• Inequality -- We all know, or should know, the plutocratic road we have been trodding over the last 40 years.  As I have noted ad nauseum on this blog, the benefits of spectacular economic growth in America have been funneling upwards since the mid-70s, leaving us with Gilded Age wealth and power disparities.  The roots of the current economic collapse are a direct result of this concentration of wealth.  Regular families, even with extra breadwinners, longer commutes, extended working hours, and improved productivity, have seen their economic conditions stagnate and worsen.  There is simply no slack or leeway in the lives of most folks.  The fruits of their labor have been captured by the corporate and banking elites, who then chop, bundle, and leverage this value into the hallucinated economy of  "high finance."  What's to keep a growing Green Economy from following this same profoundly unbalanced distributive pattern?  What good will it do us to have 5 million new green collar jobs if they all end up having downwardly-pressured wages and upwardly-funneled profits? Clearly, any Green New Deal would have to have severe conditions on loaned or granted government money, rules regardinging ownership structure, living wages, and profit distribution.  Is it feasible that the federal government would demand worker-owned enterprises be a main pillar of public works stimulus spending?  Not really, but we can hope.
• Unemployment and Underemployment -- officially, unemployment stands at 6.1%.  But as many have shown, the official stats have been consistently rejiggered, fudged, and twisted to disguise a steady upward trajectory in joblessness.  More realistic measures, ones that take into account things like long-term discouraged workers, and people who want to work full-time but can only get part-time, put the unemployment figure closer to 10 or 11%.  And if we want to be totally honest, our burgeoning prison population, currently the largest in the world, nudges the real unemployment rate to 13 or 14%.  Labor has essentially become less important as a component of economic growth.  Wide swaths of the American populace have essentially become superfluous.  Jobs they might have occupied have either been eliminated by technology (how many bookkeepers can be replaced with one accounting software package?), shipped overseas, or gobbled up and eliminated by vertically-integrated corporate behemoths.  Are these perennially-redundant people going to be part of the Green Revolution, or will they remain the embarrassing, invisible class we choose to ignore?  Will we admit that American prisons have nothing to do with the moral failings of criminals, and are simply warehouses in which we store the uppitiest of our agitated and restless underclass?  Will we empty out our prisons and train the ex-cons in the green ways of solar panel design and urban renewal via ecological entrepreneurship?  Somehow, I doubt it.  Administration after administration, when confronted with the harsh realities of underemployment and degraded work, have trumpeted job re-training, adult education, and generous "transition assistance" to get people on their feet again.  Where has al that job re-training and such gotten us, in the big picture?  Well, a report from Credit Suisse this week (Dec 9th) predicted that more than 8 million American mortgages will be in foreclosure over the next four years, around 16% of all mortgages.  Enough said.
• The Military -- the US armed forces, as a whole, represents the largest single consumer of oil in the world.  And while a sustained effort to build American energy independence, as politicians and citizens of all stripes now want to do, is a noble and worthy goal, will we be able to take the next step and acknowledge that the military itself should thus be drastically downsized (which would itself create massive layoffs and economic contraction in defense sectors)?  Say we do develop an exciting and self-reliant mix of domestic drilling, clean coal, wind, solar, geothermal, and the like.  The upshot is that we will not have to maintain a huge military presence in oil-rich countries.  So, we will not need the overbloated military budget.  And we can sell off or decommission equipment.  And we can let force sizes dwindle to a leaner, meaner level.  After all, there are not going to be any hybrid or solar-powered bombers or fighter jets any time soon.  So if we develop green energy only to leave the largest single oil-gulper in the world untouched, what's the point?  But who will have the political balls to come out and say, "We're going to shrink the military by two thirds over the next 10 years"?  Who?  Probably nobody.
• Suburbia & Peak Oil -- as we have highlighted in previous posts, and as best described by James Howard Kunstler in his seminal book The Long Emergency, the suburban landscape is flat-out unsustainable, no matter how green its products and supporting passenger vehicles.  We're all familiar with the blight of sprawl, and the continuous sea of gridlock that goes by the name of the Eastern Seaboard.  The schlocky culture of the strip mall is perhaps the most depressing, wasteful phenomenon in the history of human civilization.  All of this was made possible by vast reservoirs of cheap oil.  As Peak Oil sets in with a vengeance, and supplies fall a bit further behind demands year after year, the entire suburban infrastructure will totter and fall.  Even if we hybridized the entire American fleet of vehicles tomorrow, the sheer bulk and stuff of suburban sprawl would remain heavily dependent on oil.  Construction equipment for paving roads, building structures, repairing bridges, and hauling merchandise will be fossil-fuel intensive for a long time to come.  The logistics of this "easy-motoring utopia," as Kunstler calls it, are just too wasteful and spread out to survive the contracting forces now in play.  [One note here: do not let temporarily low oil prices deceive you about the long-term Peak Oil reality.  Oil prices represent spot relations between supply and demand, sprinkled with the vagaries of futures trading.  These prices can fluctuate wildly, as we have seen, due to speculation, regional economic changes in demand, and general investor outlook on future conditions.  None of this changes the brute facts of petro-physics: oil is a finite resource; depletion and demand are outpacing new discoveries and known reserves; oil discoveries peaked in the 1970s; global production appears to have peaked in 2004.  The extended future is certainly on the downward side of Peak Oil.]  
• Overconsumption -- the point above on suburbia dovetails nicely into the general realm of American hyperconsumption. We just use and do too much.  We've all heard the statistic that if everyone lived like Americans, we'd need 250 earths or something like that.  There are several facets to this.  One is psychological.  In an earlier post ("Consumption and the Adolescent Adult," Nov. 25th), I noted how our unnatural living arrangements have essentially arrested our appropriate psychological development (Paul Shepard's idea, not mine, as much as I might wish). Since we do not mature in the social and ecological milieu for which we are evolved, we never incorporate a real sense of a powerful, independent Other in which we are embedded.  The result is a society of adolescent adults: grasping, envious, narcissistic yet empty, forever trying to fill their internal voids by gorging on their surroundings.  Another facet of overconsumption is the capture of household and community transactions by the market.  Everything has become commodified: child care, elder care, medicine, education, entertainment, government.  Many things that used to be done outside the formal economy, by friends, family, and neighbors have been sucked into the gaping maw of the marketplace.  The wallet must be opened for all.  A related aspect of overconsumption is the full employment social form itself.  Since everything is commodified, with the market as final arbiter of value, the overall societal goal is to have as many people working as possible.  We have to have jobs to promote economic growth, so that we can provide for all of the things of life.  There is no time or space to sit back and wonder if the jobs we are creating are actually beneficial to us as citizens, as parents, as lovers, as friends.  Are we creating work that dignifies and honors the human spirit, and that enhances national, international, and ecological community?  Who cares?  There's no time for that sentimental crap.  We're looking at massive layoffs and home foreclosures, so we need money, jobs, and consumption right now!  The whole climate of work, purchase, and marketplace is such that we really have no choice but to overconsume, regardless of its detrimental effects on our psyches, our communities, and our planet. 

I'm sure there are other things to highlight, but you get the point.  We can have the coolest, greenest, hybrid-iest stuff imaginable, but our overall situation will not change unless we move quickly and drastically to confront the systemic faults in our current social form.  A green future may eventually come, but it can't happen unless we deal with the fundamental issues of inequality, injustice, militarism, and overconsumption.  And at bottom, the engine that drives most of our crises is the profoundly unnatural and dysfunctional social form of One Person-One Job/One Family-One Dwelling.  The economic, ecological, and psychological disruptions of this social form ripple through our landscapes, communities, and economies.  We want to pretend that our challenges are external and technical, and can be attacked through quantitative policy prescriptions: more or less regulation, more or less oversight, bailout vs. stimulus -- whatever.  But our real predicament in internal, in the day-to-day ordering of our eating, working, consuming, and living.  Only a new social form will exorcise our demons.

If all this is so, it is only possible to conclude that from our behavior for the last two hundred years that ours is not a human society; that it is a society outside of the human in some terrible sense.  And, in fact, it was one of the earliest insights of Karl Marx that the kind of work provided by capitalism was alienating.  That is, it made us something other than what we are.  It dehumanized us.  And so, in our no-longer-human state, it became perfectly natural for us to destroy nature (which should sound to you just as perverse as the situation really is).  Alienation in work means that instead of knowing something about a lot of things concerned with human fundamentals like food, housing, clothing, and the wise and creative use of our free time, we know one small thing.  One task in an ocean of possible tasks.... We deny what we can plainly see because to acknowledge it would require the fundamental reshaping of our entire way of living, and that is (not unreasonably) frightening for most people.  Nevertheless, our loyalty to capitalism makes us fools.  Worse than that, we know we're being fooled, and yet we lack the ability not to be fooled.  Not for nothing did the philosopher Paul Ricoeur once observe that capitalism is "a failure that cannot be defeated."

                                                                                                            Curtis White, "The Idols of Environmentalism"