Electing
Gore - Non-Linear
Climate Change Politics
By Bill Henderson
24 July, 2007
Countercurrents.org
"We are vastly mis-educated
as children into thinking that problems are linear and can be solved
by linear thinking. If ecology teaches us anything, it is that we live
within and are permeated by, right down to each cell, non-linear systems
that cannot be predicted or 'strategically addressed' ."
Paul Hawken Rachel's
Democracy and Health News #911
Al
Gore could be much more effective as president.
Climate change is a global
scale problem requiring unprecedented co-operation and
organized self-regulation in limiting greenhouse gas emissions and the
only possibly effective program for change must practically be led by
the US. Climate change is a problem that requires the US, China, Russia,
India and each and every other country in the world working together
for solution. But America was the leader in developing our present fossil
fueled global economy and of necessity must lead in innovating the next,
non-carbon emitting, economy.
First hurdle: the Bush Admin
has done immeasurable damage to both the emerging multilateral global
governance and America's ability to be an effective leader with it's
unilateralist foreign policies (Kyoto, etc) and by choosing the resource
war path for us all with aggression in Iraq.
America must renounce this
unilateralist path and justice must be done to those who launched an
illegal war of cynical self-interest before America will be in a position
to lead again in the solution of these building global scale problems.
Impeachment as catharsis? - improbable but at least a hopeful possibility.
Second hurdle: America's
politics and political system are broken.
In 1998 I wrote A
SPEECH FOR AL suggesting that in order to have a mandate
and freedom to use his presidency to address climate change Al had to
first escape the present political straightjacket process. Mr. Gore
was not particularity effective within the Clinton government on climate
change mitigation. In 2000 he didn't try to win on his own terms. This
time Al is free to ignore the primaries and the need to become a puppet
owned/controlled by key constituencies.
But, third hurdle, so far,
Americans have only awoken to the undeniable reality of climate change
and still do not have a full appreciation of the seriousness of potentially
crossing at any time, maybe even this decade, an
unmarked threshold to runaway climate change, beyond which
there is no hope for management/mitigation. Very few Americans as yet
realize that we are losing control of climate change and are close to
crossing over a threshold that could mean extinction for humanity and
most species with which we now share creation.
Instead Americans are being
conditioned to view climate change as a long slow temperature rise with
bad weather in 2050 maybe; with maybe some sea coast flooding and no
polar bears, maybe water problems IN THE FUTURE in the South-West, and
maybe it will be too hot to play baseball in St Louis in the middle
of summer.
Climate change is not yet
perceived as a danger dwarfing terrorism in magnitude, dwarfing Hitler's
fascism; as a danger requiring a wartime style government, mobilization,
and economic reconfiguration as envisioned by Lester Brown with his
PLAN
B governance innovation. Far from it, for Americans it's
still the economy, stupid and maybe whether a woman or a non-white can
be president.
A Gore run for president
will only happen and be successful when this true appreciation of danger
from climate change pushes far ahead of more immediate economic and
security electoral concerns. And, in all probability, this more accurate
appreciation of the climate change danger won't happen in time for 08
so Mr. Gore is probably not electable as climate change president and
is probably more effective still as an outsider.
So hurdles, political sinks
and peaks and vise-like timeframes, but there is another problem with
Al for climate change prez:
Even if he was electable,
if we follow the emission reduction policies Mr. Gore has been advocating,
we will fail to reduce emissions on a scale needed to ensure little
probability of runaway climate change; we will not make major reductions
soon enough. Although Gore advocates reasonable and possibly effective
cap and trade instruments, this type of regulation will predictably
be negotiated down to, first of all, an ineffective cap, and then subverted
when implemented by those who can - and market pressures in turbulent
times will provide both opportunity and incentive enough.
Perhaps more importantly,
re-configuring our socio-economies through use of these instruments
will take too much time if there is no organized stabilizing plan to
make a turnaround from the present sprawl construction based economy
possible. Relocalization is promising and cap and trade instruments
will probably get us there eventually, but too late for emission reduction
on a scale needed. Not
90% by 2030.
Gore's present completely
within Business As Usual climate change mitigation policies reminds
me of Dr.Jerry
Franklin trying to craft a workable BAU forest
industry solution to profound economic-ecological problems
within an impossibly path dependent policy framework - all you end up
doing is fooling the public about what is possible. Continuing clearcuts
with a few straggly trees pretending to be partial retention. The illusion
of meaningful emission reduction.
But say Gore ran with the
message that only a wartime coalition government capable of promising,
first, a real program for US and global success in mitigating climate
change, AND second, a fair, stabilized relocalizing re-configuration
of the American economy in this war on climate change program - then,
if elected, there would be a mandate for a new approach to government,
for a cap and trade with a high enough cap to be effective with a much
reduced chance of subversion, and much more scope for innovation and
change.
Just like in WW2 the economy
would go on with the promise of normality in the future - operating
under a cautionary flag for a NASCAR analogy - but real change would
now be unblocked. Combine with enviro-health and economic security benefits
from relocalization - especially workable ways of reducing American
dependence on foreign oil - and you have a saleable vision of how we
can get there from here.
Won't happen; can't get there
from here; but at least this improbable politics COULD be effective
in changing course so that 90% by 2030 was possible in the US. This
improbable path would have the US leading in a reconfiguration of the
global economy that could provide the leadership, incentive and innovation
to ameliorate the worst possibilities of dangerous climate change.
But, as
you surely know Mr. Gore, if we fail this time there could
easily be no future generations of people and maybe, if positive feedbacks
from latent sources of carbon propel temperatures high enough, not even
forests on this Earth any more.
The evolutionary paradigm
is different from the conventional optimization paradigm popular in
economics in at least four important respects (Arthur 1988): 1) evolution
is path dependent, meaning that the detailed history and dynamics of
the system are important; 2) evolution can achieve multiple equilibria;
3) there is no guarantee that optimal efficiency or any other optimal
performance will be achieved due in part to path dependence and sensitivity
to perturbations; and 4) ‘lock-in’ (survival of the first
rather than survival of the fittest) is possible under conditions of
increasing returns. While, as Arthur (1988) notes "conventional
economic theory is built largely on the assumption of diminishing returns
on the margin (local negative feedbacks)" life itself can be characterized
as a positive feedback, self-reinforcing, autocatalytic process (Kay
1991, GŸnther and Folke 1993) and we should expect increasing returns,
lock-in, path dependence, multiple equilibria and sub-optimal efficiency
to be the rule rather than the exception in economic and ecological
systems."
Costanza et al. Modeling
Complex Ecological Economic Systems. BioScience 1993)
bill (at) pacificfringe.net
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