McKinsey has gone up in my esteem by getting Kim Stanley Robinson [1] to
write on climate change. For those who haven't some across him before,
his most recent work is a trilogy [2] on the effects of global warming:
Forty Signs of Rain (2004), Fifty Degrees Below (2005), and Sixty Days
and Counting (2007).
An earlier book (possibly his best) has been discussed here before [3].
Udhay
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kim_Stanley_Robinson
[2]
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2005/sep/14/sciencefictionfantasyandhorror.sarahcrown
[3] http://groups.yahoo.com/group/silk-list/message/11146
http://whatmatters.mckinseydigital.com/climate_change/time-to-end-the-multigenerational-ponzi-scheme
Time to end the multigenerational Ponzi scheme
By Kim Stanley Robinson
22 February 2009
First, we need to trust our science. We do this every time we fly in a
jet or rush to the doctor in hope of relief from illness; but now there
is some cherry-picking of science going on in the various kinds of
resistance to the news about climate change, and this double standard
needs to be called out. The so-called climate change skeptics are now
simply in denial. All science is skeptical, and the scientific community
has looked at this situation and found compelling evidence for anyone
with an open mind.
Science is telling us that if we keep living the way we do, we will
trigger an unstoppable and irreversible climate change that may de-ice
the planet and acidify the oceans, causing mass extinction. It took tens
of millions of years for Earth to recover from previous mass
extinctions. It is certain that human beings would be devastated by such
an event, despite our intelligence and technological power—and there are
instabilities in the climate system that include tipping points that we
are closing in on fast.
Exhibit: The other side of the problem
That’s what our science is telling us. The most rational way to act is
to believe that and then to act on that belief.
Above all, we need to decarbonize our power and transport systems, and,
more generally, to build a carbon-neutral or even carbon-negative
civilization as quickly as possible. It’s not a matter of technology. We
already have good starter technology for lithium-ion batteries in cars;
clean, renewable energy generation; cleaner building methods; and so on.
The technical solutions are being improved all the time in research labs.
The main problem is making these changes happen more quickly than they
can in the false pricing system that we have created and enforced within
our hierarchical power structure. There is conflict over how to pay for
decarbonizing, which is deemed “too expensive” to execute quickly. There
is both a defense of the destructive carbon burning we are engaged in
and a resistance to the most obvious solutions among people who remain
frightened of the idea of government-led economic programs. But now we
simply must have such programs because the market is not capable of
taking action.
Am I saying that capitalism is going to have to change or else we will
have an environmental catastrophe? Yes, I am. It should not be shocking
to suggest that capitalism has to change. Capitalism evolved out of
feudalism. Although the basis of power has changed from land to money
and the system has become more mobile, the distribution of power and
wealth has not changed that much. It’s still a hierarchical power
structure, it was not designed with ecological sustainability in mind,
and it won’t achieve that as it is currently constituted.
The main reason I believe capitalism is not up to the challenge is that
it improperly and systemically undervalues the future. I’ll give two
illustrations of this. First, our commodities and our carbon burning are
almost universally underpriced, so we charge less for them than they
cost. When this is done deliberately to kill off an economic competitor,
it’s called predatory dumping; you could say that the victims of our
predation are the generations to come, which are at a decided
disadvantage in any competition with the present.
Second, the promise of capitalism was always that of class mobility—the
idea that a working-class family could bootstrap their children into the
middle class. With the right policies, over time, the whole world could
do the same. There’s a problem with this, though. For everyone on Earth
to live at Western levels of consumption, we would need two or three
Earths. Looking at it this way, capitalism has become a kind of
multigenerational Ponzi scheme, in which future generations are left
holding the empty bag.
You could say we are that moment now. Half of the world’s people live on
less than $2 a day, and yet the depletion of resources and environmental
degradation mean they can never hope to rise to the level of affluent
Westerners, who consume about 30 times as much in resources as they do.
So this is now a false promise. The poorest three billion on Earth are
being cheated if we pretend that the promise is stil
