10 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
10 lines
1.9 KiB
Plaintext
2 ENERGY AND HISTORY
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and international legal conventions. Economic policy in the affluent countries is gradually shifting under the weight of evidence that economies must be decarbonized whether or not that reduces economic growth.
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During the twentieth century, most thinking about the future was based on the assumption that technological and organizational complexity will continually expand in lockstep with economic growth. The most substantial challenge to those assumptions about the future was the modelling work of Jay Forrester and colleagues in the Limits to Growth Report (1972) commissioned by the Club of Rome, a prestigious international public policy "think tank."
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While the energy crisis of the 1970s illustrated the vulnerability of industrial society to oil shortage, the oil glut and low prices of the 1980s, combined with a barrage of misinformation, saw these ideas lose favor. A whole generation of economists, politicians, business people, and even environmentalists learned that, for better or worse, the limits of resources were not going to threaten "business as usual."
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It is only the recent escalation of energy and commodity prices that has seen energy, resources, and the limits of nature again being widely recognized as the key drivers in human economic systems. This return to notions of limits so clearly outlined 36 years ago has also raised the specter of the more fundamental scarcity of food, identified more than 150 years earlier by Thomas Malthus. Rising food pries are now widely recognized as being driven directly and indirectly by the cost of energy. The demand for biofuel, the cost of energy-dense fertilizers, climate-change-related droughts, water scarcity, and the impact of rising affluence driving increases in mean consumption from agribusiness-production systems are all contributing to this global crisis. Those who suggest the likely return of the four horsemen of the apocalypse (famine, pesti-
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