Global Warming Update
When the Global Warming debate was mostly between scientists with long range predictions and politicians trying to scare me about One World Order types I was mostly a MMGW skeptic.
No more.
The science is more robust and the consequences are already evident. The PPM goal to avoid was 350 and we have blown through that to 400 while experiencing the hottest year on record, where every month was the hottest month on record. The mythical Northwest Passage is no longer mythical and we are doing so much damage on so many fronts that we now live in the Anthropocene Era. Holy crap.
This changes the debate a good bit for me. The problem, as usual, is that my politics don't line up with a binary left/right position.
If I thought this was some disaster that was both so imminent and so huge that a One World Order style of "let's all pull together and defeat the aliens/blow up the asteroid/cure the Mega Plague/whatever" then I'd be looking for a political solution. But I'm not convinced we're there on either count, of size or time.
Certain things are already inevitable, but they are not catastrophic, not in any global sense. (There are those who are experiencing a personal catastrophe, but while their individual situation is tragic it is insufficient to marshal global resources wielded by the state.)
A little guy named Amory Lovins, a Mighty Mouse, has come to save the day, and he's bringing the market with him. In Reinventing Fire he has proposed a pragmatic solution to MMGW that involves no new laws or taxes, gets us almost completely off fossil fuels (as fuel, we still need petro products for a ton of other things, thus guaranteeing job security for my Petro E kid) and grows the economy by $5 trillion. With a 't'. And it requires no new tech, no new discoveries, although any such innovations will either speed up the solution or improve the economics of it.
What I really like about this is how egalitarian it is. In the binary debate we either pass a bunch of laws and effectively deny third world countries access to all the living standards of the first world, or we ignore the science and put a few billion more cars on the road with gas engines. Reinventing Fire proposes a sustainable future where economic progress benefits everybody, not just the rich or the privileged. There are profits in this for the private sector and new jobs for private sector workers.
Capitalism recently got credit for raising a billion people out of poverty, all across the planet. Let's see what else it can do.
No more.
The science is more robust and the consequences are already evident. The PPM goal to avoid was 350 and we have blown through that to 400 while experiencing the hottest year on record, where every month was the hottest month on record. The mythical Northwest Passage is no longer mythical and we are doing so much damage on so many fronts that we now live in the Anthropocene Era. Holy crap.
This changes the debate a good bit for me. The problem, as usual, is that my politics don't line up with a binary left/right position.
If I thought this was some disaster that was both so imminent and so huge that a One World Order style of "let's all pull together and defeat the aliens/blow up the asteroid/cure the Mega Plague/whatever" then I'd be looking for a political solution. But I'm not convinced we're there on either count, of size or time.
Certain things are already inevitable, but they are not catastrophic, not in any global sense. (There are those who are experiencing a personal catastrophe, but while their individual situation is tragic it is insufficient to marshal global resources wielded by the state.)
A little guy named Amory Lovins, a Mighty Mouse, has come to save the day, and he's bringing the market with him. In Reinventing Fire he has proposed a pragmatic solution to MMGW that involves no new laws or taxes, gets us almost completely off fossil fuels (as fuel, we still need petro products for a ton of other things, thus guaranteeing job security for my Petro E kid) and grows the economy by $5 trillion. With a 't'. And it requires no new tech, no new discoveries, although any such innovations will either speed up the solution or improve the economics of it.
What I really like about this is how egalitarian it is. In the binary debate we either pass a bunch of laws and effectively deny third world countries access to all the living standards of the first world, or we ignore the science and put a few billion more cars on the road with gas engines. Reinventing Fire proposes a sustainable future where economic progress benefits everybody, not just the rich or the privileged. There are profits in this for the private sector and new jobs for private sector workers.
Capitalism recently got credit for raising a billion people out of poverty, all across the planet. Let's see what else it can do.
posted by quash @ 4:15 PM
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