Climate change: the upside of anger
THOMAS BARNETT
CORPORATE FOCUS: "Big Firms to Press Suppliers on Climate: P&G, Others to Join In Pushing Plants For Emissions Data," by Jane Spencer, Wall Street Journal, 9 October 2007, p. A7.
ARTICLE: "In China, a Plan to Turn Rice Into Carbon Credits: Biotech Firm Pushes Using Less Fertilizer; Ban on Altered Seeds," by Lauren Etter, Wall Street Journal, 9 October 2007, p. A1.
ARTICLE: "Atomic renaissance: America's nuclear industry is about to embark on its biggest expansion in more than a generation. This will influence energy policy in the rest of the world," The Economist, 8 September 2007, p. 71.
OP-ED: "From afar, America resembles a 2nd-rate power: Hints of our diminished state can be seen in our paranois, our swooning U.S. dollar and our untidy airports," by Alan M. Webber, USA Today, 18 October 2007, p. 15A.
I go back and forth on Gore and the IPCC. I love the context they provide. I just don't want the narrow policy choices they encourage to become—as Lomborg puts it—the "giant knob" by which we try to run the planet over coming decades, because I'd find that global narrative as bad as Bush's focus on terror.
Life just ain't that simple, as I argue in a recent column (which is as close to a preview of the logic of my next book as I've published yet).
Still, I like the new focus on climate change to the extent it forces all sorts of private sector players to examine their chains, pushing everyone up and downstream to focus more on efficiencies. If CO2 gets me in the door, then great. Just don't pretend it's the answer on everything, because—quite frankly—temperature is not the great arbiter of success or failure in our global environment, and reducing all discussion to that one parameter is just plain goofy, as Lomborg points out.
As the China piece points out, and this is a consistent argument of mine, the focus on this meshing of global environmental narrative and global development narrative needs to remain in the New Core, and specifically in Asia. Get that rise right, and you develop a host of new approaches to making Gap shrinkage appropriately real and useful vis-à-vis global warming and a host of other important environmental issues as humanity goes from 6.5B to roughly 9.3B by 2050 and then we head into new territory—the progressive depopulation of the planet (no, not a "Children of Men" decline, we just stabilize and slowly decrease).
Does that mean the Old Core has no role to play? Far from it. But rather than focusing too much on painful and growth-reducing retrofits of the past, we need to focus on new technologies that move us beyond oil, like nukes.
I know, I know. The same people who say we cannot continue on oil also often discount any movement toward anything else, their favorite lament being, "Nothing will work, so we're screwed and therefore must dial back down to some previous century's lifestyle."
These people are nuts, quite frankly: the West's equivalent of radical Salafis whose only answer to today's challenges is to retreat into the past.
A little more faith people. Humanity doesn't get smarter all through history to achieve what we've got now only to grow inconceivably stupid and lazy at this particular moment. You may look around your neighborhood here and think that's the only path left to us, but guess what? The Core's a bit bigger than just the U.S. and Europe, and thank God, say I.
Stop dreaming up clashes of civilization to hid your own sense of ineptitude. You're not that dumb, and neither are our new friends in the East and South. Retreats into paranoia do not serve us.
thomaspmbarnett.com |
