Commoner - The poverty of power: energy and the economic crisis

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK

PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF, INC.

Copyright 1976 by Barry Commoner

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Distributed by Random House, Inc., New York.

A substantial portion of the material in this book appeared in The New Yorker.

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Commoner, Barry [Date]
The poverty of power.
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Power resources. 2. Power (Mechanics) 3. Energy policyUnited States. 4. United StatesEconomic policy19715. Economic history.
I. Title.
HD9502.A2C643 1976 333.7 7536798
ISBN 0-394-40371-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-101-87593-3

v3.1

I N THE LAST TEN YEARS , the United Statesthe most powerful and technically advanced society in human historyhas been confronted by a series of ominous, seemingly intractable crises. First there was the threat to environmental survival; then there was the apparent shortage of energy; and now there is the unexpected decline of the economy. These are usually regarded as separate afflictions, each to be solved in its own terms: environmental degradation by pollution controls; the energy crisis by finding new sources of energy and new ways of conserving it; the economic crisis by manipulating prices, taxes, and interest rates.

But each effort to solve one crisis seems to clash with the solution of the otherspollution control reduces energy supplies; energy conservation costs jobs. Inevitably, proponents of one solution become opponents of the others. Policy stagnates and remedial action is paralyzed, adding to the confusion and gloom that beset the country.

The uncertainty and inaction are not surprising, for this tangled knot of problems is poorly understood, not only by citizens generally, but also by legislators, administrators, and even by the separate specialists. It involves complex interactions among the three basic systemsthe ecosystem, the production system, and the economic systemthat, together with the social or political order, govern all human activity.

The ecosystemthe great natural, interwoven, ecological cycles that comprise the planets skin, and the minerals that lie beneath itprovides all the resources that support human life and activity.

The production systemthe man-made network of agricultural and industrial processesconverts these resources into goods and services, the real wealth that sustains society: food, manufactured goods, transportation, and communication.

The economic systemthe recipient of the real wealth created by the production systemtransforms that wealth into earnings, profit, credit, savings, investment, taxes; and governs how that wealth is distributed, and what is done with it.

Given these dependenciesthe economic system on the wealth yielded by the production system and the production system on the resources provided by the ecosystemlogically the economic system ought to conform to the requirements of the production system, and the production system to the requirements of the ecosystem. The governing influence should flow from the ecosystem through the production system to the economic system.

This is the rational ideal. In actual fact the relations among the three systems are the other way around. The environmental crisis tells us that the ecosystem has been disastrously affected by the design of the modern production system, which has been developed with almost no regard for compatibility with the environment or for the efficient use of energy: Gas-gulping cars pollute the environment with smog; petrochemical factories convert an unrenewable store of petroleum into undegradable or toxic agents. In turn, the faulty design of the production system has been imposed upon it by the economic system, which invests in factories that promise increased profits rather than environmental compatibility or efficient use of resources. The relationships among the great systems on which society depends are upside down.

Thus, what confronts us is not a series of separate crises, but a single basic defecta fault that lies deep in the design of modern society. This book is an effort to unearth that fault, to trace its relation to the separate crises, and to consider what can be done to correct it at its root.

Energy plays a decisive role in the interactions among the three systems. Energy, radiated from the sun, drives the great ecological cycles. Energy, derived from fuels, powers nearly every production process. Most of the recent increases in the output of the production system and in the rate of economic growth are due to the intensive use of energy to power new, more productive machinery. The intensified use of energy is responsible for the rapid drain on fuel supplies and for much of present environmental pollution. And, as we shall see, the intense application of energy to production processes is closely associated with two of our main economic difficulties: unemployment, and the less visible but equally dangerous shortage of capital.

Thus, the energy crisis is so tightly linked to the crucial defects of the system as a whole as to offer the hope of leading us out of the labyrinth of interwoven crisesif we can but understand it. And we do not. This is made painfully evident by the sudden, unperceived onset of the energy crisis. For years the United States and most of the world used energy as though it were a freely given resource, its availability and uses understood as well as those of water or air. Suddenly the availability of energy can no longer be taken for granted; it has become a huge problem, strongly affecting almost every aspect of society.

In the last few years, energy supply problems have disrupted daily life; they have triggered an economic depression; they have led to a bitter confrontation between Congress and the President; they have altered the political relations between the industrialized countries and the developing ones; they have generated lightly disguised threats by the President and the Secretary of State to invade oil-producing countries.

The energy crisis illuminates the worlds most dangerous political issues, as it wrenches back into open view the brutality of national competition for resources, the festering issues of economic and social injustice and the tragic absurdity of modern war. The crisis forces us to make long-avoided choices. If we must give up present energy sources and find renewable ones, curtail the wasteful uses of energy and the blind replacement of meaningful human labor by energy, where and how will the necessary decisions be made? Can these decisions be made, or even debated, without re-examining the precepts of the economic system which now govern how energy is produced and used?

There are no easy answers to these questions. But there is one way to begin to look for them. And that is to recognize that energy problems will not be solved by technological sleight-of-hand, clever tax schemes, or patchwork legislation. The energy crisis and the knot of technological, economic, and social issues in which it is embedded call for a great national debateto discover better alternatives to the deeply faulted institutions that govern how the nations resources are used. And to begin that debate, we need to understand how the ecosystem captures energy, how the production system uses it, and how the economic system governs what is done with the resultant wealth.