RuffnReadyOzStyle
10-29-2006, 07:03 PM
So, now even Bjorn Lomborg ("The Skeptical Environmentalist") and the ex-cheif economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern, believe in anthropocentric climate change. Oh, and then of course there's that study of 928 peer-reviewed scientific papers, not one of which questions the concensus, that I posted last week.
So when are Yoni and the other head-in-the-sand crowd around here going to admit that this is a real problem, that the scientific, business and political leaders of the world already acknowledge the same, and that we must start to act on this now? We are facing the greatest crisis in humanity's history, and it's time we all woke up and started to do something about it.
For those who would like to read a beautifully written account of the evidence for anthro climate change, and what we might do about it, Australian scientist Tim Flannery's book "The Weathermakers" is well worthwhile:
http://www.amazon.com/Weather-Makers-Changing-Climate-Earth/dp/0871139359
The free market got us into this mess, but is it equipped to get us out?Iain Macwhirter on capitalism’s response to climate change
‘WE are sleepwalking to catastrophe” said environment secretary David Mili band last week in the latest dire warning about climate change. He is wrong. We aren’t sleepwalking; we are walking towards catastrophe fully awake, with our eyes wide open.
There is no longer any significant dispute about the scientific evidence for global warming. Even the last of the climate-change sceptics, the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, now accepts that climate change is happening, that we are responsible for it and that the worst impact will be felt in the developing countries.
The only remaining argument is whether it is worth doing anything about it right now. Many economists have argued that it makes little sense to destroy the world economy to combat a problem that may take decades to develop. This has been the standard response of the American right.
Until now. For even the market case for doing nothing will be destroyed tomorrow by a report prepared by the former chief economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern. He will say that the world is in imminent danger of the most profound economic dislocation in history – a recession more serious than the great depression, a disruption more devastating than the second world war. And the cause will be global warming.
This is no woolly-minded tree hugger, but a hard-headed conservative econo mist. The World Bank, of which Stern was senior vice-president, has been widely criticised for its neo-liberal policies and its promotion of free-market globalisation. For someone with his background to say we are heading for an economic black hole is like George W Bush apologising for Iraq.
Why should there be a recession? Well, the capitalist economy is composed of markets, which are made by humans guessing about the future. This is what the FTSE or any hedge fund is: a group of investors speculating about the future worth of a company .
Investment is all about risk. So far the markets have not started to factor the risk of global warming into their speculations. But pretty soon they will have to. Insurance companies such as Swiss Re are already agonising about how to set realistic premiums when nobody knows the future risk any more .
We know that the seas are going to rise. At present melting rates, summer ice in the Arctic will be gone in 60 years, and all that frozen water will go into the oceans. So where does that leave house prices in flood plains and low-lying areas like central London? Where does it leave low-lying nuclear power stations?
What happens when investors realise that air travel, motor transport, power generation and all the other carbon-based economic activities no longer have a future? We know that this is the case right now. The government’s chief scientist, Sir David King, says carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will reach catastrophic levels within 30 years. The horizons are getting very short.
Mass air travel can have only a decade or so left. Cars as we understand them have maybe 15 years before we start riding around on electric trikes (bring back the Sinclair C5). When cracks were discovered in the pipes at Hunterston B power station on October 16, the share price of British Energy collapsed by 24%. Imagine what will happen when the government says Hunterston will have to be moved to higher ground to avoid inundation.
Then there is mass migration, des ertification, disappearing lands. At pre sent the world economy is in denial about climate change, but eventually it will wake up. By then it might be too late.
Climate scientists have been trying to alert humanity to its greatest-ever threat for most of the past decade.Last week alone there was confirmation that the destruction of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002 was caused by Antarctic global warming; that the Gulf Stream was actually turned off briefly in 2004; and that a six-year drought in south Australia has been caused by climate change.
Can the capitalist economy come to the rescue? Stern will argue there could be economic benefits to tackling the carbon economy. We know this very well in Scotland – or at least we should. Sitting on our vast reserves of untapped renewable energy, with the first commercially viable carbon-capture project waiting to go online in Peterhead, we could build the first post-carbon economy tomorrow.
But there is something about market economies that makes it very difficult to make this kind of change other than through economic crisis. This is because it is very difficult to plan for change when you are leaving all the key decisions to economic speculators. They tend to act, not calmly and rationally, but with the instinct of the herd, as they did after the dot.com frenzy in 2000.
Capitalist development is all about discontinuities: “creative destruction”, as the great economist Joseph Schumpeter called it. But this might be a destruction too far; we cannot afford to wait until the market makes its own climate change correction.
It is as if, right at the moment when the world needs a leap of human technological ingenuity, we have lost the capacity for adaptation that made our species so successful. We have become fatalists, passive objects instead of agents of renewal. The market is seen as an inviolable force of nature. Politicians are hypnotised, irrationally convinced of its infallibility in the face of all evidence.We keep waiting for the free market to somehow make it all right.
It is not that we are incapable of acting collectively, even in a capitalist environment. During periods of crisis like the second world war, societies such as ours achieved extraordinary feats of organisation, based on a selfless pursuit of the common good. There’s a lot of evidence that collective, altruistic behaviour is hard-wired into the human animal. We tend naturally to form associations in which the interest of the individual is subsumed in the interest of all.
Yet here is a global emergency, a crisis of biblical proportions, and we seem to have lost our ability to act. We are still promoting air travel, building roads, turning out millions of internal combustion engines, constructing houses that waste energy on a massive scale. “Well,” we say, “the Chinese are building a new coal-fired power station every week, so why should we bother?”
Unfortunately, the triumph of liberal capitalism came at precisely the wrong moment for humanity. Never before in history have governments been so reluctant to intervene as today, at the very moment when they must. We are all waiting for the market to tell us what to do.
Well, the market will get the message in the end, but it is likely to be through the greatest stock-market panic in the history of capitalism. Then will we see what has been staring us in the face.
http://www.sundayherald.com/58769
So when are Yoni and the other head-in-the-sand crowd around here going to admit that this is a real problem, that the scientific, business and political leaders of the world already acknowledge the same, and that we must start to act on this now? We are facing the greatest crisis in humanity's history, and it's time we all woke up and started to do something about it.
For those who would like to read a beautifully written account of the evidence for anthro climate change, and what we might do about it, Australian scientist Tim Flannery's book "The Weathermakers" is well worthwhile:
http://www.amazon.com/Weather-Makers-Changing-Climate-Earth/dp/0871139359
The free market got us into this mess, but is it equipped to get us out?Iain Macwhirter on capitalism’s response to climate change
‘WE are sleepwalking to catastrophe” said environment secretary David Mili band last week in the latest dire warning about climate change. He is wrong. We aren’t sleepwalking; we are walking towards catastrophe fully awake, with our eyes wide open.
There is no longer any significant dispute about the scientific evidence for global warming. Even the last of the climate-change sceptics, the Danish statistician Bjorn Lomborg, now accepts that climate change is happening, that we are responsible for it and that the worst impact will be felt in the developing countries.
The only remaining argument is whether it is worth doing anything about it right now. Many economists have argued that it makes little sense to destroy the world economy to combat a problem that may take decades to develop. This has been the standard response of the American right.
Until now. For even the market case for doing nothing will be destroyed tomorrow by a report prepared by the former chief economist of the World Bank, Sir Nicholas Stern. He will say that the world is in imminent danger of the most profound economic dislocation in history – a recession more serious than the great depression, a disruption more devastating than the second world war. And the cause will be global warming.
This is no woolly-minded tree hugger, but a hard-headed conservative econo mist. The World Bank, of which Stern was senior vice-president, has been widely criticised for its neo-liberal policies and its promotion of free-market globalisation. For someone with his background to say we are heading for an economic black hole is like George W Bush apologising for Iraq.
Why should there be a recession? Well, the capitalist economy is composed of markets, which are made by humans guessing about the future. This is what the FTSE or any hedge fund is: a group of investors speculating about the future worth of a company .
Investment is all about risk. So far the markets have not started to factor the risk of global warming into their speculations. But pretty soon they will have to. Insurance companies such as Swiss Re are already agonising about how to set realistic premiums when nobody knows the future risk any more .
We know that the seas are going to rise. At present melting rates, summer ice in the Arctic will be gone in 60 years, and all that frozen water will go into the oceans. So where does that leave house prices in flood plains and low-lying areas like central London? Where does it leave low-lying nuclear power stations?
What happens when investors realise that air travel, motor transport, power generation and all the other carbon-based economic activities no longer have a future? We know that this is the case right now. The government’s chief scientist, Sir David King, says carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere will reach catastrophic levels within 30 years. The horizons are getting very short.
Mass air travel can have only a decade or so left. Cars as we understand them have maybe 15 years before we start riding around on electric trikes (bring back the Sinclair C5). When cracks were discovered in the pipes at Hunterston B power station on October 16, the share price of British Energy collapsed by 24%. Imagine what will happen when the government says Hunterston will have to be moved to higher ground to avoid inundation.
Then there is mass migration, des ertification, disappearing lands. At pre sent the world economy is in denial about climate change, but eventually it will wake up. By then it might be too late.
Climate scientists have been trying to alert humanity to its greatest-ever threat for most of the past decade.Last week alone there was confirmation that the destruction of the Larsen B ice shelf in 2002 was caused by Antarctic global warming; that the Gulf Stream was actually turned off briefly in 2004; and that a six-year drought in south Australia has been caused by climate change.
Can the capitalist economy come to the rescue? Stern will argue there could be economic benefits to tackling the carbon economy. We know this very well in Scotland – or at least we should. Sitting on our vast reserves of untapped renewable energy, with the first commercially viable carbon-capture project waiting to go online in Peterhead, we could build the first post-carbon economy tomorrow.
But there is something about market economies that makes it very difficult to make this kind of change other than through economic crisis. This is because it is very difficult to plan for change when you are leaving all the key decisions to economic speculators. They tend to act, not calmly and rationally, but with the instinct of the herd, as they did after the dot.com frenzy in 2000.
Capitalist development is all about discontinuities: “creative destruction”, as the great economist Joseph Schumpeter called it. But this might be a destruction too far; we cannot afford to wait until the market makes its own climate change correction.
It is as if, right at the moment when the world needs a leap of human technological ingenuity, we have lost the capacity for adaptation that made our species so successful. We have become fatalists, passive objects instead of agents of renewal. The market is seen as an inviolable force of nature. Politicians are hypnotised, irrationally convinced of its infallibility in the face of all evidence.We keep waiting for the free market to somehow make it all right.
It is not that we are incapable of acting collectively, even in a capitalist environment. During periods of crisis like the second world war, societies such as ours achieved extraordinary feats of organisation, based on a selfless pursuit of the common good. There’s a lot of evidence that collective, altruistic behaviour is hard-wired into the human animal. We tend naturally to form associations in which the interest of the individual is subsumed in the interest of all.
Yet here is a global emergency, a crisis of biblical proportions, and we seem to have lost our ability to act. We are still promoting air travel, building roads, turning out millions of internal combustion engines, constructing houses that waste energy on a massive scale. “Well,” we say, “the Chinese are building a new coal-fired power station every week, so why should we bother?”
Unfortunately, the triumph of liberal capitalism came at precisely the wrong moment for humanity. Never before in history have governments been so reluctant to intervene as today, at the very moment when they must. We are all waiting for the market to tell us what to do.
Well, the market will get the message in the end, but it is likely to be through the greatest stock-market panic in the history of capitalism. Then will we see what has been staring us in the face.
http://www.sundayherald.com/58769