Taking an "interest" in energy and the environment

[GliderGuider]

It's no secret to anyone who looks that we are digesting the planet right out from under our multiplying feet.

I first noticed the symptoms of Peak Oil and climate change, and spent quite a while investigating the minutia of those issues. The questions that raised prompted me to go deeper in search of root causes. Initially I thought that overpopulation was "the problem", but it didn't take long to realize that the growth in consumption was damaging the planet far more than just our growth in numbers. Our population growth rate is slowing, but our consumption of planetary resources appears to be growing unabated.

However, this simply shifts the question - what is driving our rising consumption rates? What's causing us - as a species - to use ever more oil, metal, wood, water, land, chemicals - you name it? Is there a deeper cause that underlies both population growth and consumption growth? Initially I thought it was human nature - our evolved tendencies toward competition, hierarchy and selfishness. But that's not it either - human beings are an obstinate mix of devil and angel, just as likely to behave selflessly as selfishly.

Now I'm exploring a different root, and what I'm finding is making me even more uncomfortable than my discovery of ocean acidification and melting ice caps.

The issue is indeed overconsumption, but it's not confined to oil (or even energy in general) and it's not confined to the USA. The problem is the overconsumption of everything - whether it's matter or energy, animal, vegetable or mineral, social, cultural or spiritual. We are literally consuming the entire planet. However, even overconsumption is not "the problem" - consumption is not a cause, it's a symptom of the absolute necessity for growth in human activity. In order to support this endless growth and enable the omnivorous consumption that drives it we have commoditized and monetized the entire planet, including ourselves.

The problem is that this cancerous growth appears to be mandated by the very structure of the economic system we've decided to use as the organizing principle of all human affairs,. The reason we have growth as humanity's primary imperative is, as far as I can tell, the charging of interest on loans. The charging of interest is the mutation that has caused human activity to metastasize out of control, and has enabled its relentless growth until the situation has become inoperable.

The need to pay interest annually on every borrowed dollar makes growth inevitable. Unless we could completely restructure the global economic system, there is simply no way to stop its growth short of the collapse of the system that requires it - in the cancer analogy, until the disease kills its host.

We are structurally locked into our current course of action because nobody, whether 1% or 99%, will be willing to stop using interest as the engine of our global civilization. The disruption would be too complete - in a macabre Faustian twist we now depend on our cancer for survival. As a result we are facing an outcome that has been inevitable for the last few thousand years. All the good-hearted, high-minded "solutions" in the world will simply alter the slope of the rising curve. They can not affect its eventual destination in the slightest. The growth will simply continue until it can't. The best we can do is slow down the rate of growth, and even that may only guarantee that we digest the planet more thoroughly.

I'm pretty much convinced that the whole predicament - the destruction of the air, land and water, the global warming, Peak Oil, chemical pollution, nuclear accidents, wars, overpopulation, the whole shebang - is the inevitable end result of charging interest on loans. If this take is anywhere near correct, any possible solution appears to be utterly beyond our technical capability, cultural desire or political will. I invite you to think about it for a moment. Would you be prepared to give up everything that the loaning of money for interest makes possible? I wouldn't. If that means our species will inevitably self-destruct, taking much of the life on the planet with us, the karmic burden looks pretty heavy.

We of course need to keep working on alternative living arrangements. We need to figure out ways to lessen our impact on the planet and each other, and especially how to bring back interest-free economic arrangements wherever we can. We may not have a lot of time left to discover ways to adapt to the inevitable and perhaps protect limited bits of the planet at the same time. But the fact is, we are a lot more screwed as a species than I thought in my darkest doomer days five years ago. And since then I've actually turned into an optimist...

[GliderGuider]

1. Can't we defer dealing with the long term problem of interest-fueled growth?

After all, we face a large number of extremely pressing short term problems - from Peak Oil, climate change and overpopulation to the death of the oceans and "the diminishing marginal return on social complexity". Won't it be easier to deal with the Big Kahuna once we have addressed some of the little guys?

Here's the question this approach raises for me. Is the "problem" posed by the 5,000 year history of interest really a long term problem any more? It looks to me like it's on our doorstep. The digestion of our planetary meal is almost complete, and it feels like the postprandial burp is on its way.

The difficulty I see in attacking even short term problems is that the reason all of them exist is because of the underlying issue of interest-driven growth. As a result, addressing them requires us to somehow short-circuit our entire cultural narrative around money, interest and growth. It goes without saying that a vast majority of people see no problem at all with money, interest and growth. They see no way of existing without them, and will feel deeply, fundamentally threatened by suggestions that they have been species-scale mistakes that need to be rectified. It seems more and more obvious to me that the issue of interest, even more than our evolved neuro-psychology or our sense of separation from nature, is close to the root of our predicament.

Whenever we try to address the short-term problems, we run smack into a wall of unreasoning resistance founded on our attachment to interest-driven growth. Environmental remediation costs jobs. Aging and shrinking populations threaten national economic growth. Responsible agricultural practices are too expensive. Even the lifespan of consumer goods has been reduced though the policy of planned obsolescence in order to maximize economic opportunity. Stopping mountain-top removal, the burning of fossil fuels, overfishing, or the dumping of toxic waste all run into the barrier of having to meet next month's interest payment. The reason I'm suddenly so utterly pessimistic again after four years of diligent work repairing my psyche is that this truly does look like it makes the problem insoluble.

We must work urgently on short-term, regional, local and personal solutions. Different people choose different problems to champion depending on which ones resonate with their experience and values. With that work there is always room for a miracle, and without it there is none. But I'm a firm believer in understanding the real problem. Unless we have that understanding we will not be able to come up with solutions that don't simply make the problem bigger.

Sorry to reply to my own OP. I know it's bad manners, but I'm thinking out loud here and this seemed better than editing the OP.