Shelf Life (2009)

Abstract

F or a long time to come, economists, pundits, and politi- cians will be wondering what to do about the largest and deepest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s and how it happened, yet again. Overlooked is the fact that we are simultaneously running two intertwined defcits with very different time scales, dynamics, and politics. The frst defcit is short-term and has to do with money, credit, and how we create and account for wealth, which is to say a matter of economics. However diffcult, it is probably repairable in a matter of a few years, give or take, most likely in the time-honored fashion of stimulating even more consumer spending and causing greater environmental disorder. The second is an ecological defcit. It is permanent, in signifcant ways unrepairable, and potentially fatal to civilization. The economy, as Herman Daly has pointed out for decades, is a subsystem of the biosphere, not the other way around. Accordingly, there are short-term solutions to the frst defcit that might work for a while, but they will not restore longer-term ecological solvency and will likely make it worse. Ecological debt cannot be remedied so easily, and in the case of climate destabilization, no matter what we do, it is a steadily—perhaps rapidly—worsening condition with which humankind will have to contend for a long time to come. University of Chicago geophysicist David Archer puts it this way: