Friday, October 18, 2013

Energy vs. Jobs: Quoting Hazel Hendeson

"...The basic nature of the painful transition involves a necessary shift from economies based on maximizing labor productivity (and thereby continually increasing the capital and energy intensity of their industrial production), which heretofore has been based on non-renewable energy, to economies that must now conserve capital, energy and materials and more fully employ their human resources. This shift will require the development of a newly designed, more efficient production system based on renewable resources and managed for sustained-yield productivity.
      This is a tall order for today's economists acculturated during a brief period of fossil-fuel-based abundence, which provided the slack that allowed massive Keynesian pump priming and demand-stimulation without instant inflation."

Hazel Henderson, 1981, _Politics of the Solar Age_, Anchor Press, NY, :31