The Globe Is Warm

The globe is warm, warmer than it has been in a 100, 000 years. It wasn’t your imagination, 2005 was the hottest year ever (1). The bad news is that at this critical juncture, a choice between break or brake, climate change became a lesser priority in North America over the last 10 years. Ironically, while people are under more surveillance then ever before in the land of the free, data about a huge crisis like global warming is barely being documented. The US government cut-off funding for a number of agencies who collected climate change data back in 2002. It never signed Kyoto and Canada seems to be giving up on it as well. Instead of doing something definitive—the President formed a committee who will give a definitive answer whether the threat is real. He wants more evidence on global warming, yet c grade evidence led to the invasion of Iraq.

Global warming is suspended as in global w-a-r-m-i-n-g? Like deferred taxation it is something we will reckon with whenever, if ever. In the parallel universe of media—mainstream vs alternative, the global warming story is at best a yarn e.g., ‘Ice Age, the Meltdown’, and ‘A Day After Tomorrow.’ Global warming is irrelevant in front of other more pressing crises, e.g., hating illegal Mexicans or warring at Middle-eastern elements or even 'homegrown' terrorists in Canada or USA.

While the anti-immigration debate plays ad nauseam in US and the multiculturalism policy of Canada is questioned, the globe is getting very warm. In 10 years it will get to the tipping point after which a reversal of the process would be considered impossible(1). Watching CNN it seems odd how nothing is as catastrophic as people in the oil countries who appear to live for one purpose only. And even when they aren’t after the US it is not good enough. Who the heck wants to read an 18 page document from the Iranian head? The letter was called ‘rambling’ on (CNN).

[Aside: Ok, so we all need to survive and one must do as one must, but must they pollute Earth, eliminate those who are different and be quite as predictably boring as CNN? ]

If you read around, many articles in the popular press talk about global warming with pseudo information '...global temperatures are warmer but realistically we can't do much (a unique gift of the mid-tier US media) and predictably end with the plea—‘o yeah, but what about India and China coming on board, that’s even worse!’

[Sub-text: It isn’t a US problem anymore, India and China are the much awaited sequel to USA, whose rabid capitalism will make US look like a harmless villain, then these green yurts are going to be so sorry they said anything about US pollution. You’ll see].’

In this uni-polar world, US can tell any country, “give xyz up, or else!” but no country can tell US, “Turn off the carbon Dude, or else!”

World opinion does not matter in American politics because it does not pay its taxes, nor does it have citizenship in USA. All it does is subsidize the US lifestyle, but then that is a taboo topic. The world is an illegal alien, who gets some money to produce for US but has no right to speak in its affairs.

In a closed environment, where identity hinges on acquiescence of the status quo, the environmental movement is up against a lot. The free market isn’t free enough to actually do anything about the environment. It seems that:

• Global warming doesn’t fall into the political agendas of either left or right. This is why Al-Gore is acting as an independent apolitical voice.

• Spreading massive confusion in political maneuvering is just as important as the constructed irrelevance of oppositional viewpoints. Much obfuscation of facts is possible because the matter is scientific and technical. In Al Gore's book, the statistics are shocking. Out of 906 articles published in peer-reviewed scientific journals, 100% agree on global warming. Yet 53% of articles in popular press question if global warming is happening or is caused by human beings. Guess which is targetted to the ubiquitous 'consumer' who is constructed to act as a buyer above all.

• Unlike planes flying into the two towers, cartoons or books denigrating religious sentiment, a disaster from global warming is a far greater catastrophe and much more compelling than ethnic rivalries. Yet, the average guys reaction on global warming is don't scare us! but the same guy is fine being scared of other threats e.g., Saddam Hussain. Al Gore said in an interview in The Hour on cbc.ca that through out this career the resistance that he met with regarding global warming was phenomenal.

[Aside: Going by conservative economic theory, the market is all-knowing and is considered to authentically represent what all of us want in life. The myths of the market are dangerous because we hope that consumers will fix serious flaws (because they will be educated and then act as a collective force—in other words they will ‘know’), yet this premise is easily manipulated].

If a small group of concerned people are the ones who will solve this crisis—let’s evaluate the grassroots. Global warming as an idea originates from the environmental scientists (The Silent Spring, a book published in the 1960s), however, the way it percolated through the masses is quite another thing. Sometimes the greatest facts are the perceptions that people have about them. Here are a few perceptions:

Gut reaction 1: Does this mean that ‘living on this planet in the best way I can means that I will kill other living things!! So what, it’s either me or them. That’s survival of the fittest.

Gut reaction 2: Labeling. The person who tells the global warming story has an agenda, is irrelevant or living in la-la land; the latest one was 'a fake hypocrite' who consumes just like us but talks big.

Gut reaction 3: I can’t do anything about it. The government will fix it.

While number 3 may change their minds, Reaction 1 and 2 are both irrational and dangerously self serving. Well-regarded environmental experts have gone to great lengths to explain that the environment is you (see the mission of the David Suzuki Foundation, The Declaration of Interdependence pasted below).

“The Declaration of Interdependence”
This We Know
We are the earth, through the plants and animals that nourish us.
We are the rains and the oceans that flow through our veins.
We are the breath of the forests of the land, and the plants of the sea.
We are human animals, related to all other life as descendants of the firstborn cell.
We share with these kin a common history, written in our genes.
We share a common present, filled with uncertainty.
And we share a common future, as yet untold.
We humans are but one of thirty million species weaving the thin layer of life enveloping the world.
The stability of communities of living things depends upon this diversity.
Linked in that web, we are interconnected -- using, cleansing, sharing and replenishing the fundamental elements of life.
Our home, planet Earth, is finite; all life shares its resources and the energy from the sun, and therefore has limits to growth.
For the first time, we have touched those limits.
When we compromise the air, the water, the soil and the variety of life, we steal from the endless future to serve the fleeting present.

From the mission of ‘The David Suzuki Foundation’

Inspired, the committed anti-consumerist tries to convince. Serving the fleeting present underpins current economic and financial theory. It lies behind the power of the market makers. The present is more important than the future—industrial productivity and the time value of money are intimate friends that make it hard for you to see things in the long-term. E.g.,

To borrow one dollar today you must return more than one dollar tomorrow. Therefore you must sell more than one dollar’s worth to be able to return the amount plus interest or even an income. The entire machinery of the modern state—budgets, taxes, employment et al revolve around this relationship.

To address global warming, the machinery of the modern state needs an overhaul. Emerging ideas such as an environmental economic theory try to allocate a cost to the environment. At the very least, we need another genius who can find the place of the environment in the market. Costing for the environment seems to be the path that the US might even consider-. Businesses may be taxed for CO2 emissions. The State of California is already enacting legislation to make this happen. (4) Other states are considering giving big tax breaks to consumers for using hybrid vehicles and usage of HOC lanes.

For the longer run, federal governments in both US and Canada are speaking of nuclear energy as a replacement source. As though all we have to do is consume and the market will continue to give and we have to accept whatever it churns up, even if it is very dangerous.

This way of looking at the problem means that we accept that environmentalism and economic needs are mutually exclusive and that's that. But, the point is that markets and their underlying economic tenets are man made systems —an illusory theory perpetuates the reality of wealth. It can be changed e.g., the current market theories are pinned on the ancient idea of usury which has evolved to become a very complex system of interest rates that price and cost human activity, quite imperfectly. Surely, ideas can be changed.

Let’s stay with imperfect concepts of cost and prices; so much of what we take for free from nature is used in making products and providing services. Prices would be very different if we actually imputed the years and complex mechanisms that produce natural resources. A simple example; we would have to discount centuries of Earth time that it took to create a drop of oil and then the question of what interest rate to use? Oil would ‘cost’ much more than the cost of extraction and distribution.

The free market looks like a net wealth creator today because it is not imputing a million costs. We are ignoring the ‘cost’ of pure water, pure air, the rainforests that act as lungs for the eco-system and the ecology that keeps the planet livable for us. (David Suzuki—A Sacred Balance).

Factoid: A millionaire today has pure water, lots of discretionary income and lots of land. In the world of the future where capitalist modernity would force us to cost for the environment, that millionaire would enjoy far fewer benefits. In fact he’d be paying a huge amount of money for the most basic amenities.

Factoid: The pre-modern cultures/religions had worked out ways to live in synch with natural constraints. They had a mythology in which nature was seen as powerful. Supernatural deities and ‘gods’ disapproved of greed, rewarded sharing, community and interdependence. However, modern capitalism has different values; it trivializes human needs, rewards productization and independent consumption.

Factoid: The more millionaires a place produces, the poorer future millionaires become. A house that cost $200, 000/- 10 yrs ago now costs $1.5million. There are more people with money but the money itself means less for a variety of reasons.

People hazard that environmental impacts that seem to be in direct conflict with free market principles would eventually follow the four paths below:

1. Internalize with capital theories of costs, prices i.e., through accounting models. 2. Ameliorate the primary drivers of capitalism—money supply, productivity growth and exchange rate mechanisms to reduce the pace of harmful economic activity through taxes.
3. Become redundant because of technology innovations and a swap to clean energy.
4. Widespread changes in lifestyle results through environmental education

Given that the next 10 years are critical for controlling carbon emissions, human actions i,e., number 4 is the focus of activists in local communities rather than 1-3.

Getting the people to even listen has been the hard one. The environment as an issue is a far more difficult concept to market than the sexy creation of wealth through industrialization. Naïve catchwords like ‘save the world’ or the corny ‘green-peace’ or the pompous ‘sustainable development’ goals are the way liberal democracies struggle to incorporate ideas that are in fundamental conflict with the current system.

Ideas such as recycling, energy reduction program and spreading awareness are the most popular choices for activists, who have been talking about global warming for a 2-3 decades. It should have already happened in USA: mass awareness and changes in consumption patterns from commuting to housing. But it didn’t. The last 15 yrs have seen global warming as an issue becoming marginalized. In a nutshell, a BMW is way more sexy than a blue recycling bin. Frustratingly, the environmental movement seems to need an image that Mr Red Neck Tarzan who watches Fox News or CNN can relate with. It may be that today's activists have accepted that information is really being driven by what people want to watch, that we are now lifestyle consumers(6) for good. With bitter gall one has to acknowledge that of the two ideas underpinning liberal democracies i.e., wealth creation and freedom of thought, wealth creation has become the biggest goal at the expense of all other goals. And just as bitterly pricing clean air seems to be only realistic solution in such a scenario. It doesnt help the bitterness any to know that corporations like Exxon Mobil have funded many global warming skeptics and politicians in power today in both US and Canada.

Perhaps the problem can be encapsulated in this anecdote:

The environmental group is often the charity of the wife of some big-shot executive who shops in alternative food stores, buys organic cotton from alternative areas and champions environmental causes, while the husband thinks of better ways to sell more petrochemicals or tobacco or semi-conductors or fast-food or pharmaceuticals or cars or services etc. In their vacation time, this couple exemplifying the good life of the West goes away to a less developed place to relax. This couple more than likely will be wealthy. They may fund environmental groups but they also fund PR agencies whose job it is to tell the world that their client's product is not bad for people or their environment. People like these make the alternative energy movement possible, while the irony is self-evident. This contradiction has made the environmental movement very difficult.

Perception: The smartest people who excel in the current system are the ones who are inadvertently hastening the demise of the planet.

Bitter Perception: Environmental causes are the emotional crutches of the rich and guilty.

Immigrant Perception: The poor aspire to have the luxury to have a cause.

The one big hope is that somehow, even while living in the system, we can adjust the system to reflect environmental concerns. Public awareness, abstinence from consuming environmentally harmful substances and school education is the path of many NGOs. So far a successful boycott of petroleum products has not been organized.

[A boycott of Exxon Mobil might end the global warming crisis and many wars all at once].

What are the governments on this continent up to? In Canada the liberal government (centre-left) who had put in some novel energy incentives like the Energuide (2) program is out of power. Instead a Conservative federal government modeling itself on Bush's USA is in power now.

The American Republican mind, has other ideas; an example:

Businesses in California will have to put a cap on carbon emissions. They will measure their emissions and if they are below their emission standard they could Sell their points to a different company with greater need. This is being proposed by the current Republican governor and is more or less on its way to becoming a law. (3)

California is already an expensive place to do business and a measure like this would increase the cost of doing business and in effect be pricing clean air.

There are alternative ways to reduce carbon emissions: 1. Incentives for hybrid cars 2. Stop building highways 3. Increase public transport options 4. Tax breaks for public transport users.

But the Democrats and the alternative media are in a state of paralysis. The fear of being ‘out of touch’ with the Red states, being perceived as hippy or communists guides their speeches and their alternatives. The need to couch their words, to be perceived as loyal Americans, is more important than any real conviction of ideas in the post 9/11 USA.

A joke that sums it up: Bill Maher quipped, “folks, either we get our shit together on this quickly, or we’re going to have to go to plan B: inventing a car that runs on Chinese people.” (5)

Mr Bush however, firmly believes that global warming fear is a conspiracy by the Greens to take control of the Whitehouse as shown in the science fiction novel 'Fear' by Micheal Crichton. Mr Bush was so taken by the book that he invited the author to the whitehouse.

And this is the erstwhile innovative, highly educated, technologically advanced, change friendly North America. Perhaps it is the sign of the times that the scientists (e.g., NASA scientist Hansen) who has warned against global warming is ignored yet a science fiction writer is commended.