Scheer Solar Economy Renewable Energy for a Sustainable Global Future (Earthscan, 2005)

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any case terminally sclerotic. There is some truth in this, as today’s politicians seem to have no stomach for decisions that run counter to established business interests. Never before has political failure been so comfortable. This, too, we owe to the market – for now.

Political initiatives can and must drive and accelerate the replacement of fossil resources. Waiting for reserves to be exhausted is not an option. Their primary task must be to end privileged consumption of fossil fuels – which means abolishing direct and indirect subsidies and absurd tax exemptions – and to blaze the trail for renewable resources. If renewables can achieve rapid market penetration and revolutionize energy consumption, then there is hope for the world even in the declining years of the Industrial Revolution.

History tells us that the Industrial Revolution did not take place everywhere at the same time or even to the same extent, and that it was anything but harmonious. It was not the result of any political plan; it took off because at the time, the new technologies offered by far the best use of resources and thus the greatest potential for economic development. For this reason, it became the pre-eminent model for economic development. But the number of losers is growing exponentially as the disastrous environmental and social consequences become ever more acute, and greater numbers of the former winners now figure among the losers.

Whether the world can make the transition from fossil and nuclear energy to renewable energy in time will ultimately determine the historical status of the Industrial Revolution: a new era of opportunity, or the first step on the road to doom. Idealism alone will not bring about a solar technological revolution in energy supplies. We must recognize and exploit the economic potential of solar resources, and have no truck with the unscrupulous motives of nuclear and fossil energy companies. The road to the solar global economy is like a stream that takes a straight or winding course depending on the topographical hurdles to be overcome, flowing faster or slower depending on the size and speed of its tributaries, and finally swelling to a river with the power to reshape the landscape that surrounds it.

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The first priority of every society must be to secure essential supplies of water, energy, raw materials and food. This truth is only overlooked in societies (and in the scientific community) where easy access to necessary resources has for a long time been a matter of course. This era of plenty is coming to an end. If a source of vital supplies dries up or becomes polluted, then people are forced to move to a new source of supplies or make a concerted effort to find a replacement. For this reason alone, merely moving from a recently exhausted source of supplies to another on the edge of exhaustion can only provide a temporary respite. The seemingly boundless capacity of the global market still leads people to rely on switching at will from one fossil fuel to another, although the limits to global supplies of these resources are clear to see. Companies are now beginning to see a major business opportunity in the area of water supplies, precisely because many regions are already feeling the pinch or can at least see the limits to their supplies. In view of the disastrous practices of the expanding agribusiness industry, anyone who relies on a boundless global market for food supplies is clearly living in cloud-cuckoo-land. The widespread belief that global transport capacities mean that dependence on anonymous suppliers for the basic needs of society is no longer a problem just goes to show how thoroughly the world has been led up the garden path. Whether they choose to see it or not, societies everywhere must focus their efforts on the use of environmentally sustainable and inexhaustible resources – and in particular on those that require the least effort to extract while offering the greatest economic benefit. The laws of economics compel us to seek lower real costs and hence to return to supplying humanity’s essential needs from primarily local sources.

It is in the area of energy supplies that humanity has moved furthest from the natural world that sustains us, and it is thus in this area that past errors will be the most difficult to rectify. Hence our top priority must be a realignment towards renewable energy. In agriculture, it is only in recent decades, albeit at an accelerating rate, that ever-greater swathes of humanity have become estranged from local supplies. This has become the second crucial issue that we face, as sustainable long-term food

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supplies come under increasing threat. Once fossil and nuclear have been replaced with renewable energy, and regional agriculture has undergone its crucially necessary revitalization, a broad shift towards renewable resources will also follow.

In a solar global economy, water supplies will be secure in the long term; farmand woodland will be managed sustainably; the essential needs of humanity for energy and raw materials will be met from inexhaustible sources; and energy will be supplied almost exclusively – and food and raw materials to a far greater extent than hitherto – from regional sources. The solar global economy is the economically and environmentally superior model, and it is the world’s greatest social and cultural opportunity.

It is the task of the modern, environmentally conscious age to force this transition to a solar global economy, thereby overcoming the doomed fossil industrial age that has not only closed its eyes to the life-and-death choices that confront it, but utterly denies that such choices exist. The US philosopher Arran Gare writes in his book Postmodernism and the Environmental Crisis that disorientation ‘has been made a virtue, and the absence of fixed reference points is celebrated.’1 He portrays a generation mistrustful of the wider picture and of large-scale solutions. Such crises of identity and the loss of confidence in the future of society have always made an appearance when the existing social model has lost its credibility. But that is no excuse to abandon all convincing models.

How can we believe that there can be no more grand designs, no convictions and no more strength at a point when the global environmental crisis threatens to bring megacatastrophes of untold scale? Such ideas speak of intellectual and moral poverty. Why is it that even social democratic parties, which owe their origins to a faith in human progress, and even green parties are showing an unmistakable preference for other topics than environmental planning for the future? Why does the modern age so lack courage and conviction? Why is this capitulation celebrated as ‘facing up to reality’, and how is it possible for cloud-cuckoo delusions to pass themselves off as neorealism without being laughed out of court? Disorientation and the lack of a moral compass are the symptoms of an age in

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which the multitudes who are embedded within the current system have utterly lost the power to imagine an alternative. That goes particularly for the many people who have recently had their illusions shattered by the failure of truly unrealistic utopian ideals, ideals to which they clung by censoring out unwanted truths. We are left with people who speak vaguely of renewal, but whose real aim is to preserve the comforts that the present still affords, at least for themselves, all in the knowledge and acceptance that that is something that everdecreasing numbers of people can aspire to.

Forwards – towards the primary economy

Bringing about the vitally necessary displacement of fossil by renewable energy and resources will open up a future that gives a new impetus to the primary productive economy. No longer the economic leftovers, agriculture and forestry will become the new and lasting motors of the economy as a whole; not picturepostcard nostalgia, but modern, forward-looking enterprise; not a declining industry, but a major source of new employment.

The industrial and, to an even greater extent, the postindustrial age saw the classical primary sector of the national economy – most notably agriculture – being marginalized as the secondary manufacturing and tertiary service sectors expanded. Employment statistics showing the ever-declining proportion of the workforce employed in the agriculture and forestry sector can, however, lead to erroneous analyses and correspondingly erroneous conclusions. The current primary sector actually employs considerably more workers than the statistics would suggest. This includes all those employed in industries further up or down the agricultural supply chain, who would formerly have been directly employed by agricultural enterprises: in the production of fertilizers and pesticides, seeds and animal feeds, in energy supply and in marketing. Then there is employment in shipping agricultural inputs and products, food processing and the manufacture of agricultural machinery. None of these occupations find their way into statistics on the agricultural sector, although without it none of them would exist.

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The received wisdom of the industrial and post-industrial modern age is that this development is irreversible. This view, common as it is, demonstrates both prejudice and a lack of imagination. If a country has to import technological products or services on a large scale, nobody would dream of concluding that the industries concerned have no future. The response is rather to attempt to re-establish them on domestic soil. Yet when agricultural production moves abroad, it is thought to be gone for good. Even dire news of global environmental trends cannot shake these negative attitudes to agriculture, although the obvious and swift consequence may be that the global trade in agricultural produce is no guarantee of stable food supplies.

If all those who would naively place all economic activity in the hands of the global market only understood the immutable laws of nature that override all ideology and dogma, then they could not fail to see that, while technology can be globalized, in the long term, resource supplies cannot. Manufacturing plant and services that do not require direct personal contact can be expanded and relocated almost at will. Croplands and other natural resources cannot be so easily moved. Agricultural productivity is not simply a function of education, efficient organization of labour and optimal use of machinery. It also depends heavily on the invariables of the local geographical and climatic conditions. This is the crucial difference between the primary and all other sectors, which the undifferentiated ideology of the global market simply ignores. If the current state of affairs continues, innumerable countries risk losing their agricultural sector as global production concentrates on the most geographically and climatically favourable arable land, the fertility of which will then be lost all the more quickly to overproduction.

The assumption that agriculture must develop business structures equipped to meet global market conditions, following existing developmental trends, is also criminally negligent in its acceptance of unhealthy consequences for society, especially in the countries of the developing world. If the greater part of the world’s 600 million farmers and their families, 3 billion people in total, were to make their way to

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the cities, leaving the land to be worked by agrifactories producing ever fewer products, the economic and cultural consequences would be incalculable. This model of economic development is jeopardizing our future. Much is made of the knowledge economy as a strategy for dealing with the individual and social challenges to come. What most people fail to realize, however, is that we will be in no position to face these challenges if the existing practical knowledge of land management and plant husbandry of hundreds of millions of farmers were to vanish along with their livelihoods.

The future of society can no longer be secured if the economy is not structured around primary production. Reintegrating primary production back into the national and regional economy is of paramount importance. It will become indispensable as renewables begin to replace fossil resources. Economic realignment towards renewable resources and the biotechnology that drives their use will give further impetus to this process. As agriculture transforms itself into an integrated food, energy and resources business, it will start to grow rather than continue to shrink.

The real business opportunity for the agricultural sector lies in this cross-sectoral synergy. This, together with the concomitant ability to produce fertilizers and pest deterrents on site, is what will liberate farming from its suppliers, the chemicals and energy industries. It will also bring jobs back out into the countryside, partly with new roles, but also with wholly new opportunities. The person specification for a farmer capable of dealing with the whole spectrum of plant life is as demanding as any: the adaptability to learn the land, climate and nutrient requirements of a variety of plants; and a solid grounding in biology and biochemistry, and in the latest harvesting technology. In a solar global economy there will be a need for more independent farmers and more farm enterprises; agriculture will once again offer secure jobs to many more people. Agriculture will also deliver a huge number of less demanding jobs, of the kind that the service economy is crying out for. But as long as driving a JCB in an open-cast lignite mine, assembly-line work or the new domestic service jobs are seen as more valuable than the comparatively demand-

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ing and varied work of sowing seed, operating harvesting machinery, managing woodland or operating desiccation or biogas plants, the modern world with its cultural blinkers will fail to see this future.

This model of a rediscovered primary productive economy has several important implications, which show the agricultural trends of recent decades, along with agricultural policy and the current direction of the biotech industry, to be thoroughly short-sighted:

•There must be an immediate stop to the continued haemorrhage in the farming industry. Otherwise we will have to painfully rebuild in the near future what is now carelessly being sacrificed to the market. That is not an argument for maintaining the current subsidies indefinitely. Farming could be more effectively supported with help to organize the independent or communal production of energy and nutrients and to establish structures for regional direct marketing, such that through reduced costs and greater profitability farmers can once again support themselves. Subsidies should come with a ‘sunset clause’, and be redirected to help finance the installation of bio-energy processing plant and the conversion of agricultural machinery to run on bio-fuels. There must be support for regional marketing cooperatives for food, energy and solar resources.

•Seed supplies must be secure and freely accessible. No country will be able to manage without national seed banks providing immediate and universal access to the whole variety of plants likely to be demanded in future. Plant seed is a cultural treasure-chest that belongs to the nation, and seed stores from which seed can be purchased must be an integral part of the public infrastructure of the agriculture of the future, thus providing agricultural businesses with as level a playing field as possible.

If these opportunities are not to be squandered before they can be properly seized, there must be political action to call a halt to the recent growing wave of patents on genes and gene sequences. The natural fruits of evolution must remain in the

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public domain, freely available to all farmers. At most, only processing techniques should be patentable. It is in the vital interest of every country to put a stop to the patenting of genes, not just for reasons of human and bio-ethics, but also for the future development of the national economy. There must be an end to this most heinous case of dispossession in history, the dispossession of society by private companies. Only a ban on gene patents can prevent the rich potential of biological resources coming under the control of a few global firms before that potential has been realized on a significant scale. Ceding control of biological resources to biotech companies accords them a level of global power that all the global and colonial empires in history cannot rival. It is essential that no effort be spared to break this power if there is to be a renaissance of the primary productive economy.

Work and the solar economy

In his book Die energetischen Grundlagen der Kulturwissenschaften

(The Energy Basis of the Humanities), published at the beginning of the 20th century, the winner of the Nobel Prize for chemistry and expert in the sociology of energy systems, Wilhelm Ostwald, characterized energy as ‘everything that comes from or can be converted back into work’.2 This understanding of energy covers three different types of work: human labour, native energy and the work done by mechanical devices and machinery. The question of the ‘end of work’3 must therefore also be seen in the context of energy and resource structures. The transition to solar resources will have effects on the future of work as a social institution over and above the new jobs it creates.

In the industrialized countries, machines have replaced human labour. For a long time workers saw no benefits from this, as the technology was primarily used to increase productivity, not to make the remaining jobs easier for people to do. The burden on workers was only ever lightened as the result of action by politicians or trade unions. The future will be no different: technology may make improvements in living standards possible, but this is not guaranteed to happen when

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others have other aims in mind. New computer and information technologies make it possible as never before for people to let motors and machinery do the work for them; mental and technical skills are replacing physical skills faster and more comprehensively than ever before.

This brings a new edge to the dispute over how the product of labour should be distributed across society so that everybody can make a living for themselves. If everybody has a sufficiently well-paid job, then the product of labour is distributed through employment incomes – with all the squabbling over fair and adequate pay that inevitably ensues. If there is not enough work to go around or growing numbers of people are excluded from the direct redistribution of income, then income must be redistributed across society through shorter working weeks and/or state minimum income guarantees. This is the new big issue for social policy. At the same time, there is the increasingly interesting question of how people spend their time outside work. Mathias Greffrath talks of a ‘three-shift society’, in which people spend a third of their time in paid work, a third in unpaid voluntary activities and a third on their own needs.4 Johano Strasser emphasizes the indisputable need for a redistribution of work in his book Geht der Arbeitsgesellschaft die Arbeit aus? (When the Working Society Runs Out of Work).5

As long as this redistribution can be only imperfectly realized, the question of how people with no income from paid work can make a living will be the key issue facing any community. In theory, the output from energy and technology is so great that ever-decreasing numbers of workers are required. But the question that becomes more urgent by the day is how political institutions can siphon off the necessary income from highly productive firms, which are increasingly organized on a transnational basis and which effectively operate beyond the borders of all national governments. It is sheer fantasy to suppose that international political institutions could impose taxes on excess profits to redistribute on an individual basis. This makes it all the more necessary to take a close look at the energy component of work.

Industrial society has forgotten that the sun is the greatest and most versatile source of energy available to life on Earth,

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and that the power of the sun can be used to save human labour. This is equally true of agriculture and forestry. Here, too, human labour has been replaced by machinery and fossil energy. If the work done by fossil energy were to be done by the sun, then agriculture would reach the quintessence of its actual economic potential. The same can be said of work in nonagricultural sectors. The Industrial Revolution was reduced to replacing human with mechanical labour while also increasing the work done by fossil energy. Replacing fossil fuel work with solar technology will radically reshape the work society. With the sun doing the work formerly performed by fossil fuels, the total cost of work to society is reduced to the cost of human labour and technology.

Leveraging the sun will, as has been described, result in a more equitable distribution of jobs across the regions. The concomitant regionalization of the economy will make it easier for governments to use taxes to finance public services. Individual living costs will be permanently lowered, thereby making it easier to find a solution to the big question of how to provide everybody with the opportunity to live a dignified life free of destitution, as the cost of state income guarantees falls. Renewable energy helps us to escape the environmental catastrophes of the fossil industrial age, and brings with it lower energy costs. At the same time, it also reduces the risk of damage to human health – the costs of which are borne not by the perpetrators but by society as a whole – and thereby reduces the cost of maintaining a health service. Without the shift to renewable energy, disaster prevention and disaster relief will consume evergreater proportions of public and private funds, until increasingly frequent catastrophes overload our capacity to cope, and social and civil order can no longer be maintained by even the best-equipped security forces. Society also foots the bill for the current bout of spending on military equipment to ensure the security of the remaining fossil fuel reserves, and the public is led to believe that this is in their interest.

Even if the proportion of work done by people continues to fall in comparison to the proportion done by machines and by the sun, society will face this issue from a wholly different starting point than today. There will be less potential for