Back in the day, the World’s Fair was a global showcase of innovation and a peerless cultural event where visitors envisioned a neon future filled with technological wonders. These international expos featured miracle inventions and opportunities to explore new ideas, but also on display were useless gizmos, silly stunts (who’s ready for a game of topless donkey ping pong?), and some of the most unattractive towers people have ever built. Worse yet, a dismal thread of racism runs through the history of fairs, and in recent times, faux sustainability has become a recurring theme. Explore the diminishing marginal returns of both World’s Fairs and technology in general, and consider what’s next as dreams of a high-tech utopia go the way of the animatronic dinosaurs. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website.
Transcript
Jason Bradford
I’m Jason Bradford.
Asher Miller
I’m Asher Miller.
Rob Dietz
And I’m Rob Dietz. Welcome to Crazy Town where your favorite ride at the amusement park is the self-driving bumper cars.
Melody Travers
This is producer Melody Travers. In this season of Crazy Town, Rob, Jason, and Asher are exploring the watershed moments in history that have led humanity into the cascading crises we face in the 21st century. Today’s episode is about World’s Fairs, the diminishing returns of technology, and bizarre notions of progress. The watershed moment took place in 1851. At the time, the estimated carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere was 285 parts per million, and the global human population was 1.24 billion.
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All of humanity’s feats, whether a record-setting deadlift by the world’s strongest man or the construction of a gleaming city by a technologically advanced economy, originate from a single hidden source: positive net energy. Having surplus energy in the form of thirteen pounds of food per day enables a very big man, Hafthor Bjornsson, to lift very big objects. Similarly, having surplus energy in the form of fossil fuel enables very big societies to build and trade very big piles of stuff. Maybe Hafthor has a rock-solid plan for keeping his dinner plate well stocked, but no society seems ready to have a mature conversation about how our sprawling cities and nations will manage as net energy declines. Calling our conversation “mature” might be a stretch, but at least we’re willing to address climate change, sustainability, and the rest of the net energy conundrum head on. Alice Friedemann, author of Life after Fossil Fuels, joins the conversation. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website.
Transcript
Jason Bradford
Hi, I’m Jason Bradford.
Rob Dietz
I’m Rob Dietz,
Asher Miller
and I’m Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town, where residents are feeling nostalgic about 1950s era fallout shelters.
Rob Dietz
The topic of today’s episode is net energy. And please stay tuned for an insightful interview with Alice Friedemann.
Rob Dietz
Hey, Asher, Jason, welcome to another fine episode of Crazy Town. I would like one of you to volunteer to answer a question. Who’s it going to be?
Jason Bradford
Wanna roshambo for that?
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Way back when money consisted of iron pieces, if you wanted to buy a horse or some spices to season your horse meat, you practically had to carry an olympic weightlifting set with you. Early bankers figured out how to clear that obstacle (and prevent a lot of hernias and back injuries) when they invented paper money. Over time all-too-clever financiers cleared more and more obstacles that kept people from accessing and spending money. Today’s world of online purchases, easy credit, and cryptocurrency represents a huge ramp-up in the speed and ease of economic transactions. Yes, some of the inconveniences of yesteryear are gone, but this ramp-up is partly to blame for our problems with overconsumption, climate change, and habitat loss. Join the Crazy Townies as they swap stories around the virtual fire about spending virtual money in the virtual world. And get advice on how to do the opposite from Nate Hagens, expert on energy, ecological economics, and finance. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website.
Transcript
Jason Bradford
Hi, I’m Jason Bradford.
Rob Dietz
I’m Rob Dietz
Asher Miller
and I’m Asher Miller. Welcome to Crazy Town, where the sanist guy around is protesting the local gas station in a Santa suit.
Rob Dietz
The topic of today’s episode is runaway money. And please stay tuned for an interview with Nate Hagens.
Asher Miller
Did I ever tell you about the time where I had to spend five nights sharing a bed with a 6’9” guy?
Rob Dietz
No, I thought that was Jason’s story.
Asher Miller
No, Jason’s story if I recall correctly is he was up on top of a mountain and he was spooning with two guys.
Jason Bradford
Yeah.
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The mainstream economics notion that unfettered growth accompanied by greater consumption and productivity benefits society is false, argues Rob Dietz, Program Director at the Post Carbon Institute. In an interview with getAbstract, he shares his vision of a new economic way forward.
getAbstract:In a nutshell, could you give us a short definition of “steady-state economics”?
Rob Dietz: You can think of steady-state economics as a sustainable alternative to mainstream or neoclassical economics, which assumes perpetual growth of production and consumption. So steady-state economics is the study and practice of how to maintain an economy with a stable level of resource consumption and a stable population. Such an economy keeps material and energy use within ecological limits, and the unsustainable (and unrealistic) goal of continuously increasing income and consumption is replaced by the goal of improving quality of life for all. In short, the focus is enough rather than more.
Why do you think adopting a steady-state economic model is the only way to promote widespread prosperity and resource sustainability for future generations?
I’m not sure it’s the “only” way, but it’s our best bet at this pivotal point in history. Let’s start by establishing working definitions of the terms “widespread prosperity” and “resource sustainability.” Widespread prosperity means that everyone is able to meet his or her basic needs for physical health and sustenance, plus some standard of comfort. No one lives in poverty, and daily life offers opportunities for fulfillment and enjoyment beyond toil just to stay alive.
We live in the age of trade. Trade, supported by an infrastructure of criss-crossing cargo ships, mega-ports, and an endless armada of trains and trucks plying the railways and highways, has become the foundation of the modern global economy. (And let’s not even talk about the virtual infrastructure of banking and finance that undergirds all this real-world activity.) In fact, we’ve taken trade so far that the actual transactions are routinely irrational from an ecological or an energetic perspective, let alone a common-sense perspective. For example, consider the 10,000-mile cod. Scottish fishermen catch cod in the North Atlantic. Now, the fish could be consumed fresh in Scotland, but no… First, the poor piscine provisions are deep-frozen into codsicles, which are then shipped to China, thawed, filleted, packaged, re-frozen, and shipped back to Scotland for eventual consumption. The energy balance for codsicle processing is indefensible, as the calories spent to run the fish through this globalized Rube Goldberg machine immeasurably outstrip the calories gained from eating them.
OK, let’s pull back from the criticism for a moment. Trade isn’t all bad. Any college economics student can regurgitate a neoliberal rehashing of David Ricardo’s early-19th-century treatise of comparative advantage—trade can create benefits for a person or nation willing to engage in it. Researchers even hypothesize that trade was an advancement unique to Homo sapiens that allowed us to outcompete the Neanderthals. The thinking is that, through trade, we developed both specialization of labor and new technologies, while Neanderthals (who apparently were reluctant to trade) failed to develop either. But something’s gone awry with the idea of exchanging goods and services.
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Paying attention to the buzz around Planet of the Humans, the new film by Michael Moore, is like standing in the middle of a three-ring circus. In ring #1 are the filmmakers, who raise critical questions about how renewable sources can power industrial society, but do so with questionable facts and mean-spirited attacks. In ring #2 are the left-wing enviros, who are barfing out lazy accusations of ecofascism and doing all they can to avoid addressing the film’s legitimate questions about population and consumption. In ring #3 are the oil-soaked, right-wing libertarians who think this film will help them keep earning and burning their way to the bank at the end of Armageddon Road. Asher, Rob, and Jason grapple with the cacophony, hash out the good and bad of the film and the response to it, and argue for an honest, messy-middle approach to the transition away from fossil fuels. For episode notes and more information, please visit our website and sign up for our newsletter.
I want to believe in eternal economic growth. Given what humanity is facing with climate change and other consequences of our collective consumption, it must be awfully comforting to have faith in a cornucopian future where no one ever goes wanting. Especially if all we have to do is more of the same, sticking to capitalism’s exploitative playbook. I used to have that faith. I was a worshipper of technological progress and its potential to overcome all the social and environmental problems that accompany exponentially increasing population and consumption. I also used to believe in the Easter Bunny. Unlike Michael Liebreich (author of “The Secret of Eternal Growth,” the article I’m rebutting), however, I paid enough attention to the evidence to put aside such fantasies.
I intend to provide a blow-by-blow analysis of Liebreich’s contentions, but I feel compelled to start with a gem near the end of his article. In a one-sentence paragraph that summarizes his thesis, he writes, “The bottom line here is that the world’s most feted scientists and economists have shown that economic growth is consistent with environmental protection and the mitigation of climate change.” Here’s a small point: his use of a financial metaphor (“bottom line”) may reveal something about how much the culture of money influences his thinking. But here’s the bigger point. Really?!? What the hell is he talking about?
Let’s start with his claim about scientists. It’s a safe bet he hasn’t read the World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity. This article appeared in the peer-reviewed journal BioScience in December 2017. In the article, which was endorsed by more than 15,000 scientists at the time it was published, the authors write, “We are jeopardizing our future by not reining in our intense but geographically and demographically uneven material consumption and by not perceiving continued rapid population growth as a primary driver behind many ecological and even societal threats.”
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Olduvai IV: Courage
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