Hi all,
Today, in a response within a blog debate about energy, I suddenly
discovered that I had just crystallized into one page, the case for
using a final 'Green Bubble' via capitalism to leverage a clean energy
and sustainable future for the planet. (It forms an interesting, and
even harmonizing, counterpoint to the socialism vs libertarianism
debates that we have recently had on the Active list.)
Here it is (also attached). Please spread it around if it resonates.
Hopefully it will catch fire so that people start grasping this concept.
The Green Bubble Manifesto
While it would fundamentally solve a lot of problems to phase out
capitalism (a task we should have begun at least a couple of decades
ago), at this particular point in history, we have little choice but to
use the deeply flawed mechanisms of capitalism to get a new green
economy off the ground, because it will be the only way to do so quickly
enough to deal with the looming climate crisis.
At this stage, capitalism is hopelessly stuck in having to generate a
series of larger and larger economic debt bubbles just to keep itself
from collapsing. Because such bubbles have to be paid back with
interest, this cycle will never stop and will never cease dangerously
escalating in size (and impact on the physical world).
However, because we have to completely revolutionize our entire energy
and transportation infrastructure in the next two decades on this planet
in order to come even close to keeping the atmosphere from spiraling
into an utterly disastrous series of climate warming tipping points that
will destroy our civilization, it is pretty obvious that we should use
another, even larger capitalist bubble expansion, to leverage that badly
needed rapid retooling of our energy economy into being.
This is the obvious solution in the short term. We need national, state,
and local governments to together pump an infusion of trillions of
dollars into a global WW2 scale Green New Deal, which will rebuild our
entire civil infrastructure to run on renewable energy and mass transit
by somewhere between 2030 and 2040.
This will create another, even larger, interest driven capitalist
bubble. However it will be far more benign than our previous bubbles,
and will actually be relatively stable, because after that renewable
infrastructure is built (and its installation costs are paid off) it
will flood our economy with essentially free energy from the sun and
wind for upwards of a century; the selling of which energy can be used
to pay off the interest payments on the funding of the bubble. (The
savings from much more efficient, lower cost transportation and shipping
will also help pay off that interest debt.)
And once that universal, nearly free energy is flowing, its economically
decentralizing influence will indeed help us phase out capitalism, a
task that we absolutely must begin as soon as we can before capitalism
destroys literally everything.
Because capitalism depends on endless growth to fund endless ever
expanding finance interest bubbles (as referred to above) it is
literally eating this planet alive at an extremely rapid and
exponentially expanding pace.
If we don't immediately shift to a clean decentralized energy economy
and then immediately gear down capitalism itself such that we quickly
transition to a sustainable, rather than 'growth' economy within the
next few decades, we and the planet are doomed. And I would think that
the most educated capitalists are beginning to figure that out now.
The first step toward this transition to sustainability would be phasing
in what I would describe as 'nonprofit capitalism' in which income and
property ownership are gradually lowered until no person can make more
than a couple hundred thousand dollars a year, and each is also limited
to a sane amount of personal physical ownership of cubic feet of living
space and 'stuff'; with any excesses from sales and service prices going
to either R&D or to national, state and local governments to further
retool the economy into becoming one which will not destroy the Earth.
This is our 21st Century manifesto, if we have the courage to take it up.
Eric Brooks
San Francisco, CA
6, September, 2011
