"private financial stashes?" Indeed! If I remember correctly I think Daly does make some recommendations about decreasing the present absurd and obscene wealth differentials in our society.

It would be possible in our present system to do this using tax regulation,antitrust laws and various other regimens.Whether this is politically possible is another question and the will to do it is certainly not present in the current oligarchy.

I think that Daly is a realist and sees no advantage in proposing extreme change,no matter how desirous this would be.It is a pity that there are not more economists pushing his line of thinking.
The PTB tend to listen a little more to "experts" than they do to others crying in the wilderness.

O. K., I'm ready for radical change, so I'm sympathetic to the basic premise of your article. Here are my questions:

Yes, a cap and trade system and ecological taxes will work against the destructive tendencies of private finance capitalism, but the political pressure to let us go hammer and tongs after whatever resources will maximize our dollar income in the short term will be enormous and unrelenting. Conservative banking will prevent financial bubbles, but it will not alleviate the desire to squeeze as much short term growth out of the system as current resource flows allow.

It sounds to me that a true cap and trade system would put absolute limits on the amount of a given resource you could produce (say, coal or oil). That's what a "cap" is, isn't it? And Daly also favors a stiff progressive income tax, doesn't he, thus diminishing the incentive for an individual to expand their income beyond a given point?

It sounds to me that the objection you are raising is a political objection rather than an economic one. It sounds like you are saying, "there will be tremendous incentive to tamper with any such setup, amendments and exceptions would be added, and pretty soon we will be back to where we started." I think this is a potent objection -- this is essentially what moved the relative income equality the U. S. A. experienced in the 1950's and 1960's, to a much more unequal one today. Nevertheless, this is a political problem, not an economic problem, isn't it? Or am I missing something?

On community finance, you say:

One possible answer, of course, is the Politburo and the five year plan. The often made claim that no other possible mechanisms exist strikes me a displaying an incredible poverty of imagination. The Chilean state copper company CODELCO has existed as a highly profitable enterprise for three decades, and I see no reason for comparing its operation to that of a Stalinist tractor factory.

Sorry, I'm totally ignorant of CODELCO. Could you expand a bit on this? Maybe a quick compare and contrast of Stalin's five-year plans with the operations of CODELCO?

Keith

You are describing a socialist society, whether you realize it or not. The failures of "socialism" so far have been primarily caused by two factors: (1) trying to build a socialist society on the basis of a backward feudalist/capitalist society, as in Russia and China, and (2) the brutal opposition of the capitalist states. Ever since the United States and other Allied powers invaded Soviet Russia in 1918, thru the Second World War (with the Soviets losing 26 million people and most of their cities), thru the Cold War, they have made sure that socialism would never get a chance to develop normally.
This continues today. It is an essential part of U.S. foreign policy to oppose anything that would endanger the global rule of capitalism, and this has been the major cause of most wars in the last 60 years. Overthrowing democratic governments and replacing them with despots is standard practice,m such as Guatemala (1954), Indonesia (1965), Chile (1973), etc.. We even supported the Taliban in our drive to bring capitalism to Afghanistan. It reminds me of the rivalry between Greece and the Roman Empire; Greek democracy did finally prove its superiority, even when ancient Greece no longer existed.
Some second and third world countries are attempting to build a "socialism for the 21st century". One thing that needs to be emphasized for that, is that economic and political competition must be recognized as an evil, Otherwise, we will be busy fighting wars with each other while the environment decays and natural resources disappear. Can socialism be made to work? I don't know, but if we don't try, we're going to go the way of the dinosaurs.

Great stuff RogerK. First the vision, then the implementation. Thankyou button pressed.

Do we have to run seminars in politics, philosophy and economics in order to have a non-muddled discussion? Can we do it quickly in time for collapse? Here goes my (brief) attempt.

Socialism and capitalism are ECONOMIC systems. Democracies, oligarchies, monarchies, totalitarian societies, republics etc. etc. are POLITICAL systems. Capitalism can exist in a democratic society or in an oligarchy. Socialism can exist in a democratic society or a totalitarian one.

Most of the readers of this blog would prefer to live in a democracy. Most of the readers of this blog are fed up with the current economic system and believe that it is being propped up by an oligarchic political system. Others are worried about socialism because they believe it is always associated with a totalitarian political structure.

The readers and writers of this blog are also convinced that changes will have to come to the economic system because what cannot continue (exponential growth) will not continue. Given that collapse will come sooner or later, what sort of economic system would we prefer and is there a way to achieve it within a democracy?

I very much liked Roger K's response to Daly's post. I found Daly's prescriptions chilling because they sounded as though they would be imposed from a centralized regulatory authority that would slow exponential growth but not abolish it. It sounded like a plan that would fit nicely into a totalitarian political system. It is my opinion, based upon the history lessons that I was taught, that it will be very hard to maintain a democracy when economic decisions are taken far away from local authorities. That seems to be what RogerK is trying to say.

My thesis is that a democratic system of government must allow for most decisions about production and the use of surpluses to be made at a local level. On the other hand, I also think that restraints upon overuse of resources and pollution must be made at a regional level. And it may well be that a consensus about some matters, such as human rights and carbon use must be made and enforced at a national or even international level. The question is what should be decentralized and what should be centralized? I wish that someone would start to discuss that.

What RogerK is talking about, I believe, is an economic system where not all social benefits are measured in currency. The political structure would be democratic rather than totalitarian/oligarchic. Since we are far from that kind of a system it would require a real paradigm shift in political thinking. Is it utopian? Probably not. It appears that such societies have existed in the past. Will the western world make such a paradigm shift? Who knows but it is interesting to think about it and to see whether there is a way to help things to go that way.

The other question is how do you even begin to get from here to there? Again, my thesis is that economic collapse is going to take care of at least some of the oligarchy. If not, then they will perpetuate themselves as they now are. While that is happening, there may be a chance for local communities to establish their own currencies and local economies. That is what the Transition Town movement is trying to do. From what I have read they don't spend much time thinking about their economic underpinnings. I would like to see more discussion of local currencies, where and when they have been employed and how things worked out for them.

I would pose the question how many frugal middle class can the globe indefinitely support? This could be framed in terms of food, shelter and personal mobility. Example 5 MJ (21 kcal) of food per day, 25 square metres of floor space, 50 km a day personal mobility, 8 kwh per day of appliances, 150 litres of clean water. This might give a global carrying capacity of say 0.5 bn. Then re-assign jobs and settlements to meet that figure.

There's no real point if a town of 50,000 people is self sufficient in food but obtains 90% of its electricity from coal fired plants in the next State. Settlements that aren't ecologically balanced would have to export a surplus of some other product. Overall the system would have to be self sustaining.

Therefore I think the first task is to work out how much resource use for how many people ie how many the life raft can carry. Then interpolate that locally.

I too like Daly; and agree that a steady state economy is the only (maybe) viable way forward. There seems to be some sort of consensus on this as a goal, at least among us here on TOD.

The problem seems to be how do we get there? And what institutions will comprise the new order and how will they be governed? Is profit a good thing for instance? These are the real questions.

If I do my part to create and support a right sized economy (in however humble a role) I know that I will receive the wherewithal for a decent quality of life, and I can have confidence that in an hour of need the right sized economy that I helped to create and support will support me.

This sounds suspiciously like "From each according to his ability, to each according to his need"; and that didn't work either. The problem I think is the thousands and thousands of years of psychology encapsulated within the human cranium, most of which we do not control. We as a species are avaricious, cunning, deceitful, competitive and governed by primordial behavior patterns. We have no hope of changing this; and so whatever living arrangement we may come up will be undermined by our own behavior. Just like Marx's utopia was.

We are going to have to experience overshoot and make of it what we will. Our species may not survive, but I bet it does.

There are several unpleasant truths that even people like Daly shy away from.

1. There are too many people on earth and the number is increasing too quickly.

2. There is too much emphasis on accumulating material goods.

3. Improvements in efficiency only delay the day of reckoning

4. Non-renewable resource can't be renewed.

These difficulties are all compounded by the present inequities, so:

1. Population "control" must be non-coercive and will take at least a century to accomplish. The best path is to educate women and allow them to earn money outside the home. The birth rate drops dramatically when this is done. Fears that a birth rate below the replacement rate will lead to an aging population with insufficient workers to support it are because of point 2 above.

2. Many pre-industrial societies were steady-state, and lived happy lives without an excess of materialism. They had community, ceremony and even doing nothing to provide fulfillment. We work to possess and possess because we work. We need to scale back the amount of "stuff" we have, while bringing up the standard of living of those in the bottom billion.

3. History has shown that improving efficiency lowers cost and make consumption rise. One only has to look at gasoline consumption in the wake of the 1970's oil squeeze to see the effect. We now have more cars driving further than before.

4. With fewer possessions the need to devour natural resources will diminish. Things that can only be made using non-renewable inputs will have to be eliminated.

What all this means is that capitalism/socialism and communism have to be replaced by a new social organization. The only difference between them is who nominally owns the means of production. All of them preach that their system will best lead to even more growth. It turns out that ownership is not the important factor, governance is and all three systems have created a disconnect between the people and those who make the policy decisions.

I have at least a dozen essays on my web site that consider Daly's ideas and similar views, you are free to browse if you are interested.

Discussions of Economics and Public Policy

I think the real problem is we don't look forward into the future.

If you start thinking forward then you realize that underlying accumulation of wealth is the ability to inherit wealth. The real problem becomes one of the passing of wealth via inheritance.

If you think about it if when you die if all of your wealth is returned to the state or better commons whats the point in accumulation of massive wealth ?

You can't simply make a law disallowing inheritance since all someone will do is give away their stuff before they die. In fact the inheritance problem starts the moment a child is born as the parent will obviously support his children to the maximum of their abilities. Assuming the child is reasonably gifted this will ensure that the child has and advantage vs other children.

Inequality builds and those without struggle to build their own wealth for their children but of course late comers are playing on a uneven playing field built by the concentration of wealth from previous generations.

Obviously the longer this goes without interruption the less likely someone with little wealth will ever manage to win and gain wealth. Eventually societies become stratified.

At some point the whole game comes tumbling down as dissatisfaction grows a new class of elite are installed often having assumed much of the wealth from the previous and the game begins anew.

You cannot easily prevent people from having children but worse you can't prevent them from leveraging their own success to give their children a better chance in life.

I think this is the intrinsic and intractable problem which cannot be solved. Eventually some day if we limit the population and go with renewable resources after several generations we might reach a point that the differences in wealth have grown small enough that one parent cannot easily transfer wealth to their child to cause the child to gain significant advantage over others. One would guess that communal wealth available to all children would also have to be large such that in essence everyone is born with a silver spoon.

Once everyone is wealthy then no one is and the game finally ends. One would have to think that we would also need robotics to do most of the work labor would be done more as a hobby than being absolutely needed.
I'm guessing on this but it would make sense that the game is over only when everyone has the option to be the idle rich.

Sounds rather pointless to me to be honest. Why live if you have nothing to really live for ?
One would imagine over time that the population having reached this final point would probably slowly dwindle as having children is a lot of work. Maybe to keep the population from dying out more and more kids are raised by robots or something like that or maybe we eventually simply go extinct.

Of course if we don't balance the population and move to sustainability we will strip this planet of all resources so its a bit of a catch 22. I'd argue better to reduce and take the chance of dying of boredom.
We probably will find something else to do to keep us entertained once we give up on destroying the planet.
However I really think that its a fairly fundamental change in humanity to decide to reduce our population steadily until everyone is eventually wealthy in a renewable society. I really don't see how the current crop of wealthy people will be willing to do this and I can't see the poor willingly reducing the number of children they have. I can only seeing us take this sort of path only when almost all wealth is lost and the population level is quite low and we somehow managed to retain most of our knowledge.

I suspect we will have many more cycles of rising and falling to go through before we finally reach this point. In each one we would strip the planet of even more resources. It just seems like we wont' change until the planet is throughly plundered and the population has crashed. Only at that point can I foresee a population develop devoted to restoring the planet and sensitive to population levels simply because the planet is so wrecked it can't support a large population. One could see it taking many generations for this group to restore the planet and during this period it would be natural to practice extreme population control. In time one could see where they would consider it natural to limit population and as the planet renewed itself you would finally see them grow in wealth in each generation while maintaining the low population. We have to guess that this group would be preceptive enough to recognize that their future wealth depends on keeping population low and thus they will continue on this path. Assuming technology exists we might even see some sort of forced sterilization after having two child become the social norm.

There is no reason that our biological understanding would not advance to the point that we could well tinker with our own genes and actually add self sterilization as one of our abilities.

In any case I'd suggest we are just at the very start of this road the ending is off in a distant future with a lot more sorrow and destruction before we finally change assuming we don't drive ourselves to extinction in the interim.

Can Herman Daly's Prescription for a Steady State Economy Accomplish this Task?

No.

It's a nice piece of work, but the real world proceeds in a stepwise manner with intermediate states. Each of those new intermediate states creates a new context.

A 5-sided snowflake would be cool, but you'll never find one because there is no path to it.

The behavior of human society, like the growth of a snowflake, is emergent from simple local interactions and "individual behavior".

Daly is first and foremost a visionary. Possibly his solutions are based more on his hopes that we might proactively avoid a collapse by scaling into a steady state economy even though these solutions might be political pipe dreams.

Notwithstanding, some of Daly's early solutions are evolving now because of peak oil and global warming:

-Environmental taxes or carbon taxes or whatever one wishes to call them will be implemented and will help level the playing field in regards to cheap foreign labor while at the same time may curb low entropy usage in developing countries.
-Migration and immigration may be impeded by the lack and cost of fuels.
-There is not much low hanging fruit left, therefore we won't be picking it anymore. Thus forcing us to be less consumptive due to cost alone.

Professor Daly gave a lot to think about, and a lot to discuss. There is too much to put into a comment and much would be off- topic for TOD but there is a theme that can be addressed economically.

That is, the distance between the theoretical appreciation of what an economy can accomplish and what reality will deal to us. In order to gain this appreciation some assumptions are made. Since most of the assumptions wind up canceling each other out - run out of oil or not run out of oil; run out of food or not run out of food - the appreciation(s) can't gain much traction. In his article, Prof. Daly suggested to me that he assumed that government was both effective and benign. Considering Dick Cheney for more than a few minutes lets the air out of Herman Daly's supposition.

What will reality bring? A dichotomy! Economics is as dead as a doorknob! What is becoming more and more obvious, even to die- hard market participants and those who have greatly benefitted from the status quo that the jig is op. The current economic infrastructure is bankrupt, the actions of its managers are without direction, reactive, blatantly self- interested and in the end, pointless.

In other words, finance and economy are becoming less relevant while police power in all of its iterations becomes moreso. Power, instead of decentralizing or 'going local' is flowing more and more aggressively toward the center.

Consider what has taken place over the past ten or fifteen years as a science experiment. The purpose was to substitute asset inflation for productivity. In other words, people wouldn't earn on labor or talent; that would be devalued and the tasks involved 'outsourced'. Everyone who chose to participate would have a perceived large chance to win in a gambling - speculation - ponzi casino. Debt and velocity would inflate assets and those capable of utilizing those increases by borrowing against them would 'succeed' and the rest would fall behind. Given enough assets, enough credit and enough velocity, the various inflations could be sustained almost indefinitely, albeit with a shrinking capital basis.

The winners would afford energy and comfort even if gas cost $40 a gallon.

Looking at this, it seems clear to me that from an economic standpoint, peak oil took place far in the past, this experiment was an attempt to inflate asset price curves in advance of sharply increasing energy price curves. The experiment failed because the financing mechanisms were insufficiently robust and the lending itself was economically unsustainable. Because of how this experiemt was cast, and the economic establishment's and capital structure's investment in it, the failure reflects the conclusion that economics itself has failed and proven unsustainable ideologically.

Now ... there is a lot more to this and will be examined at some point but not here. Just keep in mind that eoonomics failed itself and therefore the ideas that have run alongside economics such as its optimum size (or the optimum interest rates or level of unemployment) have shrunk to nothing. In fact, if you look at various 'instruments' that examine the functions of the US econcomy, it has already shrunk more or less to the Treasury, the Federal Reserve, a handful of Wall Street companies and a few related departments of the Federal government ... and an ever- declining productive rump.

Be this as it may, what matters far more was the understanding - of all participants, even the lowliest sub- prime borrower or the sleaziest mortgage originator - that there was an 'unnatural' selection taking place. That there would be many losers, many more than winners. The implication is that even when the wreckage of the current economy is swept away, the replacement will be first of all a structure of form without substance, it will be a type of casino, where some will win and the rest lose. The 'loss' mechanism would serve to recycle capital. This suggests enclave societies, that will dumb thenselves down to variations on Ricardan plantation systems where the losers are 'associates' (serfs) and the winners are 'managers' (managers). I suspect in the 'winner's part of the world there will be much technology, research, conveniece, automobiles, helicopters, lights on all night, big flashy cities with suburbs and glamorous people just like today ... surrounded by countries filled with desperate peasants croaking with hunger and pestilence, lamenting the oceans swallowing their cities. It is reasonable to suggest this is the kind of regime the US and other powers are building right now, totalitarian, shrinking non- economies.

Now ... this is ambitious and audacious and compared to it, the alternate systems are less well developed with the tools to develop them being constantly stripped away by the erosion of the idea of economics - its ongoing failure. In what I would call 'Dick Cheney World' it doesn't matter how the economic system is ordered, it matters much moreso that the big shots are comfortable. With national security agencies militarizing the police, expanding the military itself and with the failure of economics running along side - how much economic theory does it take to bail out cronies? - the bigger question is whether the establishment can muster sufficient police power to sustain itself?

Looking at desperately poor North Korea the answer would have to be "Yes, I(t) can!"

This is what I think the future reality comes down to. In the end, the economic reformists are going to be left holding the bag while the US and parts of Europe and maybe parts of China and a few other places become North Korea with nice cars and houses. The establishment is not interested in reform and the citizens within the enclaves will have a more or less desperate vested interest in remaining within them at almost any cost to themselves. Those outside will be unable to leverage themselves to organizational parity - if they would choose to do so - and the productive advantages of the enclaves over the rest would be profound and increase with time.

The alternative is radicalization; political/economic extremism within the enclaves, which will certainly darken the theater of reform even as it crafts the question, 'to what end this radicalism?' There is the dichotomy, the intellectual void of the inside and the permanently radical outside, the choice to leave the null for the radical would always exist just as that choice exists now. Demo- publican- Labour Party ... Al Qaeda/ radical Islam.

Another choice is revolutioary violence which would also rapidly become an uneven contest, with the advantages and the balance of power accumulating at the center. Radicalism and violence would remove benign regulatory tendecies, these being required to impliment reforms. More likely, reforms would be aimed outside the enclaves where they would be of doubtful ncessity, the outside falling beyond the reach of economics and thereby having no need to reform them. ... or they would dispense with organized economics altogether.

What this means is inside enclaves there would be technology and (sham) economic growth. On the outside will be various - chaos and collapse to self- sustaining agrarian/merchantile 'states' that would themselves be quasi- pseudo- enclaves. This forms a paradox; the enclaves themselves would have a desperate need for reform and never get it because the enclave social structure would not tolerate it, and the rest would never really need reform because they would not be organized enough for economies or would function well without them and would therefore not worry about reform.

In the end, I would have to say that Prof. Daly's approach has an edge that can be brought against other economists, but insufficient edge that can be brought into the world we are now creating for ourselves.

The creation of a new economy not predicated on eternal growth (= the destruction or cooptation of everything that is not "the economy") is the central imperative at this moment. So this conversation is vital.

"The underlying cause is the structural emphasis of our economic system on the atomized accumulation of private financial wealth as the primary route to security and status for individuals and nuclear families.

Daily's vision of a steady state economy leaves in place the primary structures of our current economic system (e.g. capital markets, interest based banking, private savings, etc) and then proposes to control their destructive and depletionary tendencies by a series of rules and regulations. "

This is very well put. It's the old lipstick on the pig thing. At this point, "steady state" won't cut it either. We are well into overshoot right now. It is not possible to continue steadily a state overshoot. We need an economics of contraction and curtailment. And more fundamentally of respect. Respect that begins by really recognizing the existence and validity of that which is outside the "economy."

I have no clear picture of what that would look like and even less of how we could get there (though I'm thinking that centralized, top down control will be able to play only a partial role at most.)

As of this week, with reports that the Arctic ice sheet has fallen below the level of even the dramatically reduced coverage of 2007, and with evidence that methane levels are shooting up sharply, indicating strongly that the trigger of the clathrate gun has been pulled, the whole discussion is essentially academic. But being an academic myself, I still see it as worth while.

I think really the only economy now is the economy of penance. How do we steadily walk away from everything our absolutely and thoroughly destructive culture stands for and enacts? I like the idea of disengaging from the money economy as a start. This is upon us anyway, as the dollar is about to blow up in one direction or the other. But we have to also walk away from all sorts of basic assumptions about our purpose.

We have to disengage from any activity that provides humans more power to enact this current death cult. We have to challenge with every one of our acts and words the enactment of and propaganda supporting the current paradigm of total destruction. We have to do all this without any hope or pretense that it will "save the world." The world is now already lost to us, to our children, to any future.

Some will proceed with rage, others with equanimity, all sorts of other forms of poise and lack of poise. The only necessity is to be free from the delusion that we have been living in anything like a life-affirming society, and to face clear eyed the death spiral we have now entered.

>> "First of all community finance is required. Clearly we need to go on investing in infrastructure."

This is not at all clear, and since much of the rest seems to follow, it rather invalidates the whole essay. We "need to go on investing in infrastructure"? What sort of infrastructure does this mean? Isn't it a very common view that the amount of infrastructure in the world today is unsustainable, hence we need less, not more of it?

Perhaps it is a debate tactic, when introducing a controversial premise, to prefix it with "Clearly...!"

Good essay. Right topic. Key insights. Interesting comments.

Much as I hate to say this, I have come to the conclusion that collapse is both inevitable and necessary. I realize that this involves tremendous catastrophe for millions, more likely billions, of people. It is actually that scale of the problem size that convinces me that no feasible solution to saving the world exists. Once, however, the population has been reduced to a workable number, it may be feasible to consider salvaging some remnants of civilization organized under a different social order (see Homer-Dixon's "The Up Side of Down" for a related perspective). I've been considering this for some time now and have written about it from many different angles (energy, economics, population, even evolution).

In answer to the comments about socialism vs. capitalism, I would argue that there actually is another way to look at the organization of governance -- one that requires both a deeper understanding of how organic governance systems (e.g. autopoiesis) evolve to achieve something like the steady-state that Daly writes about, and a grasp of hierarchical cybernetics and systems science. For example see: Political Economy - page 5, scroll down to July 16, "Is there a sapient form of governance". The blog pages are arranged by most recent at the top, so if you scroll from that article upward and back through the pages you can read the whole series (along with some interim ideas). Maybe a book some day (if I can do it before the collapse!!!)

If one can take the truly long view of evolution on this planet, then collapse, even with the attendant suffering, may not be 'bad' thing (except of course to those of us who are doing the suffering). It is a generally hard view to take for most people. I completely understand the revulsion for considering the consequences. But if we were able to consider it, there are implications for the kinds of actions we should be taking right now in order to assure that our genus has a shot at being represented in that future world. My big question these days is, are humans just wise enough to do this kind of thinking?

Question Everything
George

RogerK--A most interesting advance on HD's ideas posted in the first thing.

But I'm very under-intrigued by this notion of "community finance".
It already exists or at least pretends to.
National budgets, local authority budgets, IMF and World Bank, and even my local ward has a Neighbourhood Management Board which spends the odd k on what the local community wants.

Why aren't these things "community finance"? Partly because usually these are not real communities of people who know one another (www.energyark.net/za/urbna.htm).

And partly because they have become corrupted by the defectiveness of electioneering pseudo-democracy, as explained in detail in my book http://www.lulu.com/content/140930 (of which there is free e-version though the printed has much to recommend it! (e.g. if 1000 people bought it it would pay for removal of the 16 dental amalgams that severely mentally disable me)).

That book has been superceded by events (incl www.2020housing.co.uk) as I now incline to the view that the (pseudo-democratic) national systems are going to defunct within a few years anyway.

I think more to the point is not "community finance" but restoration of a less commercialised less strangerised society, one in which friends and annoying neighbours cooperate together for their common good. But note that that ref to www.2020housing.co.uk should make clear that local groups "cooperating" together can amount in reality to something very different from what it seems on the surface (as I, a severely ill person, was harassed and corruptly evicted into homelessness by a "co-operative" of "community-building" "heroes".)

We need not worry about how to change to a steady state economy. The depletion of non-renewable resources will take care of that. Once humankind is forced to rely upon nothing except renewable resources, then our economy WILL be steady state. Nothing is required on our part to bring this about, all humankind needs to do is to keep on depleting the non-renewable resources as quickly as possible, which they (we) are bound to do.

The really important big questions are: 1) How to navigate the inevitable economic decline as we travel down the right side of the depletion curve; and 2) How to structure the economy & society once we have exhausted the non-renewables? There probably are some things we could do to make that ride downhill better or worse, and the extent to which we have laid the groundwork in advance could make a positive difference in how things look and operate once we settle down into that renewables-only steady-state economy.

I should point out that while the second question is a very interesting one that should be investigated thoroughly, for us it is necessarilly mostly an academic question. It appears that it will take about another century or so before the non-renewable resources are mostly depleted. All of us (with the possible exception of the very few children) reading this will therefore be dead before the renewables-only steady-state economy comes into being. Thus, it is the first question - what I call "decline management" - that we must and will be dealing with directly for the rest of our lives.

When we talk about "what should we do?", of course, the immediate problem presents itself: What CAN we do? It is all well and good to theorize and speculate and debate, but let's face it: just about all of us are pretty powerless to make much real difference. This is especially true at the macro level of nation state and world; at the local level of neighborhoods and communities, it begins to become feasible for individuals to actually make some real difference. This, it seems to me, is one of the strongest arguments in behalf of localism: it is actually within the realm of possibility for individual "change agents" to intervene within their local communities in a way that can actually result in some real changes.

There will be "winners" and "losers" among the myriad communities of the nation and the world. Individual initiatives do hold out the reasonable hope that one might help make one's community more likley to be one of the "winners".

Of course, should enough communities be changed, then you have the basis for change at a larger level. The whole is more than the sum of its parts, but the sum of the parts does consitute the major part of what defines the whole.

So, what should we be doing?

1) I'd say that the starting point is to see to yourself and your household. If we are talking about taking a leadership role in one's local community, then there is no better way than to lead by example. There is a big agenda: living a frugal, energy-efficient lifestyle; being an "early adopter" of renewable energy technologies; raising as much of one's own food as one can, patronizing local food producers, storing and cooking food at home; etc. We should all know the drill by now; it is time to move from "knowing" to "doing".

2) The most effective community leaders tend to be those who are most strongly integrated into their local communities. There is another big agenda involved with this: being friendly and getting to know people, especially neighbors; pitching in and helping out others (and therefore building up the obligations to reciprocate later on their part); joining and participating in community organizations of various sorts; patronizing local businesses; etc.

3) Identify allies and potential supporters, and build them into a cohesive action group. This takes time, don't expect it to happen overnight. Be patient, start small.

4) Take stock of where your community is actually at. Do a SWOT analysis: Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities, Threats. While there is much I like about the Transition Towns movement and things like that, I do get a little nervous when people start thinking in terms of applying a "one size fits all" template to each and every community. Every community is different, and one size only fits one. You need to figure out what is most needed in your community, and what is most possible. You may have to work on some lower priority things first in order to achieve a couple of successes and build up your groups size and influence before attempting the bigger and more important things.

5) I would suggest as a general rule that there will be few communities that do not have most of the following basic things on their action agenda:

-Ecosystem health and biodiversity preservation: The healthier the environment in which a community is situated, the better its prospect for the long term.

-Water supply: Water is essential for life support, and cannot be taken for granted. We are focused on energy issues here, but the 21st century may be remembered in history more for the water crisis than for the energy crisis. Most communities need to do more to assure their long-term clean water supply security.

-Energy: Obviously, this is a big issue, of which there are two major sub-components. First, increasing energy efficiency. This includes a lot of issues dealing with transport, as well as increasing energy efficiency in residential and other buildings. Second, developing renewable sources of energy supply. What works best will depend on the particular circumstances of each community.

-Food supply: Many of us feel that if communities are going to achieve long-term food security, they are going to have to localize their food supply. This means encouraging people to raise gardens (instead of lawns), developing community gardens for those without access to their own land, encouraging local producers through farmer's markets & CSPs, etc.

-Economic diversity and local-self-reliance: We can speculate about more thoroughgoing transformations of the economy from the present corporate capitalist model, but that is a long-term project. The immediate need is to help our local communities to become more economically resilient. Many communities have been battered by the winds of globalization, recession, etc. As a general rule, those local economies that are characterized by diversity are less vulnerable than are communities dominated by one large employer. When local citizens own and operate most of the local businesses, they are more inclined to stick it out through hard times, and also more inclined to be active "good citizens" in the local community.

None of the above comes close to being the radical transformation that is likely to be necessary as we transition to a steady-state economy. However, they are necessary first steps, and are about all that most of us can realistically hope to accomplish within our own lifetimes.

Nobody seems to give any specifics about a transition to a steady-state economy other than scary conjectures about collapse. Also most comments seem to assume the Anglo-American economic problems extend universally to include the entire planet. No doubt we can't grow forever, but why should we be scared stiff of necessary change? And why should the Dick Cheneys always rule supreme?

Very exciting topic, thank you for the informative text, and keep it up please!
greets!