Revenge

All the discussion this week about peak oil, energy subsidies, Exxon profits and more has drawn me to one of my favorite meta-theories. Revenge effects. The concept, which is brilliantly articulated in Edward Tenner's Why Things Bite Back, underscores my conviction that human beings are not nearly smart enough to anticipate the mid- and long-term consequences of their actions.

From the simple, to the sublime:

Organizations conscientiously cut costs wherever possible--including toilet paper. Thick, soft and more expensive toilet paper is often replaced with paper of much lower quality. Paradoxically, many users find the cheap paper unreliable and therefore use twice as much. The high volume use not only counteracts the intended savings, but the mass can clog drains, users are annoyed, and rolls must be changed more often.

...

Sir William Osler described a paradox in his 1935 medical textbook in which he noted that most patients at the time died not of a primary illness, but a secondary terminal infection. With the advent of sulfa and other antibiotics during the 1930's and postwar period, innumerable patients were saved after they were weakened by an incurable disease. He observed that, instead of improving general health, the medicines were increasing the prevalence of disability and chronic illness (Gruenberg, 1977). A more recent version of this is the increasingly effective health maintenance of Alzheimers patients who may live twice as long as they did a few years ago. The result is a prolonging of the devastating effects on the patient's family and savings, and overall health care costs.

It's hard to come up with a maxim that transcends a range of issues spanning from bathrooms to deathbeds, but it seems to me that it would be worth the effort. The closest I've ever been able to come is this:

Tread lightly upon this earth.

Which brings me to offshore oil exploration, where even the most ardent advocates concede that the best outcome possible is a few years' worth of oil and gas that might help us manage the transition from carbon-based energy. And the risks? Depending on whom you ask, somewhere between minor and catastrophic.

I don't accept the "minor" argument. Because the risks aren't limited to possibly despoiling our coast. The risks also include perpetuating the delusion that we can continue our gluttonous ways without sustaining revenge effects in the areas of economic shocks, climate change, health degradation, acid rain, increased traffic congestion, and worse.

The free-market extremists, of course, suffer from their own unique set of revenge effects. By postulating that the fundamental measure of merit is capital, they set in place a domino cascade that leads directly to hell. The truth is, we cannot even begin to calculate the real long-term costs of current-day actions. As a result those costs are simply ignored as though they really don't exist, leaving it to future capitalists to profit from cleaning up our collective messes. Free-market fundamentalism plays with incomplete equations. It is fundamentally and fatally flawed.

Some of the messes we're creating may very extend beyond our ability to manage. But don't worry, somebody somewhere someday will make a bunch of money trying to fix all the things we're screwing up.