Social Transformation in the Post-Carbon Age

What will society look like in the Post-Carbon Age?

If we continue down the current path, the World will become a consumer capatisist dystopia.

Dale Allen Pfeiffer expresses our options like this:

"If the US continues to pursue its current strategy, then this country will become even more of a police state in every sense of the word. The privileged classes will complete their flight to guarded and gated communities, while the rest of the population will be left to contend with a collapsed economy, energy impoverishment and starvation. Civil liberties will be dismissed and the constitution retired. Anger and dissent will be met with overwhelming repression. A massive military organization will take command of the world's resources while forcing the world population to accept a harsh military justice.

As burgeoning personal debt comes crashing down on the citizens of the US, it is likely that new laws will force them into debt servitude. Indeed, as energy production diminishes some form of slavery will have to be instituted in order for the elite to retain their accustomed lifestyles. As rates of imprisonment skyrocket, prisons will be transformed to work camps where the remaining industries will have access to abundant free labor. As for the masses, both within the US and throughout the world, they will be faced with unparalleled levels of starvation and suffering."

He continues:

"It doesn't have to be this way. We still have the time and resources to build a better world for all of us. Compromise is not the answer, nor is a cosmetic change in the prevailing economic system. It is doubtful that regulation of market-based capitalism is viable over the long-term. Experience has shown that eventually capitalism will find some way of nullifying any imposed restrictions, and then the maximization of profit will regain preeminence over environmental and social considerations.

A sustainable society must be focused on the small scale, based on strong local communities, most likely functioning on principles of direct democracy. Local communities require localized and self-contained economies. Such economies would not be measured by growth and profit, but by sustainability and quality of life. Local transportation would return to the basics: foot, bicycles and horses. Intercommunity transport would likely consist of high-speed monorails. Intercontinental transportation would return to the high seas. Housing would be restructured for energy efficiency, possibly in conjunction with the recycling of industrial waste heat. Communities would be supported by a local agricultural base, utilizing organic and permaculture techniques. There are already working models for sustainable communities, and the movement toward sustainability is growing." - Imminent Peril (Part 2)

It is clear that whatever the future holds, our society must be based on a economic plan that reduces resource extraction, shrinks industrial production, limits consumption and population, and curtails pollution. In short, we will be moved away from the excesses of consumer capitalism toward what some have characterized as a steady-state economy. Perhaps the world's leading authority on this topic is economist Herman Daly.

"Why do people produce junk and cajole other people into buying it? Not out of any innate
love for junk or hatred of the environment, but simply in order to earn an income.
If, with the prevailing distribution of wealth, income, and power, production governed
by the profit motive results in the output of great amounts of noxious junk, then something
is wrong with the distribution of wealth and power, the profit motive, or both.

We need some principle of income distribution independent of and supplementary
to the income-through-jobs link. Perhaps a start in this direction was made by Oskar Lange
in his On the Economic Theory' of Socialism, in which he attempted to combine
some socialist principles of distribution with the allocative efficiency advantages
of the market system. However, at least as much remains to be done here as remains
to he done in designing institutions for stabilizing population. But before much
progress can be made on these issues, we must recognize their necessity
and blow the whistle on growthmania."