Global Warming

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Permalink Reply by Bruce LaDuke on February 24, 2008 at 11:07am

The solution for global warming is the same solution for any other social issue today. All issues today are intricately connected to other issues and our attempts to solve them have a cascading impact. Everything we change in a fully interconnected and interdependent world impacts something else, someone else, some where else.

Any issue today can be dissected into three component parts:

1) Economy - Economic development, business/industry, and education as a feeder pool for industry.
2) Social Context - Things like values, ethics, government, governance, law, legitimacy, religion, spirituality, etc.
3) Social Advance.- Knowledge advance in general, technological and scientific advance, business and industrial advance.

Different nations, states, associations, etc. all have different models for these three. So when these try to cooperate to solve some issue, they tend to get entangled in conflicting paradigms.

To get an idea of how this works, let's say that a U.S. company develops an anti-aging pill (Social Advance), something that is quite possible in the next 50 years (some groups are planning for it). Just think of the cascade effects of this kind of change:

- The company inventing this would have an instant global market and can demand virtually any price (Economy)
- Some people will be able to afford it and some may not (Economy), which would require legislation or it could lead to conflict or war (Social Context)
- There would be more workers, which may increase unemployment (Social Context)
- Humans would be entirely dependent on the drug (Social Context)
- Humans may not need other drugs and medical services they used to need, which would strain all aspects of the current health care system in both business and government sectors (Economy)
- The concept of retirement would go away for some people (Social Context)
- Leisure and travel services would increase as people have more time to enjoy themselves (Economy)
- Time saving technologies would be less important (Economy/Social Context)
- Population would explode and strain all social systems (Social Context)
- Space travel would become an imperative to solve the space issue (Economy)

I'm sure you can think of even more cascading impacts. I like to use this example because it is extreme enough to clearly show the ripple effect of changes and issues in our world. The reality of all this is that this is just one of hundreds of issues that look almost the same. In a 'smaller,' interconnected world of ubiquitous computing and instantaneous communication, the butterfly effect becomes the rule and not the exception.

Global warming is no different. It demands an integrated perception of the problem and an integrated and cooperative approach to the solution. But while that's what the problem looks like, we're still operating under traditional political systems that are still trying to serve their own interests...and that likely isn't goiing to change.

It wouldn't take too many years of China operating in the U.S. model to destroy the entire global environment and I thiink both China and the rest of the world are realizing this. The populations in China and India strain sustainablity regardless of what approach they take to almost anything.

This is probably why the 'Air Car' (http://zeropollutionmotors.us/) has emerged out of India. That kind of model is constrained from emerging in the U.S. because of economic pressure, but India really has no choice. They can't handle a billion people the same way we handle a few million.

So the 'solution' to this and many other issues today (individual, local, state, national, and global) requires a balance of national interests in integral dialogue. Dialogue being a group conversation aimed at solving a problem. In some cases, national interests are so strong that they make this impossible. Then we get locked into the issue until it is painful enough to thos

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Permalink Reply by Doug Huber on March 7, 2008 at 7:52am

Bill Mahr (on his HBO show) made a point when talking about the environment. He posed this question: If Americans could solve global warming by throwing away their remote control (having then to get up to turn on/off the TV), would they do it?

The answer is no. For the sake of argument, lets say that humans are causing global warming. For America to react, it will take a significant event (America is very good at reacting ... examples: a)Pearl Harbor b) threat of communism c) 9/11). In all of these cases, America united, reacted swiftly and produced the desired outcome (the jury is still out on c).

In An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore makes some powerful arguments but doesn't cut to the core of the issue until the very end. He comments thatwe must have political will. Well, when the oil companies are lining your pockets, its is hard vote against the policies that Big Oil wants. I think the problem must be corrected with reform of how the govt. operates. As well, it is hard to take Mr. Gore seriously as he heats his 40,000 sq ft home and flies around in a private jet ...

Like any good student of economics, I know that to change behavior in the marketplace, we must offer the right incentives (both carrots and sticks). Right now, there is no incentive out there. Suppose the govt. offered a $500M cash prize (tax free, of course) to the first company that sold 250,000 electric cars (that met certain mileage requirements, met safety standards, etc). I think that the Big (little?) Three in Detroit would be interested. That $500M would be well spent as the popularity of those cars took off, oil prices dropped, consumer confidence soared, yadda yadda. All for the low, low price of .5 Billion.

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