April 30, 2013
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This article was published in partnership with
GlobalPossibilities.org.
It’s
not clear whether Stan Cox is a plant breeder with a penchant for
politics, or a political provocateur who finds time to do science.
Whichever aspect of his personality is dominant, Cox artfully draws on
both skill sets to make the case for rationing, perhaps the most
important concept that is not being widely discussed these days. The
power of his new book,
Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present, and Future of Rationing,
comes from his blending of scientific analyses of dire resource trends
with a compelling moral argument about the need to reshape politics and
economics.
In his day job at the
Land Institute in Salina, Kansas, the country’s premier sustainable agriculture research facility, Cox works to
develop perennial sorghum. A member of the editorial board of the magazine
Green Social Thought
(formerly Synthesis/Regeneration), Cox also has been thinking long and
hard about the multiple ecological crises we face. In 2010 he published
Losing Our Cool, a sharp-edged examination of the impacts of our society’s obsession with air-conditioning.
In
this new book on rationing, he argues that we have to become a society
that puts the brakes on consumption—in an egalitarian fashion—if we want
to survive. A society dependent on reckless growth that enriches a
small minority of people cannot expect to endure and flourish for the
long haul. Cox believes that the right kind of rationing can produce a
happier and healthier life for everyone.
Robert Jensen: In
your book, you mention that some have compared raising the possibility
of rationing to “shouting an obscenity in church.” Why is that idea so
unacceptable today?
Stan Cox: People have
shown a willingness to accept rationing in a broad variety of situations
in which society-wide scarcity is obvious—wartime, say, or when
governments have a fixed supply of subsidized food to sell, or in a
drought when there's only so much water to go around. But if rationing
is proposed as a way to preserve resources and ecological life-support
systems for the future—for dealing with environmental problems or
providing equitable healthcare, for example—then we are talking about
limiting consumption when there is no apparent scarcity. In that
situation, we all like to believe that we exercise freedom in the
marketplace, and to many it seems outrageous to limit that freedom.
RJ: Before
getting to the specifics of how rationing might work, let’s talk about
those cultural assumptions about freedom and abundance. We live in a
world that routinely tells us there are no limits, that whatever limits
we bump up against we can overcome with human creativity and advanced
technology. You seem to believe that we live in a physical world with
physical limits.
That’s a rather
sensible position, of course, but it seems to cast you in the role of
Eeyore, always the gloomy one. How do you defend yourself?
SC:
OK, you’re getting down to the heart of the matter right away here.
When opposing any kind of environmental responsibility, the Right loves
to raise the specter of rationing, but it’s really the bigger idea of
overall limits to growth that’s at the heart of our anxiety. We face an
irresolvable contradiction: We all know intellectually that no kind of
growth can go on to infinity, yet if we exist within a capitalist
economy, our lives and livelihoods wholly depend on unceasing expansion
of economic activity. A year, even a quarter, of slack or negative
growth might reduce national carbon emissions but it also triggers
widespread human misery. The converse isn’t true; robust growth doesn’t
necessarily bring prosperity to all. In recent decades, the benefits of
growth have flowed almost exclusively to the top of the economic
pyramid.
With the imposition of any serious
physical or ecological limits on the economy, familiar capitalist
economic relations would malfunction, to say the least. So those at the
top of the economy who benefit from growth have every reason to be
alarmed by the idea of fair rationing. And if we agree to overall limits
but remain committed to the current means of rationing resources and
goods—that is, “to each according to ability to pay”—then the rest of us
should be alarmed as well. But with a commitment to “fair shares for
all,” as they put it back during World War II, and with everyone playing
by the same rules (and of course with a much smaller chance of global
ecological breakdown), life under physical limits could well be a better
life for the great majority of us.
RJ: You
mention WWII, one of the cases of successful rationing. As you say, the
conventional wisdom is that such rationing is only possible in times of
crisis, when the need to limit consumption is clear. So, how would you
explain the crises we face today that make rationing necessary?
SC:
In the 1940s, Washington did shore up support for the ration system by
promising a world of plenty once the war was over. And except in a few
resources like rubber, there was no absolute scarcity. Farms and
factories were highly productive, there was no unemployment, and wages
were rising. But a huge share of what was produced—for example, 4,000
calories worth of food per soldier per day—was diverted to Europe and
the Pacific. People could see that with the end of the war, all those
resources and goods were to be available again to everyone.
Now
the green future, if there is one, will parallel the wartime ‘40s in
the sense that a large part of the economy will have to be diverted for a
period of years, or in this case, decades. We won’t be using resources
to pump up the consumer economy, because they will have to be shifted
into vast projects needed to build non-fossil, non-nuclear energy
sources; convert to a much less energy-dependent infrastructure; build
or convert to more compact, low-consumption housing; rework agriculture;
and rearrange living and working patterns to reduce the amount of
transportation required. The economist Minqui Li has estimated for the
United States that building the necessary wind and solar capacity alone
would cost $120 trillion.
All of that production will
be unavailable to the consumer economy. It may provide stimulus, but
with a nationwide policy of leaving resources in the ground, bigger
paychecks will serve to drive up the prices of goods that are available.
If the past is any guide, the only acceptable solution will be price
controls and fair-shares rationing. Indeed, in both the ‘40s and the
‘70s, there was popular demand for formal rationing. Next time around,
as you say, we won’t have the consolation that we can look forward to a
peacetime or post-energy-crisis cornucopia. For example, alternative
energy sources, even at full capacity, will provide far less total
energy than do fossil fuels today. However, we may still be able to
anticipate better times to come, once the physical conversion of society
has achieved its goals.
At that point, not only will
most of the economic effort that had gone into the conversion become
once again part of the “civilian” economy, but that new economy will be
able to satisfy more real needs for each unit of physical consumption. I
guess if there is any light at the end of the tunnel, that’s it. If the
conversion is successful, there won’t be as much easy energy around,
and GDP won’t be rising, but quality of life will have been given the
space needed for improvement.
RJ: Let’s go back
to these two basic points that are so contentious. Your pitch for
rationing is partly based on an assessment of physical realities:
Resources are finite, and technological capacities to stretch resources
have limits. Lots of people don’t accept that. You also are arguing that
we are going to live with a much a lower level of consumption. For lots
of people, that is depressing. Let’s tackle both of those.
First,
one of the major things you argue we have to ration is energy, at a
time when lots of people are celebrating new technologies that allow
humans to tap into new sources of fossil fuels (fracking, tar sands,
etc.). How do you see our energy future?
SC:
Until a few years ago, a lot of environmentally minded people were
hoping that the imminent peak and subsequent decline in the annual
extraction of conventional fossil fuels would do our work for us,
enforcing strict limits on consumption. Now a bonanza of so-called
unconventional fuel reserves has blown that possibility away, forcing us
to face the necessity of practicing self-restraint. Can we leave
precious energy in the ground when we have the ability to bring it out?
If we manage to do that, I guess it will be a first. But that’s what we
need to do.
It will be a test of how addicted to dense
energy we really are. Are we willing to launch an all-out assault on the
Earth, just to avoid a disruption of economic business-as-usual?
Unconventional fuels are a disaster—destroying vast landscapes, wrecking
water supplies, causing spills of petroleum and nasty chemicals,
increasing carbon emissions, and giving the human economy the capacity
to do all the usual ecological damage that potent energy sources
encourage. And these fuels are no free lunch. Individual gas wells are
small and dry up quickly, so enormous numbers of them have to be
drilled. They require a huge investment of energy and other resources to
produce each unit of usable fossil energy. Yet even with all those
problems, that energy is too valuable not to use, and we face a
seemingly irresistible temptation to use up these resources as fast as
we can extract them. You could say we’ve met our 21st-century
Mephistopheles in the sands of Alberta and the Marcellus shale.
RJ:Second,
in a world where so many people associate happiness with consumption,
how do you make the argument that for those of us in the more affluent
parts of the world, less can be more?
SC: In
the early 1990s, several economists took note of an apparent statistical
anomaly. While people in richer countries tend to be happier than those
in poorer countries, increases in average real income in richer
countries have not conferred an increase in happiness. In the words of
Richard Easterlin, a University of Southern California economics
professor whose name has become attached to this seeming paradox,
“raising the incomes of all” will not “raise the happiness of all.”
It’s
a fascinating problem, but the solution is just as dreary as most
explanations of modern life. As society becomes materially richer in the
aggregate, it takes a higher income every year just to keep up and
maintain the same level of contentment. When everyone has an increasing
income, it becomes harder and harder for anyone to achieve greater
happiness. In this sense, times haven’t changed much in the century-plus
since Thorstein Veblen described this phenomenon. Erosion of happiness
is largely a result of everyone trying to keep up with the Joneses.
It’s
not just the global north. In many nations once considered poor (and in
which most people still are poor), rising incomes are not bringing
happiness. On the contrary, examination of average income levels in
countries worldwide has shown that more rapid aggregate growth is
associated with a reduction in average happiness. The kind of breakneck
growth that can carry a nation as a whole from poverty to affluence in a
single generation also tends to worsen inequality and eat away at its
citizens’ sense of well-being. But make no mistake, simply putting more
emphasis on the pursuit of happiness cannot tame a capitalist economy
any more effectively than can appeals to life or liberty. Inequitable
growth in consumption is in the DNA of capitalism, and that has to be
faced directly.
RJ: It’s clearer now why
rationing is like an obscenity in church. It means leaving fossil fuels
in the ground and permanently reducing overall consumption for almost
everyone in the United States. That will require collective action
through government and a serious overhaul of the economy. All this has
to happen at a moment when what passes for leadership in the political
system can’t face the basic problems, let alone imagine serious systemic
change.
So, last question: What do
you hope your book will accomplish? It’s a clear, compelling argument
for rationing in a society that seems unwilling to accept limits and
unable to comprehend the need for them. How do we get this into the
public conversation?
SC: My aim is, in a way,
parallel to what I tried to do with Losing Our Cool—to touch off a
debate where there seemed to be total agreement. Air-conditioning has
always been viewed as being of pure benefit to humanity, which it’s not.
Rationing is constantly being held out by the Right as an unutterably
nightmarish fate that awaits us if we get serious about ecological
restraint and fairness. Meanwhile, the environmental establishment (in
basic agreement with the Right) wants to go on letting people believe
that the human economy can just keep on growing, that the market can
allocate fairly, and that rationing is indeed an evil to be avoided at
all costs.
My purpose with this book is to ask, so
rationing’s the worst that could happen? Really? Well, let’s see how bad
it might actually be—which may not be as bad as you think. And then
let’s compare it to major-league worst-case scenarios, like the global
ecological meltdown and all-against-all conflict that we could well see
if we don’t restrain ourselves.
