Global-Scale
Problems
By Bill Henderson
22
October , 2004 by
EnergyBulletin.net
Paul Weisz's already oft cited July 04
Physics Today article Basic
Choices and Constraints on Long Term Energy Supplies begins
with a succinct statement of the emerging energy supply problem:
Population growth
and energy demand are exhausting the world's fossil energy supplies,
some on the timescale of a single human lifespan. Increasingly, sharing
natural resources will require close international cooperation, peace,
and security.
Dr. Weisz then proceeds
in a careful inventory of possible energy sources that could replace
oil in the world's energy supply. He is particularly clear on basic
constraints in the use of potential fuels and on our ability to support,
in the long term, society's demands using those finite supplies.
His knowledgeable
inventory is stimulating as well as informative. Dr. Weisz is clearly
predicting a needed transition from an oil based economy that can not
survive even our (average) lifetime. He is a reasonable technological
optimist and he is providing a preliminary scoping of possible paths.
But he presupposes
or at least appears to accept as a given the key second part of his
paper's premise:
Increasingly,
sharing natural resources will require close international cooperation,
peace, and security.
Dr. Weisz and most
other scientists working on possible technological solutions to today's
emerging problems such as future energy supply externalize or take for
granted this stable framework for scientific innovation.
But what happens
if there is increased turbulence in our political and economic systems?
What happens if
a major power does not want to share and undertakes a preemptive path
that corrodes international cooperation, peace and security?
Two of America's
premier scientists, Edward O. Wilson and Jared Diamond, have made separate
predictions of a very turbulent 21st century where Kaplanesque societal
breakdown effects many regions of the globe.
In his wise little
book THE FUTURE OF LIFE E.O. Wilson postulates the
bottleneck metaphor for the 21st century: unprecedented human
populations with technology aided expanding individual and cumulative
ecological footprints will degrade ecosystems and create global scale
problems such as global warming and species extinction reducing the
biological capacity for human life on Earth.
Jared Diamond has
been studying
previous collapsed civilizations . Looking at the complexity
of reasons for the collapse of Mayan society Diamond sees a lack of
cooperation and social organization to deal with climate change. Mayan
society never evolved a unifying, organizing government. Fighting warlords
got in the way of migration and irrigation potentials.
If you combine Dr.
Weisz's thoughtful and hopeful inventory of future sources of energy
with Wilson and Diamond's prediction of turbulence - especially of conflict
and warfare - in the time period in which the transition from a fossil
fuel economy must be made, you can come to several differing conclusions.
Instead of only
preparing militarily, one reasonable conclusion is that a much better
functioning and strengthened version of the emerging global multilateral
framework for cooperation - the international rule of law, a global
governance capacity, open networked global science, etc. - is a precondition
for innovation to solve global-scale problems such as severe resource
depletion (peak oil), global warming and species extinction.
For example, a US
lead global 'New Deal' could anticipate the building Bottleneck problems
and introduce a global level of agreed upon cooperation and regulation.
But this is, of course, clearly not the direction that the Bush Administration
(nor, to be fair, every other recent US administration) wants to go.
There was a bundle
of reasons for war in Iraq not just fear of Saddam's potential use of
WMDs. There is a substantial body of speculation that control of oil,
control of the oil important Middle East, was the most important underlying
reason for the war in Iraq. If in the future this becomes the dominant
perception of US actions in Iraq then a very serious if not mortal blow
will have been preemptively dealt to the existing, nascent, multilateral
framework for cooperation.
In her prescient
paper
Multilateral Organizations after the U.S.-Iraq War of 2003 Harvard's
Lisa Martin describes how US unilateralism and in particular the aggression
against Iraq will corrode the existing multilateral framework for cooperation.
The future implications or consequences of aggression in Iraq are sadly
under appreciated in America.
If "(i)ncreasingly,
sharing natural resources will require close international cooperation,
peace, and security"; if a precondition for needed innovation is
this emerging global framework for peace and cooperation, then, right
now, we have to back up and get off of a path begun in the Bush Administration's
choice of a radical unilateral foreign policy and military geo-strategic
solutions to control the supply of oil.
We have to confront
and make visible the implications of what must be considered a planetary
coup detat . Those who can must educate about the importance
of the emerging multilateral framework and insist that the damage to
this needed higher level of cooperation caused by radical unilateralism
be on the menu for debate in America
In a companion article
in the same issue of Physics Today, in a paper on population growth
called Thoughts
on Long Term Energy Supplies: Scientists and the Silent Lie ,
("In the Physics Today essay and article, population growth is
given as a cause of the problems identified, but eliminating the cause
is not mentioned as a solution. We are prescribing aspirin for cancer."),
Dr. Albert Bartlett quotes the amazing American Mark Twain about slavery,
but it is a quote which is so crucial in understanding and acting in
our Bottleneck / end of oil era:
The universal
conspiracy of the silent assertion lie is hard at work always and everywhere,
and always in the interest of a stupidity or a sham, never in the interest
of a thing fine or respectable. It is the most timid and shabby of all
lies . . . the silent assertion that nothing is going on which fair
and intelligent men [and women] are aware of and are engaged by their
duty to try to stop.