Date: Fri, 27 Aug 1999 23:12:52 -0500 (CDT)
To: jonas@gnu.org

we primarily need people interested in economics and other areas of business management who can help us construct the specifications for the software we must make.

Jonas;

I'm going to risk being considered harebrained.

My interest is basically in Ecological Economics, which is now to great degree a do-it-yourself field of study, although there is the International Society for Ecological Economics of which I am a member.

My response to your message is that I think we should hold in the back of our mind the utility of a parallel accounting system, to be integrated into our "Enterprise Software", which tracks energy usage rather than money. By this, I mean the relation between the exhaustion of petroleum in barrels, or its equivalent of other energies, and the work which is done by that quantity instead of by human labor, i.e. the amount of human effort that is avoided with a gallon of oil used in a self-propelled harvesting wheat thresher is many orders of magnitude greater than that involved in riding one's Ford "expedition" down to the store for a loaf of bread, and could be a standard of hours-of-labor-replacement-value-per-barrel by which to evaluate other usages. In turn, such a system of accounting would enable us to better build a Leontief type input-output matrix based upon the most efficient use of energy rather than upon increase of GNP, as a tool of coordination and cooperation challenging us to transform our scheme of valuations.

The utility of such a parallel accounting system rises as does wane the idea of ever increasing oil exhaustion, certainly more dubious today than in March of this year. Everyone knows that the supply of oil is now being willfully restricted. But what would be the long-term consequences of simply a constant non-increasing supply, to not yet consider the inevitable decline which is certain to commence prior to common expectations? Does any of that restriction derive from a wish to conceal difficulty in maintaining rates of supply for reasons of financial credit, particularly among OPEC's new found associates? Curious that there are now no massive inflows of oil to thwart the natural monopoly, and that we are driven to drill in waters a mile and a half deep -- at what energy cost?

I do not hope to be able to convey all that I would in these few paragraphs, but perhaps to get a ball rolling.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

"The Coming Oil Crisis, Colin J. Campbell (Amazon.com)

I know that the Energy Information Agency of the United States predicts rising supply for twenty years without even reaching the inflection point on the upward slope of the bell curve: it's just to pull that off they need more than three times the present average estimate of ultimately recoverable oil, a number which has trended downward since 1970. Campbell is consummate in his treatment of imminent oil supply decline, even if the title sounds like one among a plethora of made-to-sell crisis books on this or that.

"Beyond Oil: the Threat to Food and Fuel in the Coming Decades" John Gever et. al. (1980)

An excellent study upon the realities of confronting supply decline, that disentangles much associated wishful thinking and presents well the importance of energy profit in considering potential solutions.

"Overshoot: the Ecological Basis for Revolutionary Change" William Catton

One of the foundation works of ecology intertwining man and the consequences of having based industrial society upon increasing exhaustion of the dead matter of carboniferous fuels.

"Input-Output Economics" Wassily Leontief

"The only comprehensive introduction to the input-output model."

"Beyond Growth: the Economics of Sustainable Development" Herman Daly

Adios to faith in GNP as a measure of well being, along with demise of comparative advantage in today's global free trade and the path of growth as the road to salvation. "putting the earth and its diminishing natural resources at the center of the field...a kind of reverse Copernican revolution in economics."

--
The harsh times approach. It is the lack of preparation which fills me with concern and anxiety, for we assume that we shall gather wood and slay game when the wind is white with winter.

Steve Morningthunder

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