Hundred Year Survival
Posted in Unfounded Speculation
on December 24th, 2009 by
Stephen DeGrace
Topics:
Crystal Ball
If our civilization makes it to Christmas, 2109 in basically one piece, it will be a true miracle. Between here and there we have to get through food supplies which are flattening out while the world population is projected to continue to grow to nine billion people before declining, and on top of that, dangerous political instability caused by climate change in an environment of food scarcity, peak oil, and Great Power reorganization. The path to survival requires effective supernational institutions and active government involvement, loathed by the right, and robust free markets and heavy investment in science and technology (with nuclear firmly on the table and interference with the climate seriously under consideration), loathed by the left.
Success is not impossible, but requires a sane, centrist approach that draws on the better elements from both basic human political prejudices. However, in an increasingly frightening and destabilized environment, people will increasingly turn to extremist ideology. Just because the right wing happens to be dominant in our time does not mean that it will necessarily be the preferred flavour of extremist ideology throughout the world in the future, either. But ideology means doctrine, and doctrine means a fact-proof screen between the believer and reality. Believe me, when reality starts to get a little scary, people won't be able to get those shields up fast enough to suit them.
Our problems are global in nature and it is becoming increasingly difficult to effectively pretend that a libertarian philosophy of minimal national government and no kind of international government whatsoever can possibly address these issues. The catastrophic degradation of our environment with respect to its ability to support our needs will become a top-tier problem for us, and closely related to our other problems, strategic and otherwise. The environment, the air we breath and the water we drink and use for countless other necessary purposes including growing food, is essentially a commons. Libertarian economics is utterly incapable of protecting a commons. In a libertarian system, any common resource will be efficiently destroyed for short term profit, because we may be assured that if we don't rape it for our share, others will, so why not have a piece of the action. Unless, of course, you happen to live in a fantasy land where common resources are limitless and indestructible. Most modern conservatives do, but only in their heads, unfortunately. Out here in the real world, failing to use governmental coercive power to protect and control access to common resources leads to disaster.
If you don't believe me, why not take a little boat trip to the Grand Banks of Newfoundland. Dip a basket over the side. When Europeans first came to Newfoundland, if you did that you would come up with a big basket of cod. Now, there's about one basket of cod for the whole Grand Banks. It was international and essentially unregulated human beings that did that, one little boat at a time (even the great factory trawlers are little in comparison to the vastness of the ocean). A lovely Libertarian free-for-all, at least on the international level, and what conservatives have in store for the whole planet. Next option, please.
Great Power war is too awful to contemplate. The weapons we have available now are just too effective, and in modern warfare, the home front is always a legitimate and essential target. Unfortunately, the generation who fought World War II and had that lesson forcefully brought home is rapidly disappearing. Nevertheless, we need effective international institutions that allow for some kind of enforceable apportioning of common resources like emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and to create an alternative recourse to countries other than war to settle serious differences.
The United Nations, reviled as it is, is actually a pretty good model of how we have to proceed, with some provisos. Number one, we are not here to promote democracy, and our definition of human rights has to get much, much looser, insofar as the UN has any role in that area at all. I would argue that except insofar as we should all consider the mass slaughter of millions as beyond the pale, I think the UN really shouldn't have a role in promoting human rights. Getting along effectively has to be our number one concern. Countries like China are simply too powerful to attempt to coerce. If they become liberal democracies, it will be on their time, not ours. In the meantime, we have to get along with them.
To prevent Great Power wars, the UN cannot be an egalitarian project. The Great Powers need a special role, as is performed in the UN right now by the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council (i.e., those wielding vetoes). A tremendous challenge for us will be to recalibrate the special privileges club to accommodate new power realities without making it too large and unwieldy. Certainly India needs to be brought on board, and perhaps Britain and France should yield their seats and give one to the European Union.
In order to be effective in enforcing environmental agreements, the UN needs means of coercion... except against small, weak states, this cannot be the use of actual force, and the use of force should be avoided even in those cases, except where total consensus exists, because it's hard to say what might cause a dangerous escalation. The most probable means of coercion would be economic, through trade, so the UN would need to be centrally involved in global trade like the WTO is now, and have the means to, for example, harm environmental shirkers economically.
The other crucial thing the UN does, besides providing a framework to negotiate access to shared resources, is prevent war. It does this by introducing the idea of binding international law, which may be legally enforced, by force, by member states with approval from the UN Security Council. Essentially, the UN makes war illegal, and guarantees the physical security of every member state through the promise that if a member state is attacked, the Security Council will come to its defence. To the extent that the member states believe this guarantee, it removes the incentive for build-up of forces and preemptive attacks. It worked in the case of Kuwait, but obviously in the intervening years under Clinton and Bush Jr., the Americans have done enormous damage to this function of the UN.
The key to making this work is that the UN should not interfere in the internal affairs of member states, however reprehensible. For example, the NATO action in Kosovo was illegal and wrong and nothing like that should ever be repeated. Regardless of the tragic consequences to individuals and peoples not protected by controlling a recognized state, the goal of stopping war, particularly Great Power war, is of absolutely overriding importance. The only case where the UN should intervene is in situations as in Rwanda where order has completely collapsed and systematic, mass slaughter is ensuing.
Other than that, the only real role for the UN would be in areas of global coordination against threats that don't respect borders, like pandemic disease.
On the other side of the coin are the necessities viscerally loathed by the left. We are going to have a global population topping out at nine billion people. We need to somehow feed those people. Only a high-energy civilization with intensive, modern agriculture can possibly accomplish this goal. The notion that organic farming and wholistic living in a participatory economic system can possibly maintain a population of nine billion people is ludicrous. Probably, no form of organization at all can maintain that population on this planet and severely destructive consequences are inevitable. However, we are morally obliged to try, and there is such a thing as bigger and smaller disasters. We should angle to at least minimize the damage.
On the food front, the only part the left is likely going to like is that fact that meat will have to become enormously expensive and most of us are probably going to become largely vegetarian whether we like it or not.
To bridge the energy and food gap, we will need to rapidly develop new technologies (no, we will not be saved by windmills) and marshal massive amounts of resources. The only proven system for driving rapid innovation and providing the things people need efficiently is free market capitalism (not pure, theoretical, libertarian free market capitalism, which is as much a fanciful intellectual construct as communism, but real-world capitalism where governments are significant players).
Compare innovation and services in the West during the Cold War to what was available in the Soviet Union. There is no comparison. Modern leftist economic pipedreams like participatory economics suffer from the same basic flaw - nice idea, wrong species. First of all, to even begin to implement these ideas beyond parochial groups requires a fervent, mass-movement atmosphere which is capable of employing violence and coercion. Secondly, since schemes like communism don't fit with real human behaviour (obviously or they'd already exist), in implementing them they either wind up watered-down and compromised, or, the failure has to be blamed on evil, counter-revolutionary elements which have to be excised, usually by mass murder. Utopia is always a disappointment, and there's no reason to believe that modern alternatives to communism will be any different.
Furthermore, we need massive and increasing amounts of energy, and for reasons of scarcity and mitigating global warming, it can't come from burning fossil fuels. Which means that all options must be on the table, including a massive expansion of nuclear power to at least buy time. Furthermore, with populations starving and war imminent, we may have to seriously consider technological interference in the environment to counteract our previous interference of dumping CO2, including firing sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to try and cool the planet.
The extremes of the right wing, the religious crazies (especially Christian religious crazies) are actively wishing for the apocalypse. With regard to the Christians, some policies such as ardently supporting Israel are actively motivated by the desire to see the world destroyed (they believe that the Temple must be rebuilt and the Jews must be in Israel for Armageddon to occur). This will be a joyful experience for the Bible-thumpers, of course, because they will all be Raptured away 
. They conveniently ignore the part of the Book of Revelations where is says 144,000 Jews will be taken in the Rapture 
.
On the other side, look for environmental crazies with a similar Apocalyptic view that the most important thing is to save Mother Gaia, and the only way to do that is for the plague of humanity to end. If people like these are willing to bomb labs doing animal research, it is not a great stretch for the environmental extremists of the future to attack facilities like nuclear power plants, cables shipping solar power to less sunny markets, desalinization plants, etc., all those things needed to give modern civilization a chance to survive. As with any terrorism, the goal of course will not be to bring civilization down directly, per se, because, of course, a few terrorist pinpricks, however spectacular and/or bloody won't do that, but to trick governments into a massive overreaction which will do the terrorists' work for them of discrediting and destabilizing the ruling dispensation.
In a way, they would not be wrong - we really are going to place an intolerable strain on the environment before we're done. It's a matter of whether people come first to you or not. If people come first, you protect the environment because it is a necessary support to human life, everything in it is interconnected, and if it fails we will have the harrowing and deadly task of somehow managing to become planetary maintenance engineers. And because protecting the environment, including part of it we have no direct use for, is good for our souls. But when all is said and done, you do what you have to. But if people no longer come first, as they absolutely don't where extremists are concerned...
As things get more difficult, the countries of the world will tend more to swing to the extremes, where each pack of wingnuts has part of the equation right but is busy trying to kill us all on some other crucial element of the survival equation. Sane centrists will be viewed more and more as morally suspect compromisers and will be increasingly squeezed out. So while there is a path through the coming difficulties and a fighting chance to survive and thrive in the centuries to come at the apex of high-energy technological civilization, our own natures will tend to sabotage our chances when the going starts to get rough. If we do go down we will have earned it; if we somehow survive, we will really have earned it.
Comments:
There are 0 comments on this item. Be the first to comment.
Post a Comment
* Required field, your email will not be posted.