How to Save Capitalism - Part 7

The final part of the series, reprinted from Harper's Magazine.

LOCALIZE
by Bill McKibben

Bill McKibben is the author of many books, including The End of Nature and, most recently, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future.

Here’s the thing about “capitalism”: in our fixated belief that it represents the way God ordained the universe to be, we forget what powers it. I don’t mean the invisible hand—I mean the coal, the gas, and the oil.

Keynes once tried some back-of-the-envelope calculating to see how much the human standard of living had increased between 2,000 B.C. and the beginning of the eighteenth century. Maybe, he said, it had doubled over all that time, mostly because we had learned very little new—we had fire and wheels and banks and governments and livestock and sails before history was ever recorded. But then we did learn something new. We learned how to take fossil fuel buried beneath the ground and use it to create power, giving each and every one of us (in the West, at
least) the equivalent of a few hundred slaves. And so, for a time, we doubled our material standard every few decades.

That time may be coming to an end, because fossil fuel is coming to an end. We’ve got a million equations to explain how to make the economy work, but those equations rest on all that coal and gas and oil. The gas and oil are getting scarce, as anyone who drives by a gas station can see: with supply plateauing and demand rising around the world, the price just keeps shooting up. And if we’re smart, we won’t use much more of the coal, because the carbon it contains is more than enough to once and for all unhinge the planet’s climate. You can see the systems of our economy starting to shudder and lurch—the airlines, say, trying to cut the number of flights by 10 and 20 and 30 percent in a year because their oil costs are spiking much faster than they can raise fares.

It’s not just around the margins that the system is beginning to buckle. It’s right at the core, with that most important of commodities—food. We used oil to replace human labor on the farm. Instead of half of Americans growing food, we now have far more prisoners than farmers. But farming without farmers requires vast machinery, incredible amounts of naturalgas-based fertilizer, and a globe-spanning transportation system that makes sure your dinner arrives marinated in crude oil.

If the logic of a cheap-energy world has been relentless globalization and specialization, the logic of a post-oil planet points in the other direction: toward increasingly localized economies. Let’s think about the opposite of a huge corporate farm growing soybeans on massive government subsidy to satisfy its pension-fund owners and its ADM overlords. Let’s think instead about a farmers’ market. It sounds quaint, but farmers’ markets may be the fastest-growing part of the American food economy. Sales are rising by double digits every year, and the number of such markets has doubled and doubled again in the past decade (increasingly, even in northern climates, they stay open through the winter, as local farmers start growing more cold-hardy crops). For the moment, some foods are more expensive at farmers’ markets—noticeably meat, because we’ve gotten rid of all the small-scale slaughterhouses around the country. But it’s easy to imagine redirecting government subsidies away from corn syrup and toward sweet corn, away from 500,000-head swine operations (one in Utah now produces more sewage daily than Los Angeles) and toward mobile butchering units.

But already the food at the farmers’ market is fresher and tastes better than the stuff at the supermarket; already it’s better for your body (which in an era of out-of-control medical costs should count for something). And already there’s a key comparative advantage that’s related not to the product but to the process: the farmers’ market is fun to visit. A couple of years ago, a pair of sociologists followed shoppers, first around a supermarket and then around a farmers’ market. They found that at the latter, shoppers had ten times more conversations than at the Piggly-Wiggly. Which brings us to the other defect of the cheap-oil economy we’ve built: it has made us the first people on earth who have no need of one another. Everything we buy comes from an anonymous distance. We eat far fewer meals with family and neighbors than we did fifty years ago; we have on average far fewer close friends. The basic premise of the American economy—that the goal was a bigger house farther apart from other people—turns out to be mistaken, both ecologically and psychologically.

The cold economic logic of the world now dawning is that a relocalization must happen, one way or another: fossil fuels are becoming too expensive for it not to happen. But we can make this process work much more easily. We can subsidize small farms and rooftop solar panels and bus systems. More fundamentally, we can make the cost of energy reflect the damage it does. A strong cap on carbon would steadily and systematically drive up the price of coal and gas and oil, and hence hasten the switch away from them. We’d need to do it in such a way that it wouldn’t beggar the populace—indeed, wise minds have come up with all sorts of formulas to rebate the proceeds of any such indirect taxes to poor and middle-class citizens. But in essence it would drive us toward farmers’ markets, for economic reasons as well as for warm fellow feeling. To a large degree, this is exactly what European countries did after World War II when they enacted stiff and permanent taxes on fossil fuels. It helps explain why our landscapes look so different, and why Europeans perceive the quality of their lives to be higher even though they have less disposable income.

The only thing we’ve asked of our economy for a century has been growth, and it’s gotten us in a world of trouble. Now we need to demand a little durability and a little satisfaction too. We need—to spin a phrase the fantasists of endless growth abhor—a mature economy.