The Moneyless Man Read Free Page A

our economy, the insurance and oil industries, will eventually take a huge hit from two massive and evolving problems: climate change and ‘peak oil’.
CLIMATE CHANGE
     
    Whatever your beliefs about why the climate is changing, it’s undeniable that it is. It’s also certain that the damage it will cause is going to cost someone an incredible amount of money. In 2006, Rolf Tolle, a senior executive of Lloyd’s of London, warned that insurance companies could become extinct unless they seriously addressed the threats climate change poses to their business. Ultimately, there are two scenarios: either the insurance companies continue to cover ‘acts of God’ (or, more accurately, ‘acts of humanity’) and drastically increase our premiums to protect themselves – yet still risk extinction; or they stop covering them and the people whose homes and possessions are wiped out pick up the tab, ruining local economies and creating one humanitarian crisis after another.
PEAK OIL
     
    ‘Peak oil’ – a huge subject – boils down to one simple fact: our entire civilization is based on oil. If you don’t believe me, take a look around wherever you are now and try to find one thing that either isn’t made from oil (remember plastics are oil based) or wasn’t transported using it. Oil is a finite resource: when it will run out is up for discussion, but the fact that it will run out is not. What’s more, even before the wells run dry, speculation will push up prices, so that oil will increasingly become unaffordable for more and more people. According to Rob Hopkins, founder of the Transition Network, we are using four barrels of oil for every one we discover, meaning that we are already moving rapidly towards this scenario. To highlight how critical oil is in our lives, Hopkins adds that the oil we use today is the equivalent of having 22 billion slaves hard at work – or each person on the planet having just over three. Oil is the sole reason that we in the West can live the lives we do; lives which are unsustainable in every sense of the word.
    Governments may be able to bail out banks during times such as the 2008 credit crunch; unfortunately, we are also approaching what George Monbiot calls the ‘Nature Crunch’. As he correctly points out, nature doesn’t do bail-outs. Pavan Sukhdev, a Deutsche Bank economist who led a study of ecosystems, reported that we are ‘losing natural capital worth somewhere between $2 trillion and $5 trillion every year as a result of deforestation alone’. The credit crunch losses incurred by the financial sector amount to between $1 trillion and $1.5 trillion; these pale in comparison to the total amount we lose in natural capital every year. As we lurch towards environmental disaster and the economy contracts, will money continue to be seen as security? Or will living in a closely-knit community that has re-learned its ability to work together and share for the common good take its place?
    This became apparent to me when I went back to Ireland, to visit my parents, in 2008. In the six years I’d been away from my homeland, working in the UK, the country had changed beyond recognition. The growth that Irish people experienced during the ‘Celtic Tiger’ economic period had radically affected their culture. Twenty years earlier, when I was growing up at the end of the eighties, it had seemed very different. My memories were symbolized by the street where my parents still live. When I lived there, everyone knew each other; it could take fifteen minutes to get to the bottom of the road on your way to town. Then, out of the eighty houses, only one had a phone. When you wanted to make a phone call, you went to that house (which, like every other house, always had an open door), stuck a couple of small coins on the table and made what was usually a pretty important call. I can remember no more than five cars on the street; if you saw a Mercedes, you knew someone had relatives visiting