Green values now in prime time
Published Wednesday June 10th, 2009
The Green Party of Canada's comprehensive policy document is called Vision Green. Of it, Globe and Mail columnist Jeffrey Simpson had not much good to say. He likes the climate change policy which puts $50 price tag on a tonne of carbon. The rest he thinks is idealistic and out of touch with the global economy, on which we are entirely dependent.
If the 'vision' were to come from another source, perhaps Simpson would give it more considered attention. What the Greens have been advocating since the 1980s will be our reality in a couple of decades. So says former CIBC chief economist Jeff Rubin in his new book, Why Your World is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller: Oil and the End of Globalization.
The transformation from global to local economies will not come about by electing Green governments.
Too many people are still stubbornly attached to the old politics defined by an economics of perpetual growth, corporatism, and security defined by militarism. Instead, it will come by necessity as the era of cheap oil comes to an end.
The unprecedented economic growth of the past century was driven by the availability of easily tapped and therefore cheap oil.
This, along with complicit governments, is what transformed human settlements to be entirely car dependent, a reality reflected in transportation systems and the mind-boggling political power of the auto industry.
It created monocultural factory farming, which depends on petrochemicals to fertilize crops and keep pests and diseases under control and delivers cheap food to supermarkets from all around the world.
It has driven the manufacture of consumer products offshore to cheap labour and pollution havens.
The pollution, ecosystem destruction and species loss, the unravelling of local economies, and more, that all this represents was foreseen by the Greens in their earliest manifestations (Britain and New Zealand in 1973; Germany in 1980; Canada in 1983).
Green platforms have consistently called for what is now being termed re-localization of production, including food production and politics. Central to this is the need to transform energy systems away from non-renewable, wasteful, polluting sources to efficient, renewable, and appropriately-scaled energy services - the only way to prevent what is now unpreventable - climate change due to global warming.
Given the political power of vested interests who benefit mightily from the current system, the chance that such a social and economic transformation would happen by sheer will of the people is pretty slim.
Yet we are going there anyway, not by dint of careful foresight and with a just transition to prevent the most vulnerable from suffering unduly, but by brute economic force, which will be indiscriminate in its impact.
Rubin predicts that as the world pulls out of the current economic recession, the price of a barrel of oil will quickly return to three-digit numbers, and within a few years after that, into the $200-plus range. As supplies of accessible oil shrink, what remains will cost so much that it will be reserved for the most strategic of purposes.
A U.S. energy analyst suggests these should be food production (assuming this isn't re-localized) and the military. The latter will be necessary, he says, because of the massive social upheaval that will result from high oil prices.
The military, he says, will become more important than ever, not just for overseas conflict but to hold the line against the swelling ranks of the dispossessed and environmental refugees (the subject of Gwyn Dyer's book, Climate Wars).
Eventually and after much hardship, a new equilibrium will be reached and, as Rubin suggests, a new economy based on local production and only a few exotic imports (coffee, for instance) will emerge. Long distance travel will be a luxury and roads will see many fewer cars.
Trade will be regional, consumer products more expensive. Goods will become more durable; waste will decrease. Our ecological footprint will shrink.
No longer the sole purview of a so-called fringe element, Jeff Rubin, a mainstream, high profile bank economist, has moved this vision into prime time. Combined with climate change, the advent of peak oil will deliver a one-two punch to our complacency and force a structural adjustment the likes of which we have not seen post-war.
That governments are blind to this pending reckoning only means that the adjustment will be harsher than necessary. As Rubin says, "Instead of investing billions... in an auto industry that's doomed to obsolescence by triple digit oil prices, we should be investing in our future, which is public transit."
One could say the same of investments in oil refineries, export-based power plants and transmission lines, and big box stores.
Janice Harvey is a freelance columnist and president of the New Brunswick Green Party. She can be reached by e-mail at waweig@nbnet.nb.ca.
Disabled
Search Articles
More CE Network Sites & Partners:
