Ted Trainer
Energy Bulletin
The dominant view, almost never questioned, is that major global problems can be solved within and by the kind of society we have now, i.e., one providing high material living standards and increasing wealth, and driven by market forces and economic growth. Many believe the changes required will have to be big but hardly anyone seems to think that the kind of society we have built over several hundred years needs to be fundamentally reconsidered, let alone abandoned.
People who work in technical fields tend to be among those most firmly adhering to this view, and the most enthusiastic of all seem to be those involved in renewable energy. There are many highly impressive reports, detailed and in glossy format, written by a cast of thousands of heavy-weight academics “proving” that we could run the world on renewables.
I want to sketch the reasons why I believe that this dominant, never questioned conventional view is quite mistaken. For more than fifty years there has been gradually accumulating an overwhelming case that the global predicament is a) far too deep to be remedied without abandoning the fundamental structures, systems, world views and values of consumer-capitalist society, b) is being generated by those foundational structures and commitments, and therefore c) can only be solved by transition to a very different kind of society in which we do not have high “living standards”, globalisation, a central role for market systems, or any economic growth at all, and indeed in which GDP per capita must be cut to a small fraction of current levels.
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