The Sage Forge

The Al Gore approach is irrational because it discounts the value of the worldwide economy in maintaining political stability across the globe and because it discounts the value of the economies of the West and, most particularly the United States, to the stability of that worldwide economy. 

Everybody in a mill town resents the power of the mill until the mill closes.  The Al Gore approach looks at the emissions from the mill's smokestacks and scares the townspeople with dire warnings of destruction and death for the millworker's children if the emissions are not stopped.  Never mind the relative benefits of employment, support to the services of the local economy, availability of medical care, and the like. In a poor region or very hard times the ending of that nominal threat could mean the closing of the mill and susequent loss of the benefits of the economic infrastructure built on its foundation.  The sky, clearer though it may be, falls anyway.

Wars are not good ecologcally.  One of the lessons of history is that economic disasters lead to wars.  It is well not to forget the fauning admiration of credulous American politicians for Hitler's capacity to"...make the trains run on time..." in depression-era Germany.  The German people's desperation in turning to such a man to make the trains run would not have been necessary in a good economy.  The ecological scars of bad monetary policy in the U.S. and pure brutish (but, of course, enlightened) vengefulness in Europe will present themselves for thousands of years in the elevated levels of radioactive strontium in my generation's bones.

The Al Gore approach to Global Warming is to scare us all into ceasing to produce CO2 RIGHT NOW.  That is a form of economic science experiment in which we have no real clue what the result will be, but, oh, What the hell....

The Rush Limbaugh approach is not better.  In it, as the strains of Old Suzannah ring in our ears we seek to find all the oil, coal, and gas we can and burn all we can.  In the mill-town analogy this is like saying the poisons frothing from the smokestack are a badge of honor.  Your child's asthma or your father's lung cancer are a sign of our prosperity!  Rejoice, be glad in it, and shut up.

The assumption, the conviction, actually, buried in this approach is that all those screaming about warming are doing so for political benefit.  If their team wins OUR team loses.  What of the economic upheaval of rising sea levels, shifting climate patterns, and stronger storms?  Prove it! or... It hasn't happened yet! or... So What!?

This approach, too, is a science experiment of sorts.  Continue to pump known greenhouse gasses into the air at relatively uncontrolled rates and see what happens.  Again, we have few clues to the natural result but, oh, What the hell... 

There is another approach.  It is not built on political prerogatives as the prevailing themes are.  Rather we should just look at the situation from the simple economic perspective that the carbon economy has unintended costs we would all do well to minimize.  The ecological cost is just one of these.  If you could minimize the power of state sponsors of terrorism like Iran and Syria it would seem logical to do so.  If you could limit the power of mafiesque nations like Russia it would seem logical to do so.  If you could limit the sway of destabilizing powers like Venezuela in already ustable regions it would seem logical to do so.  If you could eliminate this nation's foreign trade deficit, again, it would seem logical to do so.  Minimizing the carbon economy would accomplish all of these things.

This would require a shift of economic resources of huge proportions, but we have done similar things before. Look at the information economy, for example.  This blog is part of a resource of information infrastructure that was undreamt of only two decades ago.  People decided they wanted, hence they bought and invested in, information services and technologies that held a promise for being able to permit them to communicate in ways they had not been able to before.

This process required the purchaser and he investor recognize goals and see business models and technologies pointing to those goals.  In other words, the consumer had to be educated.

Will people spend money to invest in the reduction of the carbon economy?  They already are doing so.  The current crop of hybrid cars are not economically viable from a purely cost-based standpoint.  Most of the people who buy them know this.  Like people who buy overpriced big-screen plasma televisions they are spending a premium on an IDEA.  That spending will push us into the future.  Why would people make such a committment?  They would do it because it seems desireable.

Leave global warming to the politicos and they will frighten us, destabilize us, get a lot of us killed, and, for all of that, accomplish nothing.  Want to solve the problem?  Teach.  Lay out the problems, the many problems, caused by the carbon economy and how it would be good to stop digging up carbon God wisely stuffed away over the course of hundreds of millions of years and dumping it back into the air.

Consumers and investors will do the rest.

For further readings on the science about global warming, here are a few of my sources.

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/links.htm

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/Revelle.htm

http://www.aip.org/history/climate/pdf/Weart_APS_News_2-06.pdf

http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=42

http://www.geocraft.com/WVFossils/Carboniferous_climate.html

http://www.johnlocke.org/site-docs/images/Spotlight_281_Page_2.jpg

http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/253.htm 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Five_Myr_Climate_Change.png