Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Blocks
1NC
Liberal values like privacy and liberty cause widespread
environmental destruction we must explicitly downgrade
these rights to allow for the emergence of a responsible
eco-authoritarian regime
Matthew Humphrey, 2007, Ecological Politics and Democratic Theory:
The challenge to the deliberative ideal, p. 16-19, mm
problems we face with regard to our natural environment, but our belief that the choices and preferences of the
majority in democratic, affluent countries are and should be viewed as absolute, beyond discussion (Westra, 1998: 3).
What about the proposed solutions offered by this group of thinkers? How does their version of coercive politics work?
The solutions on offer can be usefully broken down into two parts: changes in values and changes in institutions. It is
because in crisis conditions there is insufficient time to inculcate the former that stress is placed upon the latter, but
both are required for an adequate analysis of the eco-authoritarian position. There are, as one might expect, variations
in terms of the values that the eco-authoritarians are seeking to promote, depending upon which thinker one is referring
our
conventional ways of thinking about, and the importance vested in, justice,
democracy, and liberalism are all challenged in the eco-authoritarian
literature, and in their place are offered a value or set of values that is/are taken to be more in keeping with our
to and which part of their argument. It is possible to make some generalisations however; most importantly,
newly discovered obligations to the non-human world or future generations.6 These latter values promote a particular
conception of the good, and some notion of a politics of virtue that flows from that conception, be it, for example,
integrity on the part of Laura Westra or the triumph of political ecology over economics for William Ophuls. We will
examine this call for value change in more detail before going on to examine the changes to political institutions that the
eco-authoritarians seek. One of the most important strategies of the eco-authoritarians is to historicise certain
we are in danger of
seeing the values of liberty, democracy, and distributional justice as eternal
verities whereas we should see them as products of a specific time and place,
and more importantly, as products of, or at least as dependent upon, the existence of an economy
of plenty which is both historically specific and fleeting. For Ophuls the
principles that they see as being predominant in modern western societies. For them,
discovery of the New World in particular liberated the Old World from ecological scarcity, and created all the peculiar
the
golden age of these values is all but over and we have to return to
something like a pre-modern, closed polity (Ophuls, 1977: 144, 145). In seeking to
challenge what they see as widely accepted and deeply held values in contemporary societies, the ecoauthoritarians seek to both promote a new set of values and
recontest or downgrade existing ones on the grounds that they are
harmful to the prospects of ecological survival . The fundamental divide here is
institutions and values characteristic of modern civilisation democracy, freedom, and individualism. However,
between a politics of the right and a politics of the good. Eco-authoritarians see liberalism (as a manifestation of the
politics of the right) as being a transient phenomenon crucially dependent upon the temporary conditions of material
1977: 152). As an account of the rights embedded in liberal ideology this is itself a contestable account, but it illustrates
the way in which liberal democracy is understood in this body of literature. The problem lies in the rights that are granted
which allow us to live according to our self-defined values. Westra also holds that the proliferation, under conditions of
constrained by a conception of the common good, and so can be harmful to all (Westra, 1998: 155). Hardin focuses on
one particular right, that of procreation it is painful to have to deny, categorically, the claim embodied in the UN
Declaration on Human Rights that any choice and decision with regard to the size of the family must irrevocably rest
with the family itself, and cannot be made by anyone else (1968: 1246). Nonetheless it is the case that to couple the
concept of the freedom to breed with . . . an equal right to the commons is to lock the world into a tragic course of
one of the political concepts for which a move away from the liberal definition is suggested as explained later in this
chapter. Against the politics of the right the eco-authoritarians recommend a virtue politics based upon a conception of
the common good. Against the liberal desire to allow people to choose their own values, wisdom tells us that not all
values are equal and that virtue matters in life (Ophuls, 1977: 237). Virtue here entails recognising the necessity of
living life according to ecological values and being prepared to abandon or reconfigure those values that are not
conducive to the end of sustainability. Westra offers the overarching value of (ecological) integrity as the embodiment
of this politics of the common good. This in turn is defined in terms of ecosystem health, resilience, the optimum
potential for speciation and development, and the non-constraint of non-human nature by the actions of human beings
(see Westra, 1998: 78). Integrity demands that approximately one-third of the earths surface be left in a wild and
unmanaged state. The value of integrity is taken to embody the good of all, and so is uncompromising in its prescription
of infinite, non-negotiable value to life (1998: 12). Integrity serves to ground the precautionary principle, which should be
mandatory in public policy.7 Integrity is more basic than justice, and is an anti-democratic principle (1998: 9) because
democratic choices are inadequate when it comes to realising the principle (1998: 222). The principle is rendered
compatible with the idea of right simply by being recast in terms of a right, the fundamental and trumping right to
integrity, which is taken to operate at both a micro (organism) and macro (species, ecosystem) level. Only such a
principle can protect people from unchosen harm, whereas democracy can inflict unchosen harms, or at least the risk of
it behoves all of us to
live according to the principle of ecological integrity, and to the
extent that we do not embrace this principle voluntarily, those in
authority will have to force it upon us, rather in the fashion of the forced administration of
such harms, onto defeated minorities. As a manifestation of the common good
anti-psychotic medicines. The Aristotelian wise man referred to above will have the task of running a top-down
regulatory regime the
democratic decisions that are not underpinned by conceptions of the common good (1998: 155), of choosing leaders for
we have to accept
the imperative to downgrade the value of democracy and accept
more authoritarian forms of public rule. This downgrading of the value of democracy is
the wrong reasons and making decisions on the basis of uninformed preferences,
common across this literature, although at times it seems in tension with the projection of mutual coercion mutually
agreed upon, which implies a democratically legitimated move towards authoritarian forms of government. So for
example Ophuls suggests that certain normatively justified restrictions must be imposed upon a populace that would do
something quite different (and more damaging) if left to their own devices. The problem lies in legislating the
appropriate temperance and virtue without exalting the few over the many and subjecting individuals to the
unwarranted exercise of power or to excessive conformity to some dogma (1977: 227). To return to the Schumpeterian
theme one of the significant problems with democratic decision making for this group of writers stems from a belief that
people vary significantly in terms of their competence to make appropriate political decisions, whereas a key assumption
of democratic theory is that people do not differ greatly in competence (Ophuls, 1977: 159). If they do so differ,
effective government may require the sacrifice of political equality and majority rule.8 Indeed in certain circumstances
democracy must give way to elite rule (Ophuls, 1977: 159), such an elite being made up of the biologists, philosophers,
and so on who function as the wise man of Westras account. We may have to respect a plurality of positions but we
do not have to accord them equal weight in the political process (Westra, 1998: 2201, although is not entirely clear
how we show respect to a political position by granting it inferior status to our own beliefs). The problem with this
analysis is the epistemological barrier it seems to place in the path of us ever achieving mutual agreement upon the
mutual coercion that is taken to be necessary. If we could reach such agreement we would be democratically coercing
ourselves to behave responsibly (Ophuls, 1977: 155) and thus the authoritarian government we place over ourselves
would have a degree of democratic legitimacy. There is clearly, however, a problem with the analysis here. If we are
both (1) woefully attached to the wrong values already and (2) drop down to a childlike level of performance in the
political sphere, it is difficult to see where the political resources are that would enable us to vote down the liberties to
which we are apparently so attached. It seems rather more likely that eco-authoritarianism would consist in coercion that
had not been mutually agreed and would thus lack that imprimatur of democratic legitimation, which in turn leaves
open the question of how the ecological wise man could ever reach a position of authority, given that powerful
economic and political interests are taken to be in fundamental opposition to ecological values and also to manipulate
the preferences of citizens (from what baseline of preferences, that is, what the counter-factual is here, is not clear).
we must eliminate
hazardous and wasteful individual rights, including property and procreative rights.
which have to be set against the politics of the common good. Indeed
Strong rights must be basic only, and the prime instance of a basic right is that to ecological integrity. It follows from
this basic right to integrity that respect for wildness for both its services and its component life is basic as well
(Westra, 1998: 235). Limitations on rights to property, mobility, and procreation do not conflict with the ethic of (micro-)
we should not
fear that any concession of political rights to the community must
lead to the total subjugation of the individual by an all-powerful
state, as authoritarian rule can still be constitutional and limited
integrity because they are compatible with respect for life (1998: 256). Ophuls comments that
(1977: 226).
We
are now entering the sixth great mass extinction event ," one of the authors
it is allowed
to continue, life would take many millions of years to recover and
our species itself would likely disappear early on". The research examined
historic rates of extinction for vertebrates, finding that since 1900 more than 400
vertebrates have disappeared an extinction rate 100 times higher
than in other non-extinction periods. "There are examples of species all over the
world that are essentially the walking dead, said Stanford University professor Paul
Ehrlich. He added: "We are sawing off the limb that we are sitting
on." The research, which cites climate change, pollution and deforestation as causes for the rapid change,
of the paper told the BBC. Gerardo Ceballos, lead author of the research, added: " If
notes that a knock-on effect of the loss of entire ecosystems could be dire. As our ecosystems unravel, the
Centre for Biological Diversity has noted that we could face a snowball effect whereby individual species
extinction ultimately fuels more losses. The report, which builds on findings published by Duke University
last year, does note that averting this loss is still possible through intensified conservation effects, but
that window of opportunity is rapid closing.
boundaries, perturbations, dissipation, attractors, bifurcations and a whole bunch of other stuff largely
clear enough:
clear answer on the are we f**ked question, Werner set the jargon aside and replied, More or less.
There was one dynamic in the model, however, that offered some hope.
Werner termed it resistance movements of people or groups of people who
adopt a certain set of dynamics that does not fit within the
capitalist culture. According to the abstract for his presentation, this includes
environmental direct action, resistance taken from outside the
dominant culture, as in protests, blockades and sabotage by indigenous peoples, workers,
anarchists and other activist groups. Serious scientific gatherings dont usually feature calls for mass
political resistance, much less direct action and sabotage. But then again, Werner wasnt exactly calling for
those things. He was merely observing that mass uprisings of people along the lines of the abolition
movement, the civil rights movement or Occupy Wall Street represent the likeliest source of friction to
slow down an economic machine that is careening out of control. We know that past social movements
have had tremendous influence on . . . how the dominant culture evolved, he pointed out. So it stands to
reason that, if were thinking about the future of the earth, and the future of our coupling to the
environment, we have to include resistance as part of that dynamics. And that, Werner argued, is not a
and creationism. And in November 2012, Nature published a commentary by the financier and
environmental philanthropist Jeremy Grantham urging scientists to join this tradition and be arrested if
necessary, because climate change is not only the crisis of your lives it is also the crisis of our species
existence. Some scientists need no convincing. The godfather of modern climate science, James Hansen,
is a formidable activist, having been arrested some half-dozen times for resisting mountain-top removal
coal mining and tar sands pipelines (he even left his job at Nasa this year in part to have more time for
campaigning). Two years ago, when I was arrested outside the White House at a mass action against the
Keystone XL tar sands pipeline, one of the 166 people in cuffs that day was a glaciologist named Jason Box,
a world-renowned expert on Greenlands melting ice sheet. I couldnt maintain my self-respect if I didnt
go, Box said at the time, adding that just voting doesnt seem to be enough in this case. I need to be a
citizen also. This is laudable, but what
that his research drove him to take action to stop a particular policy; he is saying that his research
it makes the
ditching of that cruel system in favour of something new (and perhaps, with
lots of work, better) no longer a matter of mere ideological preference but
rather one of species-wide existential necessity . Leading the pack of these
hang themselves in their homes, this work should be of particular interest. Because
new scientific revolutionaries is one of Britains top climate experts, Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of
the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, which has quickly established itself as one of the UKs
premier climate research institutions. Addressing everyone from the Department for International
Development to Manchester City Council, Anderson has spent more than a decade patiently translating the
implications of the latest climate science to politicians, economists and campaigners. In clear and
understandable language, he lays out a rigorous road map for emissions reduction, one that provides a
decent shot at keeping global temperature rise below 2 Celsius, a target that most governments have
determined would stave off catastrophe. But in recent years Andersons papers and slide shows have
become more alarming. Under titles such as Climate Change: Going Beyond Dangerous . . . Brutal
Numbers and Tenuous Hope, he points out that the chances of staying within anything like safe
temperature levels are diminishing fast. With his colleague Alice Bows, a climate mitigation expert at the
Tyndall Centre, Anderson points out that we have lost so much time to political stalling and weak climate
policies all while global consumption (and emissions) ballooned that we are now facing cuts so drastic
that they challenge the fundamental logic of prioritising GDP growth above all else. Anderson and Bows
inform us that the often-cited long-term mitigation target an 80 per cent emissions cut below 1990 levels
by 2050 has been selected purely for reasons of political expediency and has no scientific basis. Thats
because climate impacts come not just from what we emit today and tomorrow, but from the cumulative
emissions that build up in the atmosphere over time. And they warn that by focusing on targets three and
a half decades into the future rather than on what we can do to cut carbon sharply and immediately
there is a serious risk that we will allow our emissions to continue to soar for years to come, thereby
blowing through far too much of our 2 carbon budget and putting ourselves in an impossible position
later in the century. Which is why Anderson and Bows argue that, if the governments of developed
countries are serious about hitting the agreed upon international target of keeping warming below 2
Celsius, and if reductions are to respect any kind of equity principle (basically that the countries that have
been spewing carbon for the better part of two centuries need to cut before the countries where more than
a billion people still dont have electricity), then the reductions need to be a lot deeper, and they need to
come a lot sooner. To have even a 50/50 chance of hitting the 2 target (which, they and many others
warn, already involves facing an array of hugely damaging climate impacts), the industrialised countries
need to start cutting their greenhouse-gas emissions by something like 10 per cent a year and they need
to start right now. But Anderson and Bows go further, pointing out that this target cannot be met with the
array of modest carbon pricing or green-tech solutions usually advocated by big green groups. These
measures will certainly help, to be sure, but they are simply not enough: a 10 per cent drop in emissions,
year after year, is virtually unprecedented since we started powering our economies with coal. In fact, cuts
above 1 per cent per year have historically been associated only with economic recession or upheaval,
as the economist Nicholas Stern put it in his 2006 report for the British government. Even after the Soviet
Union collapsed, reductions of this duration and depth did not happen (the former Soviet countries
experienced average annual reductions of roughly 5 per cent over a period of ten years). They did not
happen after Wall Street crashed in 2008 (wealthy countries experienced about a 7 per cent drop between
2008 and 2009, but their CO2 emissions rebounded with gusto in 2010 and emissions in China and India
had continued to rise). Only in the immediate aftermath of the great market crash of 1929 did the United
States, for instance, see emissions drop for several consecutive years by more than 10 per cent annually,
according to historical data from the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Centre. But that was the worst
economic crisis of modern times. If we are to avoid that kind of carnage while meeting our science-based
emissions targets, carbon reduction must be managed carefully through what Anderson and Bows describe
as radical and immediate de-growth strategies in the US, EU and other wealthy nations. Which is fine,
except that we happen to have an economic system that fetishises GDP growth above all else, regardless
of the human or ecological consequences, and in which the neoliberal political class has utterly abdicated
its responsibility to manage anything (since the market is the invisible genius to which everything must be
entrusted). So what Anderson and Bows are really saying is that
in order to
appear reasonable within neoliberal economic circles, scientists
have been dramatically soft-peddling the implications of their
research. By August 2013, Anderson was willing to be even more blunt, writing that the boat had
proposed to ensure that the diktat of economists remains unquestioned. In other words,
sailed on gradual change. Perhaps at the time of the 1992 Earth Summit, or even at the turn of the
millennium, 2C levels of mitigation could have been achieved through significant evolutionary changes
within the political and economic hegemony. But climate change is a cumulative issue! Now, in 2013, we in
high-emitting (post-)industrial nations face a very different prospect. Our ongoing and collective carbon
profligacy has squandered any opportunity for the evolutionary change afforded by our earlier (and
larger) 2C carbon budget. Today, after two decades of bluff and lies, the remaining 2C budget demands
We probably
shouldnt be surprised that some climate scientists are a little
spooked by the radical implications of even their own research . Most of
revolutionary change to the political and economic hegemony (his emphasis).
them were just quietly doing their work measuring ice cores, running global climate models and studying
ocean acidification, only to discover, as the Australian climate expert and author Clive Hamilton puts it,
of digging up more carbon have had to find ever more thuggish ways to silence and intimidate their
nations scientists. In Britain, this strategy is becoming more overt, with Ian Boyd, the chief scientific
adviser at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, writing recently that scientists should
avoid suggesting that policies are either right or wrong and should express their views by working with
embedded advisers (such as myself), and by being the voice of reason, rather than dissent, in the public
arena. If you want to know where this leads, check out whats happening in Canada, where I live. The
Conservative government of Stephen Harper has done such an effective job of gagging scientists and
shutting down critical research projects that, in July 2012, a couple thousand scientists and supporters held
a mock-funeral on Parliament Hill in Ottawa, mourning the death of evidence. Their placards said, No
activity in Balcombe; interfering with Arctic drilling preparations in Russian waters (at tremendous personal
cost); taking tar sands operators to court for violating indigenous sovereignty; and countless other acts of
Humans are eating away at our own life support systems at a rate unseen
in the past 10,000 years by degrading land and freshwater systems, emitting greenhouse gases, and
releasing vast amounts of agricultural chemicals into the environment,
Australian National University and the Stockholm Resilience Center. Steffen is the lead author on both of
and regional areas but were now seeing this occurring on a global scale. These changes are down to
human activity, not natural variability. Steffen said direct human influence upon the land was
contributing to a loss in pollination and a disruption in the provision of nutrients and fresh water. We are
clearing land, we are degrading land, we introduce feral animals and take the top predators out, we
change the marine ecosystem by overfishing
he
said. That direct impact upon the land is the most important factor right now, even more than climate
change. There are large variations in conditions around the world, according to the research. For
example, land clearing is now concentrated in tropical areas, such as Indonesia and the Amazon, with the
practice reversed in parts of Europe. But
at a rapid rate. Its fairly safe to say that we havent seen conditions in the past similar to ones
we see today and there is strong evidence that there [are] tipping points we dont want to cross, Steffen
said. If the Earth is going to move to a warmer state, 5-6 degrees C warmer, with no ice caps, it will do so
and that wont be good for large mammals like us. People say the world is robust and thats true, there will
be life on Earth, but the Earth wont be robust for us. Some people
to technology, but thats a belief system, its not based on fact. There is no
convincing evidence that a large mammal, with a core body temperature of 37
degrees C, will be able to evolve that quickly. Insects can, but humans cant and thats
a problem. Steffen said the research showed the economic system was
fundamentally flawed as it ignored critically important life support
systems. Its clear the economic system is driving us towards an
unsustainable future
survive, he said. History has shown that civilizations have risen, stuck to their core values and then
collapsed because they didnt change. Thats where we are today. The two studies, published in Science
and Anthropocene Review, featured the work of scientists from countries including the U.S., Sweden,
Germany, and India. The findings will be presented in seven seminars at the World Economic Forum in
Davos, which takes place between Jan. 21 and 25.
Both de la Boetie and Hoppe are primarily concerned with the preservation of freedom of the individual,
this being the core value in their systems. But for us freedom is not the most fundamental value and is
merely one value among others. Survival strikes us as a much more basic value. Now our proposal is that
since fighters for freedom are always likely to arise, the probability
of fighters for life and survival arising must be as great if not
greater. This will be especially so if the opportunity is provided for
such ecowarrior/philosophers to develop and be nurtured in special
institutions called real universities or academies. At present our
leaders are primarily trained in institutions that perpetuate and
legitimate our environmentally destructive system. The
conventional university trains narrow, politically correct thinkers
who ultimately become the economic warriors of the system. Our
proposal is to counter this by an alternative framework for the
training and complete education of a new type of person who will be
wise and fit to serve and to rule. Unlike the narrowly focused economic rationalist
universities of today, the real university will train holistic thinkers in all of
the arts and sciences necessary for tough decision making that the
environmental crisis confronts us with. These thinkers will be the
true public intellectuals with knowledge well grounded in ecology .
Chapter 9 will describe in more detail how we might begin the process of constructing such real
universities to train the ecowarriors to do battle against the enemies of life. We must accomplish this
education with the dedication that Sparta used to train its warriors. As in Sparta, these natural elites will
be especially trained from childhood to meet the challenging problems of our times.
post-growth-society--an-inquiry-into-the-democratic-prospect-article-136.php,
mm
new developments have arisen to complicate governance
enormously, such as the global mobility of capital and investment that undermines the relative power of the
nation state as a meaningful policy maker and as a locus of economic leverage. Meanwhile, regional and global
ecological problems have gotten much worse than they were in the 1970s
climate change, biodiversity loss, fresh water shortages, damage to the
ocean ecosystems. Hence, the continuing viability of the liberal traditiona proud
In addition,
and hard-won intellectual orientation promoting liberty, equality, and human rights for three hundred years beginning in
the seventeenth centuryis in serious question. Can we be sanguine about the possibility of genuinely
coping with limits to growth while still remaining committed to these basic values, institutions, and practices? Two points,
however, do seem reasonably certain. First, while we do not know what form the transition to a new structure of
timetable of our collective capacity to respond are tragically out of joint. The second clear starting point is that whatever
type and form of governance emerges, it will require normative legitimation to be sustained. Beginning in the 1970s, a
number of social theorists began to maintain that
legitimation crisis for liberal democracy and that either a non-democratic authoritarian state or at
least a democratic regime with new non-democratic power centers will emerge from that crisis. A future authoritarianism
does not necessarily entail a military dictatorship or police state. Coercion alone, even if ethically justified, cannot sustain
behavioral compliance across a large population and govern complex networks of economic activity under modern social
conditions for a sustained period of time. Popular commitment and voluntary consent, not coercion, are the key to modern
whatever effective
form of governance emerges in a future degrowth society, a new form of social
contract will be needed as its foundation: a transformation within the political culture that
governance, certainly on the national level, let alone on larger scales than that. Hence
will produce voluntary consent to the new forms of governance and to new reach of political authority. Such commitment
is brought about in one of two ways: by purchase or by persuasion; by deploying financial incentives and self-interested
motivations, or by manipulating ideas, ideals, and arguments. If the growth of material consumption and affluence will not
be the currency with which to buy the necessary commitment and compliance, then what form of persuasion can secure
without the continuing promise of an ever-growing pie to hold them in abeyance, claims for substantive redistribution from
the most to the least well-off will inevitably arise, calling for potentially disruptive allocation decisions and, therefore, new
than the successful management of material economic growth without losing normative legitimacy and social-political
stability.
As Keynes said, the world is ruled by little else. The process is inevitably
dialectical: when ideas are given concrete form, that form then affects our way of thinking. To adapt
Winston Churchills tribute to the power of architecture, We shape our institutions, and afterward our
institutions shape us.
often called authoritarian and an illiberal democracy. Singapore became independent in 1965 when,
like many other countries in the third world, it was poor and lacked natural resources.13 Today its citizens
have one of the highest per capita incomes in the world without suffering the sectional and social
Party (PAP) was elected in 1959 and has governed ever since. It has dedicated itself to economic success
by value creation and full employment. It has created high standards in management, housing, health,
education, transportation, and the environment. It has used the expertise of multinational corporations
without succumbing to their philosophy. When the PAP is in effect the state, why has its authoritarian rule
not become corrupt and incompetent? Lee Kwan Yew was the leader of the PAP in the fi rst decades of
its rule. He was a highly intelligent technocrat who avoided the cult of personality and established a
prevalent in the liberal democracies. Economic advancement has been a legitimizing factor for
authoritarianism and opposition is insignificant. In the sphere of parliamentary opposition there are
nominated members to represent particular interests and expertise. The PAP did not evolve into an
authoritarian structure. It was created in this mold. Lee said that the PAP founders believed that political
stability was the top priority because it was a prerequisite for development and modernization. This belief
accompanied a shared apprehension about the transferability of Western democracy to an Asian society
and an underlying conviction that unfettered democracy contained within it certain frailties always
threatening to degenerate into mob rule.14 This viewpoint from an Asian culture reflected Platos
Singapore
demonstrates that it is possible for a state to fashion an intellectual
elite that can succeed in creating a wealthy economy for all its citizens. In doing this it
does not allow the freedoms that many self-proclaimed leaders of the worlds liberal
democracies enjoy. However the freedoms of democracy are increasingly eroded by leaders
conclusions from centuries before and has been justified by Lees outcomes.
using the threat of terror and the imposition of law and order to bolster their own power. It is becoming
debatable whether it is better to live under these deprivations or under a benign authoritarianism that
analysis of the pathetic, self-serving performance of many elected representatives of liberal democracies
is a cogent argument for this option.
2NC AT Perm
The perm cant solve - rights and autonomy are
incompatible with an eco-authoritarian model privileging
these values makes environmentally responsible
governance impossible
Bruce Jennings, May 2013, [Jennings is the Director of Bioethics and
Editor of Minding Nature at the Center for Humans and Nature], Center for
Humans & Nature, Governance in a Post-Growth Society: An Inquiry into the
Democratic Prospect, http://www.humansandnature.org/governance-in-apost-growth-society--an-inquiry-into-the-democratic-prospect-article-136.php,
mm
Ecological authoritarians maintain that the
successful governance in a degrowth era will require centralized,
elitist, and technocratic management at least in the areas of economic and
Ecological authoritarianism.
environmental policy.[9] Mindful of the internal contradictions plural democratic governance faces as it
attempts to cope with problems of productivity, capital accumulation, and growth, ecological authoritarians
stress the need for policy makers and planners to be insulated from democratic pressures and granted an
increasing measure of autocratic authority if they are to steer the economy on an ecologically rational and
crisis point . The ecological authoritarians here make an important point. The fact that pluralistic
democracy has demonstrated its inability to perform ecologically precautionary governance in a consistent
or timely way is not fortuitous; it is built into the deep structure and political logic of this type of system as
degradation, and again the governments will lose their popular support and legitimacy.[10] Note, however,
that the political costs of the first prong of this dilemma are more immediate than those from the second
prong, so pragmatism in a pluralistic democracy counsels the first course of action. Such pragmatism is
ecologically insane.
I did not know how the dictionary defines the word utopia. Anyhow, Hovila uses it to indicate a model
differing from the dominating one or in more elaborate terms a model that differs from the one that
happens to prevail at the time of observation. This concept, I would argue, is both fruitless and
misleading. The words utopia and utopian are useful when used to describe reveries that are only dreamt
of: things impossible, deceptive, unrealistic or which lead to ruin. For a long time it has been clear that of
all known societies and economies, the most genuinely utopian are those that have been adopted at
present, as they are founded on the logical impossibility of continuous economic growth. When, in an
articles entitled Utopian Politics are Dangerous, Hovila describes the model societies suggested by Pentti
Linkola and Eero Paloheimo as unrealistic, dangerous utopias, his line of reasoning makes no sense
they are as far away from being dangerous as could be. What Hovila writes is often unbelievable: The
use of violent methods poses a concrete risk. The recent raids carried out by animal-rights extremists are
an example of how utopians may collaborate with dissenters. In his expression of this matter Hovila
even manages to lump together two completely opposite things: the subtle and altogether limited violence
of animal rights activists on the one hand; the massive violence openly practiced by fur farmers and the
vast, hidden violence perpetrated by economic growth on the other. Hovila deftly writes: These models
present the same problem as all utopias: unless fully implemented, they will not be implemented at all.
Without a connection to the present, these programmes are simply meaningless. It is rather grotesque
that Hovilas words should be completely disproved by his own suggestions (in this case, in favour of
greener farming). For neither have his own compromising suggestions been realized to any degree: the
complete end of agriculture and absolute triumph of industrial farming are shaping market economy. Small
adjustments toward a softer direction have not been accepted any more than radical environmentalist
alternatives: integrated farming or IP (Integrated Production) plays no part whatsoever in the
Hovilas point about being connected to the present is significant. The
worst mistake that anyone thinking about society can make is to
envisage the prevailing system as the starting point: to begin from a
tabula rasa, a clean slate, is an absolute must in order to develop any
sort of programme. Human history across the world offers a wide
range of societal models: the model that happens to be the
prevailing one in our own society does no represent any intrinsically
superior point of reference. Any binding to a given societal model
paralyses the whole thinking process , as is shown by the conventionalities that
contemporary economy.
Links - General
Link Privacy
The affirmatives conception of privacy is not valueneutral it reinforces a materialist view of the world that
allows for widespread environmental destruction
Bruce Jennings, May 2015, [Jennings is the Director of Bioethics and
Editor of Minding Nature at the Center for Humans and Nature], Center for
Humans & Nature, Mine and Ours, http://www.humansandnature.org/mineand-ours-article-202.php?issue=26, mm
The concept of property is fundamental to an understanding of the
relationship between humans and nature. Moreover, land use, or land
management and governance, is a significant factor determining the
human impact on natural systems, including agriculture, biodiversity
and habitat loss, deforestation, and overall climate change . Aldo Leopold
made the connection between property and land use explicit: We abuse land because we
regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we
belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.[1] The note Leopold sounds here has been an enduring one in
social philosophy. Here are three of my favorite examples. Writing in 1755, Jean-Jacques Rousseau maintained that a
decisive turning point in the story leading from the state of nature to human political and social being was the invention of
property, especially as it manifested itself in the enclosure of land: The first person who, having fenced off a plot of
ground, took it into his head to say this is mine and found people simple enough to believe him, was the true founder of
civil society. What crimes, wars, murders, what miseries and horrors would the human Race have been spared by
someone who, uprooting the stakes or filling in the ditch, had shouted to his fellows: Beware of listening to this impostor;
you are lost if you forget that the fruits belong to all and the Earth to no one![2] A century later, writing shortly before his
death in 1884, Karl Marx described the next step in human social evolution as involving a change in our attitude toward
ownership and the land: From the standpoint of a higher socio-economic formation, the private property of particular
individuals in the earth will appear just as absurd as the private property of one man in other men. Even an entire society,
a nation, or all simultaneously existing societies taken together, are not the owners of the earth. They are simply its
possessors, its beneficiaries, and have to bequeath it in an improved state to succeeding generations as boni patres
familias.[3] Finally in 1944, economic historian and anthropologist Karl Polanyi traced the changes that led in the late
medieval and early modern period to viewing land, human labor, and capital as commodities that could be bought and
sold in an impersonal market. He regarded this way of looking at land and labor as artificial and pernicious, but recognized
how historically and politically powerful this alteration of perception had been in history. It changed the ways in which the
relationship between human beings and the material world was understood and the ethical rules governing it. And it
fractured the way that economic production and consumption had been embedded in a larger cultural structure of
meaning and norms, thereby setting the economy apart as a semi-autonomous sphere of life and activity, with rules and a
logic of its own. Polanyi argued that this commodification of material life and separation of economic activity from a more
seamless cultural web of meanings, despite its material benefits, was in other ways impoverishing and diminishing to
humanity. He expresses the point this way: The economic function is but one of many vital functions of land. It [land]
invests mans life with stability; it is the site of his habitation; it is a condition of his physical safety; it is the landscape and
the seasons. We might as well imagine his being born without hands and feet as carrying on his life without land. And yet
to separate land from man and organize society in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of a real-estate market was a
vital part of the utopian concept of a market economy.[4] At the beginning of the twenty-first century, This is mine
increasingly looks like a bad deal. Where is Rousseaus someone, that shadowy figure who pulls up the stakes and fills in
the ditch? Where are Marxs good householders and good ancestors? The answer is, everywhere. But they operate on
local scales mainly, and they are only slowly gaining ground.[5]They are the new commons movement that is redefining
property and the management and governance of common-pool resources. It is a diverse movement, full of intellectual
inspirations that are often conflicting. Recovering and re-governing the commons in a practical sense must go hand in
hand with rediscovering the concept of the commons. The concept, ethics, and politics of the commons are vibrant topics
in many disciplines. This is especially the case in economics. A starting point for discussion in that discipline was Garrett
Hardins essay The Tragedy of the Commons, which focused attention on the vulnerability of common-pool resources to
overexploitation or neglect. This is a situation in which individuals following the logic of rational self-interest produce
suboptimal collective results. Many, including Hardin himself, have drawn the lesson that privatization of the common
resource is the best solution to this collective action problem. However, Elinor Ostroms work challenged this. Rather than
embracing privatization as a solution to the degradation of the commons, she found in many parts of the world that
localized, culturally informed participatory management of common-pool resources results in sustainable governance. And
it avoids the conventional approaches of competitive market privatization on the one hand, and of central government
regulatory and legal control on the other.[6] Moreover, since the concept of the commons tends to reintegrate economic
activity within a broader cultural and value network as a counterpoint to the fragmentation that Polanyi decried, it has
also led to lively discussions between economists and anthropologists, who find that much more is involved than
rationality and efficiency, which are often the overriding concerns of economists.[7] For example, a study of the aboriginal
commons in Queensland, Australia, found that the land is not understood as an economic resource primarily, but as a
being with its own agency of listening, watching, nurturing, disciplining and balancing human and natural resources.[8]
It is important to distinguish
between private property and collective or common property . Today the
right of access and use brings corresponding duties and obligations.
term property is often taken to be synonymous with private property or individual ownership, but this closes off creative
Private property
puts one person in control of how a resource is used; common
property involves shared control and shared use. Indeed, there are forms of property
possibilities, especially in connection with sustainable land use and ecological trusteeship.
rights in which the private owner does not have complete and exclusive control over access and use of a resource.
Usufruct (usus et fructus, use and enjoyment of fruits) arrangements cover a situation in which individuals have rights of
access to property owned by someone else, as long as the property is maintained appropriately. Use and enjoyment rights
to someone elses property historically have come in many forms and varieties, but one important notion that was
developed over time is the idea of estover (est opus, it is necessary) rights under which owners could not deny nonowning occupiers access to resources needed to sustain themselves and to perform their services on the land. Such
resources could include access to grazing land, firewood, wild fruits, game, and the like. Hence it is important to note that
while common property involves shared ownership and shared power to determine resource use, and thus, the normative
dimensions of participatory decision making are readily apparent, even private property ownership can also be limited by
normative notions, such as the appropriate maintenance and usage necessary to sustain people or ecosystems. Commonpool resources are those for which open access is difficult to restrain, either for physical or traditional cultural reasons.
Neither private ownership nor state ownership always provide the best governance and trusteeship for the commons.
for the planet, commons-inspired efforts to reintegrate the property system with the fabric of other cultural and natural
systems is a worthy goal and an ethical imperative. Today the vision of ecological trusteeship through democratic
governance is not a self-evident truth by any means. It requires hard work to make a case for its ethical justification that
can persuasively garner popular support. But nature is chiming in and pressing its own case against the continued abuse
of the land in the name of private property rights. In the past, the notion of estover was applied as a basis for claiming
certain rights to common access and land use for people. How about the estover claims of nature itself? To the human
the current
psychological and economic defaults of individualistic strategic
thinking must be reset to a mode of relational ethical thinking that
is mindful of human interdependence, sustaining the natural
cultural claim, It is mine, the answering response is the natural claim, It is necessary. In other words,
commons, and promoting the social common good. From mine to ours, from
Whats in it for me? to Whats in it for diverse, abundant, and resilient life?
http://www.truth-out.org/opinion/item/19039-without-privacy-there-can-be-nodemocracy, mm
She said, "Without
freedom of opinion, and so there is no actual democracy." This is not just true of
international relations. It's also true here within the United States. Back before the Kennedy
administration largely put an end to it, J Edgar Hoover was infamous in political circles in Washington DC
for his spying on and blackmailing of both American politicians and activists like Martin Luther King. He
even sent King tapes of an extramarital affair and suggested that King should consider committing
suicide. That was a shameful period in American history, and most Americans think it is behind us. But
democracy. Democracy requires opposing voices; it requires a certain level of reasonable political conflict.
And it requires that government misdeeds be exposed. That can only be done when whistleblowers and
a larger
problem is that well over half some estimates run as high as 70% of the NSA's
budget has been outsourced to private corporations. These private
people committing acts of journalism can do so without being spied upon. Perhaps
corporations maintain an army of lobbyists in Washington DC who constantly push for more spying and,
Link Repression
Repressive political strategies like surveillance are key to
ensuring an authoritarian regime can maintain power
Dan Shahar, 2015, Environmental Values, 24(3), Rejecting ecoauthoritarianism, again, 345-366, mm
History seems to teach us that the only reliable way to achieve true
autonomy from citizens demands is through an active and
sustained commitment to suppressing would-be dissenters and to
imposing policies without compromise. For both the Soviet Union and
Peoples Republic of China, the price of political openness was the risk of
instability and political upheaval when citizens came to disapprove of their
leaders actions, and there is good reason to think that this outcome was not a coincidence. 66
It is only by preventing robust civil discourse and open dissent from
emerging in the first place through consistent repression that
authoritarian governments have been able to retain and exercise
their power with relative impunity.67
The world takes note of all this. Authoritarian state media gleefully
publicize these travails of American democracy in order to discredit
democracy in general and immunize authoritarian rule against U.S.
pressure. Even in weak states, autocrats perceive that the pressure
is now off : They can pretty much do whatever they want to censor the media, crush the
opposition, and perpetuate their rule, and Europe and the United States will swallow it. Meek verbal
protests may ensue, but the aid will still flow and the dictators will still be welcome at the White House
transition, pressure and solidarity from the United State and Europe often generated a significant and
even crucial enabling environment that helped to tip finely balanced situations toward democratic
If this solidarity is
now greatly diminished, so will be the near-term global prospects
for reviving and sustaining democratic progress. Democracy has
been in a global recession for most of the last decade, and there is a
growing danger that the recession could deepen and tip over into
something much worse. Many more democracies could fail, not only in
change, and then in some cases gradually toward democratic consolidation.
poor countries of marginal strategic significance, but also in big swing states such as Indonesia and
Ukraine (again). There is little external recognition yet of the grim state of democracy in Turkey, and
Apathy
and inertia in Europe and the United States could significantly lower the
barriers to new democratic reversals and to authoritarian
entrenchments in many more states. Yet the picture is not entirely
bleak. We have not seen a third reverse wave. Globally, average levels of freedom have ebbed a
little bit, but not calamitously. Most important, there has not been significant erosion
in public support for democracy. In fact, what the Afrobarometer has consistently shown
there is no guarantee that democracy will return any time soon to Thailand or Bangladesh.
is a gapin some African countries, a chasmbetween the popular demand for democracy and the
supply of it provided by the regime. This is not based just on some shallow, vague notion that democracy
is a good thing. Many Africans understand the importance of political accountability, transparency, the
rule of law, and restraint of power, and they would like to see their governments manifest these virtues.
While the performance of democracy is failing to inspire, authoritarianism faces its own steep challenges.
There is hardly a dictatorship in the world that looks stable for the
long run. The only truly reliable source of regime stability is legitimacy, and the number of people in
the world who believe in the intrinsic legitimacy of any form of authoritarianism is rapidly diminishing.
Economic development, globalization, and the information revolution are undermining all forms of
authority and empowering individuals. Values are changing, and while we should not assume any
teleological path toward a global enlightenment, generally the movement is toward greater distrust of
authority and more desire for accountability, freedom, and political choice. In the coming two decades,
these trends will challenge the nature of rule in China, Vietnam, Iran, and the Arab states much more than
they will in India, not to mention Europe and the United States. Already, democratization is visible on the
horizon of Malaysias increasingly competitive electoral politics, and it will come in the next generation to
Singapore as well. The key imperative in the near term is to work to reform and consolidate the
democracies that have emerged during the third wavethe majority of which remain illiberal and
the Philippines, South Africa, and Ghana. It is possible and urgently important to help stabilize the new
democracies in Ukraine and Tunisia (whose success could gradually generate significant diffusion effects
throughout the Arab world). It might be possible to nudge Thailand and Bangladesh back toward
electoral democracy, though ways must be found to temper the awful levels of party polarization in each
country. With time, the electoral authoritarian project in Turkey will discredit itself in the face of mounting
corruption and abuse of power, which are already growing quite serious. And the oil-based autocracies in
Iran and Venezuela will face increasingly severe crises of economic performance and political legitimacy.
In the 20th century, the United States reached levels of wealth for more people than had ever been seen in
human history. However, those in power whittled away at the nations basic freedoms, slowly and over
generations. Complaints were few because material prosperity endured. Today, massive and
Freedom continues to be
whittled away at, but more US Americans are awakening to this hard truth, because material
prosperity for many is evaporating. One area that they view with growing alarm is the emergence
of the United States of America as a surveillance state , since, along with a
militarized police force, it is the infrastructure of totalitarianism .+ This is the second
unsustainable debts are maintaining the US standard of living.
in a series of reflections seeking to understand these negative trends in the United States. The first essay
analyzed the role of the US Supreme Court in particular, its decisions that undermined private property
rights and forced taxpayers to cooperate with evil. I concluded with the controversial proposition that the
present system in the United States is post-constitutional.+ For generations, US Americans believed that
the first, third, fourth, and ninth amendments found in the Bill of Rights protected the privacy of citizens of
the United States that only a small number engaged in criminal conduct would be subjected to
the
arrival of new technologies provided the state with the means to
circumvent these constitutional provisions. In the state of Florida, for example,
surveillance, following a court order permitting such activity by the authorities.+ However,
automated systems are replacing toll operators, and they either process your information via your Sun
Pass or by photographing your license plate and sending you the bill. According to the pre-paid toll
program privacy policy, information concerning a SunPass account is provided only when required to
comply with a subpoena or court order.+ In other words, they are compiling and storing information on
your whereabouts.+ Affirming this reality, the American Civil Liberties Union stated on July 18, 2013, that
Police around the United States are recording the license plates of passing drivers and storing the
information for years with little privacy protection. The information potentially allows authorities to track
the movements of everyone who drives a car.+ However, the Electronic Frontier Foundation makes clear
that the federal and state governments are monitoring not only US Americans physical movement, but
without a probable cause warrant. Finally, the media reports confirm the upstream collection off of the
foreigners and Americans. In some cases, it retains the written content of emails sent between citizens
within the U.S. and also filters domestic phone calls made with Internet technology . . . What is equally
disturbing is that private companies are complicit in the behavior when not engaging in their own
monitoring of internet communications although, to be fair, their will is not always on the side of the
spying. (See the video below.) Further, even though the immense and illegal surveillance apparatus is out
in the open now, we see no remorse from the instigators and the elected officials responsible. Rather, they
are doubling down, and their apologists are right there with them. Unfortunately, there is no plan; there is
no conspiracy. This expansion and centralization of power has continued under both Republicans and
Democrats in the United States and would most likely continue under a third party. Centralized power has
become an end unto itself, and as the late Czech president Vaclav Havel observed:+ Once the claims of
central power have been placed above law and morality, once the exercise of that power is divested of
public control, and once the institutional guarantees of political plurality and civil rights have been made a
mockery of, or simply abolished, there is no reason to respect any other limitations. The expansion of
central power does not stop at the frontier between the public and the private, but instead, arbitrarily
pushes back that border until it is shamelessly intervening in areas that once were private.
The
for International Studies, former U.S. ambassador to the United Nations Human Rights Council
Why the NSA undermines national security)
The U.S. model of mass surveillance will be followed by others and could
unintentionally invert the democratic relationship between citizens and their governments. Under the
cover of preventing terrorism, authoritarian governments may now
increase surveillance of political opponents. Governments that collect and
monitor digital information to intimidate or squelch political opposition and dissent can more
justifiably claim they are acting with legitimacy. For human rights
defenders and democracy activists worldwide, the potential
consequences of the widespread use by governments of mass
surveillance techniques are dark and clear.
where he is director of the Canada Centre for Global Security Studies and the Citizen Lab at the
Munk School of Global Affairs Why NSA spying scares the world)
Many of the countries in the Southern Hemisphere are failed or fragile states;
many of them are authoritarian or autocratic regimes. No doubt the elites in those
regimes will use the excuse of security to adopt more stringent state
controls over the Internet in their jurisdictions and support local versions of
popular social media companies over which they can exact their own nationalized controls -- a trend that
began prior to the NSA revelations but which now has additional rhetorical support. In the age of Big Data,
agents, the building of 700 additional miles of walls, fences, and barriers, and an investment of billions of
Calling this immigration reform is like calling the National Security Agencys expanding global
the policed . The $46 billion border security price tag in the immigration reform bill will simply expand on what has already been
built. After all, $100 billion was spent on border enforcement in the first decade after 9/11. To that must be added the annual $18 billion
budget for border and immigration enforcement, money that outpaces the combined budgets of all other federal law enforcement agencies. In
fact, since Operation Blockade in the 1990s, the U.S.-Mexico border has gone through so many surges that a time when simple chain link
fences separated two friendly countries is now unimaginable. To witness the widespread presence of Department of Homeland Security
agents on the southern border, just visit that international boundary 100 miles south of Border Security Expo. Approximately 700 miles of
walls, fences, and barriers already cut off the two countries at its major urban crossings and many rural ones as well. Emplaced everywhere
are cameras that can follow you -- or your body heat -- day or night. Overhead, as in Afghanistan, a Predator B drone may hover. You cant
hear its incessant buzzing only because it flies so high, nor can you see the crew in charge of flying it and analyzing your movements from
possibly hundreds of miles away. As you walk, perhaps you step on implanted sensors, creating a beeping noise in some distant monitoring
room. Meanwhile, green-striped Border Patrol vehicles rush by constantly. On the U.S.-Mexican border, there are already more than 18,500
agents (and approximately 2,300 more on the Canadian border). In counterterrorism mode, they are paid to be suspicious of everything and
everybody. Some Homeland Security vehicles sport trailers carrying All Terrain Vehicles. Some have mounted surveillance cameras, others
cages to detain captured migrants. Some borderlanders like Mike Wilson of the Tucson-based Border Action Network, a member of the Tohono
Oodham Nation (a Native American people and the original inhabitants of the Arizona borderlands), call the border security operatives an
occupying army. Checkpoints -- normally located 20-50 miles from the international boundary -- serve as a second layer of border
enforcement. Stopped at one of them, you will be interrogated by armed agents in green, most likely with drug-sniffing dogs. If you are near
the international divide, its hard to avoid such checkpoints where you will be asked about your citizenship -- and much more if anything you
say or do, or simply the way you look, raises suspicions. Even outside of the checkpoints, agents of the Department of Homeland Security can
pull you over for any reason -- without probable cause or a warrant -- and do what is termed a routine search. As a U.S. Border Patrol agent
told journalist Margaret Regan, within a hundred miles of the international divide, there's an asterisk on the Constitution. Off-road forward
operating bases offer further evidence of the battlefield atmosphere being created near the border. Such outposts became commonplace
during the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where they were meant to house U.S. soldiers deployed into remote areas. On the border, there
are high-tech yet rudimentary camps that serve the same purpose. They also signal how agents of the Department of Homeland Security are
gaining, maintaining, and expanding into rural areas traversed by migrants and used by smugglers, though to this point never crossed by a
known international terrorist. These rural areas, especially in Arizona, are riddled with migrant causalities. More than 6,000 remains have
been recovered since the mid-1990s, deaths not for the most part from bullets but from exposure. The U.S. borderlands, according to
sociologist Timothy Dunn, started to become a militarized zone as early as the 1970s -- in part, in response to the Pentagons low-intensity
conflict doctrine. With Congressional immigration reform, if it passes the House of Representatives, it may very well become a full-fledged war
zone. Since the 1990s, the strategy of the Border Patrol has been termed prevention by deterrence and has been focused on concentrating
agents and surveillance technologies in urban areas, once the traditional migrant routes. The idea was to funnel migrant flows into areas too
dangerous and desolate to cross like the triple-degree-temperature desert in Arizona. Deadly yes; impossible to cross, no. Although
unauthorized border-crossings have slowed down in recent years, tens of thousands continue to cross into the United States annually from
Mexico and Central America, thanks in part to the continued havoc of the North American Free Trade Agreement, which left more two million
Mexican farmers unemployed. I met Adira, a 21-year-old from Oaxaca, Mexico, in early June. She told me a story all too common in Arizona.
As she described her experience, I realized that I was talking to somebody who had probably died and been brought back to life. We were only
a few blocks from the border. Homeland Security had formally deported her only days before. Still reliving the trauma of her experience, she
stared down, her face colorless, as she talked. I had heard the basics of her story so many times before: to avoid the militarized surveillance
apparatus, she and her companions walked for at least five days through the southern Arizona desert with little -- and then no -- water or food.
By the fourth day, the mountains began to talk to her, so she told me, and she suspected she was coming to the end of her young life. After
she couldnt walk any more, the guide dragged her, telling her constantly: We just have to make it to the next point. When they reached a
road on the American side of the border, she remembers convulsing four times (just as she remembers blood bursting spontaneously from the
noses of her companions). And then she remembers no more. She woke up in a hospital. There were scars on her chest. Medics must have
used a machine, she thought, to shock her back to life. She found out later that somebody had lit a fire to attract the Border Patrol. Shes lucky
not to be among those remains regularly found out in that desert. In other words, each further tightening of the border is a death sentence
passed on yet more Latin Americans. According to a statement by a group of Tucson organizations, including No More Deaths and the Coalicin
de Derechos Humanos, the border build-up in the immigration reform bill promises more of the same: Make no mistake: this bill will lead to
DRS Technologies set up its integrated fixedtower technology at the University of Arizonas (UA) Science and Technology Park, just
more deaths on the border. In early March ,
south of Tucson, an hour from the border, and very close to where Adira almost lost her life. The
company was eager to show off the long-range surveillance
technology it had been developing for borders in places like Egypt
and Jordan. It set up a mock operational control room to do a dog-and-pony show for the local
media. Four of its IT guys then focused their cameras on an elevated railroad spur more than four miles
away in the middle of the desert where two men were approaching each other to consummate a fake drug
deal. One handed the other a backpack. It was all vividly watchable on DRSs video screens. Although the
of technology, radar, unattended ground sensors, and camera systems meant to detect anyone crossing
the border anywhere. The last attempt to install such an experimental system along part of the border was
in 2006. Then the Department of Homeland Security awarded Boeing Corporation a multi-billion-dollar
contract to develop such a wall, known as SBInet. That contract was abruptly cancelled in 2011, after the
costly and delayed program advertised as offering unprecedented situational awareness misfired
regularly in the rugged terrain of the Arizona borderlands. Now, companies like DRS are standing in line for
the next round of potentially lucrative contracts, as Homeland Security wantsto finish the job. The UA
Tech Park is one place in the southern borderlands where surveillance technology can be developed,
tested, evaluated, and demonstrated. It has 18,000 linear feet of fencing surrounding its solar zone, a
solar-technology-centric research area ideal for testing sensor systems along a future border wall. On any
of the roadways in its 1,345 acres, it can set up mock border-crossings or checkpoints to test new
equipment and methods. It draws on faculty and graduate students from the college of engineering. In
rapid-response teams, they offer third-party evaluations of border control technology. Some of this same
technology is also being created on the UA campus, thanks in part to millions of dollars in DHS grants.
Here, too, as Tech Park CEO Bruce Wright tells me, they can test new technologies right in the field -- that
is, on the border, presumably on real people. One of the tech parks goals, he says, is to develop the first
border security industry cluster of its kind in the United States. In southern Arizona alone, they have
already identified 57 companies, big and small, working on border policing technology. The Tech Parks
director of community engagement Molly Gilbert says, Its really about development, and we want to
create technology jobs in our border towns. These are sweet words for the economically depressed
communities of southern Arizona, their poverty rates usually hovering at around 20%. With projected
global revenues of approximately $20 billion in 2013 and a 5% growth rate that has withstood a worldwide
recession,
immigration reform proposal. Now, it is poised for a potential bonanza. The key, as
Wright stressed in a 2012 interview, is that the products developed for the U.S.-Mexican borderlands be
marketed in the future for the U.S.-Canada border, where defenses are already being upgraded, for other
international borders, but also for places that have little to do with borders. These might include the
perimeters of utility companies and airports, or police forces with expanding national security and
immigration enforcement missions. Theres
It is enough to say in opposition that omnipresent invasive listening creates fear. And that fear is the
enemy of reasoned, ordered liberty. It is utterly inconsistent with the American ideal to attempt to fasten
procedures of totalitarianism on American constitutional self-governance. But there is an even deeper
inconsistency between those ideals and the subjection of every other society on earth to mass
surveillance. Some of the system's servants came to understand that it was being sustained not with, but
against, democratic order. They knew their vessel had come unmoored in the dark, and was sailing without
a flag. When they blew the whistle, the system blew back at them. In the end -- at least so far, until
tomorrow -- there was Snowden, who saw everything that happened and watched the fate of others who
spoke up. He understood, as Chelsea Manning also always understood, that when you wear the uniform
you consent to the power. He knew his business very well. Young as he was, as he said in Hong Kong, "I've
been a spy all my life." So he did what it takes great courage to do in the presence of what you believe to
be radical injustice. He wasn't first, he won't be last, but he sacrificed his life as he knew it to tell us things
we needed to know. Snowden committed espionage on behalf of the human race. He knew the price, he
knew the reason. But as he said, only the American people could decide, by their response, whether
sacrificing his life was worth it. So our most important effort is to understand the message: to understand
its context, purpose, and meaning, and to experience the consequences of having received the
communication. Even once we have understood, it will be difficult to judge Snowden, because there is
always much to say on both sides when someone is greatly right too soon. In the United States, those who
were "premature anti-fascists" suffered. It was right to be right only when all others were right. It was
wrong to be right when only people we disagreed with held the views that we were later to adopt
ourselves. Snowden has been quite precise. He understands his business. He has spied on injustice for us
and has told us what we require in order to do the job and get it right. And if we have a responsibility, then
it is to learn, now, before somebody concludes that learning should be prohibited. In considering the
political meaning of Snowden's message and its consequences, we must begin by discarding for immediate
purposes pretty much everything said by the presidents, the premiers, the chancellors and the senators.
Public discussion by these "leaders" has provided a remarkable display of misdirection, misleading and
outright lying. We need instead to focus on the thinking behind Snowden's activities. What matters most is
how deeply the whole of the human race has been ensnared in this system of pervasive surveillance.
We begin where the leaders are determined not to end, with the question of whether
any form of democratic self-government, anywhere, is consistent with
the kind of massive, pervasive surveillance into which the United States
government has led not only its people but the world. This should not
actually be a complicated inquiry. For almost everyone who lived through the 20th century -- at least its
middle half -- the idea that freedom was consistent with the procedures of totalitarianism was selfevidently false. Hence, as we watch responses to Snowden's revelations we see that massive invasion of
privacy triggers justified anxiety among the survivors of totalitarianism about the fate of liberty. To
understand why, we need to understand more closely what our conception of "privacy" really contains.
Our concept of "privacy" combines three things: first is secrecy, or our ability to keep the content of our
messages known only to those we intend to receive them. Second is anonymity, or secrecy about who is
sending and receiving messages, where the content of the messages may not be secret at all. It is very
important that anonymity is an interest we can have both in our publishing and in our reading. Third is
autonomy, or our ability to make our own life decisions free from any force that has violated our secrecy or
our anonymity. These three -- secrecy, anonymity and autonomy -- are the principal components of a
politics, we must also be able to protect ourselves against retaliation for our expressions of political ideas.
is the antithesis of liberty. This is the conversation that all the "don't listen to my mobile phone!"
misdirection has not been about. If it were up to national governments, the conversation would remain at
this phony level forever.
Prior
to 9/11, the operative presumption in developed nations favoured
privacy, but the security narrative has since reversed the
presumption, eroding our privacy rights in favour of government control over our
personal information. However, government is an instrument sometimes a crude one
susceptible to abuse, as demonstrated by recent admissions that the US Internal Revenue
the US government on its massive spy cloud one that the NSA operates and the Five Eyes share.
Service has targeted specific groups based on ideology. When we empower the state, we empower those
that hold sway over the state, and the state is subject to influence from a multitude of quarters. I have
personally been a victim of such abuses. The US government has indicted me, shut down my cloud storage
company Megaupload and seized all of my assets because it claims I was complicit in copyright
infringement by some of the people who used the Megaupload service. I have emphasised that I am being
prosecuted not because the charges against me have some sound basis in US copyright law, but because
the US justice department has been instrumentalised by certain private interests that have a financial
stake in neutralising my business. That trend represents a danger not just to me, but to all of us. Recent
polls in the US suggest that the public is not much preoccupied with the fact that our data is being
retained, so long as our own political party is in control of the government. That kind of fickle comfort is
Every person who values personal freedom, human rights and the rule of law must recoil against such a
possibility, regardless of their political preference. Others take a more cavalier approach, such as former
Google CEO Eric Schmidt in 2009: If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you
the
prospect of an Orwellian society outweighs whatever security
benefits we derive from Prism or Five Eyes. Viewed through the long lens of human
history, concerns over government tyranny are always legitimate. It is
shouldn't be doing it in the first place. We should heed warnings from Snowden because
those concerns that underpin the constitutions of most developed countries, and inform international
principles of human rights and the rule of law. Prism and its related practices should be discontinued
immediately, and the Utah Data Center should be leased to cloud storage companies with encryption
capabilities.
lessen their impact on the natural environment may not find sufficient support to make them realisable or
effective. As Lieberman (2002, p. 709) points out, an ideas time arrives not simply because the idea is
compelling on its own terms, but because opportune political circumstances favor it. In much of
Southeast Asia and China the forces supporting environmental protection are comparatively weak and
unable to overcome powerful vested interests intent on the continuing exploitation of natural resources
In short, predominantly Western concerns with thick cosmopolitanism and the hope that a metabolistic
[sic] relationship with the natural environment might bind us to strangers (Dobson 2006, p. 177), seem
bizarrely at odds with lived experience where climate change is already profoundly undermining
The
sobering reality would seem to be that . . . as the human population
grows and environmental damage progresses, policymakers will
have less and less capacity to intervene to keep damage from
producing serious social disruption, including conflict (Homer-Dixon 1991,
sociability within national frameworks, let alone between them (Raleigh and Urdal 2007).
p. 79).
Such ideas are difficult to accept, especially for societies steeped in traditions of liberalism, individualism,
freedom of choice and personal advancement. The US is, of course, such a country, where an entire
national consciousness and way of life is predicated upon liberal values values which some consider
has done
most to contribute to global environmental problems like climate
change, but which has until now seemed incapable of addressing them politically (Stephens 2007).
In China, by contrast, an authoritarian regime has arguably done
more to mitigate environmental problems than any other
government on earth: without the one-child policy instigated in the 1970s, it is estimated that
profoundly inimical to environmental sustainability (Ophuls 1997). It is also the country that
there would already be another 400 million Chinese (Dickie 2008) and Chinas environmental problems
(and everyone elses) would be that much worse. Luckily for the worlds non-Chinese population, China
does not enjoy the same living standards as the US, and it is impossible to imagine that the vast majority
of its citizens ever will. There are, it seems, fundamental, implacable constraints on the carrying capacity
of the planet (Cohen 1995). The real tragedy about Chinas development is not the failure to democratise
rapidly, but that at the very moment that human beings seem to have figured out how to generate
not interrupt others doing the same and disrupt the peace.
as. As long as we can still travel to the other side of the globe four times a year, we will do it. As long as
we can still buy a SUV, we will buy it. This is the reality. In doing so, he has escaped the methodological
ghetto. The safe methods we have been using do not achieve our goals, so we must change. Linkola saw
that while every well-meaning education program has vanished without making change, the occasional
Either we
enforce an unpopular truth on ourselves, or we wait paralyzed by
our inability to transcend our methods, and let nature enforce it on
us through environmental cataclysm . To avoid the selfishness of
individuals, Linkola advocates an end to Third World aid and immigration, mandatory
population control, and the creation of a ruthless green police to clean up
the planet. His theories tie together deep ecology with a recognition
that democratic, liberal societies cannot control themselves. He believes
governmental fascism like the Endangered Species Act in the USA has produced results.
that the individual who connects himself to reality through struggle and not the individual withdrawing
into him or herself brings the greatest meaning to life.
ordinary robotic worker and mechanical consumer that he or she has now become. It will require a
fundamental change in society for the citizen to be able to understand the present political system, let
We doubt if any
transformation of the masses is possible, at least to the extent
needed for a radical democratic transformation of the present
system. For example, most people have difficulty understanding the
nature of the monetary system of capitalism at the basic level described here. It is
difficult even for those with slightly higher IQs to grasp the
diabolical logic of credit creation. Yet without such a grasp, reform
alone the complexities of our dependence on ecological services.
nation has an overriding legal duty to protect the environment and ensure that social, political, and all
economic systems and activities that impact substantially upon the environment by any agents, persons,
or entities whatsoever are ecologically sustainable. By the expression ecologically sustainable we
mean X and in the assertion will be placed a concise drafting of the principles of sustainability. Further to
that, each person and corporation has a duty of environmental protection.
increasingly depend for livelihood. Nothing less than a resurgence of fraternity will make the return of
scarcity bearable. Without some feeling of kinship that induces us to seek or at least accept a common
fight other democracies. Or as President George W. Bush put it with his customary eloquence,
"democracies don't war; democracies are peaceful."136 The democratic peace theory is the
unstable regimes, if the military can use force domestically without jeopardizing its
cohesiveness, it will favor repressing domestic oppo nents and refrain from
international aggression. Thus, Dassel points out that regimes in which there are few checks on foreign
policy decision makers, and in which domestic conflicts are resolved through massive violence, may be the
very states that pursue pacific foreign policies; because force can be used at home, it will not be used abroad. In
short, democratic peace theorists wrongly assert that non-democracies are predisposed to aggression because of
the characteristics of their governments. In this book, we suggest that only some nondemocratic states will use
force abroad; treating all nondemocracies as potential aggressors is misleading.
arguably
"In
every sense, in the sense of communities that will preserve soil,
promote local climate, keep the atmosphere, preserve water, and
every thing else, the first rule of being able to put together
communities well or have the world go on functioning well, or to
keep climates as they are, or to retard disease, to produce products
we want sustainably, be cause, after all, plants, algae, and photosynthetic
bacteria are the only device we have to capture energy from the sun
effectively-in all those senses, and in the sense that we're losing the parts so
rapidly, I con sider the loss of biological diversity to be the most
his thinking on Leopold's observation "To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering":
The story of non-human life on the planet Earth over the past few decades is a simple
one: loss. While there are always a few bright spotsincluding the recovery of threatened animals like the brown pelican,
thanks to the quietly revolutionary Endangered Species Act on
heading downwards. In a bitterly ironic twist, back in 2002 the United Nations declared that 2010 would be the
international year of biodiversity, and countries agreed to" achieve a significant reduction of the current rate of biodiversity loss
at the global, regional and national level," as part of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD). At this paper in
Science shows (download a PDF here), however, the world has utterly failed to reduce the rate of biodiversity loss, and by
just about every measurement, things are getting worse all the time .
life on Earth exists thanks to the benefits from biodiversity in the forms of fertile soil,
clear water and clean air. We are now close to a 'tipping point' - that is, we are about to
reach a threshold beyond which biodiversity loss will become irreversible, and may
cross that threshold in the next 10 years if we do not make proactive efforts for
conserving biodiversity. Ahmed Djoghlaf, the executive secretary of the CBD, struck
an even darker note, reminding diplomats that they were on a clockand time was
running out: Let's have the courage to look in the eyes of our children and admit that we have failed, individually and
collectively, to fulfil the Johannesburg promise made by 110 heads of state to substantially reduce the rate of loss of
biodiversity by 2010. Let us look in the eyes of our children and admit that we continue to lose biodiversity at an unprecedented
rate, thus mortgaging their future. But what will actually come out of the Nagoya summit, which will continue until Oct. 29?
Most likely there will be another agreementa new protocoloutlining various global strategies on sustaining biodiversity
and goals on slowing the rate of species loss. (You can download a PDF of the discussion draft document that will be picked
over at Nagoya.) It won't be hard for governments to agree on general ambitions for reducing biodiversity losswho's against
saving pandas?but the negotiations will be much trickier on the question of who will actually pay for a more biodiverse
planet? And much as we've seen in international climate change negotiations, the essential divide is between the developed and
developing nationsand neither side seems ready to bend. The reality is that much of the world's biodiversitythe most
fantastic species and the most complete forestsis found in the poorer, less developed parts of the world. That's in part because
the world's poor have been, well, too poor to develop the land around them in the way rich nations have. (There was once a
beautiful, undeveloped island off the East Coast of the U.S., with wetlands and abundant forests. It was called Mannahatta. It's a
little different now.) As a result, the rural poorespecially in tropical nationsare directly dependent on healthy wildlife and
plants in a way that inhabitants of developed nations aren't. So on one hand that makes the poor directly vulnerable when
species are lost and forests are chopped downwhich often results in migration to thronging urban areas. But on the other,
poverty often drives the rural poor to slash-and-burn forests for agriculture, or hunt endangered species to sell for bush meat.
Conservation and development have to go hand in hand. That hasn't always been the mantra of the conservation movementas
Rebecca Tuhus-Dubrow writes in Slate, conservation projects in the past sometimes displaced the human inhabitants over a
reserve or park, privileging nature over people. But that's changed in recent decadesenvironmental groups like Conservation
International or the Nature Conservancy now spend as much of their time working on development as they do in protecting
nature. "Save the people, save the wildlife"that's the new mantra. The missing ingredient is moneyand that's what will be
up for debate at Nagoya. As climate change has risen on the international agenda, funding for biodiversity has laggedthe 33
member nations of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) donated $8.5 billion for climate
change mitigation projects in 2008, but just $3 billion annually for biodiversity. One way to change that could be through
"payment for ecosystem services." A biodiverse landscape, intact forests, clean water and airall
of these ebbing qualities of a healthy world are vital for our economies as well. (The
Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity, a UN-funded study, estimates that nature
degradation costs the world $2 trillion to $5 trillion a year, with the poorest nations bearing the brunt
of the loss.) Rich countries could pay more biodiverse developing nations to keep nature runningallowing poorer countries to
capitalize on their natural resources without slashing and burning. Will that work? I'm skepticalthe experience of climate
change negotiations have shown that the nations of the world are great at high ideals and fuzzy goals, but not so hot at actually
dividing up the pie in a more sustainable fashion. That doesn't mean there aren't smaller solutionslike Costa Rica's justannounced debt-for-nature dealbut a big bang from Japan this month doesn't seem too likely. The problem is as simple as it is
unsolvable, at least so farthere's no clear path to national development so far that doesn't take from the natural world. That
worked for rich nations, but we're rapidly running out of planet, as a report last week from the World Wildlife Fund showed.
Impact Warming
Global warming is real, anthropogenic, and causes
extinction
Deibel 7 (Terry L. Deibel, professor of IR at National War College, 2007,
Foreign Affairs Strategy, Conclusion: American Foreign
Finally, there is one major existential threat to American security (as well as prosperity) of a nonviolent nature,
which, though far in the future, demands urgent action. It is the threat of global warming to the stability of the climate
upon which all earthly life depends. Scientists worldwide have been observing the gathering of this threat for
three decades now, and what was once a mere possibility has passed through probability to near certainty. Indeed not
one of more than 900 articles on climate change published in refereed scientific journals from 1993
to 2003 doubted that anthropogenic warming is occurring. In legitimate scientific circles, writes
Elizabeth Kolbert, it is virtually impossible to find evidence of disagreement over the
fundamentals of global warming. Evidence from a vast international scientific monitoring
effort accumulates almost weekly, as this sample of newspaper reports shows: an international panel
predicts brutal droughts, floods and violent storms across the planet over the next century; climate
change could literally alter ocean currents, wipe away huge portions of Alpine Snowcaps
and aid the spread of cholera and malaria ; glaciers in the Antarctic and in Greenland are melting much faster
than expected, andworldwide, plants are blooming several days earlier than a decade ago; rising sea temperatures have been
accompanied by a significant global increase in the most destructive hurricanes; NASA scientists have concluded from direct
temperature measurements that 2005 was the hottest year on record, with 1998 a close second; Earths warming climate is estimated
to contribute to more than 150,000 deaths and 5 million illnesses each year as disease spreads; widespread bleaching from Texas to
Trinidadkilled broad swaths of corals due to a 2-degree rise in sea temperatures. The world is slowly disintegrating, concluded
Inuit hunter Noah Metuq, who lives 30 miles from the Arctic Circle. They call it climate changebut we just call it breaking up.
From the founding of the first cities some 6,000 years ago until the beginning of the industrial revolution, carbon dioxide levels in the
atmosphere remained relatively constant at about 280 parts per million (ppm). At present they are accelerating toward 400 ppm, and
by 2050 they will reach 500 ppm, about double pre-industrial levels. Unfortunately, atmospheric CO2 lasts about a century, so there is
no way immediately to reduce levels, only to slow their increase, we are thus in for significant global warming; the only debate is
how much and how serous the effects will be. As the newspaper stories quoted above show, we are already experiencing the effects of
1-2 degree warming in more violent storms, spread of disease, mass die offs of plants and animals, species extinction, and threatened
inundation of low-lying countries like the Pacific nation of Kiribati and the Netherlands at a warming of 5 degrees or less the
Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets could disintegrate, leading to a sea level of rise of 20 feet that would cover North Carolinas
outer banks, swamp the southern third of Florida, and inundate Manhattan up to the middle of Greenwich Village. Another
catastrophic effect would be the collapse of the Atlantic thermohaline circulation that keeps the winter weather in Europe far warmer
than its latitude would otherwise allow. Economist William Cline once estimated the damage to the United States alone from
the most
frightening scenario is runaway greenhouse warming, based on positive feedback from
the buildup of water vapor in the atmosphere that is both caused by and causes hotter surface temperatures. Past
moderate levels of warming at 1-6 percent of GDP annually; severe warming could cost 13-26 percent of GDP. But
ice age transitions, associated with only 5-10 degree changes in average global temperatures, took place in just decades, even
though no one was then pouring ever-increasing amounts of carbon into the atmosphere. Faced with this specter, the best one
can conclude is that humankinds continuing enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect is
akin to playing Russian roulette with the earths climate and humanitys life support
system. At worst, says physics professor Marty Hoffert of New York University, were just going to burn everything up;
were going to het the atmosphere to the temperature it was in the Cretaceous when there were crocodiles at the poles, and
then everything will collapse. During the Cold War, astronomer Carl Sagan popularized a theory of nuclear winter
to describe how a thermonuclear war between the Untied States and the Soviet Union would not only destroy both countries
but possible end life on this planet. Global warming is the post-Cold War eras equivalent of nuclear
winter at least as serious and considerably better supported scientifically. Over the long
run it puts dangers from terrorism and traditional military challenges to shame. It is a threat
not only to the security and prosperity to the United States, but potentially to the continued existence of life on
this planet.
Crunch UQ
in extent and degree among the various regions and societies that make up modern industrial civilization.
Moreover, all these societies are now interconnected in a vast and complex world system far beyond
years old (i.e., close to what Glubb deems to be the natural lifespan of a civilization). Having built up a
stupendous fabric far beyond anything that Gibbon could have conceived, the implosion to come seems
destined to be equally stupendous. Before civilization became universal, the consequences of decline and
fall may have been catastrophic for a particular society and for many or even most of its inhabitants, but
they were not fatal to civilization itself. There were always others to keep the flame alive. Or a lurking
horde of barbarians poised to bring fresh blood to a tired and moribund society. But now that a highly
interdependent, global, industrial civilization extends its monopoly to the ends of the earth, there are no
others to pick up the baton, nor any barbarian reservoirs to replenish its lan. Collapse, if and
when it comes again, will this time be global , says Tainer. It will also be
uniquely devastating. Given the enormous growth of populations and the extent of ecological
devastation and social dislocation caused by industrialization as well as the degree to which the methods
and materials of traditional agriculture have been abandoned in the rush to ramp up yields by converting
fossil fuel into food a gradual and gentle transition to a viable agrarian civilization capable of supporting
large numbers of people and a reasonable level of complexity is extremely unlikely. In fact, says Tainter,
be readily accepted. For the hubris of every civilization is that it is, like the Titanic, unsinkable. Hence the
motivation to plan for shipwreck is lacking. In addition, the civilizations contradictions and difficulties are
seen not as symptoms of impending collapse, but, rather, as problems to be solved by better policies and
personnel. In other words, the populace does not yet understand that the civilization has reached an
impasse. As Tainter notes, It takes protracted hardship to convince people that the world to which they
have been accustomed has changed irrevocably. Moreover, although collapse may be foreordained, its
course and timing are largely unpredictable. Collapse could happen suddenly or gradually, sooner or later,
so why act now? To make matters worse, preparing for this uncertain future requires present sacrifice
that is, the diversion of resources from both current consumption and from the task of coping with todays
problems at a time when those very same resources are becoming scarcer and more expensive. In short,
denial, evasion, and procrastination are all but inevitable. Thus if preparations for collapse are made at
all, they are likely to be too little and too late. Modern civilization is therefore bound for a worse fate than
the Titanic. When it sinks, the lifeboats, if any, will be ill provisioned, and no one will come to its rescue.
In an
Egalitarian society that has no elite class, an equilibrium can be
reached where the commoner population increases to the maximum
carrying capacity of the planet. However, if the population
overconsumes its resources, a collapse results from which there is no
recovery. Resources, wealth and population all go to zero . The
Equitable society divides the population into workers and
nonworkers. This society can reach equilibrium with slow growth and fairly
distributed salaries. In the Unequal scenario, the population collapses after
an apparent equilibrium when the elite population starts to take off, peaking around year
(a collapse). The study looked at three scenarios: Egalitarian, Equitable and Unequal.
775. By year 900, everything has collapsed, and nature makes a recovery.
morrow or consider that they are borrowing from posterity. Finally, however, resources are either effectively exhausted or
others is not a permanent solution, because conquest, too, has serious costs: imperial overstretch has spelled the
governed by a basic ecological principle called the law of the minimum. Thus the factor in least supply is controlling. For
example, to grow cereals takes soil, seeds, fertilizer, and water as well as labor. Not only must all of these factors of
production be present for there to be a crop, but they must be present in the right quality or proportion. Thin soils or poor
seeds will stunt crop growth even if all the other factors are present in abundance. Thus some resources are more critical
for civilization than others. The most critical of all is water, without which life simply cannot be sustained. But as
civilizations develop, they tend to overuse and misuse their water supplies, with consequences that can be serious. For
example, salinization due to inappropriate irrigation plagued many ancient civilizations (and continues to be a problem
today). Civilizations also damage watersheds by cutting down the forests that moderate climate, promote rainfall, and
store water. In addition, the law of the minimum have a corollary: consuming to the limit when times are flush leaves a
civilization exposed to peril if resources decline in quality or quantity. For example, because rainfall varies from year to
year, water supply inevitably fluctuates. This means that past levels of agricultural production may not always be
achievable, threatening the civilization with hunger or even famine. To restate the corollary in prescriptive form ,
thermodynamic terms. The steady flow of solar energy is not simply consumed but is instead used to build
nature internalizes
thermodynamic costs, using the same matter and energy over and over to wring a maximum of
life out of a minimum of energy. Although it might be theoretically possible for
the human economy to mimic the natural economy, it would involve
a radical transformation of civilization as we know it. Societies would have
to be far more intricately and closely coupled just as in natural ecosystems.
And individuals would have to tolerate strong checks on human will
up a rich and diverse capital stock. To put it more technically,
question whether human beings have the managerial capacity to sustain it. Let us, therefore, turn to the
fourth biophysical limit that confronts civilization: the challenge of complexity.
to the need for a new public philosophy on political as well as ecological grounds. This book attempts to
sketch the basic outline of such a philosophy a natural law theory of politics grounded in ecology,
physics, and psychology. In doing so, I make explicit the basic principles of ecological polity that were
implicit in my previous work and add new material to make the theory more robust. I start from the radical
premise that sustainability as usually understood
Dana Dovey, writer for Medical daily cites study from scientists at Stanford,
Princeton and Berkeley
http://www.medicaldaily.com/end-world-6th-mass-extinction-earths-historyhas-begun-and-humans-may-not-survive-339480
Extinction is a natural part of life. With each passing century species enter and fade
from existence, but mass extinctions are few and far between . To date,
Earth has seen only five, with the last one taking out the dinosaurs
about 65 million years ago. However, according to a recent study
completed by an international team of biologists, we are currently in
the midst of a sixth mass extinction, and humans may be one of the first species to die
off. Stories on pollution, habitat destruction, and the impending end of days are nothing new. What
marks this collaborative paper apart from the countless number of doomsday predictions is that it is based
on accurate and hard-to-dispute scientific data. Using fossil records, the team compared natural extinction
rates, which are also known as background extinction rates, to current extinction rates, and came up with
some disturbing figures. Results showed that even with conservative estimates, species today are
disappearing up to 100 times faster than the normal rate between mass extinctions. We emphasize that
our calculations very likely underestimate the severity of the extinction crisis, because our aim was to
According
to Dr. Paul Ehrlich, a researcher involved in the study, "[The study]
shows without any significant doubt that we are now entering the
sixth great mass extinction event." Whats A Mass Extinction? The mass extinction of
place a realistic lower bound on humanitys impact on biodiversity, the researchers wrote.
the dinosaurs, scientifically known as the Cretaceous-Tertiary (or K-T) extinction, is the best known of all
mass extinctions, but it is only one of five extinction events believed to have occurred on Earth. Mass
extinctions are defined as periods where abnormal or above average numbers of species completely die
out. For example, BBC reports that in the Permian mass extinction, which occurred an estimated 248
million years ago, about 96 percent of all of Earths species died out. The International Union for
Conversation of Nature, which maintains an authoritative list of threatened and extinct species, estimates
the current specter of extinction could wipe out 41 percent of amphibian species, 26 percent of all
itself would likely disappear early on." In a video clip, Ehrlich explains that this is because of our
dependence on the natural services that other species provide. Examples of this include the pollination
of crops and climate control. We are not likely to lose the honey bee as a species but we are already
losing it in lots of places where its important, say for pollinating your almond orchards, Ehrlich said. Past
extinctions were brought about by a number of uncontrollable factors, such as climate change, sea level
shifts, and possibly a large, catastrophic asteroid impact. What marks this current descent into extinction
as different is not only that it's believed to be completely man-made but also that it might be avoidable if
we take action against it now. The team writes that deforestation for farming and settlement, the
introduction of invasive species, carbon emissions, and our introducing toxins to the environment are
permanently and irreversibly destroying ecosystems. Despite the grim news, it may still be a bit early to
start building a doomsday bunker. Through intensified conservation efforts, we may still be able to
preserve the Earths ecosystem. But the window of opportunity is rapidly closing, the researchers said.
"Avoiding
requires a modest investment in pasture, water, and fodder for the two to three years it takes from
conception until the horse can work. But to make a car requires not only many direct inputs steel, copper,
fuel, water, chemicals, and so forth but also many indirect ones such as a factory and labor force as well
as the matter and energy needed to sustain them. To use a technical term, the embodied energy in the
car is many times that in the horse. In addition, the thermodynamic cost of operating the car is far greater.
A horse needs only a modicum of hay, water and oats procured locally without too much difficulty. But the
auto requires oil wells, refineries, tankers, gasoline stations, mechanics shops, and so on that is, a
myriad of direct inputs that are difficult and expensive to procure, as well as a host of indirect costs. So the
substitution of auto for the horse may have brought many advantages, but at a heavy thermodynamic
price. Even the technological leap represented by the computer is no different. Its partisans may believe
that it will be the instrument of humanitys final liberation from the tyranny of nature, but a quick glance at
the enormous quantity of embodied energy in each computer and in the systems that support it, plus the
entropy
(and generates other problems that we shall take up in the next chapter). It is vital to
understand that technology is not a source of energy. That is, it is not a fuel in its own
right, only a means for putting fuel to work or for transforming one energy resource into another. Thus, for
example, coal can be converted into gasoline but at a high thermodynamic price, because much of the
Authoritarianism UQ
debilitating separatist rebellion in the eastern part of that country, has dominated the news recently. But
this action should be seen for what it is: a Kremlin containment effort to prevent Ukrainians from achieving
The
Ukraine example is just one small part of a vast containment
ambition led by the regimes in Moscow, Beijing, Riyadh and Tehran ,
which may disagree on many things but share an interest in limiting the spread of democracy. The
strategy has evolved in three key areas. The first concerns
institutions. Seeing regional and international rules-based bodies as a threat to regime interests,
a democratically accountable government that would threaten Russias corrupt authoritarian system.
authoritarians have focused their efforts on hobbling key institutions democracy and human rights
mechanisms. Russia, in cooperation with other authoritarian regimes in Eurasia, has undermined the
human rights dimensions of the Council of Europe and the Organisation for Security and Cooperation in
Europe, especially the latters election-monitoring and media-freedom functions. Venezuela plays a
with China and Russia, is pursuing greater control of the Internet in intergovernmental bodies worldwide.
As the authoritarians whittle away at democratic standards, they have created their own clubs, such as the
Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) and the Eurasian Customs Union, that mimic their liberal
counterparts but whose aim is to institutionalize authoritarian norms. Through a treaty arrangement with
SCO members, China has challenged the norm against refoulement the return of persecuted individuals
to the hands of their persecutors by using a designation of terrorist as the basis for repatriation. China
has persuaded non-SCO countries such as Cambodia and Malaysia to cooperate with this new standard.
More broadly, authoritarian regimes work with each other to monitor activists and oppositionists and block
their movement, for instance through international watchlists and blacklists that are generated within
addition to Ukraine, Russia pursues a disruptive policy toward democratic hopefuls Georgia and Moldova.
The Baltic states, although NATO and European Union members, nevertheless are targets of Kremlinbacked political efforts and media campaigns that aim to raise doubts about the integrity of their young
democracies. China is taking measures to slowly squeeze the democracy out of Hong Kong. Saudi Arabias
political and security commitment to Bahrains government has served to contain its smaller neighbors
and Russia have built formidable traditional and new media outlets that enable them to project such
messages into the global marketplace. This prowess is especially apparent in the developing world, where
a new battle of ideas is underway. China has an enormous media presence in sub-Saharan Africa and has
rapidly gained a foothold there. Its multibillion-dollar international CCTV has programs in Arabic, French,
Russian and Spanish, and the state news agency Xinhua is expanding worldwide. Russias RT, in addition to
its virulently anti-Western English programming, broadcasts its jaundiced view of the world around the
clock in Spanish and Arabic. While the authoritarians claim that their massive international broadcasting
ventures are needed to offer an unfiltered view of their countries, it is telling that these state-led media
conglomerates devote so much of their programing to assailing the West and the idea of democracy. We
can infer from this that the emerging authoritarian doctrine reflects the need for leaders in Moscow, Beijing
and elsewhere to contain what they fear and do not possess: democratic accountability and legitimacy.
Given the stakes for the liberal order, the democratic world will need
to develop a serious long game sooner rather than later to respond to the
growing challenge presented by the migration of the authoritarians illiberal norms beyond their
borders.
and its implications. The panel included the volumes two editors, Mathew Burrows and Maria J. Stephan,
Its worrisome, said Stephan, a Senior Policy Fellow at the United States Institute of Peace (USIP).
Theres
In the 1930s travelers returned from Mussolinis Italy, Stalins Russia, and Hitlers Germany praising the
hearty sense of common purpose they saw there, compared to which their own democracies seemed
weak, inefficient, and pusillanimous. Democracies today are in the middle of a similar period of envy and
today they go to China to take the bullet train from Beijing to Shanghai, and just as in the 1930s, they
return wondering why autocracies can build high-speed railroad lines seemingly overnight, while
democracies can take forty years to decide they cannot even begin.
momentwhen in 1989 Westerners were told that liberal democracy was the final form toward which
all political striving was directednow looks like a quaint artifact of a vanished unipolar
moment. The conflict between authoritarianism and democracy is not a new cold war, we are told,
because the new authoritarians lack an expansionary ideology like communism, he writes for the New
York Review of Books. This is not true. Communism may be over as an economic system, but as a model
of state domination it is very much alive in the Peoples Republic of China and in Putins police state, he
notes: Nor does this new authoritarianism lack an economic strategy. Its goal is a familiar form of
modernization that secures the benefits of global integration without sacrificing political and ideological
control over its populations. Its economic model is price-fixing state capitalism and its legal system is rule
by (often corrupt) fiat in place of the rule of law. Its ethics rejects moral universalism in favor of a claim
that the Chinese and Russian civilizations are self-contained moral worlds. Persecution of gays, therefore, is
not some passing excess, but is intrinsic to their vision of themselves as bulwarks against Western
individualism. Russias and Chinas strategic visions may draw on different historical experiences, but the
messages they take from their histories are similar. Both dwell on the humiliations they have received at
the hands of the West. Both explicitly refuse to accept liberal democracy as a model. Both insist that their
twentieth-century experience of revolution and civil war necessitates centralized rule with an iron fist. The
Chinese and Russian variants of authoritarian modernization draw upon different resources, and they
remain geostrategic competitors, one rising, the other trying to halt its decline, but both see good reasons
to align their interests for the medium term. This commonality of interest is strikingthey vote together on
the Security Council, persecute their own dissidents, and jointly stick up for exterminatory dictatorship in
Syria. In their shared resentment toward the American world order, they have spoken as one since the day
the Americans bombed the Chinese embassy in Belgrade in 1999. The
new authoritarians
offer the elites of Africa and Eurasia an alternate route to modern
development: growth without democracy and progress without freedom, notes Ignatieff. This is
the siren song some African, Latin American, and Asian political elites, especially the kleptocrats, want to
hear. U.S. no longer vanguard of democracy President Obamas recent address at West Point suggests
that he is listening to a new doctrine of restraint, he writes, one which captures a sense, among
John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge urge Western democrats to learn from their authoritarian
competitors, says Ignatieff: The fact that Singapore and Shanghai are better governed than Detroit or Los
Angeles is hardly news. The issue is whether authoritarian governance is sustainable in the face of
demands by the middle class to be treated like citizens, and whether such governance is capable of
dealing with radical shocks like a long-term economic slowdown of the kind currently predicted for China.
continuing
environmental degradation may also affect political systems. This
to environmental challenges determine the health of the planet, but
interaction is likely to be especially acute in parts of the world where environmental problems are most
One possible
consequence of environmental degradation is the development or
consolidation of authoritarian rule as political elites come to privilege regime maintenance and
internal stability over political liberalisation. Even efforts to mitigate the impact of, or respond
to, environmental change may involve a decrease in individual
liberty as governments seek to transform environmentally destructive behaviour. As a result,
environmental authoritarianism may become an increasingly
common response to the destructive impacts of climate change in an age of diminished
expectations. Long before the recent global economic crisis inflicted such
a blow on Anglo-American forms of economic organisation, it was
apparent that there were other models of economic development
and other modes of political organisation that had admirers around
the world. The rise of illiberal forms of capitalism and an apparent
democratic recession serve as a powerful reminders that there was
nothing inevitable about the triumph of Western political and
economic practices or values (Zakaria 2003, Diamond 2008). Nowhere has the potential
pressing and the states ability to respond to such challenges is weakest.
importance of authoritarian, state-led capitalist development been more evident than in East Asia.1 An
examination of East Asias development and the concomitant environmental problems it generates
highlights a number of broad-ranging trends that have widespread relevance.
Alt
of political questions, which frequently relate to policy choices filtered through complex social and
economic problems and long-term time horizons. There are good reasons for this; we have sufficient
control over the circumstances of our daily lives such that our actions can make a genuine difference to
our welfare. If we know we can get the same model car cheaper at one showroom rather than another, or
we understand that an item of electrical equipment is still under guarantee and can be exchanged for
something new, this is important information. When it comes to the world of democratic politics, however,
the understanding of the average citizens, says Schumpeter, drops to that of a primitive, who fails to
understand complex processes of cause and effect (1943: 262). Who can say whether a drop in interest
rates two years ago caused inflation today? Or whether a rise in the value of the national currency in the
past led to increased unemployment now? It is not merely that these complex causal process are difficult
to understand, it is also that the average citizen has no incentive to try and understand them, which would
involve a great deal of effort for little reward (the reward of a better informed vote, for example, which
would have no more effect on the outcome of an election than an uninformed vote. Inefficacy does not
possess only a very rough understanding of how to promote them through the ballot box. This certainly
were, the present political cabal would not move over for them. The emergence of the World Social
Forum may offer some lessons in networking individuals with common goals, the seed of an international
organization for environmental equity and sustainability. This would not be inward looking and selfserving like various Zionist organizations or the Yale Skull and Bones, but might be universal like a
Authoritarian leadership
exists in the Roman Catholic Church where power and greed are
successfully suppressed to deliver spiritual succor to the believers
and nourishment for the poor. Lessons can be learned from the
modus operandi of this Church. In its service to humanity it publicly
abhors the destructiveness of both totalitarianism and capitalism , and
reformed Roman Catholic Church. Come back St. Francis!
its views might allow it to be the chrysalis of care for the earth through directions to its flock. As Pope
John Paul II stated: The ecological crisis is a moral issue . . . respect for life and for the dignity of the
human person extends also to the rest of creation . . . Humanity has disappointed Gods expectations.
Man, especially in our time, has without hesitation devastated wooded plains and valleys, polluted waters,
disfi gured the earths habitat, made the air unbreathable, disturbed the hydrological and atmospheric
systems, turned luxuriant areas into deserts and undertaken unrestrained industrialization . . . We must
therefore encourage and support the ecological conversion which in recent years has made humanity
more sensitive to the catastrophe to which it has been heading.36 A recurrent theme in this text is the
need for a new religious basis to modern life to give substance and meaning to peoples existence as an
alternative to consumerism and materialism. A green pope who actively pursued the philosophical
words of Pope John Paul II quoted above would make a substantial contribution to the saving of
civilization. But there is another important contribution that Catholicism offers to our argument.
The
civilization (the Roman), has existed through a dark age, and survived wars, revolutions, and plagues. As
churches,
simply too much information, chaotic nonlinear effects, and unpredictable events to permit accurate
hold that when civilization-threatening changes occur, liberal democratic solutions are the first things to
go. The rule of law is abandoned, and the rule of the strong dominates. We are not indicating that we like
this; we are maintaining as a matter of real politick that this is what occurs historically and is likely to
death for society. Such forms of authoritarianism typically lead to social disaster when the leader,
Our form of
authoritarianism looks to the leadership of an entire stratum of
society rather than one individual or even part, and there is a better
chance that corruption and madness of the Hitler and Stalin levels
can we weeded out. But there is no guarantee; human life is uncertain and down the track,
following the weaknesses of human will, succumbs to corruption or madness.
Aff Answers
breakdowns at a growing pace, and levels of freedom have receded in many places. Autocrats are
cooperating and innovating to preempt movements for democratic change. The worlds oldest and
most esteemed democracies, beginning with the United States,
have lost their luster and (it seems) their capacity to function effectively to address their most
important public policy challenges. Still, no other broadly legitimate form of
government exists today, and authoritarian regimes face profound
challenges and contradictions that they cannot resolve without
ultimately moving toward democracy. During the past century, democracy went
from being a unique feature of the West (and a few Western-leaning Latin American countries) to a
system incorporated by a growing number of nonWestern countries, most of them former British colonies
that reached independence during the first two decades after World War II. But the rise of communism
and fascism and the shock of the Great Depression during the interwar period had occasioned what the
political scientist Samuel Huntington called a reverse wave of democratic breakdowns. From the late
1950s to the mid- 1970s, the world wrestled with a second reverse wave, during which military coups
swallowed fragile and often deeply polarized democracies in Latin America, Greece, Turkey, and parts of
Asia, while elsewhere in Asia and Africa one-party or personal authoritarian regimes came to dominate.
A number of factors fed the authoritarian zeitgeist: the spectacular failures of some democracies to
govern effectively or maintain order, the successes of East Asian developmental dictatorships, the
popularity in poor countries of authoritarian socialist models and ideologies, and the US-Soviet Cold War
rivalry that saw each superpower back any dictator who would offer geopolitical support. By the mid1970s, democracy seemed to many a quaint relic of a liberal pasta model of where the world had been,
not where it was headed. Then came Portugals Revolution of the Carnations in April 1974, overturning
nearly half a century of quasi-fascist dictatorship, and a new wave of democratization began. Even with
the rise of democracy in Portugal, Spain, and Greece in the subsequent few years, and then the
transitions from military to democratic rule in Latin America in the late 1970s and early 1980s, few
imagined that a truly global process of transformation was under way. Even the popular protests that
toppled Ferdinand Marcos in the Philippines, or the student demonstrations that compelled the military to
The
fate of democracy outside the West will be shaped
disproportionately by what happens in these weighty G-20 countries that
unemployment, and poor service deliverylong-standing problems that have only grown worse under Zuma.
could move in either directionIndonesia, Argentina, Turkey, and South Africaand by whether Brazil and India can
demonstrate the ability of large democracies to generate vigorous, sustainable, and reasonably equitable economic
Particularly in Asia, economic development in a number of countries is having the predictable effects it
Ronald Inglehart of the University of Michigan and Christian Welzel of Leuphana University put it,
information, opinion, and ideas. These psychological and social changes undermine the legitimacy of
authoritarian rule and generate favorable conditions for democratization in Asianot only in Malaysia
and Singapore, where it will probably happen within a decade, but in China itself, where both the decay
of communist rule and the rise of a middle-class society are much more advanced than has generally
been appreciated. Without major political reforms, it is unlikely that communist rule can survive in China
beyond Xi Jinpings expected two five-year terms as president. And in terms of the pressure for political
change, Vietnam is not all that far behind China (particularly given South Vietnams earlier experience
with more pluralistic politics and more capitalist economics). Factor in as well the incremental progress
toward reviving democracy in Thailand, the efforts of reformist President Benigno Aquino to rein in
corruption in the Philippines, and a political opening in Myanmar (though it is still far from democracy),
When one factors in the growth of the proportion of GDP of services, the picture becomes even less
foreboding. Services have become the major drivers of global economic growth. They constitute over
63% of global GDP and well over 70% of GDP in the developed world,6 and the proportion is increasing.
While services such as translation, consulting, planning, accounting, massage therapy, legal advice, etc.,
also consume some natural resources, the quantity is infinitesimal in relation to the economic value
produced. If I manufacture a car for $10,000 I have consumed a huge amount of natural resources and
energy. But if I translate a 100,000-word book for $10,000 I have consumed merely the electricity
necessary to run my computer, and the electricity used to send the translation as an email attachment,
as Buckyballs or Buckypaper (in honor of Buckminster Fuller). Carbon nanotubes are between
1/10,000th and 1/50,000th the width of a human hair, more flexible than rubber and 100-500 times
stronger than steel per unit of weight. Imagine the energy savings if planes, cars, trucks, trains,
elevatorseverything that needs energy to movewere made of this material and weighed 1/100th
what they weigh now. Imagine the types of alternative energy that would become practical. Imagine the
positive impact on the environment: replacing many industrial processes and mining, and thus lessening
air and groundwater pollution. Present costs and production methods make this impractical but that
infinite resourcethe human
only two years after the Wash ington Monument was capped with aluminum. Today aluminum costs $3 a
kilogram, or $3000 a metric ton. The soft drink can that would have cost $1,125 today without the
process now costs $0.04. Today the average cost of industrial grade carbon nanotubes is about $50-$60
revolutionary
methods of production are now being developed that will drive
costs down even more radically. At Cambridge University they are working on a new
a kilogram. This is already far cheaper in real cost than aluminum was in 1884. Yet
electrochemical production method that could produce 600 kilograms of carbon nanotubes per day at a
projected cost of around $10 a kilogram, or $10,000 a metric ton.39 This will do for carbon nanotubes
what the Hall-Hroult process did for aluminum.
raw material of choice, displacing steel, aluminum, copper and other metals and materials.
Steel presently costs about $750 per metric ton. Nanotubes of equivalent strength to a metric ton of
steel would cost $100 if this Cambridge process (or others being pursued in research labs around the
world) proves successful. Ben Wang, director of Florida States HighPerformance Materials Institute
claims that: If you take just one gram of nanotubes, and you unfold every tube into a graphite sheet,
you can cover about two-thirds of a football field.40 Since other research has indicated that carbon
nanotubes would be more suitable than silicon for producing photovoltaic energy, consider the
implications. Several grams of this material could be the energy-producing skin for new generations of
superlight dirigiblesmaking these airships energy autonomous. They could replace airplanes as the
materials that have one or more properties that can be significantly changed in a controlled fashion by
external stimuli.32 They can produce energy by exploiting differences in temperature (thermoelectric
materials) or by being stressed (piezoelectric materials). Other smart materials save energy in the
manufacturing process by changing shape or repairing themselves as a consequence of various external
Innowattech has underlain a one-kilometer stretch of local highway with piezoelectric material to
harvest the wasted stress energy of vehicles passing over and convert it to electricity.33 They reckon
that Israel has stretches of road that can efficiently produce 250 megawatts. If this is verified, consider
the tremendous electricity potential of the New Jersey Turnpike or the thruways of Los Angeles and
elsewhere. Consider the potential of railway and subway tracks. We are talking about tens of thousands
of potential megawatts produced without any fossil fuels. Additional energy is derivable from
thermoelectric materials, which can transform wasted heat into electricity. As Christopher Steiner notes,
capturing waste heat from manufacturing alone in the United States would provide an additional 65,000
megawatts: enough for 50 million homes.34 Smart glass is already commercialized and can save
significant energy in heating, airconditioning and lightingup to 50% saving in energy has been
achieved in retrofitted legacy buildings (such as the former Sears Tower in Chicago). New buildings,
designed to take maximum advantage of this and other technologies could save even more. Buildings
consume 39% of Americas energy and 68% of its electricity. They emit 38% of the carbon dioxide, 49%
of the sulfur dioxide, and 25% of the nitrogen oxides found in the air.35 Even greater savings in
electricity could be realized by replacing incandescent and fluorescent light bulbs with LEDS which use
1/10th the electricity of incandescent and half the electricity of fluorescents. These three steps:
transforming waste heat into electricity, retrofitting buildings with smart glass, and LED lighting, could
cut Americas electricity consumption and its CO2 emissions by 50% within 10 years. They would also
Coal driven
electricity generation would become a thing of the past . The coal released
generate hundreds of thousands of jobs in construction and home improvements.
could be liquefied or gasified (by new environmentally friendly technologies) into the energy equivalent
of 3.5 million barrels of oil a day. This is equivalent to the amount of oil the United States imports from
the Persian Gulf and Venezuela together.36 Conservation of energy and parasitic energy harvesting, as
well as urban agriculture would cut the planets energy consumption and air and water pollution
hydrocarbon resources that can be transformed into ethanol, methanol, and biobutanol or biodiesel.
These can be used for transportation, electricity generation or as feedstock for plastics and other
Waste-to-energy also prevents the production, and release from rotting organic waste, of methanea
greenhouse gas 25 times more powerful than CO2 . Methane accounts for 18% of the manmade
greenhouse effect. Not as much as CO2 , which constitutes 72%, but still considerable (landfills emit as
much greenhouse gas effect, in the form of methane, as the CO2 from all the vehicles in the world).
When their
declining costs meet the rising costs of fossil fuels, they will
become commercialized and, if history is any judge, will replace fossil fuels
very quickly just as coal replaced wood in a matter of decades and petroleum replaced whale oil
Numerous prototypes of a variety of waste-to-energy technologies are already in place.
in a matter of years.
destroying consumption is the norm in the west largely because our imaginations are pillaged by any
corporation with an advertising budget. From birth, we are assaulted by thousands of commercial
messages each day whose single mantra is "buy". Silencing this refrain is the revolutionary alternative to
visual polluter out of business. Grassroots organisers in the US are pushing for an amendment to the
constitution that will end corporate personhood while others are fighting to revive the possibility of death
penalties for corporations.
economics met recently in Barcelona. In Ithaca, New York a local, time-based currency is thriving.
Buy Nothing Day campaign is celebrated in dozens of nations and now Adbusters is upping the ante with a
call for seven days of carnivalesque rebellion against consumerism this November. And, most important of
all,
The human population will peak at 9-10 billion by 2060, after which,
for the first time since the Black Death, it will begin to shrink. By the end of the
century, the human population might be as low as 6 billion-7 billion.
The real danger is not a population explosion; but the consequences of the impending population
implosion.47 This demographic process is not being driven by famine or disease as has been the case in
all previous history. Instead, it is being driven by the greatest Cultural Revolution in the history of the
CO2 emissions by eight gigatons by 2050, this project alone would have a tremendous ameliorating
effect. Given that large swaths of semi-arid land areas contain or border on some of the poorest
populations on the planet, we could put millions of the worlds poorest citizens to work in forestation,
thus accomplishing two positives (fighting poverty and environmental degradation) with one project.
particular have questioned the ability of the Communist Party to successfully implement and enforce its
high-minded directives,42 noting that sometimes being
of those that have undergone processes of authoritarian modernization, such as China, Russia or South
Korea.51 What Giddens fails to appreciate, however, is the extent to which contemporary EcoAuthoritarians accept his observations. Shearman and Smith, for example, begin The Climate Change
Challenge and the Failure of Democracy by announcing, We agree that existing authoritarian societies,
largely based upon Marxist doctrines, have had an appalling environmental record. We accept that there
is no example of an existing authoritarian government that does not have a record of environmental
abuse.52
Case Western Reserve U., New Atlantis, Green Bridge to Nowhere, Fall,
2008, http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/green-bridge-to-nowhere,
mm
The first item on his agenda is the replacement of modern capitalism with some undefined non-socialist
alternative. The planet cannot sustain capitalism as we know it, he warns, calling for a fundamental
transformation. But he does not understand the system he wants to reform, let alone what he would
substitute in its place. According to Speth, most environmental deterioration is a result of systemic
environmental progress, he hardly stops to consider the reasons why some environmental resources have
been conserved more effectively than others. Fisheries are certainly declining throughout much of the
worldsome 75 percent of fisheries are fully or over-exploitedbut not everywhere. It is worth asking why.
Tropical forests in less-developed nations are declining even as most temperate forests in industrialized
world is undergoing dematerialization, such that economic growth far outpaces increases in resource
demand, but seems not to appreciate how the capitalist system he decries creates the incentives that
Earth would be far greater . While modern civilization has developed the means to effect
massive ecological transformations, it has also found ways to produce wealth while leaving more of the
productive efficiency. This can be seen everywhere from the replacement of copper with fiber optics (made
from silica, the chief component in sand) and the light-weighting of packaging to the explosion of
agricultural productivity and improvements in energy efficiency. Less material is used and disposed of,
reducing overall environmental impacts from productive activity. The key to such improvements is the
same set of institutional arrangements that Speth so decries: property rights and voluntary exchange
protected by the rule of lawthat is, capitalism. As research by Wheaton College economist Seth Norton
performance than the other factors, such as population growth, that occupy the attention of Speth and so
many other environmental thinkers. Speth complains that capitalism is fundamentally biased against the
future; but the marketplace does a far better job of pricing and accounting for future interests than the
political alternative. Future generations cannot participate in capitalisms markets [today], says Speth.
Fair enough, but they cannot vote or engage in the regulatory process either. Thus the relevant policy
question is what set of institutions does the bestor least badjob of accounting for such concerns, and
here there is no contest. However present-oriented the marketplace may be, it is better able to look past
the next election cycle than any plausibly democratic alternative.
premise was quickly challenged in the academic literature by critics who argued that authoritarian governments would
be hard-pressed to cope successfully with their vastly increased size and complexity while also navigating difficult
the faith
they placed in an authoritarian state to resolve these problems was
surely misguided. Whilst the inferior ecological record of nondemocratic states in itself proves
nothing (how many of these states actually prioritised environmental goals?), the ability of a
state to impose its green will on an unwilling and resentful public
who see their taken-for-granted freedoms being curtailed is
questionable, in the absence of a monstrous architecture of green totalitarianism.
Authoritarian states have often not been good at achieving those
policy goals that they have prioritised, as the forlorn ambition of the
Soviet Union to outstrip the productive capacity of the capitalist
West testifies. There is no obvious reason to expect an authoritarian
green state to be better than the Soviet Union at overcoming the
internal divisions, inefficiencies, corruption, and perverse incentives
that plague such states.
For all that the problems with which eco-authoritarians struggled were and remain real,
Despotism is obviously problematic due to the harms it typically generates for citizens living under its
would need to provide reason to think that following their prescriptions would mean putting our collective
futures not into the hands of injurious despots but rather into those of administrators who possess both
the capacity to address an impending environmental crisis effectively and the motivation to do so. This
challenge has two interrelated aspects: first, it must be shown that a capable and benevolent eco-elite
could be generated in the first place to rule over our society; and second, it must be shown that a system
of rule by eco-elites could be effectively perpetuated over a long period of time. To my knowledge, the
only contemporary Eco-Authoritarians who have taken up this challenge are also the most extreme
proponents of the view: David Shearman and Joseph Wayne Smith. In The Climate Change Challenge and
the Failure of Democracy, Shearman and Smith contend that successful Eco-Authoritarianism would
require leaders of a caliber far higher than we find in contemporary society, and that producing such
leaders would require a radically different system of education. This new system would be built around
superior real universities that would purportedly train holistic thinkers in all of the arts and sciences
necessary for tough decision making that the environmental crisis confronts us with.54 The products
would be true public intellectuals with knowledge well grounded in ecology,55 who would be charged
with preserving remnants of our civilization when the great collapse comes as the new priesthood of
the new dark age.56 Perhaps unsurprisingly, the authors give only sketchy details on exactly how real
universities would achieve these felicitous results. Their main proposals in The Climate Change
Challenge and the Failure of Democracy seem limited to focusing scholarly research on problems that are
important to human well-being,57 expanding the role of information sharing among the intellectual
community,58 and accelerating the development of programs in environmental studies.59 Although many
of these proposals seem reasonable and even attractive, they hardly seem like the sorts of revolutionary
changes that would equip graduating students with the capacities and motivations needed to effectively
rule over complex modern societies.
Hierarchical
structures, by their very nature, make it easy for the most
competitive, most ruthless and least caring to attain power. Moreover,
the centralized exercise of authoritarian rule is an ever-attractive
goal for would-be usurpers, whose vision is usually less pure than
those whom they usurp, as the history of many coups attests to.60 At
the very least, it seems that Eco-Authoritarians owe us some account of
guaranteed that those who inherit his or her position will be equally benevolent?
this
argument has validity, but not as a complete empirical description
of currently existing culture and politics. It underestimates the
remaining moral capital in a growth-oriented society that can be
channeled in future degrowth directions, thereby making a different
form of democracy compatible with ecological requirements. Many still
account of the logical tendencies at work in a particular form of economic system and society,
quite powerfully held values compete with individualism and materialism in the attitudes and motivations
even if they fail to produce high levels of economic prosperity. Indeed, it is not at all clear that a
democratic system would not be able to survive even a period of considerable austerity, if the need for
such measures were clear and if the burdens and hardships were shared in a truly just and equitable way.
As a
matter of intellectual history, this equating of all forms of democracy
with materialism and a narrowly self-interested individualism is overly selective . Even
These are large ifs. The relationship between economics and political legitimation is complex.
in the modern period, democratic governance has rested on more than simply the ideology of growth and
Thus it is misleading to argue that democratic governance cannot honestly appeal to any sense of public
purpose larger than throwaway consumption. Believing that democratic governments could neither call for
ecological
authoritarianism turns to non-democratic governance out of a sense
of despair. But, so far at least, neither the sociological nor their historical
arguments of this theory are sufficient to warrant that conclusion .
nor obtain popular support except on the basis of a promise of more economic growth,
The second concern about democracies being more prone war is also
exaggerated. Democracies do not go to war with each other. More
precisely, Bruce Russett, one of the closest observers of this
phenomenon, writes, First, democratically organized political systems
in general operate under restraints that make them more peaceful in
their relations with other democracies. . . . Second, in the modern
international system, democracies are less likely to use lethal violence toward
other democracies than toward autocratically governed states or than
autocratically governed states are toward each other. Furthermore, there are
no clearcut cases of sovereign stable democracies waging war with each
other in the modern international system. Reflecting on a vast academic
literature on the causes of war, Jack Levy concluded that the
democratic peace theory is "the closest thing we have to empirical
law in the study of international relations."107 Democracies are not
pacifist regimes when dealing with autocracies. But democracies are peaceful
when interacting with other democracies.!
Democracies are more likely to initiate wars against non-democracies than vice-versa.
wars with lower costs when they begin the wars. Transitional democracies are more likely to fight, and larger democracies
are less likely to go to war than smaller ones. Critics have questioned whether the findings are
statistically robust, or have argued that omitted variables such as the stability of the Cold
War are the true explanations. Yet it appears that the democratic peace is as close to a
statistical law as anything will be in international politics .
democratic peace thesis is critical to our argument. Rigorous statistical analysis shows
that democracies do not wage war with other democracies.
It is not true either that the various ecological crises we are facing will bring about "the
end of the world." Consider the projections of the Stern Review, the recently released report
commissioned by the British Government. If nothing is done, we risk "major disruption to economic and
social activity, later in this century and the next, on a scale similar to those associated with the great wars
and economic depression of the first half of the 20th century." This is serious. Some sixty million people
died in World War Two. The Stern Review estimates as many as 200 million people could be permanently
of people on the planet right now, caught up in savage civil wars or terrorized by U.S. bombers (which
dropped some 100,000 lbs. of explosives on a Baghdad neighborhood during one ten-day period in January
2008--the amount the fascists used to level the Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War), are
faced with conditions more terrible than anyone here is likely to face in his or her lifetime due to
environmental degradation.
asteroids and
comets bearing far more force than man's nuclear arsenals; and the years without summer that
followed these impacts. Yet hearts beat on, and petals unfold still . Were the
environment fragile it would have expired many eons before the advent of the industrial affronts of the
Although one may agree with ecologists such as Ehrlich and Raven that the earth stands on the
brink of an episode of massive extinction, it may not follow from this grim fact that
human beings will suffer as a result. On the contrary, skeptics such as science writer Colin Tudge have
challenged biologists to explain why we need more than a tenth of the 10 to 100 million species that grace the earth.
Noting that "cultivated systems often out-produce wild systems by 100-fold or more," Tudge declared that
"the argument that humans need the variety of other species is, when you think about it, a theological one." n343
more than 10,000 species (other than unthreatened microbes) that are essential to ecosystem productivity or
human species could survive just as well if 99.9% of our fellow creatures
went extinct, provided only that we retained the appropriate 0.1% that we need." n346 [*906] The
monumental Global Biodiversity Assessment ("the Assessment") identified two positions with respect to redundancy of
species. "At one extreme is the idea that each species is unique and important, such that its removal or loss will have
demonstrable consequences to the functioning of the community or ecosystem." n347 The authors of the
Assessment, a panel of eminent ecologists, endorsed this position, saying it is "unlikely that there is much, if any,
ecological redundancy in communities over time scales of decades to centuries, the time period over which
environmental policy should operate." n348 These eminent ecologists rejected the opposing view, "the notion that
species overlap in function to a sufficient degree that removal or loss of a species will be compensated by others, with
negligible overall consequences to the community or ecosystem." n349 Other biologists believe, however,
species are so fabulously redundant in the ecological functions they perform that the life-support
processes in general will function perfectly well
with fewer of them, certainly fewer than the millions and millions we can expect to remain even if
every threatened organism becomes extinct. n350 Even the kind of sparse and
that
miserable world depicted in the movie Blade Runner could provide a "sustainable" context for the human economy as
long as people forgot their aesthetic and moral commitment to the glory and beauty of the natural world. n351 The
Assessment makes this point. "Although any ecosystem contains hundreds to thousands of species interacting among
themselves and their physical environment, the emerging consensus is that the system is driven by a small number of
. . . biotic variables on whose interactions the balance of species are, in a sense, carried along." n352 [*907] To
make up your mind on the question of the functional redundancy of species, consider an endangered species of bird,
plant, or insect and ask how the ecosystem would fare in its absence. The fact that the creature is endangered
suggests an answer: it is already in limbo as far as ecosystem processes are concerned. What crucial ecological
services does the black-capped vireo, for example, serve? Are any of the species threatened with extinction necessary
to the provision of any ecosystem service on which humans depend? If so, which ones are they? Ecosystems and the
species that compose them have changed, dramatically, continually, and totally in virtually every part of the United
States. There is little ecological similarity, for example, between New England today and the land where the Pilgrims
died. n353 In view of the constant reconfiguration of the biota, one may wonder why Americans have not suffered
more as a result of ecological catastrophes. The cast of species in nearly every environment changes constantly-local
extinction is commonplace in nature-but the crops still grow. Somehow, it seems, property values keep going up on
the sheer
number and variety of creatures available to any ecosystem buffers that system against
stress. Accordingly, we should be concerned if the "library" of creatures ready, willing, and able to colonize
Martha's Vineyard in spite of the tragic disappearance of the heath hen. One might argue that
ecosystems gets too small. (Advances in genetic engineering may well permit us to write a large number of additions
to that "library.") In the United States as in many other parts of the world, however,
the number of
to grow there, how many birds and bugs visit the yard, and how many fungi, creepy-crawlies, and other odd life forms
show forth when it rains. All belong to nature, from wherever they might hail, but not many homeowners would claim
that there are too few of them. Now, not all exotic species provide ecosystem services; indeed, some may be
disruptive or have no instrumental value. n357 This also may be true, of course, of native species as well, especially
because all exotics are native somewhere. Certain exotic species, however, such as Kentucky blue grass, establish an
area's sense of identity and place; others, such as the green crabs showing up around Martha's Vineyard, are
nuisances. n358 Consider an analogy [*909] with human migration. Everyone knows that after a generation or two,
immigrants to this country are hard to distinguish from everyone else. The vast majority of Americans did not evolve
here, as it were, from hominids; most of us "came over" at one time or another. This is true of many of our fellow
species as well, and they may fit in here just as well as we do. It is possible to distinguish exotic species from native
ones for a period of time, just as we can distinguish immigrants from native-born Americans, but as the centuries roll
by, species, like people, fit into the landscape or the society, changing and often enriching it. Shall we have a rule that
a species had to come over on the Mayflower, as so many did, to count as "truly" American? Plainly not. When, then,
is the cutoff date? Insofar as we are concerned with the absolute numbers of "rivets" holding ecosystems together,
extinction seems not to pose a general problem because a far greater number of kinds of mammals, insects, fish,
plants, and other creatures thrive on land and in water in America today than in prelapsarian times. n359 The
Ecological Society of America has urged managers to maintain biological diversity as a critical component in
strengthening ecosystems against disturbance. n360 Yet as Simon Levin observed, "much of the detail about
species composition will be irrelevant in terms of influences on ecosystem properties." n361 [*910] He added: "For net
primary productivity, as is likely to be the case for any system property, biodiversity matters only up to a point; above
a certain level, increasing biodiversity is likely to make little difference." n362 What
about the use of plants and animals in agriculture? There is no scarcity foreseeable. "Of an estimated 80,000 types of
plants [we] know to be edible," a U.S. Department of the Interior document says, "only about 150 are extensively
cultivated." n363 About twenty species, not one of which is endangered, provide ninety percent of the food the world
takes from plants. n364 Any new food has to take "shelf space" or "market share" from one that is now produced.
Corporations also find it difficult to create demand for a new product; for example, people are not inclined to eat pawpaws, even though they are delicious. It is hard enough to get people to eat their broccoli and lima beans. It is harder
still to develop consumer demand for new foods. This may be the reason the Kraft Corporation does not prospect in
remote places for rare and unusual plants and animals to add to the world's diet. Of the roughly 235,000 flowering
plants and 325,000 nonflowering plants (including mosses, lichens, and seaweeds) available, farmers ignore virtually
all of them in favor of a very few that are profitable. n365 To be sure, any of the more than 600,000 species of plants
could have an application in agriculture, but would they be preferable to the species that are now dominant? Has
anyone found any consumer demand for any of these half-million or more plants to replace rice or wheat in the human
diet? There are reasons that farmers cultivate rice, wheat, and corn rather than, say, Furbish's lousewort. There are
many kinds of louseworts, so named because these weeds were thought to cause lice in sheep. How many does
agriculture really require? [*911] The species on which agriculture relies are domesticated, not naturally occurring;
they are developed by artificial not natural selection; they might not be able to survive in the wild. n366 This
argument is not intended to deny the religious, aesthetic, cultural, and moral reasons that command us to respect and
protect the natural world. These spiritual and ethical values should evoke action, of course, but we should also
recognize that they are spiritual and ethical values. We should recognize that ecosystems and all that dwell therein
compel our moral respect, our aesthetic appreciation, and our spiritual veneration; we should clearly seek to achieve
the goals of the ESA. There is no reason to assume, however, that these goals have anything to do with human wellbeing or welfare as economists understand that term. These are ethical goals, in other words, not economic ones.
Protecting the marsh may be the right thing to do for moral, cultural, and spiritual reasons. We should do it-but
someone will have to pay the costs. In the narrow sense of promoting human welfare, protecting nature often
represents a net "cost," not a net "benefit." It is largely for moral, not economic, reasons-ethical, not prudential,
reasons- that we care about all our fellow creatures. They are valuable as objects of love not as objects of use. What is
good for [*912] the marsh may be good in itself even if it is not, in the economic sense, good for mankind. The most
valuable things are quite useless.
We are
defiling our Earth, we are told. Our resources are running out. The population
is ever-growing, leaving less and less to eat. Our air and water is more and
more polluted. The planet's species are becoming extinct in vast numbers we kill off more than 40,000 each year. Forests are disappearing, fish stocks
are collapsing, the coral reefs are dying. The fertile topsoil is vanishing. We
are paving over nature, destroying the wilderness, decimating the biosphere,
and will end up killing ourselves in the process . The world's ecosystem is
breaking down. We are fast approaching the absolute limit of viability. Global warming is probably
taking place, though future projections are overly pessimistic and the
traditional cure of radical fossil-fuel cutbacks is far more damaging than the
bad shape", and when the New Scientist calls its environmental overview "self-destruct".
original affliction. Moreover, its total impact will not pose a devastating
problem to our future. Nor will we lose 25-50% of all species in our lifetime in fact, we are losing probably 0.7%. Acid rain does not kill the forests, and
the air and water around us are becoming less and less polluted. In fact, in
terms of practically every measurable indicator, mankind's lot has improved .
This does not, however, mean that everything is good enough. We can still do even better. Take, for
example, starvation and the population explosion. In 1968, one of the leading environmentalists, Dr Paul R
Erlich, predicted in his bestselling book, The Population Bomb, that "the battle to feed humanity is over. In
the course of the 1970s, the world will experience starvation of tragic proportions - hundreds of millions of
people will starve to death." This did not happen. Instead, according to the UN, agricultural production in
the developing world has increased by 52% per person. The daily food intake in developing countries has
increased from 1,932 calories in 1961 - barely enough for survival - to 2,650 calories in 1998, and is
expected to rise to 3,020 by 2030. Likewise, the proportion of people going hungry in these countries has
dropped from 45% in 1949 to 18% today, and is expected to fall even further, to 12% in 2010 and 6% in
2030. Food, in other words, is becoming not scarcer but ever more abundant. This is reflected in its price.
Since 1800, food prices have decreased by more than 90%, and in 2000, according to the World Bank,
prices were lower than ever before. Erlich's prediction echoed that made 170 years earlier by Thomas
Malthus. Malthus claimed that, unchecked, human population would expand exponentially, while food
production.
(Matt Ridley is the author of The Rational Optimist, a columnist for the Times
(London) and a member of the House of Lords. He spoke at Ideacity in Toronto on June 18., PCC
commissioned models to see if global warming would reach dangerous levels this century. Consensus is
no , [ http://tinyurl.com/mgyn8ln ] , //hss-RJ)
The debate over climate change is horribly polarized. From the way it is
conducted, you would think that only two positions are possible: that
the whole thing is a hoax or that catastrophe is inevitable. In fact there
is room for lots of intermediate positions, including the view I hold,
which is that man-made climate change is real but not likely to do
much harm, let alone prove to be the greatest crisis facing humankind
this century. After more than 25 years reporting and commenting on
this topic for various media organizations, and having started out
alarmed, thats where I have ended up. But it is not just I that hold this
view. I share it with a very large international organization, sponsored
by the United Nations and supported by virtually all the worlds
governments: the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
itself. The IPCC commissioned four different models of what might happen to the
world economy, society and technology in the 21st century and what each would mean for the climate,
given a certain assumption about the atmospheres sensitivity to carbon dioxide. Three of the models
show a moderate, slow and mild warming, the hottest of which leaves the planet just 2 degrees Centigrade
Now two
degrees is the threshold at which warming starts to turn dangerous,
according to the scientific consensus. That is to say, in three of the four
scenarios considered by the IPCC, by the time my childrens children
are elderly, the earth will still not have experienced any harmful
warming, let alone catastrophe. But what about the fourth scenario? This
warmer than today in 2081-2100. The coolest comes out just 0.8 degrees warmer.
is known as RCP8.5, and it produces 3.5 degrees of warming in 2081-2100. Curious to know what
assumptions lay behind this model, I decided to look up the original papers describing the creation of this
from coal, compared with about 30% today. Indeed, because oil is assumed to have become scarce, a lot of
liquid fuel would then be derived from coal. Nuclear and renewable technologies contribute little, because
of a slow pace of innovation and hence fossil fuel technologies continue to dominate the primary energy
portfolio over the entire time horizon of the RCP8.5 scenario. Energy efficiency has improved very little.
These are highly unlikely assumptions. With abundant natural gas displacing coal on a
huge scale in the United States today, with the price of solar power plummeting, with nuclear power
experiencing a revival, with gigantic methane-hydrate gas resources being discovered on the seabed, with
energy efficiency rocketing upwards, and with population growth rates continuing to fall fast in virtually
every country in the world, the one thing we can say about RCP8.5 is that it is very, very implausible.
The per capita income of the average human being in 2100 is three
times what it is now. Poverty would be history. So its hardly
Armageddon. But theres an even more startling fact. We now have many different studies of
climate sensitivity based on observational data and they all converge on the conclusion that it is much
lower than assumed by the IPCC in these models. It has to be, otherwise global temperatures would have
risen much faster than they have over the past 50 years. As Ross McKitrick noted on this page earlier this
week, temperatures have not risen at all now for more than 17 years. With these much more realistic
estimates of sensitivity (known as transient climate response), even RCP8.5 cannot produce dangerous
warming. It manages just 2.1C of warming by 2081-2100. That is to say, even if you pile crazy assumption
upon crazy assumption till you have an edifice of vanishingly small probability, you cannot even manage to
make climate change cause minor damage in the time of our grandchildren, let alone catastrophe. Thats
not me saying this its the IPCC itself. But what strikes me as truly fascinating about these scenarios is
that they tell us that globalization, innovation and economic growth are unambiguously good for the
environment. At the other end of the scale from RCP8.5 is a much more cheerful scenario called RCP2.6. In
this happy world, climate change is not a problem at all in 2100, because carbon dioxide emissions have
plummeted thanks to the rapid development of cheap nuclear and solar, plus a surge in energy efficiency.
The RCP2.6 world is much, much richer. The average person has an income about 15 times todays in real
terms, so that most people are far richer than Americans are today. And it achieves this by free trade,
massive globalization, and lots of investment in new technology. All the things the green movement keeps
saying it opposes because they will wreck the planet. The answer to climate change is, and always has
between 1914 and 2000. Do we really think there will be less in this century? As for how to deal with that
small risk, well there are several possible options. You could encourage innovation and trade. You could put
a modest but growing tax on carbon to nudge innovators in the right direction. You could offer prizes for
low-carbon technologies. All of these might make a little sense. But the one thing you should not do is pour
public subsidy into supporting old-fashioned existing technologies that produce more carbon dioxide per
unit of energy even than coal (bio-energy), or into ones that produce expensive energy (existing solar), or
that have very low energy density and so require huge areas of land (wind). The IPCC produced two reports
last year. One said that the cost of climate change is likely to be less than 2% of GDP by the end of this
century. The other said that the cost of decarbonizing the world economy with renewable energy is likely to
be 4% of GDP. Why do something that you know will do more harm than good?
After
all, the pause as curious as it is/was, is not central to the primary
argument that, yes, human activities are pressuring the planet to
warm, but that the rate of warming is going to be much slower than is
being projected by the collection of global climate models (upon which
claque. The lukewarmers (a school we take some credit for establishing) seem to be taking the results in stride.
mainstream projections of future climate changeand the resulting climate alarm (i.e., calls for emission regulations, etc.)
are based). Under the adjustments to the observed global temperature history put together by Cowtan and Way, the
models fare a bit better than they do with the unadjusted temperature record. That is, the observed temperature trend
over the past 34 years (the period of record analyzed by Cowtan and Way) is a tiny bit closer to the average trend from
the collection of climate models used in the new report from the U.N.s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)
than is the old temperature record. Specifically, while the trend in observed global temperatures from 1979-2012 as
calculated by Cowtan and Way is 0.17C/decade, it is 0.16C/decade in the temperature record compiled by the U.K.
Hadley Center (the record that Cowtan and Way adjusted). Because of the sampling errors associated with trend
estimation, these values are not significantly different from one another. Whether the 0.17C/decade is significantly
different from the climate model average simulated trend during that period of 0.23C/decade is discussed extensively
Slowdown and alarmists rejoice because global warming hasnt stopped after all. (If the logic sounds backwards, it does
to us as well, if you were worried about catastrophic global warming, wouldnt you rejoice at findings that indicate that
future climate change was going to be only modest, more so than results to the contrary?) The science behind the new
Cowtan and Way research is still being digested by the community of climate scientists and other interested parties alike .
The main idea is that the existing compilations of the global average
temperature are very data-sparse in the high latitudes. And since the Arctic (more
so than the Antarctic) is warming faster than the global average, the lack of data there may mean that the global average
temperature trend may be underestimated. Cowtan and Way developed a methodology which relied on other limited
sources of temperature information from the Arctic (such as floating buoys and satellite observations) to try to make an
estimate of how the surface temperature was behaving in regions lacking more traditional temperature observations (the
authors released an informative video explaining their research which may better help you understand what they did).
They found that the warming in the data-sparse regions was progressing faster than the global average (especially during
the past couple of years) and that when they included the data that they derived for these regions in the computation of
the global average temperature, they found the global trend was higher than previously reportedjust how much higher
depended on the period over which the trend was calculated. As we showed, the trend more than doubled over the period
from 1997-2012, but barely increased at all over the longer period 1979-2012. Figure 1 shows the impact on the global
average temperature trend for all trend lengths between 10 and 35 years (incorporating our educated guess as to what
the 2013 temperature anomaly will be), and compares that to the distribution of climate model simulations of the same
period. Statistically speaking, instead of there being a clear inconsistency (i.e., the observed trend value falls outside of
the range which encompasses 95% of all modeled trends) between the observations and the climate mode simulations for
lengths ranging generally from 11 to 28 years and a marginal inconsistency (i.e., the observed trend value falls outside of
the range which encompasses 90% of all modeled trends) for most of the other lengths, now the observations track
closely the marginal inconsistency line, although trends of length 17, 19, 20, 21 remain clearly inconsistent with the
weather station data far into the Arctic Ocean. While land
temperatures can bounce around a lot, the fact that much of the ocean
is partially ice-covered for many months. Under well-mixed
conditions, this forces the near-surface temperature to be constrained
to values near the freezing point of salt water, whether or not the
associated land station is much warmer or colder. You can run this experiment yourself
by filling a glass with a mix of ice and water and then making sure it is well mixed. The water surface temperature must
hover around 33F until all the ice melts. Given that the near-surface temperature is close to the water temperature, the
limitations of land data become obvious. Considering all of the above, we advise caution with regard to Cowtan and Ways
findings. While adding high arctic data should increase the observed trend, the nature of the data means that the amount
of additional rise is subject to further revision. As they themselves note, theres quite a bit more work to be done this area.
In the meantime, their results have tentatively breathed a small hint of life back into the climate models, basically buying
them a bit more timetime for either the observed temperatures to start rising rapidly as current models expect, or, time
for the modelers to try to fix/improve cloud processes, oceanic processes, and other process of variability (both natural