on Religion, Morality, and Politics. I have the book but haven’t read it yet. I have lot of respect for Hamilton and I’m looking forward to reading it.
However, in the course of McKnight’s review, he lifted this quote from Hamilton’s book and it is a line of reasoning I take issue with:
I’ve heard this stat repeated over and over again over the least thirty years. I think the first place I probably encountered it was in Ron Sider’s Rich Christians in an Age of Hunger. It is intended to give evidence of the incredible wastefulness of American society.
But what if I were to tell you that for each hour worked, an American worker produces four to five times as much as the average worker in the world? That is the flip side of this statistic. Americans consume 22% more fuel and produce 22% of the world’s goods even though they are 5% of the world’s population.
Prior to the industrial era, the great masses of humanity have had one option:
With the industrial era a new option emerged:
As industrialism matured, a third option emerged:
That basically leaves us with two options with good and bad consequences.
2. High energy consumption (bad) with most people having a wide range of options that don’t require long hours of hard physical labor (good.)
Ideally what we would like is low energy consumption with few people engaged in long hours of hard physical labor. The problem is that growth and decline in gross domestic product correlates almost perfectly with growth and decline in energy consumption. Barring innovation, we will need to consume a great deal more energy resources in order to bring the rest of the planet to our level of post-industrial life. “Barring innovation” are the operative words.
A century ago, the United States had 300 million acres of land in crop production. Up until that time the ratio of cropland to population had been fairly constant. Land had been plentiful and the pressure to innovate was not strong.
If we could return to 1900 with the knowledge that the population would more than triple in the next 100 years, then project forward based on land to population ratios of that time, we would see that we would need another 700 million acres by century end. That is roughly the land area east of the Mississippi! So how many acres are in crop production today? Same as in 1900, about 300 million. Not only are more than triple the number of people fed and with the same amount of land but surpluses are sold around the world. The government pays some farmers not to grow crops in order not to depress food prices with too much supply.
Energy is the new cropland dilemma. Oil is the energy that moves the world today. The recent spike in oil and gas prices had far more to do with institutional investors diving into the commodities markets when other investments were underperforming than it did with the actual demand for oil. That said, with India and China (one third of the world) significantly subsidizing gasoline for their citizens, demand pressure had been rising faster than would otherwise have been the case. There is more than enough oil for a rapidly growing world for centuries to come but the price is still likely to creep higher in real terms. Concerns about carbon emissions are likely to put even more upward pressure on the price of oil. The economic pressure for affordable alternative energy and for technologies that are more energy efficient has been rising.
The other challenge that frequently gets mentioned is the exhaustion of natural resources. Yet for 140 years the real cost of commodities has been falling and is expected to continue on that path (the recent investor driven spike notwithstanding.) And as Donald Hay has pointed out in Economics Today almost everything we use today can feasibly be replaced by renewable and recyclable materials. The economic pressures to force such transitions simply have not yet been present.
The challenge of the 21st Century is how to create a global economy of low energy (or at least renewable energy) consumption with few people engaged in long hours of hard physical labor. The fact that 5% of the world consumes 22% of world energy is not an indictment of American consumerism (though surely consumerism is present.) It is a consequence of having discovered how to substitute energy and technology for back-breaking human labor so the masses can be free to flourish in ways unimaginable prior to our era. The next step in economic evolution is figuring out how to extend this development to the rest of the world while transforming our energy sources.
Unfortunately, there are anti-growth activists at work who wish to block this emergence. They have decided the world economy has grown large enough. With discredited Matlhusian logic they project current relationships of production and consumption forward into the future and prophecy global disaster. “Sustainable” comes to mean projecting current realities into the future as a justification for blocking growth in the present when instead sustainable is a moving target directly related to the technologies and economies we have available to us at any given moment.
