[p2p-research] [Abundance] Re: Fwd: Launch of Abundance: The Journal of Post-Scarcity Studies, preliminary plans

[Kevin Carson]

On 2/12/09, Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com> wrote:

> But amongst our network of experts, Vinay Gupta of Global Swadeshi takes a
> rather radical point of view. While it does not negate the damage that can
> be done through our continued use of fossil fuels, it does suggest that Peak
> Oil is not such a fundamental drawback for the next phase of civilisation
> based on distributed renewable energies.
>
> In fact, says Gupta, these alternatives already exist, and just have to be
> implemented:

> "There's no energy crisis. If we work on scaling plastic solar panel
> manufacture, we'll cut human CO2 emissions by 40% (the proportion currently
> produced by coal) in 20 years because it will simply be uneconomic to keep
> the coal plants burning."

In general terms I agree, although I don't know enough to have an
opinion about whether some form of photovoltaic will pan out and beat
fossil fuels in terms of EROEI.

But more generally, all the building blocks of an alternative,
decentralized and less energy-guzzling economy are out there and ready
to adopt.  As Amory Lovins et al argued in Natural Capitalism, the
main thing holding it back is cultural inertia and path dependency.
When energy prices get high enough, they'll overcome that inertia.
And according to Lovins et al, just the low-hanging fruit (things like
replacing trucks with trains and cogenerating power from industrial
waste heat) could eliminate more than half our current fossil fuel
consumption.

On a more radical level, the building blocks are already out there for
local, small-scale manufacturing economies, as well as the
prerequisites for shifting a considerable portion of production to the
household or neighborhood barter economy.  As little known as they
are, I expect skyrocketing energy prices and a collapse of much of the
wage economy to make it a lot easier for those currently involved with
such technologies to promote them.  For example, almost nobody in the
conventional building industry knows about passive solar cooling by
running intake pipes underground.  But some people, scattered around
the country, do have it.  And when the cost of air conditioning a
conventional tract house rises to $300 a month, I expect a guy whose
house is cooled for $0 a month to generate some hellacious word of
mouth in surrounding neighborhoods.

As I've also argued elsewhere, I expect small machine shops and
backyard hobby shops to become the basis of a localized industrial
economy, under pressure of necessity, when the supply chains of the
centralized corporate industrial economy collapse.  This was the focus
of my discussion of S.M. Stirling's fictional industrial economy in
the Nantucket trilogy, which I raised in an exchange with Samantha
Atkins on the Open Manufacturing list.

Coupling such distributed manufacturing with microenterprises
(bakeries, day care centers, cab services, market gardens,
microbreweries, etc.) run out of people's homes using their ordinary
household capital equipment, and with liquidity provided by LETS
systems if the old currency collapses, I think thriving local
economies will expand to fill the gap pretty quickly under pressure of
necessity.

One thing that will help the transition will be if the U.S.
government, state governments, and other "hollowed out states" lack
the capability of enforcing bank ownership of paper on defaulting
mortgagers, and we can transition as the banks collapse to a default
system of ownership based on current possession.  That, and no
last-ditch effort at large-scale police statism to enforce the DMCA
and suchlike.

FWIW, I also expect the collapse to be a long one (a "long emergency")
taking around two decades, so there will be no catastrophic collapse
and sudden vacuum to fill. But even when collapses have been
catastrophic, as in Argentina early in the decade, people have been
extremely resilient and creative in finding ways to make things work
in the face of necessity.

-- 
Kevin Carson
Mutualist Blog:  Free Market Anti-Capitalism
http://mutualist.blogspot.com
Studies in Mutualist Political Economy
http://www.mutualist.org/id47.html
Anarchist Organization Theory Project
http://mutualist.blogspot.com/2005/12/studies-in-anarchist-theory-of.html