The Solar Economy

CHAPTER	4
The distorting effectsof fossil supply chains

THE DISTORTING EFFECTS of fossil supply chains can be seen most clearly at the extreme ends of the sociocultural spectrum – in the cities of the industrialized countries and the rural regions of the developing world. It was supplies of fossil energy that first made the megacities of the modern age possible; now, as supplies of fossil energy near exhaustion, those megacities are threatened with collapse.

The rise to dominance of fossil energy and the emergence of a global energy monoculture had severe knock-on effects on rural regions. Developing countries are experiencing today what the industrialized countries lived through in the past. Despite abundant solar energy, migration from ...