Trying to stop pulling the blanket
April 3rd, 2008Warning: I could not resist a little doom and gloom.
When we are burning fossil fuels, we only see the environmental impact. There is supposed to be a Kyoto quota, and when we consume more, we feel some sort of hypothetical environmental guilt regarding global warming. The concept of future generations is very abstract, and very uncertain, and it does not make for easy arbitrations in everyday’s life.
Digression on market, non-renewables and future generations
As a side-note, just note that market price is fixed just with today’s supply-demand balance. Future generations cannot stake claims on today’s market, while today’s sales will deprive them of their share. Imagine a group of ten friends camping together in the wilderness, with so much tea for breakfast. Four early-risers sit down for breakfast at sunrise, and drink as much tea as they wish. Four others wake up later, find that there is only tea left for three. Two of them agree to drink just half a mug each in exchange of cookies from the other two. The two late-risers get nothing. Had we placed all ten together with the global tea and cookie problem, the share would have been quite different.
For non-renewables, day-to-day supply-demand market rules are a total nonsense.
An unfair negotiation
But let’s not consider future generations. Let’s just focus on today’s market. What does the price of fuel reflect? It reflects the market and the law of supply and demand of today. The more people want fuel now, the higher the price will get.
I want fuel. Fuel price rises. I can afford it. I pay my fuel. Why should I feel guilty of burning it? Because a sky-high price is just a way of saying that somebody else forsook their expected share of today’s fuel supply. It would be OK if it were my retired neighbor in the same affluent neighborhood who said: “OK, you need to drive to work, I will stay at home instead of going fishing, so you can have my share of today’s gas”. But it is not like this. The negotiation power on a market is money, not importance. Therefore, the final share will not reflect an arbitration in terms of what’s more important to humans considered equals (e.g. trading comfort uses for vital ones), and the rich will always get more of the share, however futile their intentions.
Economic theory says that the rich will pay more, therefore get poorer, while the poor save money by not buying the stuff, therefore things even-out in the end. This is only true if the rich do not get richer with what they get to do with the stuff. And if the poor do not starve before that. Because in the meantime, rising gas prices are also pushing food prices upwards.
In a world of scarce resources in which the power scales are already all the way to our side, something has to break somewhere if we want more for us. Whenever I drive my car for a week-end excursion, whenever I turn heating on, whenever I eat a juicy steak, I can only do this because someone else forsook their share of today’s driving to work, their share of today’s stove, their share of today’s food.
My macabre illustration
Imagine yourself and a small child fighting over a blanket while camping out in a blizzard. The colder it gets, the harder you have to pull to keep warm and cosy. You have more strength, therefore you get more of the blanket, although you do not need it as much as the kid does. At some point, the child is too weak and lets go of the blanket altogether. This is called price elasticity in an unfair market.
Depressing, yes, but someone needs to say it. So glad you’re around to do so, and I absolutely love your blanket and young child analogy. No other word can describe it except “perfect.” Thank you, and I hope you get hundreds of thousands of readers to this post. I’ll help out with about twenty by linking to my blog in my next post (and I’ll also link to this post when I start my ecojustice challenge later this month, if you don’t mind).
Please do. Meanwhile, I will be preparing more joyful articles on what we can do about it. Because I am convinced there is a brand new life ahead of ‘happy sobriety’ (as eco-pioneer Pierre Rabhi calls it).
Hello. I found you through Emily Barton’s recent post. Thank you so much for the care you took in laying this out…and especially for the blanket analogy. Very few of us would deprive a child of warmth to serve ourselves…yet this is exactly what we do everyday that we don’t get our energy consumption under control. I applaud your conviction. I hope you get a lot of traffic on this post. Thanks!
I am not so keen on having a lot of traffic here, but if someone wants to take the post and shout it out somewhere populous, they are welcome.
As always, great analogy. Especially with the news of the food riots in Haiti this past few days. You know my thoughts on trying to live green from other comments I’ve made to your blogs, so I won’t repeat them here. Just wanted to say I dropped in, and as always, I try to live as lightly on the earth as I can; the native american philosophy was to live so lightly on the earth that you left no trace as you passed through. And, for the future generations, aboriginal elders say what we do affects the next seven generations. If only we could get this concept out there!! or have people care that what they do, does matter.
The concepts are changing fast, though. If someone had been hibernating these past five years and woke up now, they would probably be really suprised at how ‘green’ everything has become (at least in our speech). Now we need to turn words and intentions into real actions.
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