Of course, in the United States and in other industrialized nations many people wish they were billionaires. That is what the culture of consumerism has taught them. Even the billionaires who turn out to be scoundrels at best, are idolized for their wealth however ill-gotten. The “greed is good” value system of ‘Gordon Gecko’ (played by Michael Douglas in the 1987 movie “Wall Street”) is ascribed to by people at all economic levels.
The accelerated rise of the billionaire class since 1987 to much more direct political power has been exponential, especially since Trump’s MAGA movement anointed the grifter to the presidency. The process is now accelerating much faster in his well-organized second term, despite his erratic personal behavior and inflammatory speech. There is so much to say about all that.
But here I want to clarify the relationship between what the Trumpist billionaires deny—the climate/ecological emergency and its destructive consequences—and the realities of extreme societal hierarchy and its destructiveness equal to that of ecological chaos in this particular time. To understand the connections between billionaire class control of the economy, anti-climate action, Trump’s abandonment of the Ukrainian people, Musk’s dismantling of Social Security, the FAA, NOAA, USAID, as well as many other key federal programs, and the rise of the new deeply corrupt autocratic attempt to turn America into a dictatorship, you must watch David Kay Johnson’s interview on the Mark Thompson Show on YouTube. We not only do not ‘need’ the Billionaire Class, that level of wealth concentration makes a livable future for the world’s people impossible. David Kay Johnson has reported on Trump for almost 37 years and knows his mad methods probably better than anyone.
The ‘bottom line’ for humanity in all this rests with the fact that an ecological civilization, which we must create in order to shape a livable future, cannot be achieved without radically restructuring society on the basis of an equitable economy in which power accrues to the service of human necessities, not to an oligarchy in the form of a financial elite. The MAGA takeover of the U.S. government is an accelerating movement in the direction of total collapse.
Excessive Energy Consumption: The Norm
The only chance for humanity to survive by curbing the accelerating climate and ecological chaos is to radically reduce energy consumption. However, the entire global political economy is built on the ever increasing use of energy to generate further capital accumulation by the global financial elite. That means we—that is, humanity—cannot afford the billionaire class.
You can hate or admire the wealth and power accumulated by an Elon Musk, but that is not the point. The existence of that much economic applied as political power concentrated in one person or group actually prevents any public development of a path to mutual survival and healthy lives. Unfortunately, the concentration of power is a direct result of the over-use of energy invested in capital, not in society. We have been told that ‘wealth creation’ is what grows prosperity for all. Well, how has that worked out for us? If unchecked, power breeds power breeds absolute power. Throughout history, the result is some variant of fascism, followed by violence, then societal collapse.
The global political economy of growth is the system we have; it is also a system rapidly approaching collapse. In the simplest terms, a system designed and operated for perpetual growth cannot survive in a finite environment where its ever growing demand for energy and materials is limited—in this case, planet Earth. Barring a turn toward democracy, our future looks grim.
We are already in a state where accelerating disturbances of climate and ecosystems will cause massive population decline due to starvation and likely resource wars. The growing disruption of agricultural production, already weakened by industrial methods that destroy soil, will result in extreme food shortages, forced migration, and consequent chaos. The norm is no longer normal.
The Necessity of Low Energy Consumption
For as long as I have been researching and writing about the growing global crises, it has seemed imperative that instead of looking for new ‘renewable’ sources of ever growing energy consumption, we should simply conserve energy in any of many ways. But a lot of other ideas were being promoted. Solar and wind generation would replace coal and natural gas. Electric cars would replace the combustion engine. But it wasn’t that simple.
Solar and wind power added to total energy supply, encouraging more consumption. Electric cars, which combined with clean electricity generation, made sense. But at least in the near term, along with the charging infrastructure, did not lower total pollution, especially considering the extraction of rare earth minerals and its ecological destruction and societal disruption where the mining occurs.
For the decades of public discourse on carbon emissions control and more energy efficient products, the idea of energy conservation has hardly been mentioned, and never taken seriously. It is all about finding ways to continue our profligate consumer lifestyles with more energy efficiency. That was and still is an illusion an for the promoters a flat out lie.
Finally, this week I ran across an article on Resilience.org that addresses quite seriously how to form genuine sustainable low energy-use communities, where life is good and deprivation of comforts is not necessary to achieve energy efficiency. In an interview with Nate Hagens on his Great Simplification podcast, Peter Strack, a French researcher and author, discusses the concept of 2000-Watt Societies, in which energy consumption is drastically reduced from that typical of industrialized nations, while maintaining a comfortable life for people and communities. The U.S. consumes an average of 10,000 watts per capita; the European nations consume slightly less.
Living Well: Less is More When It’s Better
The deep assumption underlying the culture of Industrial Civilization is that the good life results from unbounded consumption of industrial products. And while many products make life easier, fun, and more comfortable, there is a downside. I remember reading an article in the Scientific American in the 1960s that reported on some of the social behavioral consequences of owning a range of products. What struck me then was that the article focused on time spent maintaining, repairing, and money spent replacing all those ‘leisure’ gadgets and increasingly complex techno-toys.
In reviewing a number of products from washing machines to power boats, the article concluded that time saved in both work and time spent at play by owning these products was less than the time needed to maintain and fix them. I don’t know of any recent studies of that kind, but I do know that the more ‘stuff’ you have and use, the more time or money you must spend to maintain that stuff in working order. That is why, I would suggest, so many garages are filled with unused stuff instead of having cars parked in them; the spill-over goes to commercial storage units.
Life is sustained through work, whether it involves hunting and gathering what is needed for daily survival, or taking the subway to work on corporate finance. In this life of ‘modernity,’ we tend to work at some job that is far removed from our everyday lives, except for the salary or profit that connects the two. What we might call “working in the world” is intellectually and emotionally unconnected from the rest of our lives—if there is a significant ‘rest of our lives.’
It seems to me that in the New Great Transformation that is inevitable in some way at the end of the industrial age, the smart choice is to recognize the failure of consumerism to produce the good life, and to explore what is really important for living in this world. that means re-integrating our lives with the natural world of which we are currently alienated members.
The richness of ecological communities is a possible outcome of making smart decisions in this historical moment. The alternative strategy of ‘business as usual’ will be a catastrophic collective disaster. The most likely future will fall somewhere in between, in other words, too little too late. But in either case, low energy production and use will replace the profligate present high-energy global political economy, which is doomed to collapse if we don’t make radical changes now. The good life, if we can attain it, will result from creating ecological communities integrated with our local-regional habitats an will not be based on a global political economy dominated by billionaires—who we simply cannot afford so sustain any longer.
Robert MacNeil Christie, Author 