To be fair to Hubbert and his followers, I think Hubbert's basic point was precisely about the need for technical change and energy efficiency. "We are not starting from zero." He was quoted in a 1983 article, " We have an enormous amount of existing technical knowledge. It's just a matter of putting it all together. We still have great flexibility but our maneuverability will diminish with time." That's not exactly *ignoring* technical change. It's more like advocating it.
To the extent his followers anticipate misery and conflict, it may have much to do with the hitherto desulatory track record of the market and the state about responding to the need for change. Another point is that the scale and scope of change necessary here is "epochal" not merely adaptive fine tuning. Who's to say whether a couple of world wars and a depression is not too high a price to pay for the transition? People who ignore such details of technical change are not really giving misery and conflict their due. Can you see the devil in the previous sentence? Like Keynes(!), Hubbert talked about the need to move from growth to a steady-state economy. And, by the way, he does mention the need for "stabilization of the world's population." Come to think of it, though, one couldn't have a growing population and a steady-state economy without at least a quantitative immiseration of that pop. could one? Do people actually read anything by Hubbert before they pronounce sentence on him or do they rely entirely on second-hand characterizations and vague impressions? You know, I happen to think Hubbert may be right for reasons that have little to do with proven or probable or as yet undiscovered reserves of petroleum. He may be "right" for all the wrong reasons. Rather than marking some half-way point along the road to depletion, I would see the impasse as arising from the "Contradiction between the foundation of bourgeois production (value as measure) and its development..." "...to the degree that large industry develops, the creation of real wealth comes to depend less on labour time and on the amount of labour employed than on the power of the agencies set in motion during labour time, whose 'powerful effectiveness' is itself in turn out of all proportion to the direct labour time spent on their production, but depends rather on the general state of science and on the progress of technology, or the application of this science to production." In other words, to *realize* the now necessary technical and cultural changes would require abandonment of what Marx called "value as measure" and what Hubbert called "American folk-lore" about the work ethic. "Most employment now is merely pushing paper around. The actual work needed to keep a stable society running is a very small fraction of available manpower." Jim Devine wrote, >I don't think that the validity of the bell curve is that important to >the discussion of Hubbert's peak. His basic point -- or rather, that of >his followers -- is the same as that of David Ricardo & Thomas Malthus: >long-term diminishing returns in the supplies of natural resources leads >to increasing misery and/or conflict. >Of course, as with Ricardo & Malths, that ignores such matters as >technical change (improvements in the efficiency of oil use, etc.) Tom Walker 604 255 4812
