Strong, passionately held opinions have frequently divided Americans and the politicians that represent them. The divisions have been cut by fundamental, yes-or-no questions:
should some humans be allowed to hold others as slaves?
Can states secede from the Union?
Should money be coined in silver, easing the deflation that benefits banks and lenders and hurts farmers and borrowers?
Is society responsible for establishing a minimum standard of living for its members, or should it be every man for himself?
Will capital and corporations be brought under social control, or should there be free markets and less regulation?
What’s it to be, less government or more?
These lines of cleavage don’t admit of much compromise, and they’ve propelled Americans into sharp, sometimes violent division more than once in the history of the Republic.
There is now a new line of cleavage emerging, although only one side of the division seems to have recognized and capitalized on the change.
The question that divides the American public today cuts as deeply as did the issues of slavery, states’ rights, free silver, and the New Deal in the past: is the planet infinite or not?
The answer seems obvious—and yet nationally, the Infinite Planet Party scored a major victory at the polls.
They won because the election wasn’t framed as a referendum on physical reality, but as a report on emotional states: do you like where the country is headed? Chris Matthews, of MSNBC, got it right when he said "Americans are voting based on symptoms, not diagnosis." The symptoms are those of an infinite-planet system colliding with the reality of a finite planet.
The financial crisis? Debt is a claim on future production of wealth—production that has a physical element. You can’t have near-infinite growth of debt in a physically finite system without having the spasm-and-collapse of major debt repudiation every few years.
Security and immigration issues? You can’t take 60% of the world’s resource stream to serve less than 10% of its population without engendering some resentment, or attracting immigration, legal and otherwise, as people elsewhere in the world recognize a good deal when they see it.
Big government? If you’ve got big corporations cashing out the life-support systems of a finite planet and turning them into consumer products (and fat bonuses), you’re going to need big government if you want to set any kind of limits to that behavior at all. On an infinite planet? No need.
Reduced taxes? Government is a kind of overhead, and it’s easy to finance overhead when your income stream begins with oil, which was returning 100:1 in the early part of the century. (The energy of one barrel of oil invested in exploration and extraction yielded 100 in return.) But oil is a finite resource, and that rate of return has declined dramatically. When oil is done, we’re going to have to get used to financing all our social overhead on the return rate provided by renewable sources of energy—typically 14:1 to 18:1, compared to oil, today, at 19:1 (and falling). To get the cost of overhead back to the proportion it took in 1920, we’d have to cut government spending by 80%--small government, indeed.
Or consider the weather news from the summer of 2010: unprecedented heat in Russia, a thousand-year monsoon in Pakistan, continuing drought in Australia and Niger and Sudan and the American Southwest. Although no particular weather event can be ascribed to man-made climate change with any certainty, the unusual weather is just what scientists have said we would see as the planet’s climate changes. These events have another common thread: they, and the Deepwater Horizon blowout in the Gulf, warn us that our economy is diminishing the ability of the planet to feed us. The monsoon floods drowned a national granary, taking it off-line for a year, maybe two, maybe three. One-quarter of the annual grain crop was scorched to death in the Russian summer. No protein was harvested by the idled shrimpers and fishermen of the Gulf Coast, and stocks of seafood there may take years to rebound. The summer brought "food insecurity" to an additional twenty million people in Africa. The news from the summer of 2010 was this: Our globalized economy is running into limits, physical limits that we can do little to change.
Physics tells us that there are only two ways an economy can grow. It can take up a larger stream of resources—matter and energy-- from the planet, or it can achieve efficiencies in the use of a constant stream. Taking up an ever-larger stream of resources is impossible on a finite planet, and yet we remain dedicated to doing this—even when, as now, doing so decreases our overall standard of well-being. In contrast, taking a steady, constant flow of uptake is possible—and possible forever, if it’s sized to fall under what the planet can sustainably give to us in the form of resources and take from us in the form of waste. With technological advances, that steady stream can lead to a constantly rising material standard of living. Because a sustainable flow preserves ecosystems and their services, while the infinite growth approach does not, the sustainable flow actually produces a higher standard of living.
And there you have the emerging cleavage in America: Sustainable Society versus Infinite Planet Politics.
Clearly, on the national scene Republicans are the Infinite Planet Party. An infinite planet has, by definition, an infinite capacity to absorb all of our effluents, green house gases included. Forty five of the 97 Republican freshmen in the House of Representatives are climate change deniers, joining the 85 already there. (Most of the rest lay low on the issue; only four House Republicans have said the phenomenon is real and the science sturdy.) One of the best ways to line up a healthy and efficient market economy with reality is to get prices to tell the ecological truth. The truth: cranking pollution into the atmosphere imposes costs on all of us, a cost that ought to be reflected in prices of the things that are made as the pollution is emitted. Republicans supposedly want market-based solutions, yet 86% of the incoming Republican Class of 2010 oppose increased taxes on polluting industries. Their position makes sense only on an infinite planet.
Majority opinion doesn’t always get physical reality right (just ask Galileo, or Darwin, or climate scientist James Hansen). But had the Democrats framed the election as a referendum on Infinite Planet Theory, they’d have given Americans an opportunity to see a clearer diagnosis. And who knows? They might have succeeded in getting a mandate to bring America and its economy a little closer to reality.