Earlier this month, environmental and clean energyactivists, as well as coastal communities breathed a much needed sigh of reliefwhen the Obama administration reversedlast spring’s reckless decision to open up new offshore areas to oildrilling. Now, thankfully, the coastlines of the Pacific, Atlantic and theeastern Gulf will be spared the same fate as the Western Gulf into the foreseeablefuture. In a year of oil disasters and energy policy failures it’s a muchneeded cause for celebration. But on the eight month anniversary of theDeepwater Horizon spill, as we enjoy this rare bit of good news we shouldn’t letourselves forget that the American offshore oil industry is still growing -- over10,000 wells in the Gulf and counting -- and that growth is an imperativethat it will stop at nothing to obey.
That should be the major lesson that we take away from thegulf spill. Tougher industry rules are needed, but there is no way toeffectively regulate an industry that has grown so large, and that is driven tokeep growing and growing. 10,000 wells mean 10,000 opportunities for blow outpreventer failings, 10,000 opportunities for human error -- 10,000 chances foranother catastrophe. And those risks only multiply as the rigs push intodeeper and deeper water under the gun of consumer and investor demand formore.
Unfortunately though, as with so many of the other crisescaused by capitalism from the recent financial crisis, the popular narrative ignoresprofound systemic problems to focus on the actions and failings of a fewcompanies or individuals. Public villains like Tony Hayward or the Wall Streetbankers allow us to wrap up complex issues in tidy packages and avoidconfronting inconvenient truths. Even claims about lax regulatory systems,while true, distract us from the bigger picture.
But if we take just a few steps back, that bigger picturequickly emerges with startling clarity: we see that to end the spills, we needmore than regulation; we need to take away the growth imperative. And not onlybecause the industry has grown too big to regulate, but because regulation is alimit that it is systemically designed to circumvent. Just as sharks can neverstop moving, under our current economic design, corporations have to grow inorder to survive. Stock market speculators won’t tolerate a corporation or aneconomy that’s simply big enough, or even too big. It has to be ever bigger.Indeed, according to growth economists a “healthy” global economy has tomaintain a constant rate of three-percent annual compound growth. In aninfinite world where resources aren’t scarce and markets don’t get saturatedwith surplus dollars, such an approach might work. But we live in a world whereresources like oil are rapidly dwindling, and where markets that produce realgoods have become so saturated that speculators have few frontiers left wherethey can keep that three percent ‘healthy’ growth going.
In such a world continued growth depends on the invention offictions. So with no real markets left that could produce the desired profitmargins, Wall Street invented a fictitious market in mortgage assets.Similarly, the oil industry has run out of easily accessible reserves; only itdoesn’t have the luxury of creating fictitious ones -- thoughit sometimes tries. Instead, to get bigger, big oil has had to pushdrilling into ever riskier and costlier environments and invent the fictionthat this can be done safely and profitably without cutting corners.
Unfortunately reality has a way of catching up with thesefictions and smacking them down with devastating force, as we’ve learned thehard way with the biggestrecession since the Great Depression and the worstoil spill in U.S. history.
And herein lies the really frightening truth about ourgrowth economy: because fictions are essential to its continuation, the crises thosefictions unavoidably create are also essential to its continuation. In other words, oil spills, recessions and highunemployment are necessary evils that we must accept if we want to maintain thefiction of endless growth.
To stop the crises, we have to shift to an economic systemthat’s based in reality. And, again, it won’t be enough to try to try to limitgrowth capitalism, since that system is programmed to bulldoze its way throughregulatory limits. Even a carbon cap won’t be enough to check the oil companiesin a growth economy. Such retail fixes need to be pursued, but they won’t beeffective until we’ve committed ourselves to a wholesale shift away from thegrowth model.
Fortunately, it turns out that the best alternative to thegrowth fiction -- the steady-state economy -- won’t just spare us the crises of growth,but help us build the truly prosperous global society that growth has beenunable to deliver. As outlined in the Centerfor the Advancement of the Steady State Economy’s (CASSE) recent report Enough is Enough, the pathwayto a steady-state economy will be paved with an array of policies that willbenefit us economically, environmentally and socially by dramatically reducingdebt, stopping population growth, securing employment, distributing income andwealth, reforming the monetary system and limiting resource use and wasteproduction among other things.
It’s a tall order, no doubt, but even though the odds mayseem to be currently stacked against such a wholesale transformation, it turnsout that the opportunities to realize it will eventually be handed to us by growthcapitalism itself. The basis for such hope was, ironically enough, articulatedwell by one of the ultimate high priests of growth capitalism, Milton Friedman:
Only a crisis --
actual or perceived -- produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the
actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I
believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies,
to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically
inevitable.
If there’s one thing that we cancount on, it’s that capitalism is sure to hand us another crisis before long.In the meantime, to ensure change, we simply have to do our best to pack the manycracks in the growth edifice with the ideas of a steady state economy. So whenthat edifice finally collapses under its own weight and we start to siftthrough the rubble, those bright ideas of the steady state will be lyingeverywhere, beckoning to be picked up.