The Oil Drum

The only aspect of PO theory that I find unconvincing is the doomsday scenarious.  The reason I find them unconvincing is that they seem to exclude the impacts of price on demand and supply for crude, substitute energy sources, and human activities.   Not that there will not be painful adjustment periods.  But the end of civilization is not in the cards in my view.

In fact, when you consider the impacts on different economies, I think there is a good argument that China and India, particularly China, will pay much higher prices for the impact of PO than western economies because the high prices for transport will serve to move manufacturing back toward the source of demand, thus creating many more jobs in the developed economies and fewer in the now cheaper labor markets that are so far away.  Plus, the very energy wastefulness of developed economies, particularly the US, will make it far easier for them to cut back on their energy use.  This tendency will also mitigate the financial impact.

Net, net, I expect US stocks to tank very big time at some point, probably within the next five years, and for there to be an initial period of substantial unemployment.  But I think that will lead to a later stage of growth for our economy accompanied by vast adjustments to high energy costs.

This will not take place evenly -- it will eat away at the edges first, pieces dropping off like chunks of ice off glaciers. That's also the middle class -- a glacier -- gigantic chunks dropping off into the abyss.

What's overlooked in the rosier scenarios is the way capitalism works. If capitalism worked the way it was pictured, we wouldn't be where we are now, ready to take on the globe militarily. Capitalism cannot go into reverse, downsizing peacefully. The ever increasing capital intensity and concentration is key to the profitability of finance capital. It's a huge mistake to just look at physical and productive resources as just material stuff which can be deployed rationally. They exist as capital, meaning profitable, or they are junk and subject physical destruction. (This does not exclude people, who are also capital -- or not.)

It's also a mistake to confuse the capitalism we have now with early capitalism and "free markets". The big corporations, the gov't, the military are all intermeshed (not that there aren't big clashes and between factions.)

This capitalism will NEVER consider any solution to PO that doesn't involve greater capital investment and greater intensity. Those parts of the economy that cease being profitable will be junked, literally. But the junking will always be disguised in one way or another. PO will render ever greater parts of the economy unprofitable.

The tendency of people will be to look at land and housing and unused productive capacity as just that, and make efforts to utilize them in some kind of effort to survive. But these efforts will meet gov't hostility because they threaten withdrawal from the market and threaten profitablity.

The energy and capital intensive part of the economy will contract, leaving ever larger parts of the rest of economy to rot. This is already happening and has been happening for a long time on the world scale. Large sections of the third world are considered to be just such detritus, until there is resistance and interference with the "world" economy. They then become terrorists, needful of suppression.

The model is there: large parts of the US will piece by piece become part of an internal third world, needful of supression and gating off.

So you see, Agric is an optimist of sorts!