Steven Kotler, Contributor
I cover the far frontiers of science, technology and culture.
Stan Cox is a lot of things. At the Kansas-based Land Institute, he’s a senior scientist and plant breeder, working on perennial sorgh
Steven Kotler, Contributor
I cover the far frontiers of science, technology and culture.
Stan Cox is a lot of things. At the Kansas-based Land Institute, he’s a senior scientist and plant breeder, working on perennial sorghum (tangentially, if you don’t know anything about the Land Institute’s efforts to turn annual crops into perennials—like Cox’s perennial sorghum—you’re missing out on one of the coolest stories in agro-ecology, check out this video). As an author, Cox is something of an old-school muck-raking journalist with some new school flavor, combining hard-nosed investigative journalism with an equally rational future forward idealism.
In 2012, Cox penned Losing Our Cool, which is the history of the world’s energy and climate crisis tucked inside the history of air-conditioning (check out an NY Times review here).
This week, Cox’s latest foray, Any Way You Slice It: The Past, Present and Future of Rationing, hits the stands. The big idea here is incredible simple and horribly controversial.
For starters, Cox points out what a lot of people have been pointing out: that the world is facing an incredibly wide and serious array of threats, that our current production and consumption practices are unsustainable, and that it’s time we start considering some novel solutions.
Here’s how he puts it (from the book’s intro):
The spiral of production and consumption that built today’s world cannot spin upward forever. It may begin winding down because some combination of fuels, ores, building materials, soils, water, or food be- comes depleted. It could wind down because the atmosphere-, land-, and water-based ecosystems that provide both tangible necessities and myriad unseen benefits become degraded. or maybe we ourselves will attempt to restrain the growth spiral by preemptively limiting resource consumption and curbing climatic and ecological disruption. In the process, societies will face a vexing two-part puzzle: How can we reduce the burden we place on the Earth’s ecological and mineral resources while at the same time ensuring that everyone can consume enough resources to maintain a good quality of life?
Now, here’s the controversial part: Cox thinks rationing is a reasonable solution.
Now, certainly, we already have price-based rationing in the form of the market but relying on it to manage what’s coming, as Al Jazeera recently explained, will only lead to disaster:
A little math shows that if we have a decent chance holding the rise in the Earth’s average atmospheric temperature to less than two degrees Celsius – a margin beyond which lies catastrophe – we will have to leave two-thirds to four-fifths of the world’s current fossil-fuel reserves in the ground, at least beyond 2050.
But if we continue to allow prices alone to ration fuels, the bulk of that ancient carbon will, inevitably, find its way to the surface and into the atmosphere as rapidly as possible. And if we persist our all-out assault on “unconventional” fuels like tar-sand oil and shale gas, augmenting our headlong exploitation of conventional reserves, we’ll not only cook the Earth even faster, but also do irreparable damage to landscapes, water supplies and ecosystems, all with little chance of actually achieving a “golden age” of energy. Cheap fossil fuels are also undermining efforts to develop and adopt renewable energy.
Cox, meanwhile, believes there’s a better way to ration— a way we can all learn to agree upon and benefit from:
If we do make a serious effort to corral the national and world economies within ecologically supportable boundaries, the method we choose for divvying up the resources that humanity can afford to consume must be a method we can all live with. In fact—considering the many tragic consequences of rationing by ability to pay in a world with such enormous imbalances of economic power—we might even find that we can devise ways of sharing scarce resources that produce a happier, better-fed, healthier, more comfort- able, and more secure world than the one we inhabit today. but such methods cannot be expected to pop up spontaneously. that is why it is important to examine how nonprice rationing works, on paper and in the real world, and to find out if it will be possible to paint our society out of its corner.
For sure, on a certain level, Cox’s argument seems the opposite of the future is better than you think platform laid out by Peter Diamandis and myself in Abundance, but not entirely.
For starters, there’s total agreement about the level of the environmental and ecological crisis we’re now facing, and that coordinated global action is needed sooner and not later.
Sure, that’s about where similarities almost end