Thanks for this - I'm going to send this diary to some of my energy nerd friends.

It's not exactly a "Peak Silicon" yet, but it's definitely a problem for the development of alternative energy/solar energy.

It would seem that the simple and logical solution to the energy crisis would not to fall into the same trap as with oil-by that I mean relying solely on one solution for the whole problem.  Seems only reasonable that a diversified approach involving various industries would be the way to go.  That to me would also mean that no one industry would have a monopoly nor the public over a barrel(no pun intended) with having to rely on one industry for all it's needs.

Here's a great Native American saying:  "We do not inherit the earth from our ancestors, we borrow it from our children."

"People never do evil so throughly and happily as when they do it from moral conviction."-Blaise Pascal

I hadn't read this article at the time when I wrote this op/ed on "why feminists need to read economics".  I tentatively attribute the "economic hero" quote to Paul Hawken, but Hawken may possibly have been quoting Cobb et al, above.  Here is a "New Economics Manifesto" and here is a cluster of info on a small rebellion in the academy:  the Truecost Manifesto.

This gets us back to the fundamental question of "what is an economy," or what is the purpose of having a polity and a semi-managed or directed economy -- and please let us not indulge in the fantasy that "capitalist" economies are not managed and directed.  There's a man called Greenspan who can tell us all about that, and a 400-year-plus history of government subsidy, monopoly, regulation and all the rest which shapes the face of commerce in every "advanced" (i.e. high-consumption) nation.  Modern economies are engineered, whether the ideology of the governing elite permits us to admit this or not.  They have purpose, they are directed.

But directed to what end?  Growth for its own sake, said Abbey, is the ideology of the cancer cell.

If "growth" is not just for its own sake -- the mindless behaviour of yeast in a petri dish, doomed to choke on its own wastes or exhaust its nutrients, whichever happens first -- then what is it for?  Well, obviously "growth" produces "profit".  If I make a profit of $10 per widget that I make and sell, and I can sell 50 widgets rather than 25, then I make more money.  Hooray for me, especially if all related costs -- opportunity costs and damages -- are "externalised" and conveniently not accounted for.  Growth expands opportunities:  if I sell hot chestnuts at a street stand and the population in my village increases, the number of potential customers increases.  Hooray!  Growth looks good.

"Growth" also offers the illusion of, if not egalitarianism, at least abundance.  That is, if some people are very poor and suffer, and others are very rich and wallow in excess and luxury, one obvious solution is to redistribute wealth.  But equally obviously the rich people will not like this idea -- sometimes the more toys a child has, the less willing he is to share any of them.  So a convenient moral and ideological escape from the necessity of sharing (lifeboat ethics) is to pretend that infinite growth is possible and therefore new resources will magically appear and relieve the poverty of those who suffer, while those who already have can hang on to everything they've got -- without guilt.  This is known as "Reaganomics" or "trickle-down economics" or "a rising tide floats all boats" or (by me) as an insane Cornucopian cargo cult.  

It's a finite planet -- big, I grant you, but functionally no different from a lifeboat or a sailing ship.  There is only so much potable water, arable land, surface area for living on.  If some people hog 30 or 50 or 100 times their share then other people will have to go without.  Pretending that infinite growth is possible merely offers us an excuse for not confronting the fundamental problems of inequity, poverty, and misuse of resources;  it offers us an escape from the conflict between profit and fundamental moral values like community, charity, democracy.  In this sense I think it is very hard to challenge the Growth Cult, because not only does it always look good from the viewpoint of the individual merchant or artisan, it is also such an emotionally comforting belief, a shelter from our consciences.  Opportunity will go on expanding and everyone will get their slice of the infinitely-growing pie.  Even a tiny crumb will look good after it expands by a factor of 3 or 4.

[A Digression:  I seem to recall in a recent article I cited on climate change, that the author noted Africa as a continent where "most people depend on agriculture."  I have to laugh -- or cry -- when I read statements like this.  Hello?  Every single human being on earth depends on agriculture.  If agriculture stops, or productivity declines sharply, the result is hunger.  It may not be hunger immediately for the wealthy, who can go on stealing food from the poor as long as armed force or superior wealth allows;  but there is not one of us who does not depend every day on dirt, sunlight, pollinators and photosynthesis for our very breath and life.  The idea that only "backwards" continents are "dependent" on something as old-fashioned as agriculture is a very dangerous idea, part of the pernicious illusion that we in the "advanced" nations are somehow divorced entirely from earthly reality.  We live only thanks to plants, fungi, soil bacteria, invertebrates and bugs.  Any other notion is mere hubristic fantasy.  Moreover, plants, soil bacteria, bugs and all the rest would be quite happy without humans.  We need the lower orders -- they do not need us.]

The next question is whether "growth" (the accelerating conversion from low-entropy to high-entropy state of our energy resources, consumption of raw materials for fabrication, generation of waste) actually produces anything recognisable as happiness.  We might logically assume that the object of our human endeavour is happiness, and if we are democratically minded then we would like to achieve "the greatest happiness for the greatest number."  But our attempts at "growth" in the last 30 or 40 years are producing increased poverty for billions, and bloated wealth for a tiny few -- not what any good Utilitarian would approve of.  We might also wonder why even the privileged -- say those who live at the heart of the American Empire and are still prosperous, not yet immiserated by its internal policies -- are the world's largest consumers of antidepressant drugs.  If a glut of material goods makes us so happy, why are so many of us dependent on SSRIs?  Aren't we happy yet?  And if McMansions and SUVs and a TV in every room are not enough to make us happy, then what the hell will be?  Is there really any connection between material glut and happiness, or is this a classic diminishing returns problem?  The Paradox of Choice suggests that in fact, a bewildering array of consumer choice makes us less happy, not more so.  In this context, is growth really good?  Or is our object not to make people happy?

If the goal of our economy is not to make people happy, then what is it?  It's hard for me to avoid the conclusion that the present goal, as usual when resources get tight, is the replication of feudalism.  In Finley's Ancient Slavery and Modern Ideology the author notes that as the rate of conquest and annexation of new territories slowed down, the Roman aristocracy increasingly concentrated its efforts on consolidating land ownership within the core, dispossessing yeoman farmers, merging smaller estates into larger ones, etc.  When the greedy appetite for More was no longer easily sated by fresh wealth from the periphery (i.e. Growth), the predators began to pick off the smaller and weaker amongst themselves.  I think that this is what we see in our contemporary economies as resource shortages either make themselves directly felt or loom on the horizon:  the wealthy are starting to strip the core of its assets, as the peripheries no longer return enough "growth" to sate their material demands.

If our ideas about democracy and open societies are based -- as many of them are -- on the myth of perpetual growth and ever-increasing prosperity, i.e. if our ideas of social justice are based on "opportunities opening up in expanding markets" rather than on correcting maldistributions of resources (whether by taxation or Jubilee years or nationalisation or other strategies) then I believe we are in for a collision between democratic ideals founded on a bogus "frontier mythology" of growth, and the reality of a resource-limited planet.  The best possible outcome would be universal demand limitation, wealth redistribution, land reform, carbon taxes and other 'safe and sane' methods of adjusting to a sustainable economic model.  The more likely outcome is a revival of feudalism or banana republic lifestyle, where the elite defend their luxuries by armed force, dominating and exploiting (or exterminating) an immiserated mass of plebes.

One way or another, we are going to have to come to terms with the notion of limits.  The discomfort that this dawning reality causes seems to be manifesting in several ways.  The crackpot Cornucopianism of Lomborg, Simon, et al (a quick rebuttal here at the controversial dieoff.org site) is one response:  simply deny that limits exist and maintain staunchly that infinite growth is not only possible but desirable.  Another response is increasing belligerence, tribalism, and nationalism:  resources are limited, so let's kill all the Other People and have enough for Us.  Another is the lunatic millenarism of the wingnut Christian community in the US:  resources are limited, but it doesn't matter because the world is ending anyway and the Saved are going to Heaven where material resources are not an issue (milk and honey for all).  I see all these -- and the smash-and-grab capitalism of recent years -- as responses to the creeping consciousness of resource limits: the flailings of a culture in crisis because one of its fundamental beliefs is in danger.  Any takers?

The difference between theory and practise in practise ...