[THS] The United States, China, Peak Oil, and the Demise of Neoliberalism

[Peter Webster]

http://www.monthlyreview.org/080401li.php

An Age of Transition
The United States, China, Peak OIl, and the Demise of Neoliberalism
by Minqi Li

Minqi Li teaches economics at the University of Utah in Salt Lake City.


Until recently, the global capitalist economy has enjoyed a period of
comparative tranquility and grown at a relatively rapid pace since the
global economic crisis of 2001­02. During this period of global economic
expansion there have been several important economic and political
developments. First, the United States—the declining hegemonic power
but still the leading driving force of the global capitalist economy—has
been characterized by growing internal and external financial
imbalances. The U.S. economy has experienced a period of debt-
financed, consumption-led “expansion” with stagnant wages and
employment, and has been running large and rising current account
deficits (the current account deficit is a broad measure of the trade
deficit). Second, China has become a major player in the global
capitalist economy and has been playing an increasingly important role
in sustaining global economic growth. Third, global capitalist
accumulation is imposing growing pressure on the world’s natural
resources and environment. There is increasingly convincing evidence
that the global oil production will reach its peak and start to decline in a
few years. Fourth, the U.S. imperialist adventure in the Middle East has
suffered devastating setbacks and there has been growing resistance to
neoliberalism and U.S. imperialism throughout the world.

As the U.S. housing bubble bursts and the dollar’s dominance over the
global financial system becomes increasingly precarious, the U.S.
economy is now going into recession and the global capitalist economy
is entering into a new period of instability and stagnation. The coming
years are likely to see a major realignment of the various global political
and economic forces and will set the stage for a new upsurge of the
global class struggle.

Neoliberalism and the Global Imbalances

Since the 1980s, neoliberalism has become the dominant economic
ideology of global capitalism. Under the neoliberal policies and
institutions (such as monetarism, privatization, deregulation, labor
market “reform,” and trade and financial liberalization), inequalities in
income and wealth distribution surged, and in many parts of the world,
people suffered devastating declines in living standards. As financial
capital flowed between countries in search of speculative gains, one
national economy after another was destroyed. Under the pressure of
financial capitalists and their institutional representatives (such as the
International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the U.S. Treasury
Department), many national governments were committed to so-called
“responsible” fiscal and monetary policies, often leading to disastrous
economic and social consequences.

By the 1990s, the contradictions of neoliberalism led to increasingly
more violent financial crises. From 1995 to 2002, the global economy
was struck successively by crises that developed in Mexico, countries in
Southeast Asia, Russia, Argentina, and Turkey. The Japanese economy
struggled with deflation and stagnation following the burst of the asset
bubble in 1990. There was a serious danger that the entire global
capitalist economy could fall into a vicious circle of financial breakdowns
and sink into depression. In this context, the U.S. current account
deficits played an indispensable stabilizing role.

In the 1990s, the United States experienced the greatest stock market
bubble in history. Despite stagnating real wages and family incomes,
household consumption expanded rapidly as household debt surged. In
the 2001 recession, fearing that the United States could fall into a
persistent, Japanese-style stagnation, the Federal Reserve drastically cut
the policy interest rate and kept the real policy interest rate at below
zero for several years. As a result, the stock market remained highly
overvalued by historical standards and the excessive supply of money
and credit capital in turn fueled a major housing bubble.

Fueled by one asset bubble after another, the U.S. economy has been
able to maintain a relatively rapid expansion of domestic demand. As
the rest of the world suffers from insufficient internal demand, U.S.
imports of goods and services have tended to grow more rapidly than
exports. As a result, the United States has been running large and rising
current account deficits, which reached more than 800 billion dollars or
6 percent of GDP by 2006.

The U.S. current account deficits directly generate effective demand for
the rest of the world economy, allowing many economies, including the
Asian economies and oil and commodities exporters, to pursue export-
led economic growth. But perhaps more importantly, the U.S. current
account deficits represent U.S. spending in excess of income that must
be financed by borrowing from the rest of the world. The U.S. deficits
thus create assets for the rest of the world.

The central banks of the Asian economies and oil exporters have
become the major financiers of the U.S. current account deficits. From
1996 to 2006, the total foreign exchange reserves of the low- and
middle-income countries surged from 527 billion dollars to 2.7 trillion
dollars and their share in the world GDP more than tripled from 1.7
percent to 5.6 percent. Rising foreign exchange reserves have reduced
the risk of massive capital flight and financial crisis, allowing these
countries to have some space to pursue expansionary macroeconomic
policies. China, in particular, has played a crucial role in financing the
U.S. current account deficits and has accumulated the world’s largest
foreign exchange reserves currently standing at about 1.6 trillion
dollars.

Chart 1. Annual world economic growth rate, 1961­2006, constant
(2000) U.S. dollar

Chart 1
Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators Online,
http://devdata.worldbank.org/dataonline.

Chart 1 presents the world economic growth rates from 1961 to 2006,
with the world GDP measured in constant 2000 U.S. dollars. In the
“golden age” of the 1960s, the global economy expanded rapidly with
annual growth rates fluctuating between 4 and 7 percent. Since the
1970s, the global economy has been struggling with sluggish growth
with growth rates mostly fluctuating between 2 and 4 percent. During
four periods, 1974­75, 1980­82, 1991­93, and 2001­02, the global
economy was in deep crisis (although there is no official definition, the
global economy is generally considered to be in recession when world
economic growth rate falls below 2.5 percent a year). Since 2003, the
global economy has enjoyed some relative stability and has grown at
about 4 percent a year. However, with the U.S. economy now going
into recession, this short-lived relative stability is about to come to an
end.

The U.S. Economic Expansion since 2001

Table 1 presents selected economic indicators of the U.S. economy. The
U.S. economic recovery after the recession in 2001 was very weak.
Since then, the average annual growth rate has been only 2.4 percent
compared to 4 percent in the 1960s and 3.3 percent in the 1980s and
1990s. Both employment and workers’ real wages have been stagnant.
Measured in 1982 dollars, the U.S. private sector workers’ average real
hourly wage in 2006 was 8.2 dollars, about eighty cents lower than in
1972. Since 2000, real median family income has been falling.

However, corporate profits have surged. Corporate profits as a share of
GDP rose from 5.8 percent in 2001 to 9.8 percent in 2006. The stock
price to earnings ratios remain excessively high, suggesting that the
stock market bubble has not yet been fully deflated. The stock market
boom in the late 1990s led to pervasive over-investment. In the early
2000s, the industrial capacity utilization rates were at the lowest levels
decade by decade in the post-Second World War period. With
substantial excess production capacity, private investment has been
sluggish despite the dramatic improvement in corporate profitability.

U.S. economic growth since 2001 has been led by the expansion of
household consumption, which now accounts for over 70 percent of
GDP. As the majority of households suffer from falling or stagnant real
incomes, the expansion of consumption has been financed by the
explosive growth of household debt. U.S. household debt soared from
about 90 percent of personal sector disposable income to 103 percent in
2000, and to 140 percent in 2006. By 2007, the household debt services
(interest and principal payments on debt) had risen to 14 percent of
disposable income, the highest on record. In the meantime, the
household saving rate (the ratio of household saving relative to
disposable income) has fallen from the historical average of near 10
percent to virtually zero now.

Table 1. Selected indicators of the U.S. economy, 1961­2007
Table 1

Source: the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, http://www.bea.gov; the
U.S. Economic Report of the President,
http://www.gpoaccess.gov/eop/tables07.html; the U.S. Federal Reserve
Board, http://www.federalreserve.gov/releases.

The debt-financed consumption was clearly unsustainable. Neither
household debt nor the debt service burden can rise indefinitely relative
to household income. With the burst of the housing bubble, households
will have to increase their saving rates and reduce their debt burden. If
the household saving rate were to return to its historical average level, it
would lead to a huge reduction of household spending. With the
majority of U.S. households suffering from falling or stagnating real
incomes, it is difficult to see how consumption can grow rapidly in the
coming years. If consumption stagnates, then given the overwhelming
weight of consumption in the U.S. economy, it is highly likely that it will
fall into a deep recession followed by persistent stagnation.

Will the Federal Reserve be able to come to the rescue and create yet
another massive asset bubble? Terrified by the turmoil of the global
stock markets, the Federal Reserve has already cut interest rates
drastically. However, with both the stock market and the housing
market quite overvalued, one can hardly identify another major asset
bubble to create. Moreover, with the household debt level so high and
the household saving rate already so low, low interest rates can do very
little to stimulate household consumption.

More realistically, with household consumption stagnating or
contracting, the U.S. government could attempt to make up the
shortfall with more public spending and an increase in the fiscal deficit.
If the household saving rate rises toward its historical average, then
Washington will have to run a very large fiscal deficit, on the order of 6
percent of GDP or more. Given the current political environment in the
United States, it is doubtful that an effective fiscal policy of a sufficiently
large magnitude could be developed and implemented.

If the current, or more likely, the next administration has the nerve to
use very aggressive expansionary policies to jump-start the economy,
then the United States is likely to continue running very large current
account deficits. With a current account deficit of 6 percent of GDP,
theoretically, the U.S. net foreign debt could keep rising up to 120
percent of GDP.1 This would clearly be impossible. Long before this
theoretical limit is reached, it would become increasingly difficult for the
United States to finance its current account deficits. The current
relatively orderly decline of the dollar would then develop into a crash.
The dollar would lose its status as the world’s main reserve currency
and the United States would experience its own shock therapy.

One way or the other, the United States will not be able to run large
and rising current account deficits much longer. Given the crucial role
of the U.S. current account deficits in stabilizing the global capitalist
economy, if the U.S. economy falls into persistent stagnation and the
U.S. current account deficit has to be corrected, the question arises:
Which of the other large economies can replace the United States to
lead the expansion of the global capitalist economy?

China and Global Capitalism

Chart 2 compares the contribution to world economic growth by the
world’s big economies (measured by the ratio of national economic
growth to global economic growth). The U.S. contribution has fallen
from about 40 percent in the late 1990s to approximately 30 percent
today, and the Eurozone contribution has fallen from about 20 percent
to about 10 percent. By comparison, China’s contribution has risen to
about 15 percent and the “BRIC” group (Brazil, Russia, India, and China
combined) now generates more than 20 percent of the world’s
economic growth.

Chart 2. Contributions to world economic growth (as a percentage),
1981­2006, three-year averages

Chart 2
Sources: World Bank, World Development Indicators Online,
http://devdata.worldbank.org/dataonline.

As the Eurozone lacks growth momentum and Brazil, Russia, and India
remain relatively small to play decisive roles in the global economy,
China seems to be the only plausible candidate to replace the United
States to become the leading driving force of the global capitalist
economy. Can China lead global capitalism into another period of
stability and rapid growth?

After Deng Xiaoping’s notorious “Southern Tour” in 1992, the Chinese
Communist Party’s leadership was officially committed to the goal of a
“socialist market economy,” which, in the Chinese context, is nothing
but a euphemism for capitalism. In the 1990s, most of the state and
collectively owned enterprises in China were privatized. Tens of millions
of state and collective sector workers were laid off. The remaining state
sector workers lost their traditional socialist rights symbolized by the
“iron rice bowl” (a package of economic and social rights that included
job security, medical care, child care, pensions, and subsidized housing)
and were reduced to wage workers exploited by domestic and foreign
capitalists. In the rural areas, with the dismantling of the people’s
communes, public medical care and education systems have collapsed.
More than a hundred million have become migrant workers, forming
the world’s largest reserve army of cheap labor.

Table 2. Manufacturing workers’ wage rates in selected countries, 2005

Table 2

Source: International Labour Office (Geneva), Yearbook of Labour
Statistics 2006, 763­838, 933­1031. Wage rates are converted into U.S.
dollars using exchange rates from World Bank, World Development
Indicators Online (2007).

Table 2 compares the Chinese workers’ wage rate with the workers’
wage rates in selected countries. An average worker’s wage rate in
China is about one-twentieth of that in the United States, one-sixteenth
of that in South Korea, one-quarter of that in Eastern Europe, and one-
half of that in Mexico or Brazil. The Chinese wage rate now seems to be
higher than those in the neighboring Southeast Asian countries. But the
Chinese wage rate could be overstated as the official wage statistics only
cover the workers in the urban formal sector and do not include the
migrant workers.

A large, productive, and cheap labor force allows Chinese capitalists and
foreign capitalists in China to profit from intense and massive
exploitation. However, this raises the question how the massive amount
of surplus value produced by the Chinese workers can be realized
through “effective demand.” With the majority of the Chinese workers
and peasants heavily exploited, mass consumption at best has been
growing at a slower pace than the overall economy. As mass
consumption lags behind, the Chinese economy has increasingly
depended on investment and exports to lead the expansion of demand.
Table 3 presents selected indicators of the Chinese economy.

Table 3. Selected indicators of the Chinese economy, 1981­2005

Table 3Source: China’s National Bureau of Statistics, China Statistical
Yearbook 2007 and earlier years.

Labor income (the sum of the urban residents’ wage incomes and the
peasants’ net incomes) as a share of China’s GDP fell from 51­52
percent in the 1980s to 38 percent in the early 2000s. Similarly,
household consumption as a share of GDP fell from 50­52 percent in
the 1980s to 41 percent in the early 2000s. By contrast, the share of
investment in GDP rose above 40 percent and the share of exports rose
above 30 percent.

Net exports already made a significant contribution to China’s economic
growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s. Since then, China’s trade
surplus has experienced explosive growth. For 2007, China had an
enormous current account surplus of $378 billion, or 12 percent of
China’s GDP. In a few years, China is expected to overtake Germany to
become the world’s largest exporter.

How long can China’s current model of growth be sustained? The
United States accounts for about 20 percent of China’s overall export
market. In 2007, the European Union as a whole (including the
Eurozone, the United Kingdom, and the new member states of Eastern
Europe) actually replaced the United States to become China’s single
largest export market. However, for China to run large current account
surpluses, some other economies have to run large current account
deficits. The European overall current account balance has been in
rough balance. From a global perspective, China’s current account
surpluses have been entirely absorbed by the U.S. current account
deficits. If the United States no longer runs large current account
deficits, then unless Europe starts to run large deficits, it will be very
difficult for China to sustain its large trade surpluses.

China’s excessively high level of investment results in massive demand
for energy and raw materials. In 2006, China consumed one-third of the
world’s steel and one-quarter of the world’s aluminum and copper.
China’s oil consumption was 7 percent of the world total, but since
2000, China has accounted for one-third of the world’s total incremental
demand for oil. China’s massive demand has been a major factor
behind the surging global costs of energy and raw materials. Between
January 2003 and January 2008, the world energy price index rose by
170 percent and the world metals price index rose by 180 percent.2

If the current level of investment is sustained for some more years, it
would leave China with a massive amount of excess production capacity
that is far greater than what is needed to meet the final demand in the
world market and far greater than what can be supported by the world
supply of energy and raw materials. China would then be threatened
with a major economic crisis. For the Chinese economy to be
restructured on a more “sustainable” basis (from the point of view of
sustaining capitalist accumulation), the Chinese economy has to be
reoriented toward domestic demand and consumption.

As China’s investment and net exports have been rising more rapidly
than the overall economy, the combined share of household and
government consumption now stands at less than 50 percent of GDP. If
investment were to return to more sustainable levels (about 30­35
percent of GDP) and the trade surplus were to become smaller (0­5
percent of GDP), then the combined share of household and
government consumption would need to rise by more than 15
percentage points to 65 percent of GDP. But for consumption to rise,
the workers’ and peasants’ incomes and government social spending
have to rise accordingly. Table 3 shows the close correlation between
labor income and household consumption. It follows that there must be
a massive income redistribution from capitalist income to labor income
and social spending by the amount of about 15 percent of GDP.

Will the Chinese capitalist class be enlightened enough to undertake
such an economic and social restructuring? Suppose the Chinese
Communist Party’s leadership is sufficiently farsighted to understand
that for the sake of the long-term interest of Chinese capitalism, it is
necessary to make some concessions to the Chinese workers and
peasants. Will the party have the necessary will and means to impose
such a redistribution on the transnational corporations, on the wealthy
Chinese capitalists (many of whom have intimate connections within the
party and the government), and on the provincial and local
governments that have in recent years developed various alliances with
the domestic and foreign capitalists? These are some difficult questions
for the Chinese capitalist elites.

Peak Oil and the Limits to Accumulation

Suppose the Chinese capitalist class has the necessary wisdom and will
to pursue a Keynesian, social-democratic-style restructuring. Will such a
restructuring take Chinese capitalism onto a path of sustained stable
and rapid growth, and will the expansion of the Chinese economy in
turn lead the global capitalist economy into another “golden age”?

Table 3 shows the growth of China’s energy consumption. Since 2000, it
has greatly accelerated. It now accounts for 15 percent of the world
total and amounts to 70 percent of U.S. energy consumption. At the
current growth rate, China’s energy consumption will double in seven
years and China will soon overtake the United States to become the
world’s largest energy consumer. China depends on coal for about 70
percent of its total energy consumption and China’s coal consumption is
also growing at a rate indicating a doubling in seven years. China’s oil
consumption (already accounting for one-third of the world’s
incremental demand for oil) is growing at a rate that implies a doubling
in nine years. In other words, in about a decade if the current trend
holds up, China will consume one and a half times as much energy as
the United States consumes today. Will the world energy supply keep
pace with China’s rapidly growing demand  while meeting the demand
from the rest of the world?

The global capitalist economy depends on fossil fuels (oil, natural gas,
and coal) for 80 percent of the world’s energy supply. Oil accounts for
one-third of the total energy supply and 90 percent of the energy used
in the transportation sector. Oil is also an essential input for the
production of fertilizers, plastics, modern medicine, and other
chemicals.

Oil is a nonrenewable resource. In a recent study, the German Energy
Watch Group points out that world oil discoveries peaked in the 1960s
and world crude oil production has probably already peaked and will
start to decline in the coming years. Outside OPEC, oil production in
twenty-five major oil producing countries or regions has already peaked,
and only nine countries or regions still have growth potential. All the
major international oil companies are struggling to prevent their oil
production from declining.3

Colin Campbell of the Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas
estimates that the world production of all liquids (including crude oil, tar
sands, oil shales, natural gas liquids, gas-to-liquids, coal-to-liquids, and
biofuels) is likely to peak around 2010. After the peak, the world oil
production will fall by about 25 percent by 2020 and by about two-thirds
by 2050. Campbell also estimates that the world natural gas production
will peak by 2045. In an earlier study, the German Energy Watch Group
expects the world coal production to peak by 2025.4

Nuclear energy and many renewable energy sources (such as solar and
wind), in addition to their many other limitations, cannot be used to
make liquid and gaseous fuels or serve as inputs in chemical industries.
Biomass is the only renewable energy source that can be used as a
substitute for fossil fuel in the making of liquid or gaseous fuels. But
large-scale production of biomass could lead to many serious
environmental problems, and the potential of biomass is limited by the
available quantity of productive land and fresh water. Ted Trainer, an
Australian eco-socialist, estimates that meeting the current U.S. demand
for oil and gas would require that the equivalent of nine times all U.S.
crop land or eight times all currently forested U.S. land be fully devoted
to production of biomass. Trainer concludes that “there is no possibility
that more than a quite small fraction of liquid fuel and gas demand
could be met by biomass sources.”5

If world oil production and the production of other fossil fuels reach
their peak and start to decline in the coming years, then the global
capitalist economy will face an unprecedented crisis that it will find
difficult to overcome.

The rapid depletion of fossil fuels is only one among many serious
environmental problems the world is confronting today. The capitalist
economic system is based on production for profit and capital
accumulation. In a global capitalist economy, the competition between
individual capitalists, corporations, and capitalist states forces each of
them constantly to pursue accumulation of capital on increasingly larger
scales.

Therefore, under capitalism, there is a tendency for material production
and consumption to expand incessantly. After centuries of relentless
accumulation, the world’s nonrenewable resources are being rapidly
depleted and the earth’s ecological system is now on the verge of
collapse. The survival of the human civilization is at stake.6

Some argue that because of technological progress, the advanced
capitalist countries have become “dematerialized” (decreasing the
throughput of materials and energy per unit of output) as economic
growth relies more upon services than traditional industrial sectors, thus
making economic growth less detrimental to the environment. In fact,
many of the modern services sectors (such as transportation and
telecommunication) are highly energy and resource intensive.

Despite such claims regarding dematerialization, the advanced capitalist
countries are ecologically much more wasteful than the periphery, with
per capita consumption of energy and resources and a per capita
ecological footprint far higher than the world average. According to the
Living Planet Report, North America has a per capita ecological footprint
of 9.4 global hectares, more than four times the world average (2.2
global hectares). The supposedly environmentally friendly European
Union has a per capita ecological footprint of 4.8 global hectares, or
more than twice the world average. Cuba, the only country that remains
committed to socialist goals among the historical socialist states, is the
only country that has accomplished a high level of human development
(with a human development index greater than 0.8) while having a per
capita ecological footprint smaller than the world average.7

Claims of the advanced capitalist economies to dematerialization in the
wider, more meaningful sense of declining overall environmental impact
are in fact refuted by the Jevons Paradox, which says that increased
efficiency in the throughput of energy and materials normally leads to
an increase in the scale of operations, thereby enlarging the overall
ecological footprint. This has been a normal pattern throughout the
history of capitalism.8

Moreover, part of what is referred to as dematerialization arises from
the relocation of industrial capital from the advanced capitalist countries
to the periphery in pursuit of cheap labor and low environmental
standards. The dramatic rise of Chinese capitalism partly results from
this global capital relocation. Although the advanced capitalist countries
may have become slightly “dematerialized” in this sense, the capitalists
and the so-called middle classes in China, India, Russia, and much of
the periphery are emulating and reproducing the very wasteful capitalist
“consumerist” life style on a massively enlarged scale. Global capitalism
as a whole continues to move relentlessly toward global environmental
catastrophe.

The Demise of Neoliberalism and the Age of Transition

On February 1, Immanuel Wallerstein, the leading world system
theorist, in his biweekly commentaries pronounced the year 2008 to be
the year of the “Demise of the Neoliberal Globalization.” Wallerstein
begins by pointing out that throughout the history of the capitalist
world-system, the ideas of free market capitalism with minimal
government intervention and the ideas of state regulated capitalism
with some social protection have been in fashion in alternating cycles.

In response to the worldwide profit stagnation in the 1970s,
neoliberalism became politically dominant in the advanced capitalist
countries, in the periphery, and eventually in the former socialist bloc.
However, neoliberalism failed to deliver its promise of economic growth,
and as the global inequalities surged, much of the world population
suffered from declines in real incomes. After the mid-1990s,
neoliberalism met with growing resistance throughout the world and
many governments have been under pressure to restore some state
regulation and social protection.

Confronted with economic crisis, the Bush administration has
simultaneously pursued a further widening of inequality at home and
unilateral imperialism abroad. These policies have by now failed
decisively. As the United States can no longer finance its economy and
imperialist adventure with increasingly larger foreign debt, the U.S.
dollar, Wallerstein believes, faces the prospect of a free fall and will
cease to be the world’s reserve currency.

Wallerstein concludes: “The political balance is swinging back....The real
question is not whether this phase is over but whether the swing back
will be able, as in the past, to restore a state of relative equilibrium in
the world-system. Or has too much damage been done? And are we
now in for more violent chaos in the world-economy and therefore in
the world-system as a whole?”9

Following Wallerstein’s arguments, in the coming years we are likely to
witness a major realignment of global political and economic forces.
There will be an upsurge in the global class struggle over the direction
of the global social transformation. If we are in one of the normal cycles
of the capitalist world-system, then toward the end of the current
period of instability and crisis, we probably will observe a return to the
dominance of Keynesian or state capitalist policies and institutions
throughout the world.

However, too much damage has been done. After centuries of global
capitalist accumulation, the global environment is on the verge of
collapse and there is no more ecological space for another major
expansion of global capitalism. The choice is stark—either humanity will
permit capitalism to destroy the environment and therefore the material
basis of human civilization, or it will destroy capitalism first. The struggle
for ecological sustainability must join forces with the struggles of the
oppressed and exploited to rebuild the global economy on the basis of
production for human needs in accordance with democratic and
socialist principles.

In this sense, we have entered into a new age of transition. Toward the
end of this transition, one way or the other we will be in a
fundamentally different world and it is up to us to decide what kind of
world it turns out to be.

Notes
1.   The net foreign debt equals the cumulative sum of the current
accounts deficits. If we assume that the U.S. current account deficit
remains at 6 percent of GDP, the U.S. nominal GDP growth rate
continues at 5 percent a year, and there is no change in the exchange
rate, then theoretically the U.S. net foreign debt to GDP ratio will keep
rising up to 120 percent.
2.   Martin Wolf, “China Changes the Whole World,” Financial Times,
January 23, 2008.
3.   The Germany Energy Watch Group, “Crude Oil—The Supply
Outlook,” EWG-Series no. 3 (October 2007),
http://www.energywatchgroup.org.
4.   The Association for the Study of Peak Oil and Gas, Newsletter No.
86 (February 2008); The Germany Energy Watch Group, “Coal:
Resources and Future Production,” EWG-Series No. 1 (March 2007),
http://www.energywatchgroup.org.
5.   Ted Trainer, Renewable Energy Cannot Sustain A Consumer Society
(Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer, 2007), 73­92.
6.   On the potential destructiveness of capitalist accumulation on the
global environment, see John Bellamy Foster, “The Ecology of
Destruction,” Monthly Review 58, no. 8 (February 2008): 1­14.
7.   World Wildlife Fund, Zoological Society of London, and Global
Footprint Network, Living Planet Report (2006),
http://www.panda.org/downloads/living_planet_report.pdf.
8.   John Bellamy Foster, Ecology Against Capitalism (New York: Monthly
Review Press, 2002), 94­95.
9.   Immanuel Wallerstein, “2008: The Demise of Neoliberal
Globalization,” Commentary no. 226 (February 1, 2008),
http://www.binghamton.edu/fbc/226en.htm.