(Photo: BlackRockSolar / Flickr)Recently Karen Rybold-Chin interviewed Nate Hagens, former editor of The Oil Drum and former Lehman Brothers vice president, questioning him about a future economy without growth and an environment suffering climate change. Nate Hagens asks whether ultimately – contrary to our animal nature – we are willing and able to plan for future generations by reducing our own energy consumption and economic growth.
Dr. Hagens’ full lecture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison synthesizes concepts from economics, finance, energy, the environment and human behavior into some first-order principles that apply to our current world situation.
His basic message is that the primary drivers of historical economic growth – the inexpensive substitution of human labor by fossil labor, and recently, the explosion of available monetary credit – are no longer available, and this will spell the end of global growth.
Hagens explains that energy – specifically the cheap energy from the already found and burned fossil fuels – accounts for the majority of our past productivity gains and economic riches. It is thus not our lack of hydrocarbon resources that is the problem, but rising extraction costs – for example, 17 percent higher annually for oil since 2002 – that are making continued global growth from these levels unattainable.
Hagens suggests that a renewables-based economy, as promoted by many in environmental circles, is possible and even desirable, but will require far lower living standards. Ergo, wind and solar are part of the answer, but not to the question of “how can we continue growth.”
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We’ve borne witness to a chaotic first few months in Trump’s presidency.
Over the last months, each executive order has delivered shock and bewilderment — a core part of a strategy to make the right-wing turn feel inevitable and overwhelming. But, as organizer Sandra Avalos implored us to remember in Truthout last November, “Together, we are more powerful than Trump.”
Indeed, the Trump administration is pushing through executive orders, but — as we’ve reported at Truthout — many are in legal limbo and face court challenges from unions and civil rights groups. Efforts to quash anti-racist teaching and DEI programs are stalled by education faculty, staff, and students refusing to comply. And communities across the country are coming together to raise the alarm on ICE raids, inform neighbors of their civil rights, and protect each other in moving shows of solidarity.
It will be a long fight ahead. And as nonprofit movement media, Truthout plans to be there documenting and uplifting resistance.
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