Securing the Future

Introduction
The recent news of Gaia is not good. Yesterday's story about the dramatic decline of fisheries, and the possible annhiliation of large oceanic life forms, is only the latest shock. We have been told the Arctic ice is melting faster than expected, the Antarctic Ozone Hole is larger than ever, and coral reefs are on the verge of disappearing. Those things and global climate change may be more than Homo sapiens can handle, as suggested by the British government's report on greenhouse gases. What would be a reasonable response to these conditons?

Introduction

The recent news of Gaia is not good. Yesterday's story about the dramatic decline of fisheries, and the possible annhiliation of large oceanic life forms, is only the latest shock. We have been told the Arctic ice is melting faster than expected, the Antarctic Ozone Hole is larger than ever, and coral reefs are on the verge of disappearing.

Those things and global climate change may be more than Homo sapiens can handle, as suggested by the British government's report on greenhouse gases.

What would be a reasonable response to these conditons?

The Stern Review estimates about 20% of the world's GDP will be lost to global climate change if nothing is done about it, whereas an intelligent plan to control damages would cost about 1% of GDP. As Nature's summary tells us, Capitalist economists were instantly off the mark in ripping apart the Stern Review and denying the necessity of any action. Surely by now everyone knows the market will cure all ills.

The difficulty with Capitalist economists' rosy outlook is simply that it flies in the face of the facts. Capitalism has failed to cure a number of social and ecological ills. For example, toxic wastes are still accumulating. The biggest toxic waste sites have not been cleaned up despite 30 years of effort. According to Capitalist theory, companies should have arisen to take care of this problem, if the price was right. What actually happened is that Capitalist corporations sued to prevent toxic waste cleanup. Most of the taxpayers' cleanup money is drained into endless fees charged for defending against corporate lawsuits. The same, suing corporations pay their Conservative political shills to trumpet the failure of toxic cleanup, and protest loudly about the undue influence of lawyersand government. The object of this game is to prevent any toxic waste cleanup that assigns liability and assesses corporations for the costs. Corporations continue to create toxic wastes, but deny any responsibility for them. They probably wouldn't oppose cleaning up toxic wastes if they weren't taxed or sued on account of them.

The sort of thinking that considers the public as unpaid janitors obliged to clean up after the party encourages party-goers to celebrate with abandon. It is the same sort of thinking that prevailed on America's highways after Word War II, until the piles of roadside littler and costs of cleanup became ominously large. This is a form of Moral Hazard; i.e., a Tragedy of the Commons. Moral Hazard attends any project in which responsibility is disconnected from action. Clearly, corporate pollution without penalty, taxation or other cost only encourages more pollution to the extent that pollution is profitable.

While Conservatives are given to denouncing the Moral Hazards of Welfare and Third World debt forgiveness, they seldom look to their own doings. Yet, just as using the public roads as garbage dumps was eventually recognized as piggish behavior subject to punishment, we must acknowledge that air and water cannot be loaded with public refuse without penalty. Nature is already setting itself against us on account of our abuses. Now it is only a matter of how much difficulty we will encounter, even if we discontinue the abuses this instant.

Capitalism as actually practised is ill suited to solving ecological problems. In the United States, most people cannot foresee things beyond a few days or weeks. Corporations hire research workers of every sort to figure out the likely future, but their best projections seldom go beyond a few months or a year. Even large corporations and goverments can only suggest the outlines of a future three or five years hence. The difficulty is simply that one thing affects another, so the geometric explosion of permutations makes it very difficult to "see ahead." This is essentially the same problem that confronts programmers in designing chess software. Fortunately, in the cases of chess and climate change, we now have very large and very fast computers able to solve enough of the problem to make reasonable guesses about where each "move" leads. So, it becomes a matter of enforcing the best moves on players, something Capitalists are unwilling to accept because it is against their free market principles and because .it eliminates them from the equation.

If it was not clear before, it should be crystal clear now: surviving global climate change is not a small project. What is required are major changes in the physical and social arrangements of human societies. These cannot be accomodated by decisions of a Board of Directors settling upon the next three month's sales strategy. Unfortunately, what is required is also not subject to the vote. The only thing that can be settled at the ballot box is granting of sufficient authority to a potent and knowledgeable body to implement the necessary changes. Unfortunately, we have gone too far down the path to leave this to the social and corporate elites, or to the politicians, or even to the people.

If there is to be a solution to global climate change and all the other abuses of the environment that are starting to plague us, it will have to be international in nature. A major factor in our human problems is, simply, too many people. What is required are international policies and programs of population reduction. Those activities must be international to avoid the possibility of nuclear or other disastrous wars resulting from unfair allocations. Each and every nation has to accept and implement its goals as set by international agreement. No single nation, not even China and India, are capable by themselves of solving the population problem. In fact, despite decades of self-imposed One Child Policy in China, the world's population continues to increase. If the rest of the world continues to carp about and ignore the Chinese policy, eventually the Chinese may give it up. So, international unity and international goals are of the essence.

The Kyoto Treaty will not solve the greenhouse gas problem. It was only a start. Those at Kyoto implicitly recognized global climate change as an international problem. One of the tragedies of the Bandit Administration was its refusal to approve Kyoto with the connivance of a U.S. Senate controlled by opposition Democrats. The physical and economic changes required to avoid or reduce global climate change and other environmental problems are global, not local. The same sort of international co-operation is required in economic matters as in population matters.

If there is not near-universal agreement and compliance, I think it unlikely any of these problems will get solved. Gaia is a globally interactive phenomenon.