Dear all -
I must say I think, like others, that the exercise will be worthwhile if good
things come out of it, regardless of my doubts about the style of the
manifesto. I also think that the Dark Mountain chaps seem much more natural and
self-effacing in their off-manifesto comments, so they're probably very nice
and don't really sit on top of craggy mountains with hawks on their shoulders
cursing antibiotics and the banking system and munching on the still-warm
livers of unsuspecting suburbanites.
Incidentally I do have a constructive suggestion, but it comes with a warning:
these things are never as simple as we would like.
It struck me some years ago that since money is the real power in our world,
the only power that can really get things done, we ought to be trying to
restructure the markets to incentivise environmentally friendly behaviour and
disincentivise environmental damage. At the same time, if we really want those
countries which still have rainforests left to preserve them - to lay off the
deforestation and industrial development and become, in effect, park-keepers on
behalf of the rest of the world - we ought to be offering them money to do it,
instead of just shaking our heads and wagging our fingers at them as we drive
past in our expensive cars or zoom overhead in our petrol-guzzling planes. We
must have sufficient science by now to know which countries are producing a net
surplus of oxygen, and which are producing a net surplus of CO2 and other
greenhouse gases. The answer seems simple: the countries which produce a
surplus of greenhouse gases should be paying penalties in proportion to the
amount they produce; this money should be paid into a fund; and from this fund
the countries which produce a surplus of oxygen should be paid for doing so,
again in proportion to the amount they produce. There would then be a good
monetary reason both for reducing carbon emissions and for preserving forests -
perhaps even for replanting them.
At first I thought this was a brilliant idea; but gradually I've started to see
more and more problems with it. The underlying principle, that you should
incentivise good practice and disincentivise bad, is a sound one, I think. But
the first snag which occurs to me is this - what if you were a military
dictator in control of a country where the peasants were cutting down the
rainforests because they were so poor, and their population was growing so
rapidly, that it was the only thing they could do to make ends meet? As a
dictator, once you realised that the rainforests were not expendable but a
financially valuable asset, it might occur to you that it would be a good idea
to shoot the peasants and introduce a mass sterilisation programme. So instead
of incentivising environmentally friendly policies, my scheme would then be
incentivising brutality and repression. To avoid this, along with the basic
financial system you would have to introduce some kind of a code of conduct.
But secondly, if you were a rich capitalist owning lots of profitable
enterprises, and it suddenly became apparent that rainforests were not a waste
of space but a rich source of revenue, you would immediately start trying to
get your hands on as much acreage of rainforest as possible by any available
means, including swindling or bribing any tribes who might happen to live
there, or simply pushing them out at the point of a gun. If the rewards were
sufficiently high there would be a global scramble for rainforests, and in the
blink of an eye, instead of being owned by nations or indigenous tribes or the
human race, they would all be in the hands of multinationals and
multibillionaires.
Thirdly, if you were a company specialising in genetic engineering, you would
probably come up with a super-oxygen-producing plant, let's say a fifty-foot
tall Brussel sprout tower, far better at taking in carbon dioxide and giving
out oxygen than a rainforest tree; a plant which could be mass-produced in
fields all over the USA so that overnight that country would shoot up to the
top of the oxygen-producing league table, instead of languishing somewhere in
the bottom half. Other countries, if they wanted to avoid greenhouse-gas
penalties and make money from exporting oxygen instead, would feel obliged to
follow suit, filling their countrysides with the same plant or something very
similar. Countries with rainforests would go back to cutting them down for the
sake of growing monstrously tall Brussel sprout towers in their place, much as
they are now cutting them down for the sake of producing palm oil as an
"environmentally friendly" fuel. The end result might be favourable from the
point of view of global warming, but biodiversity would take an almighty
clobbering.
Fourthly, if you're going to penalise producers of greenhouse gases, how do you
legislate for aviation, the area in which greenhouse gas production is
increasingly most steeply? Who gets the penalty, the country from which a plane
takes off, or the country in which a plane lands? The country which owns the
airline, or the country where the people buy the tickets? What if they buy
their tickets on the Web, from a multinational company? This has already proved
a knotty problem for environmental legislation: "Under the 1997 Kyoto Protocol,
international aviation emissions, along with those of shipping, were excluded
from reduction targets to be met by developed countries (so-called Annex I
Parties) because of the difficulties in allocating emissions to specific
countries." (http://www.greenaironline.com/news.php?viewStory=146)
Fifthly, of course, the real Achilles heel of my plan is that you'd never get
the likes of China on board - nations which have already launched themselves on
a planned programme of super-industrialisation as a means of transforming
themselves into economic superpowers. Those nations are hardly likely to hamper
their own progress by signing an agreement which would land them with big
economic penalties.
So, incentivising environmentally friendly behaviour and disincentivising the
opposite is an excellent principle, but when you start trying to think of a
good way of applying that principle in the real world you soon find yourself
getting tangled up in all kinds of practical considerations and
counter-considerations: bringing in systems of checks and balances, having to
take special circumstances into account, making compromises, and generally
inching forward instead of making the big strides you would like. And this, I
think, is generally true of human organisation and human endeavour. Principles
are one thing, but implementation is another. For the last twenty years I've
been working in the NHS, and during that time some quite exciting schemes have
been put forward (along with some terribly naff ones) for improving the health
service - but they all get tangled up in all sorts of practical complications
as soon as they come off the drawing-board and get to the implementation stage.
It's like the idea you have for a work of art versus the actual work of art
itself when you actually try to create it. It never comes out quite the way you
expected - sometimes it comes out better, but it never comes out exactly the
same - and the reason for this is that you can't forsee in advance all the
practical considerations that will come into play once the nuts-and-bolts part
of the work begins. Your mind is limited, and the world always turns out to be
a bit more complicated than you were expecting it to be.
That, in a nutshell, is why I distrust big heroic sweeping statements. They
don't ring true to our actual experiences of trying to get things done in the
real world.
- Edward Picot
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