of modern society. Authors should have shown trends in the past that suggest
we face catastrophe and other trends that suggest solutions. Doing so would
encourage students to use evidence from history to reach their own
conclusions. Instead, authors assured us that everything will come out right in
the end, so we need not worry much about where we are going.^38 Their
endorsement of progress was as shallow as General Electric’s, a company that
claims, “Progress is our most important product,” but whose ecological
irresponsibility has repeatedly earned it a place on Fortune’s list of the ten
worst corporate environmental offenders.^39
No longer do I suggest this evenhanded approach. Even though Simon is
right and capitalism is supple, in at least two ways our current crisis is new
and cannot be solved by capitalism alone. First, we face a permanent energy
shortage, only beginning with an oil shortage. Such a shortage leads toward
oligopoly—a “natural” cartel, not a forced cartel such as John D. Rockefeller
achieved with Standard Oil around 1900—and cartels are not good capitalism.
If a handful of companies controlled the manufacture of skis, so they could get
together and charge whatever they wanted, someone might start another
company not bound by their agreement or develop new, cheaper materials for
skis or invent the snowboard—or we the public could stop buying skis. But if a
handful of companies or countries control the oil industry, no new producer
can break in. Moreover, no alternative can easily be developed for petroleum
in transportation.
Second, our use of oil (and all other fossil fuels) has a serious worldwide
impact: global warming. As everyone now knows, except some high school
history textbook authors, this warming melts the polar ice caps, causing sea
levels to rise. Oceans rose one foot in the last century. The most conservative
estimate, embraced by the George W. Bush administration, predicts they will
rise another three feet in this century. Around the world—from Miami to
Venice to much of Bangladesh—hundreds of millions of people live close
enough to sea level that this rise will endanger their lives and occupations. The
resulting dislocation will constitute the biggest crisis mankind has faced since
the beginning of recorded history. And this is the most pleasant estimate. If the
Greenland ice sheet melts, the oceans may rise twenty-three feet. Scientist
James Lovelock in 1970 famously invented the “Gaia hypothesis,” the idea that
the earth acts as a homeostatic system. Recently Lovelock has pointed out that
as the earth’s equilibrium gets disturbed, some disequilibrium processes may