How about a serving of hope for Thanksgiving?

Hope is a powerful force. So what I want to bring you for Thanksgiving is hope. Hope that we CAN have cheap, abundant energy. Hope that we CAN have cheap, abundant food — for everyone. Hope that we CAN have cheap, abundant clean water — for everyone. Hope that we CAN have cheap, abundant medical care — for everyone. Hope that we CAN provide every person on our unique blue planet a decent standard of living worthy of the dignity of being human. And hope that we CAN do all these things while addressing and reversing the widespread environmental damage that the past two centuries of industrialization and mechanization have caused. And, so, hope that we CAN solve global warming.

We are at a history-shattering point of transition to a new era of human history, an era in which resources and energy will not be scarce, and will never again be scarce. In the past half century, humanity has developed technological capabilities which are now growing exponentially. The best known example is Moore’s Law: the number of transistors we can put on integrated circuits doubles approximately every two years. In a cell phone, one person now has at his or her fingertips more computing power than NASA used to put astronauts on the moon a half century ago. It is a bit shocking to realize that in the United States, only a third of Americans were alive when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon. Everyone else — about 207 million of us — were born afterwards.

How can there be room for hope, when all the experts say we can’t afford to do this, or we can’t afford to do that. These nay-saying experts were a key part of Donald Trump’s con-act: Trump was masterful in ridiculing these people as obstructions to progress, and making his supporters believe that only he could overcome their obstructionism.

So, who’s right? The experts, or Trump? Well, neither, actually. The real obstacles are old ideologies of political economy and business management that prevent us from reforming the financial and monetary systems for the common good and to pay for what we need to do. This is the major problem the new Biden administration must confront and overcome, if Biden’s presidency is going to be successful.

For example, let’s look at mainstream economics. Almost every economics textbook begins with a definition of economics that is centered on the allocation of scarce resources. Scarcity is central to mainstream economic thinking. In the best selling textbook on macroeconomics, economist H. Gregory Mankiw writes near the bottom of the first page:

The management of society’s resources is important because resources are scarce. Scarcity means that society has limited resources and therefore cannot produce all the goods and services wish to have. Just as each member of a household cannot get everything he or she wants, each individual in a society cannot attain the highest standard of living to which he or she might aspire.

Mankiw’s arguments that resources are scarce is a smokescreen that prevents us from seeing how rich oligarchs manipulated national economies. (Mankiw was George W. Bush’s chief economist, and earlier this year wrote a piece entitled “Defending the One Percent” — honest, not joking, that’s Mankiw’s title).

Another economist, almost exactly century ago, named Thorstein Veblen, actually argued that in modern industrial societies, scarcity and shortages are deliberately created.

Without some salutary restraint in the way of sabotage on the productive use of the available industrial plant and workmen, it is altogether unlikely that prices could be maintained at a reasonably profitable figure for any appreciable time. A businesslike control of the rate and volume of output is indispensable for keeping up a profitable market, and a profitable market is the first and unremitting condition of prosperity in any community whose industry is owned and managed by business men. And the ways and means of this necessary control of the output of industry are always and necessarily something in the nature of sabotage — something in the way of retardation, restriction, withdrawal, unemployment of plant and workmen — whereby production is kept short of productive capacity.

The mechanical industry of the new order is inordinately productive. So the rate and volume of output have to be regulated with a view to what the traffic will bear — that is to say, what will yield the largest net return in terms of price to the business men who manage the country’s industrial system. Otherwise there will be “overproduction,” business depression, and consequent hard times all around.

— The Engineers and the Price System, 1921

It is no surprise that most economists in the orthodox mainstream absolutely hate Veblen. Mankiw, for example, does not even mention Veblen in his textbook. Compare that to nine index citations for British empire apologist Adam Smith, and another none for Chicago school monetarist crank Milton Friedman. How can anyone who has been indoctrinated in mainstream economics in college possibly think properly about economic problems, even if they are supposedly “progressive”? Like many of the people now being named to positions in the Biden administration…

One of the biggest scarcity scams in today’s mainstream economics is the argument that money is in short supply — especially money to fund government projects and spending. Fortunately, in the past few years, a new school of economics, called Modern Monetary Theory (MMT), has gained enough influence to begin challenging mainstream economists. MMT proponents, such as Stephanie Kelton and L. Wrandall Wray point out that money is created out of nothing, so there is never any real physical limitation on how much money there is. The limitations are political and ideological.

Historians such as Nancy MacClean, Mehrsa Baradaran, and Heather Cox Richardson have shown how arguments that the government does not have enough money were created and refined by bigoted politicians and economists who did not want to see social spending helping African-Americans and other minorities. The most egregious example of this was probably Lee Atwater, an adviser to presidents Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush and chairman of the Republican National Committee in the 1980s. Atwater made the mistake of being honest in an interview, when he said,

Y’all don’t quote me on this. You start out in 1954 by saying, “Nigger, nigger, nigger”. By 1968 you can’t say “nigger” — that hurts you. Backfires. So you say stuff like forced busing, states’ rights and all that stuff. You’re getting so abstract now [that] you’re talking about cutting taxes, and all these things you’re talking about are totally economic things and a byproduct of them is [that] blacks get hurt worse than whites.

The typical environmentalist belief that the planet’s resources are finite falls right into this trap. What we consider as resources is defined by our ability to access and process them — in other words, our technology. All environmental and resource problems are actually, when you think about solving them, engineering problems. The problem is that the people who run our societies and our economies — the one percent — do not want to spend the money needed to fund the creation and implementation of these engineering problems. They would rather keep that money as their multi-billion dollar profist.

Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler argue in their 2012 book, Abundance: The Future Is Better Than You Think

When seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible. Yet the threat of scarcity dominates our worldview.

Thus, the most important economic activity human beings undertake is scientific research. But, there are no mainstream economics textbooks which discuss the overriding importance of scientific and technological development and deployment. They all, therefore, lack a sound foundation for actually assisting the human species in our task of surviving and thriving. Aluminum, for example, is ridiculously abundant. It is, after oxygen and silicon, the third most abundant element in the Earth’s crust, accounting for 8.3 percent of the world’s weight. Yet, until relatively recently in human history, the use of aluminum by humans was far more scarce than the use of gold or silver. It was not until 1886 that the Hall-Heroult process was developed, using electricity to extract aluminum from its ore, bauxite, and aluminum became cheap and plentiful. Diamandis and Kotler argue that “technology is a resource liberating mechanism. It can make the once scarce the now abundant.”

But many progressives and liberals object that our world is overpopulated, and the planet simply cannot support a high standard of living for nine billion people. They point out we are already using thirty percent more natural resources than the planet can sustain. Diamandis and Kotler explain example after example of new technologies that will solve this problem. Such as nano-engineered filters for making drinking water from the most heavily polluted sources, to new materials that will allow us to build photovoltaics without semiconductors, reducing the cost of solar energy by not one, but several orders of magnitude.

Just as important — and as hopeful — as these new technologies, is the fact, demonstrated over and over and over again, that as a society becomes more prosperous, more economically secure, and healthier, the birth rate drops dramatically. In fact, the birth rate collapses. We have seen this happen in Britain and the USA in the mid-1800s, in Japan in the late 1800s, in South Korea in the 1960s, in Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and India more recently. In a number of advanced industrial countries, such as Italy and Japan, the birth rate is now actually insufficient, that is, below the level needed to offset natural death rates, and the populations of those countries are shrinking. Diamandis and Kotler write:

John Oldfield, managing director of the WASH Advocacy Initiative, which is dedicated to solving global water challenges, explains it this way: “The best way to control population is through increasing child survival, educating girls, and making knowledge about and availability of birth control ubiquitous. By far the most important of these is increasing child survival. In communities where childhood death rates hover near one-third, most parents opt to significantly overshoot their desired family size. They will have replacement births, insurance births, lottery births — and the population soars. It’s counterintuitive, but eradicating smallpox and vaccine-preventable disease and stopping diarrheal diseases and malaria are the best family planning programs yet devised. More disease, especially affecting the poor, will raise infant and child mortality which, in turn, will raise the birth rate. With fewer childhood deaths, you get lower fertility rates — it’s really that straightforward.”

What about water shortages? Only 2.7 percent of the water on the planet is non-salty and usable for human consumption. Right now, one billion people have no clean drinking water, and 2.6 billion people lack access to basic sanitation. Dean Kamen, the creator of the gway, has developed a water distiller that recovers 98 percent of the energy it uses and can produce 250 gallons of clean water per day. The power source is a Stirling engine that can burn almost anything, such as rice husks. Others have invented machines that process human wastes and turn them into electric power.

Energy? In sub-Saharan Africa, 70 percent of people live with no access to electricity — yet one square kilometer of land soaks up from the sun the energy equivalent of 1.5 million barrels of oil. Deploy enough photovoltaics, and Africa has a huge surplus of energy it can export to Europe. This is why China proposed, in April 2016, a $50 trillion plan to build a new electricity grid with long-range transmission lines connecting wind and solar energy capacity in the Equator regions, to population centers in the north. Unfortunately, rather than beginning serious discussion with Chinese officials on this and other proposals, it appears that the new Biden administration is being filled by old Democratic policy hacks whose thinking is stuck in the 1990s and is conditioned by confrontation with both Russia and China.

University of Michigan physicist Stephen Rand discovered a way of creating magnetic fields one hundred million times stronger than what the known, accepted “laws” of physics had previously predicted was possible. The result of this research will hopefully be a way of making photovoltaics without semiconductors, reducing the cost of solar energy by not one, but several orders of magnitude.

Global climate change? Diamandis and Kotler describe the SunShot Initiative by the U.S. Department of Energy

….now funded the Joint Center for Artificial Photosynthesis, a $122 million multi-institution project being led by Caltech, Berkeley, and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. JCAP’s goal is to develop light absorbers, catalysts, molecular linkers, and separation membranes-all the necessary components for faux photosynthesis. “We’re designing an artificial photo-synthetic process,” says Dr. Harry Atwater, director of the Caltech Center for Sustainable Energy Research and one of the project’s lead scientists. “By ‘artificial,’ I mean there’s no living or organic component in the whole system. We’re basically turning sunlight, water, and CO, into storable, transportable fuels — we call ‘solar fuels — to address the other two-thirds of our energy consumption needs that normal photovoltaics miss.” Not only will these solar fuels be able to power our cars and heat our buildings, Atwater believes that he can increase the efficiency of photo-synthesis tenfold, perhaps a hundredfold-meaning solar fuels could completely replace fossil fuels. “We’re approaching a critical tipping point,” he says. “It is very likely that, in thirty years, people will be saying to each other, ‘Goodness gracious, why did we ever set fire to hydrocarbons to create heat and energy?’ “

And what about the carbon we have already dumped into the atmosphere? Dr. David Keith at the University of Calgary has developed technology that actually removes CO2 from the air. Can the technology be scaled up to actually make a difference and undo the damage already done? With enough cheap energy, it probably can.

One of the most exciting developments Kotler and Diamandis discuss is the work of tissue-engineer Anthony Atala at Wake Forest University Medical Center, who led a team that modified a desktop laser printer to print with each pass one layer of stem-cell based specific tissue cells and were able to “print” a mini-kidney in a few hours. Kotler and Diamandis don’t write how long the mini-kidney survived in the lab, but did mention that the organ was secreting a urine-like substance.

A truly golden age of economic prosperity and bounty is closer than most of us realize, but we are quite literally killing ourselves by clinging to ideologies that were hammered out when famine was the norm, cholera swept away millions, and the average human being could expect to live only somewhere between 30 and 40 years. We will soon be at a point that we can give every person on the planet a decent standard of living. Not the wasteful standard of living of the contemporary USA, but enough that no person, anywhere, for any reason, need experience hunger or cold or deprivation. The real problem we face are rich reactionaries who have poured billions of dollars into promoting the idea that poor people deserve the hardships and indignities they suffer. That’s how we got Donald Trump, and if we don’t push Biden and his team to abandon their old ways of thinking, there’s a very real danger we’ll have to deal with someone even more dangerous than Trump in four or eight more years.