Kicking the Habits

It looks like The Great Recession is going to be the label attached to this thing we're going through. Since it has to have a label, I guess that one'll work.

But is it something we're going through, or is it here to stay? And is it, maybe in some ways, not a bad thing, but a good thing?

I hate to think there could be anything good about all those people at GM and all the people working for their suppliers getting thrown out onto the pavement, on top of everybody else who's lost jobs. How many of them suddenly find themselves deep in debt and living on unemployment, with the prospect of either welfare or no income down the road a short way?

But make no mistake, we won't deal with the environmental crisis or the danger of an energy famine unless we get a lot poorer than we've been, and stay that way. There's a lot of pain in poverty, but, as David Owen shows in his New Yorker lead editorial, "Economy vs. Environment,""the world’s principal source of man-made greenhouse gases has always been prosperity."

The recession makes that relationship easy to see: shuttered factories don’t spew carbon dioxide; the unemployed drive fewer miles and turn down their furnaces, air-conditioners, and swimming-pool heaters; struggling corporations and families cut back on air travel; even affluent people buy less throwaway junk. Gasoline consumption in the United States fell almost six per cent in 2008. That was the result not of a sudden greening of the American consciousness but of the rapid rise in the price of oil during the first half of the year, followed by the full efflorescence of the current economic mess.

Owen also comments that the economic crisis has "put a little time back on the carbon clock." I'd add that it puts a little time back on the clock which is ticking toward the certainty of petroleum and fuel shortages if we don't radically and permanently cut back on consumption, and continue to work to find alternatives, not just to petroleum, but also to driving. And the only way to accomplish that is by combining a poorer population and more expensive gasoline, even if the price of oil stays low. A national gas tax would be the best way to accomplish this.

There's one more silver lining in that dark prospect of a permanent economic downturn: unemployment and underemployment might evolve over time into a renewed opportunity for people to spend more time maintaining families, networks of friends, and communities. Instead of nuclear households in which both adults are working full time and the kids are shuttled from day care to home to school to Saturday morning soccer, we might be able to adjust to a norm of one parent working and one staying home, as we used to, or both adults working part-time, with the caveat that workers would have to be paid better than most of them are now, for we've seen real household wages decline in the years since 1980, even as the number of hours worked per household has risen.

People living in a future characterized by a lower standard of living but a higher quality of life would have to forget about the weekly trip to the gourmet grocery store, or eating at Applebee's all the time, or the annual motor pilgrimage to Orlando. But we were better off before those things came on the scene anyway.