Taking an "interest" in energy and the environment [View all]

[GliderGuider]

It's no secret to anyone who looks that we are digesting the planet right out from under our multiplying feet.

I first noticed the symptoms of Peak Oil and climate change, and spent quite a while investigating the minutia of those issues. The questions that raised prompted me to go deeper in search of root causes. Initially I thought that overpopulation was "the problem", but it didn't take long to realize that the growth in consumption was damaging the planet far more than just our growth in numbers. Our population growth rate is slowing, but our consumption of planetary resources appears to be growing unabated.

However, this simply shifts the question - what is driving our rising consumption rates? What's causing us - as a species - to use ever more oil, metal, wood, water, land, chemicals - you name it? Is there a deeper cause that underlies both population growth and consumption growth? Initially I thought it was human nature - our evolved tendencies toward competition, hierarchy and selfishness. But that's not it either - human beings are an obstinate mix of devil and angel, just as likely to behave selflessly as selfishly.

Now I'm exploring a different root, and what I'm finding is making me even more uncomfortable than my discovery of ocean acidification and melting ice caps.

The issue is indeed overconsumption, but it's not confined to oil (or even energy in general) and it's not confined to the USA. The problem is the overconsumption of everything - whether it's matter or energy, animal, vegetable or mineral, social, cultural or spiritual. We are literally consuming the entire planet. However, even overconsumption is not "the problem" - consumption is not a cause, it's a symptom of the absolute necessity for growth in human activity. In order to support this endless growth and enable the omnivorous consumption that drives it we have commoditized and monetized the entire planet, including ourselves.

The problem is that this cancerous growth appears to be mandated by the very structure of the economic system we've decided to use as the organizing principle of all human affairs,. The reason we have growth as humanity's primary imperative is, as far as I can tell, the charging of interest on loans. The charging of interest is the mutation that has caused human activity to metastasize out of control, and has enabled its relentless growth until the situation has become inoperable.

The need to pay interest annually on every borrowed dollar makes growth inevitable. Unless we could completely restructure the global economic system, there is simply no way to stop its growth short of the collapse of the system that requires it - in the cancer analogy, until the disease kills its host.

We are structurally locked into our current course of action because nobody, whether 1% or 99%, will be willing to stop using interest as the engine of our global civilization. The disruption would be too complete - in a macabre Faustian twist we now depend on our cancer for survival. As a result we are facing an outcome that has been inevitable for the last few thousand years. All the good-hearted, high-minded "solutions" in the world will simply alter the slope of the rising curve. They can not affect its eventual destination in the slightest. The growth will simply continue until it can't. The best we can do is slow down the rate of growth, and even that may only guarantee that we digest the planet more thoroughly.

I'm pretty much convinced that the whole predicament - the destruction of the air, land and water, the global warming, Peak Oil, chemical pollution, nuclear accidents, wars, overpopulation, the whole shebang - is the inevitable end result of charging interest on loans. If this take is anywhere near correct, any possible solution appears to be utterly beyond our technical capability, cultural desire or political will. I invite you to think about it for a moment. Would you be prepared to give up everything that the loaning of money for interest makes possible? I wouldn't. If that means our species will inevitably self-destruct, taking much of the life on the planet with us, the karmic burden looks pretty heavy.

We of course need to keep working on alternative living arrangements. We need to figure out ways to lessen our impact on the planet and each other, and especially how to bring back interest-free economic arrangements wherever we can. We may not have a lot of time left to discover ways to adapt to the inevitable and perhaps protect limited bits of the planet at the same time. But the fact is, we are a lot more screwed as a species than I thought in my darkest doomer days five years ago. And since then I've actually turned into an optimist...