RENEWABLE ENERGY AND A NEW ECONOMIC PARADIGM

Scarcity is the the economic premise that we must use limited resources to meet unlimited needs and wants. The reality of scarcity gives us the necessity of supply and demand as resources are — theoretically — spread efficiently throughout the market. Because resources are scarce (meaning finite), we divvy up what we have in an attempt to meet our wants and needs. From this, we derive our system of capitalism in which — ideally — goods are moved throughout the market based on the needs of consumers and the ability of producers to meet those needs.

Other less successful economic systems address the question of scarcity in different manners. For example, a communist or socialist system attempts to address the issue of scarcity by divvying up the resources in a manner it deems fair.

While we have seen that different peoples have experimented with different ways of addressing scarcity with varying levels of success, we haven’t strongly considered a post-scarcity society. What happens to the world when key resources become unlimited?

According to theoretical physcist Michu Kaku, human beings are currently a Type Zero civilization, that is, a civilization whose energy source consists of the materials we find here on Earth (different than the energy that lands on the earth such as sunlight or wind). Kaku puts human beings about 100 years away from becoming a Type I society in which we rely solely on energy that comes to us from the sun and elsewhere to power our society, and according to his estimates, we are just 1000 years away from becoming a Type II society, which means we have learned to actively harness the power of the sun.

Kaku’s predictions are worth considering not just because of the not-so-distant timeline, and humanity’s inevitable switch to newer, cleaner, and more efficient types of energy in the face of global warming and climate change, but also because renewable energy will change our economic paradigm by eliminating the scarcity of important resources.

Energy is the linchpin that makes our entire way of life possible. Just as domestication of animals allowed us to grow more crops, and the discovery of coal and oil spurred global industrialization, so too will the harnessing of sustainable and renewable energy revolutionize how our economy operates. Infinite energy is not yet a reality, but neither is it a distant pipe dream. What happens to the economy when scarcity is no longer the foundation for the system?

Unlimited energy ultimately leads to unlimited water (if for no other reason than we can use infinite energy for desalinization, a process that is very energy inefficient). Unlimited water leads us to unlimited food, and from there the scenarios are both unimaginable and exciting. What happens when we have addressed the economic cornerstones of energy and food, and laid the foundation for an economy in which our most basic and important needs are not scarce, but unlimited?

The inevitability of this scenario ought to give us pause. Whether through wind and sun, nuclear fusion, or some other means, humanity will push past fossil fuels, which not only threaten our species’s livelihood, but are also ultimately incredibly inefficient: the furthest fossil fuels alone will take us is the moon.

I do not (yet) have a vision for the post-scarcity world, but such a world is coming. Unlike Marx, I do not offer an alternative to the woes of capitalism. Perhaps the elimination of scarcity will allow us to pursue other endeavors in a capitalistic manner in which all basic needs are met, and only our ever-evolving wants are subject to the market. Perhaps the system will change completely. Perhaps the boundless potential of unlimited resources will only help us find new ways to destroy ourselves.

Renewable energy is the future of our civilization and our species, and with it will come changes to the way that our economic system works. What the outcome of this economic evolution will look like is ultimately up to us, and how we choose to engage with this new paradigm, but the change is coming, so it would be wise of us to consider what we want a world without scarcity to look like.

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