In his column about global warming in today's Washington Post, Robert Samuelson cites a 42 percent projected growth in population by 2050 and economic growth in less developed nations to suggest that even drastic deployment of existing technologies to curb greenhouse emissions will not be enough to solve the problem.
I agree. But there's something a bit too technocratic about Samuelson's framing of the issue.
E.g. he insinuates that the consensus is still out as to whether we can blame the problem on "man-made greenhouse emissions," thus using lazy logic to shore up the greenhouse gangsters' resistance to attempts that connect the dots between our actions and all the ongoing damage (I wonder if he's read the page-one story that explains how "the escalating level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is making the world's oceans more acidic, government and independent scientists say. They warn that, by the end of the century, the trend could decimate coral reefs and creatures that underpin the sea's food web.") Connecting the dots is in fact what is so great about Al Gore's movie: He uses a deft display of the facts to make the case for global warming without overstating the evidence. He also leaves you feeling as if the country could once again be ready for rational policy debates, informed by science.
Samuelson, on the other hand leaps to a quite cynical conclusion: "if the majority are correct, the IEA report indicates we're now powerless. ...No government will adopt the draconian restrictions on economic growth and personal freedom (limits on electricity usage, driving and travel) that might curb global warming."
This is what might be called analytical gridlock. That is, according to Samuelson, it's not possible to change the direction we're headed, so why try?
First, notice that he postulates that any regulatory scheme that attempts to address global warming will hurt the economy, as well as personal freedoms. But the question here is, which economy and whose freedom are we talking about? He may be right -- from the perspective of the companies and industrial sectors that have gained so much under Bush and Cheney -- i.e. oil, gas and the military. But what about the industries (e.g. agriculture, insurance, fisheries, etc.) that are already beginning to suffer from climate change. And what about the industries that stand to gain from selling conservation and renewables? How are the subsidies for Hummers and oil extraction and other current policies so heavily tilted towards the administration's cronies healthy for the economy? Isn't it a question of what kind of regulation, rather than regulation v. deregulation?
As for personal freedoms, what if we as consumers aren't given the choicesthat favor this kind of progress? Has Samuelson seen "Who Killed the Electric Car?"
We're often told that saving the environment is our personal responsibility, when the system is designed for failure. That's why people get cynical when we hear all these "Hints from Heloise" pitches for recycling. After they put all that paper and glass, etc. out on the curb, they sometimes hear it's being taken to a landfill. But do we ask why? Is it because there's some technology missing, or because the virgin materials are still cheaper? Is that a technological problem, or a failure of political imagination? E.g. why are we still subsidizing clearcuts on public land while trying to recycle? And why do we tolerate the fact that the federal government's procurement policy chief is too busy golfing with Jack Abramoff to establish procurement policies that would shore up the market for all that glass, paper, etc.?
The kind of cynicism that Samuelson seems to be buying into seems to me to be borne less out of a lack of available technological prowess than a lack of political imagination, though it's these problems are linked, and both relevant to the global warming crisis.
Similarly, the America people understand how global warming is linked to the current constitution-shredding regime's cynical foreign policy. Our commanders in chief (Bush and Cheney) have designed a secretive energy policy that has so deeply committed us to petroimperialism and oil dependency (keeping in mind that Clinton/Gore did nothing to raise auto efficiency standards during their 8 years) that whoever gets elected in 2008 will face a situation with global warming that's equivalent to taking the helm of the Exxon Valdez just minutes it is expected to run aground. (No wonder Al Gore doesn't want to run for President -- on Charlie Rose he said he thinks we have "less than 10 years" to address global warming, before it becomes irreversible.)
The carbon criminals should themselves be sequestered for virtually crippling our ability to turn things around in time, but it would be a bigger crime to focus on the blame game before we exhaust all of the potential solutions.
Thus, instead of dismissing the hundreds of American cities that have "ratifed" Kyoto economists like Samuelson should be figuring out ways that this kind of civic imagination and energy can evolve. Energy experts say there's no silver bullet -- but there are thousands of brass tacks, and most will be deployed locally, where the solutions are various and the needs related to local and regional conditions, industrial character, infrastructure design, etc. Groups like the Center for Neighborhood Technology in Chicago have a store of ideas ready to be enacted.
Meanwhile, economists like Samuelson can help by decoupling resource consumption, energy consumption and the indicators of national economic strength. For many economists, global warming poses a lesson in thermodynamics: Unlimited material growth is not possible in a world of ecological limits. How can economic "growth" be healthy if it doesn't distinguish between activities that push us towards those limits and those that drag us away from the edge?
It's startling how little debate among economists there seems to be on these questions. They seem to have adopted a kind of short-sighted devotion to growth and econometric equations that blissfully ignore the great public challenges of the day. (Not all economists, of course, but many, perhaps most) If Global Warming teaches us anything, it is that as a public policy tool we need a new type of economic way of thinking. Otherwise economics will become increasingly irrelevant to the facts as they exist. Key to this is the economists' blind devotion to growth: Just as growth at all costs was the culture of corporations like Enron, so in living systems it is the ideology of the cancer cell. In a world of limits, it is a destructive paradigm.
Therefore, pretending that global warming is merely an "engineering problem" is to ignore the failure of economics to address the systemic causes in the structure of the economy. I agree with Samuelson's that we have to address global warming as an engineering problem, but it's much mroe than that. The problem is unlikely to be solved merely by a series of drop-in technologies, like Thorium-powered nukes. That's just a convenient excuse to dodge these dicier political questions about the structure of our economy and the significant consequences of its failure to account for the common good.
Global Warming is the great challenge to this generation of Americans, just as the challenge for the last one was the defeat of communism. Our ability to develop a renewed sense of collective security -- a security that is almost fractal -- i.e. replicable at the local and global levels -- will require us to toss out the old ideas of unity around national purpose at the expense of local health and global citizenship -- i.e. the enterprise of war.
This is a big challenge. One that we have yet to even define very well. And one that will require all of us -- economists as well as everyone else -- to be courageous enough to take strong action and stretch our imaginations much further than we have so far.