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blue bits. red rocks.
Tuesday 30 June 2009

The challenge of the 21st Century is how to create a global economy of low energy (or at least renewable energy) consumption with few people engaged in long hours of hard physical labor. The fact that 5% of the world consumes 22% of world energy is not an indictment of American consumerism (though surely consumerism is present.) It is a consequence of having discovered how to substitute energy and technology for back-breaking human labor so the masses can be free to flourish in ways unimaginable prior to our era. The next step in economic evolution is figuring out how to extend this development to the rest of the world while transforming our energy sources. Unfortunately, there are anti-growth activists at work who wish to block this emergence. They have decided the world economy has grown large enough. With discredited Matlhusian logic they project current relationships of production and consumption forward into the future and prophecy global disaster. “Sustainable” comes to mean projecting current realities into the future as a justification for blocking growth in the present when instead sustainable is a moving target directly related to the technologies and economies we have available to us at any given moment. Kruse Kronicle

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