Brittle Power- PARTS 1-3 (+Notes) - Natural Capitalism Solutions

Chapter Three: How Systems Fail 27and tax employment, also increased unemployment. This worsened povertyand inequity, which increased alienation and crime. High oil prices and thecollapse of the automobile industry hastened the decay of the urbanNortheast. Priorities in crime control and health care were stalled in part bythe heavy capital demands of building and subsidizing the energy sector. Atthe same time, the energy sector itself—by its extraordinary capital intensityand its noxious emissions—contributed to the unemployment and illness atwhich those social investments were aimed. Energy prices and oil balance-ofpaymentsdeficits helped to drive inflation. Inflation and unemployment fedcivil unrest. The growing vulnerability of the energy system to strikes, sabotage,and protest required greater guarding, surveillance, and erosion of civilliberties, which would in time encourage a drift towards a garrison state.This, coupled with consolidation of oil and uranium cartels and a widespreadfailure to address the energy security needs of developing countries hithardest by oil prices, encouraged international distrust and domestic dissent,feeding further suspicion and repression. On the horizon loomed energy-relatedclimatic shifts that could jeopardize agriculture, especially in theMidwestern breadbasket, and so endanger a hungry globe. The competitiveexport of arms, reactors, and inflation from rich countries to poor countriesmade the world more inequitable, tense, and anarchic. Plans proceeded to create,within a few decades, an annual flow of tens of thousands of bombs’worth of plutonium as an item of commerce within the same internationalcommunity that had never been able to stop the heroin traffic. Nuclear bombcapabilities crept towards the Persian Gulf from several directions.All of this is rather a lot, of course, to blame on underpriced energy. Butthe point of this tracing spree, exploring some possible consequences of a supposedlysimple action, is that the elements of national security must be consideredas an interdependent whole. Their bizarrely intricate connections keep onworking whether we perceive them or not.SurprisesThe United States does not yet have—and may not have for a very longtime if ever—all the information needed to foresee all important consequencesof our actions. This does not mean that we dare not do anything. It doesmean that we need to view any reductionist catalogue of national security concernswith a certain wariness and humility. However thoughtful the catalogue,it cannot capture the most important sources of risk—the higher-order interactionswithin a complex system and the surprises from outside it. Takentogether, four factors—unavoidable ignorance of how some things work, the