OpenSpace4Life

Al Gore's group and others have definitely been heeding the lesson of that essay, “The Death of Environmentalism.” Rather than incessantly giving the “I have a nightmare” speech, they've been relentlessly upbeat lately about the potential for a new green economy that will make life better, rather than requiring any real sacrifice. All we have to do is use energy more efficiently, take the bus or bike when we can, buy local and organic (which, okay, does cost somewhat more), and oh yeah, demand that our leaders “save us from this climate crisis.” I'm hoping what they really meant there was “provide the necessary incentives to motivate industry and job seekers, so we can save ourselves.”

But then along comes someone like Sharon Astyk to upset the applecart. Sharon is the sort of environmentalist I used to think conservatives just made up as a straw man argument; she actually thinks we need to shrink the economy, raise unemployment (to reduce the number of commuters on the roads), and become a nation of “poorer but happier greenies,” an ideal that's deeply unattractive to the vast majority of Americans. And her argument against Gore's rosy scenario is concise and disturbingly obvious: Building all that new renewable infrastructure, most of it in rural areas that don't currently have the necessary population of workers, will itself be responsible for huge amounts of CO₂ production, perhaps enough to push the world over a tipping point and precipitate the very catastrophe it's trying to prevent.

The obvious alternative is to focus on conservation and efficency and develop renewables at a slower, more realistic pace. To be honest, few if any highly-placed people are paying attention to Gore's ten-year timeline anyway; Obama's plan calls for a mere 25% transition in our electricity supply by seven years after Gore's deadline. But how far do we need to go here? Astyk actually claims that some efficiency measures, like building retrofits that add insulation to the walls to lower heating and cooling costs, are also worrisomely carbon-intensive themselves.

In the abstract, I have to admit that there is no a priori reason why we should be able to solve the climate crisis without reducing our quality of life. To claim otherwise is to work from the cornucopian assumption that there will always be a quick, cheap technical fix. But then, we do have a number of hopeful signs that the sacrifice Obama will need to ask us to make won't necessarily involve making the recession worse.

• The massive power of the Internet: America's CO₂ emissions have increased by about 20% since 1990. The SMART 2020 study seems to show that Obama's goal* of getting us back to 1990 levels by 2020 could be mostly accomplished just by using information technology to make our electric grid, transportation networks, and buildings “smarter” and enable more “virtual commuters.”
• Biomimicry: Nature makes complex structures using nontoxic, room-temperature chemistry, in stark contrast to our current industrial practices, and those structures themselves are exquisitely adapted to make the most of whatever energy is available. Already, companies are looking into ways to make products that accomplish their goals the same way organisms do. One thing we've learned already, particularly from biomineralizing corals and other shelled critters, is that the right way of sequestering carbon is to solidify it rather than burying it still in gaseous form.
• Pointless energy use: I'm not even talking about Las Vegas casinos here. In his book, Van Jones quotes Anuradha Mittal as saying that for example, “20 percent of California table grapes go to China, while China is the world's largest producer of table grapes. Half of all California's processed tomatoes go to Canada, and the U.S. imports $36 million worth of Canadian processed tomatoes yearly. . . . We are exporting what we are also importing because it is profitable for the companies doing it, not because it is good for the nation or the environment.” This kind of pointless trade-for-the-sake-of-trade is exactly the sort of thing Obama's carbon cap should stop in its tracks.
• New coal power plants placed on hold: Thank you, EPA, for finally listening to the what the Supreme Court told you over a year and a half ago! The CO₂ savings from avoiding both these huge construction projects and the subsequent plant operation are probably enough to build quite a number of wind turbines, while simultaneously providing an intense motivator for conservation. Local governments' long-term energy plans were probably founded on the assumption of those new coal-based supplies coming online. Now they'll be forced to look for simple things that just needed more political will (the ultimate renewable resource, eh, Al?), like programs to get people (especially apartment landlords!) to trade in all their old, inefficient appliances for Energy Star-compliant ones.

I'm sure Sharon Astyk would come up with some objection to each of these. My hope is that she'll come out with some actual numbers on the high carbon cost of making carbon-reducing tech, so she and Gore's people can have a real argument based on facts rather than conjecture.

*Note: it is somewhat worrisome that Obama doesn't mention energy efficiency at all in this speech.

"[Curitiba, Brazil's] municipal government is dedicated to solutions that are simple, fast, fun, and cheap, to what [Bill] McKibben calls 'constructive pragmatism.' [Former mayor Jaime] Lerner, convinced that hope is sustained by visible change for the better, inculcated a culture of speed: 'Credit cards give us goods quickly, the fax machine gives us the message quickly -- the only thing left in our Stone Age is the central governments.' City Hall's credibility in Curitiba comes from its creating a big park in only twenty days, or launching a vast recycling program within months of its conception. . . .

"Conceptual tests of new ideas lead quickly to their application. Risks are taken in the expectation that mistakes will be made, quickly detected and diagnosed, and corrected. When budgets can't support an entire new program, it's launched anyway so that learning can begin while more resources or economies are sought. Failures are frequent, hard lessons constant, struggles to improve unrelenting. . . . Curitiba experiments and improves as assiduously as any startup company."

- Chapter 14 of Natural Capitalism by Paul Hawken and Amory and L. Hunter Lovins, which holds up Curitiba as a model of holistic, sustainable design and governance.

Last Thursday, Al Gore called for a similar "culture of speed" by challenging America to switch to 100% clean, carbon-neutral energy sources within ten years. Now, one can certainly quibble that Gore may have exaggerated some details in his case for action, or that a ten-year timeframe is somewhat overoptimistic, but the overall case is strong: We need to act, we will benefit immensely from the resulting new jobs and greater energy security as well as reduced pollution, and what we most need right now is the inspiration to tackle this great challenge in the spirit of the Apollo program, or any of the other massive projects America has embarked on and completed throughout our history.

This is not to say we should throw caution to the winds. With our current global-scale technologies, we're already conducting a vast uncontrolled experiment with unknown results; we must be careful that the new experiments we set in motion are better planned and understood before we bring them to full-scale production. We don't want to face a "hard lesson" in the form of one massive disaster brought on by an overly rushed and incautious attempt to prevent another such disaster.

But be that as it may, we are probably past the time when "take it slow" can be our primary philosophy in working toward solutions to the climate crisis.

"The man explained to Max that . . . both he and the man who had saved Max from the kidnappers belonged to an ancient and secret society of men known as the League of the Golden Key. Such men roamed the world acting, always anonymously, to procure the freedom of others, whether physical or metaphysical, emotional or economic. In this work they were tirelessly checked by the agents of the Iron Chain, whose goals were opposite and sinister. It was operatives of the Iron Chain who had kidnapped Max years before.

- The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, by Michael Chabon, p. 133

I would like to suggest that the operative word in this fanciful quote, from the backstory of an imaginary comic book series called "The Escapist," is "from." If your opponent wishes to keep people in chains, whether literal or metaphorical, then your goal is to free people from those chains, i.e. from negative impositions by other people or society more generally--anything from debt slavery to overly high taxes on investment income. The corresonding freedom to is much more ill-defined, but clearly centered on the affected individual's abilities, with little direct reference to any positive interaction with society at large.

About four and a half years ago, I posted this screed about the limitations of an ideology whose only tenet is that "freedom is good." I didn't offer much of an alternative, other than an inchoate plea for people to make choices with greater consideration for the survival-of-the-species problem. Here's a better idea, which has a nice yin-yang symmetry to it: rather than viewing society as necessarily opposed to individual freedom, why not accept that humans are social creatures who gain from the formation of friendships, teams, and communities? The best single word I could think of to express this concept is "mutualism," a term from ecology that simply means an arrangement where both or all parties benefit. If you prefer, "mutuality" could also work to describe the general principle. Rather than working against each other, freedom and mutualism can reinforce one another, as each member of a group contributes most when he/she is free to choose how to contribute.

Of course this is all very well for small groups, perhaps up to a few hundred. Large-group mutualism is a basically unsolved problem, as I discussed in my previous entry as well as this post from last year.

My current best stab at a solution in the realm of politics would be something along the general outlines of a soviet democracy, that is, a hierarchical series of councils with each level's representatives chosen from the ones below it. Obviously, I would put in extensive checks to ensure that the power of the highest councils remains limited. I also think it might be better to choose representatives to the next higher council by simply rotating through the lower council's members--send a different pair every few years, not going back to the first pair until everyone else has served (two is better than one because one can serve as a check on the other). That way the council doesn't just select whoever is best at persuading them that he/she will do a good job when given broader authority, since as Douglas Adams observed, "those who most want to rule people are, ipso facto, those least suited to do it." This probably holds even if you replace the word "rule" with "govern" or even "coordinate."

In fact, if there are councils down to neighborhood level, the whole idea of voting could be removed altogether in favor of a simple aptitude test on the basic workings of government--if you pass, you get to be on the council. Would this still count as democracy? Certainly, in the sense of "a philosophy that insists on the right and the capacity of a people, acting either directly or through representatives, to control their institutions for their own purposes" (from the first entry on Dictionary.com). Except in my system, we would be working together in the open to achieve this, rather than casting anonymous ballots in a basically statistical exercise that we hope will manage to achieve the greatest good for the greatest number.

Reading bdunbar's livejournal hasn't been easy lately, because while an opposing view is always useful for refining one's own beliefs, political opposition tends to make me unreasonably angry and defensive.  I'm not alone in this; I once read an article about a psychological study that found that challenging someone's political beliefs causes an emotional reaction very similar to religious fervor.  We're compelled to defend our ideology with zeal and anger, and to do our best not to really listen to our opponents lest their ideas sow any doubt in our minds.  This article, linked from this post, is particularly worrisome to me in that sense because it's written by a convert (there's no zealot like one), and that famous Churchill quote has always made me nervous: "Any man who is under 30, and is not a liberal, has not heart; and any man who is over 30, and is not a conservative, has no brains."

So here's me being defensive, and since there's no defense like a good offense:

Conservatism, far from being the only position for people with brains, is the easy way out of having to think about disturbing realities.  Conservatives get to believe that:

• It's generally okay to be selfish, because Adam Smith said so.
  


• For rich and middle-class conservatives: My life is basically okay, so everything must be fine. No need to worry about the state of the world.
  


• If anything is wrong, I can just point in the general direction of Washington, D.C. and say "that darn government never does anything right," because:
  
  
  • I don't like paying taxes or having to detour around road work.
  
  
  • Most days I'm not the victim of a crime or stuck in a burning building, just irritated by noisy police and fire-truck sirens in the distance.
  
  
  • My water, sewer, gas, electric, phone, cable, and internet bills come from companies, not the government that built the pipes and wires.
    
  
  
• Poor people are often scary and always remind me that not everything is fine, so it's okay to ignore and disparage them, assuming that it's always their own fault that their poor (or at best that my donations to my church are enough to deal with the problem).
  


• For conservatives with no military connections: I don't have to experience the horrors of war directly, so it's okay to ignore any such concerns and assume that the military is doing the right thing by "staying the course" in Iraq.

Now for the more directly defensive part: Mr. Mamet is correct to observe that the most vocal liberals spend too much time complaining about how everything is going wrong, because that's not actually what liberalism is about. We don't believe everything is wrong, merely that everything can be improved:


Image source

And our government, being theoretically beholden to the people's needs, is far more obviously improvable than the corporations, who are principally beholden to small groups of major shareholders. So liberals agree that the government as it exists now is corrupt, often incompetent, and sometimes downright evil. But we believe in its potential to be improved, and to act as the engine of progress--because it has been that engine throughout American history. Government abolished slavery and created laws that (imperfectly) draw us closer to the ideal of equal opportunity for all. Government actions essentially created the agrarian, industrial, and service-based incarnations of the middle class, and we look to it now to push the transition to a technology- and green-collar-based incarnation for the twenty-first century. Government made initial investments in scientific and medical advancements, government has kept the citizenry (imperfectly) educated so we can contribute to progress--I could go on.

But of course all this thinking about how we need to change and improve things is hard to do. Maybe only people under 30 have the energy for it, and then they convert to conservatism later in life out of sheer exhaustion.

The standard progressive story is that terrorists are desperate people who live under oppressive regimes with starkly limited economic opportunities and, unable to strike at their own governments, are pushed instead by unscrupulous leaders to blame the West for their problems. The standard conservative riposte is that many terrorists have middle-class living standards, so why would they be desperate? (Yet both sides basically agree that more democracy would help.)

Still, what if the conservatives have a point? After all, it's not only the terrorists who are willing to sacrifice their own lives for a cause. Maybe they have core beliefs in the superiority of Islam every bit as strong as a good American soldier's belief in the superiority of democracy.* Or, if you don't like the comparison of "cowardly" suicide bombers to our brave servicemen and women, we can consider what terrorists actually are: covert operatives, agents battling in the shadows to try to reshape the world, somewhat as the CIA has done by inciting revolutions and toppling governments.

Of course, it's easy to argue that a typical American soldier or CIA operative doesn't expect to die in the line of duty, though s/he may be prepared to do so (and if religious, s/he probably believes that s/he will go to Heaven in that event). So maybe suicide bombers really are just desperate, for whatever reason--but there are other kinds of terrorists. There are those who merely plan the operations, and those who launch missiles or plant roadside bombs.

So in the shadow war that we hope is being won by our counterterrorism agents around the globe, both sides have similar outlooks--it's just that we view our ideology, with some justification, as better than theirs. They think the world would be better off united under Islam; we believe democracy is best for everyone, because it serves as a meta-ideology, a framework that allows each of us to choose what kind of beliefs we want to follow.


* During a get-out-the-vote drive, I once talked on the phone with a veteran who told me that he was only "fighting for the guy next to me." But my guess is that he was drafted, and of course we don't have any draftees at the moment (knock on wood). And while you could turn the argument around and claim that most of our current soldiers are desperate poor people too, could the same be said of the highly educated covert operatives who "volunteered" for the CIA?

Link to part 1

"When you don’t have young workers to replace the older ones, you have to import them. The European countries are currently importing Moslems. Today, the Moslems comprise 10 percent of France and Germany, and the percentage is rising rapidly because they have higher birthrates. However, the Moslem populations are not being integrated into the cultures of their host countries, which is a political catastrophe. . . .

"The huge design flaw in the post-modern secular state is that you need a traditional religious society birth rate to sustain it. . . . By 2020, one out of every five Japanese will be at least 70 years old. Nobody has any idea about how to run an economy with those demographics. . . .

"If we give up our Judeo-Christian culture, we become just like the Europeans. The culture war is the whole ballgame. If we lose it, there isn’t another America to pull us out."

- a much-posted essay by Herb Meyer, former intelligence official under Reagan

I finally figured out what bothers me about this kind of analysis: Meyer is assuming our situation is analogous to that of the Colonial Fleet on Battlestar Galactica, which consists of less than 50,000 refugees from the destruction of humanity. In an episode called "The Captain's Hand" late in season 2, we learned that people in the Fleet are having so few children that the population will collapse entirely within decades, unless the President enacts an abortion ban.

Listen: America's population recently passed the 300 million mark. If we fail to outlaw abortion and homosexuality and take other religiously-motivated steps to keep the middle class breeding, it's not going to be the end of America any time soon. And while it may be reasonable to panic about Islamic unrest in Europe or the potential cultural battle between traditional Moslem societal models and European democracy, it's much harder to find a good reason to be really afraid of the growing Latino population in the US, a country that used to pride itself on being forged by immigrants.

Even for countries that are shrinking, I have to believe there are solutions, particularly in this day and age. With improvements in medical care, the productive portion of an average European or Japanese citizen's life is getting longer. And with the increasing use of computers and other automation to reduce the physical effort required for many kinds of work, there's quite possibly an easy way to raise the retirement age for countries that need the economic support. After all, the population was going to age anyway, due to those same medical advances; if conservatives don't think human ingenuity can handle that challenge, they're a lot less optimistic about the future than I thought.

This post contains some dubious peripheral arguments, but its central thesis is much less dubious. In fact, it's a tautology obvious to any student of population ecology: the population within a species that grows fastest will come to dominate that species. In humanity's case, Muslims are at or near the top of that list, while more secular affluent populations in Western countries are near the bottom. In short, demography rather than terrorism will bring about the global dominance of Islam, unless we Westerners do something about it.

This thesis should be of interest to liberal environmentalists for three reasons. First, convincing people to have smaller families is an uphill battle because the populations we haven't convinced yet are constantly getting larger. Secondly, a minor corollary of the thesis is that religious conservatives in America, who tend to have relatively large families, will continue to outvote secular liberals by increasingly wide margins. Third, while we may disparage conservatives for taking overly drastic measures against terrorism (perhaps partly because we're defensive about our ideological association with "ecoterrorists"), these population trends are a much larger global issue, one that forces us to think about our position on Islam and its various sects.

Mr. Steyn doesn't really propose "solutions" directly, but four obvious ones come to mind:

1. Assume that it's not a problem, because as Muslims gradually take over the European population (for instance), they will have to increasingly adopt European values (as opposed to, for instance, suddenly deciding to lob England's and France's nukes at America, which to his credit Mr. Steyn doesn't predict).


2. Start having a lot more babies, which, in addition to being hard for middle-class people to pay for, will exacerbate the overpopulation problem that conservatives like Mr. Steyn can currently afford to ignore.


3. Get Muslims to stop having so many babies, which would require either lots of economic improvement in poor Islamic nations (the so-called demographic transition) or lots of wars.


4. If we don't like 2 or 3 but are still worried about the spread of the more constricting aspects of Muslim law, try to gradually convince Islamic religious leaders to change those laws.

Then again, the global-scale application of any set of constricting laws is unlikely to work in the face of the accelerating change that characterizes our time. That change and its chaotic results, rather than the unchanging order that religions try to impose, is the problem environmentalists must continue to focus on.

Science has given us great leaps in understanding of our Universe. It has done this at the cost, not of "hacking things apart" as is commonly claimed, but of putting things together, eliminating qualitative differences. Consider: science has given us the ideas that

• Apples and oranges are both fruits.


• Apples and leaves are both parts of plants.


• Apples and people are both living things.


• Apples and rocks are both solid objects.


• Apples and oceans are both collections of atoms and molecules.


• Apples and white dwarf stars are both collections of protons, neutrons, and electrons.

More recently, it has also given us the theory that apples, light rays, and everything else in the Universe are nothing more than sets of complex folds in the fabric of spacetime.

This is all kind of depressing, considering that it tends to eliminate qualitative divisions we hold dear, like the human/animal boundary, the body/mind boundary, and the living-thing/inanimate-object boundary. But we can console ourselves that no one is going to start naming things, beings, and people using a system that results in statements like "Howdy, piece-of-folded-spacetime-number-48QJ5R! How's the old piece-of-folded-spacetime-number-56BM1D doing?" And the Universe makes it easier to preserve the illusion of difference by including a number of fairly sharp quantitative boundaries between things we like to think of as different.

Also, I would note that without science, environmental crises would be much harder to understand and resolve, though I grant that it would also be harder to get into them in the first place.

I once read a review that said that Michael Crichton's "Big Theme" is the hubris of scientists. In most of his works, this is manifested in unexpected side effects of otherwise wonderful technologies: runaway dinosaurs, deadly nanites, etc. But in his latest "novel," State of Fear, he takes an altogether different tack, accusing scientists of making up such side effects in order to enhance their careers. The side effect Crichton claims to be faked is, of course, global warming.

Larry Niven, an author I have much greater respect for, also doesn't believe in global warming, because "the predictions have been flaky." Now, it's perfectly reasonable to view a theory as discredited if you don't think it has stood up to experiment, but what I find interesting is that these nonbelievers don't have much of an alternative theory to put in its place. The theory of the greenhouse effect is derived from basic chemistry and physics, and states simply that the current quantity of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere should trap enough of the Sun's heat to result in warming. Since few would deny the chemical properties of these gases or dispute the measurements of their atmospheric concentrations, the nonbelievers are forced to claim that something is countering the effects of the greenhouse gases and preventing greenhouse warming from occurring.

As far as I can tell, the something that Niven has come up with is that the current interglacial period is coming to an end, and only our heroic polluting efforts are holding back the tide of ice that would otherwise be crushing our civilization. (See the "novel" Fallen Angels by Niven and Jerry Pournelle.) Not only does it seem awfully convenient timing for a multi-millenial cycle to enter a downswing during the century when our civilization's exponential growth and change curves are turning sharply upward, it also seems unlikely to me that anyone has made any tests of the Niven hypothesis. I might be willing to at least consider switching camps if I found out otherwise; it would also help to know for certain that the oil industry didn't bribe Crichton to write State of Fear.


P.S. Even if I did switch camps, I could still be an environmentalist, startlingly enough. An environmentalist who doesn't believe in global warming? Well, global warming is simply not a necessary condition for biosphere collapse. I used to have a nice flowchart describing all the contributing factors, but I lost it. Aargh.

When it comes to abortion, most liberals are pro-choice and most conservatives are pro-life. But when it comes to the environment, most conservatives are pro-choice (freedom to grow the economy and pollute as much as we want), whereas many liberals are pro-life (yes, choice must be limited if we want to save the biosphere).

And yet, it seems like environmentalists almost have to be anti-abortion. I mean, if our credo is "respect for all life," how can we leave out fetuses, embryos, or even blastocysts? You can argue that they aren't sentient or even human, but you can't reasonably claim that they aren't alive.

From this perspective, the only real way to argue for abortion is to demonstrate that rescinding Roe v. Wade would result in more deaths from illegal abortions (which often kill the mother as well) than currently result from legal ones.