I'd like to further contextualize (warning: gratuitous use of fitty-cint words) my little
ode to despair from the other day, by observing that dynamic through two long-term prisms facing us (the U.S. and the world at large), geopolitical and environmental.
The geopolitical case is more within the power of humans to resolve sanely and humanely, which of course means it probably won't happen that way. Months ago I did an
extended post on what I believe to be the (somewhat) falsely proposed dichotomy of the multipolar versus unipolar (U.S.-dominated) world of the near future. I believe that economically, technologically, and militarily, the ascendancy of enormous powers such as China and India will necessitate a refocusing toward realistic multipolarity by 2020 or sooner.
But the practical reality of that scenario will also have to take into account other rising secondary powers (Russia, Iran, Brazil) who, while not nearly as influential, can cause specific impacts on various trends, especially at the regional level. Add in the trend of the aforementioned "untied states", and you have a multiplication of what could be called "event drivers", since it is the unforeseen events, by definition, which have the greatest adverse impact on predicted trends. Technology and decentralization gives smaller groups with more disparate loyalties and agendas more leveraged degrees of power, and hence greater ability to drive previously unforeseen events. This means not only high-casualty terrorist attacks such as 9/11 or Beslan, but also small to medium scale socioeconomic trends, particularly in more ignored (except for marginal resource-extraction capacities) areas.
These are people who are almost exclusively operating from the standpoint of despair, rather than hope, regardless of their specific agenda or actions. They are channeling that despair into action, albeit all-too-frequently violent, counterproductive action. This is not so much a lesson to be drawn, as an observation to be made. It is there all the same, and whatever external forces act upon these areas make decisions, whether deliberate or accidental, on which directions their imposed external impacts push these areas.
The oversimplified phrase, oft used to describe Palestine's woes, is that we decide whether to stop the violence by giving them hope in their lives, so that they no longer simply act from pure despair, or continue to impose punitive actions upon them, in the hopes that they will finally internalize whatever message generational refugee ghettos and intrusive policies are supposed to communicate.
Perhaps the current nation-state paradigm is irretrievably debauched and corrupted, because of the meta-cynicism on all levels -- politicians know that we think they're all crooks to begin with, and
we know that
they know, and so on, so the most effective mode for rounding up votes becomes appealing overtly to the
limbic voter demographic, which has worked out just superbly.
Whether this culminates in the remaining majority getting on the same page and keeping the limbics down, or the great powers continuing to devolve into cliques of feudal entities, the rich ones corporatist, and the poor ones tribalist, is probably a question for our great-grandchildren to deal with. It's still worth being aware of, as a potential problem for future stability and progress.
An interesting and informative report which speculates in more detail many of these impact agents, large and small, is the Global Trends 2020 report from the National Intelligence Council, available
here. The most troublesome trends appear to be energy consumption and demographics; currently dominant powers such as the U.S., Europe, Japan, and China all face rapidly-aging populations in the near future, which in all cases will likely necessitate further importation of labor (or worse, exportation of manufacturing), thus heightening already critical tensions in many areas.
Russia's rather drastic demographic future (low life expectancy, low birth rate, and high emigration rate combine for population decline in the near future) and increasingly authoritarian political structure make it something of a wild card. I have seen some speculation as to a future Russo-Iranian commercial alliance of sorts, and it makes a lot of sense for both of those countries. The "wild card" part is whether such an alliance becomes enhanced militarily, which, considering the available options of both countries, is not all that unlikely.
Europe's need to keep its high GDP (its market viability and manufacturing capability is a huge part of non-military world GDP), combined with its own aging population and low birth rates, puts it in a bad spot as well. They will have to both expand the EU further east, absorbing more and more former soviet economic basket cases, and import more cheap labor from North Africa. If they're not serious about accepting and assimilating these newcomers, nobody will be happy with the arrangement. Preventing economic marginalization is going to be the key to avoiding the problems, the negative outbursts of
despair we've been seeing.
That self-sufficient countries such as Switzerland and Norway continue to hold out against joining an increasingly federalized EU also seems to be a sign of how things will continue to develop there. Switzerland can probably hold out indefinitely if it's economically advantageous, but as Norway's North Sea oil and fishing stocks continue to be depleted, that country's outlook may change.
It's a long report, with many items worthy of excerpt, but you get the idea. The main thing is that the era of true unipolarity is already over, even if it is something of a lagging indicator. So the goal then becomes to harness ascendant powers into some sort of multipolar cooperative effort (not the micromanaged flailings of the UN), so that disassociated impact groups do not further devolve things into a
non-polar world, essentially divided merely between have-nots and have-mores.
Which brings us to the second major trend of future despair, on what appears to be an increasingly cataclysmic scale -- the
environment. While we've been dithering about whether global warming is "real" or not, as if it needs the official validation of one species to become so, the warming trend has been gathering momentum.
The report says that for the next two decades a warming of about 0.2C per decade is predicted. It says that even if CO2 emissions had been halted completely in 2000, the world would still be committed to a rise of about 0.6C, because of the time the climate system takes to react. The report offers a series of projections of future temperature increases, based on six different scenarios of global human, and in particular, industrial activity, and consequent emissions of CO2 from cars and power stations.
The best estimate for the low scenario, known as B1, is a 1.8C rise (on a range of 1.1C to 2.9C) and the best estimate for the high scenario (known as A1FI) is 4C, with a lower range limit of 2.4C, and the upper range limit of 6.4C - up susbtantially from the worst-case figure of 5.8C given in the IPCC Third Assessment Report, known as the TAR, published in 2001. As we report elsewhere, a 6C-plus rise would represent a true nightmare for the world.
What has informed these new projections is the increase over the past six years in knowledge of climate "feedback" mechanisms - by which a warming world becomes less able to absorb CO2, which further increases the warming, which further slows the CO2 uptake, and so on. The report says: "The new assessment of the likely ranges now relies on a larger number of climate models of increasing complexity and realism, as well as new information regarding the nature of feedbacks from the carbon cycle."
Anybody purporting to be remotely serious about the subject has long moved on from questions of verification, and on to goals of mitigation and minimizing impact. So it is essential to put the Jim Inhofes in the debate back out on the far margins, where they belong. They are simply clogging up the process, sucking away the ability of responsible adults to deal with this problem before it results in more Katrinas.
It may be too late, anyway, whether it's a weather phenomenon or a terrorist attack; I think the recent AquaTeen Hunger Force fiasco, in which seditious cartoon advertisements went unnoticed for ten days before they were suddenly perceived to be a terrorist plot, amply demonstrates the adipose tissue in any first-response bureaucracy. Prevention is more effective than treatment after the fact by at least an order of magnitude.
This problem has to be dealt with on many levels, obviously, not the least of which is economic. Sustainability and regional growth has to become at least as important as consumption and comparative advantage. A significant chunk of both petroleum usage and carbon emissions is the transportation of food; an average of 1500 miles via long-haul trucking cannot have anything but a profoundly negative impact. Removing this from the equation requires serious rethinking of the current hub-and-spoke distribution chain, of sustaining regional and seasonal producers, as well as the many thousands of food-service businesses impacted by such changes.
The more difficult systemic change to incorporate will, of course, be traveling, commuting. This will be a profoundly hard nut to crack, particularly in America, especially in California, where we have grown up with an enormous freeway system that caters to us, encourages us to drive, makes it practically impossible not to in many areas. But raising CAFE standards, imposing real and painful gas-guzzler taxes, and implementing the aforementioned changes in the food-distribution system are steps in the right direction, and will have a significant impact in the aggregate. Repairing and re-subsidizing the rail system, urban and national, as
Jim Kunstler has long advocated, would also go a long way toward such a goal.
What doesn't get discussed nearly often enough, when talking about gas-guzzling shitboxes is their externalities, the space they require to maneuver, to park, the impact they have on things like fuel prices and availability, and emissions, in the aggregate. With the world economy, international geopolitics, and the physical well-being of the planet and its species almost completely pivoting on energy consumption rates, it is amazingly stupid and short-sighted to continue in this direction.
There is no longer any serious question about whether these things will have to be done; it's just a matter of whether we can nip
this scenario in the bud:
Clues as to how the world looks in a long-term extreme greenhouse state also come from the Cretaceous period, 144 to 65 million years ago, when there was no ice on either pole and much of Europe and North America was flooded by the higher seas. Tropical crocodiles swam in the Canadian high Arctic, whilst breadfruit trees grew in Greenland. The oceans were incredibly hot: in the tropical Atlantic they may have reached 42C, whilst at the North Pole itself, the oceans were as warm as the Mediterranean is today. The tropics and sub-tropics were so hot that no forests grew, and desert belts probably extended into the heart of modern-day Europe.
During the Cretaceous, of course, species evolved over millions of years to be able to survive on a much hotter planet. Nowadays very few species could survive such a sudden transition. Cold-adapted species like polar bears would obviously be an early casualty, and coral reefs will also disappear from the tropics. The Met Office's Hadley Centre has predicted that the Amazonian rainforest could start to burn as early as 2050, gradually transforming towards desert as temperatures soar in the interior of South America. Ash and smoke would blanket much of the southern hemisphere, and nearly half of the world's terrestrial biodiversity would be wiped out at a stroke.
How people might fare is anyone's guess. With the tropics too hot to grow crops, and the sub-tropics too dry, billions of people would find themselves in areas of the planet which are essentially uninhabitable. This would probably even include southern Europe, as the Sahara desert crosses the Mediterranean. As the ice-caps melt, hundreds of millions will also be forced to move inland due to rapidly-rising seas. As world food supplies crash, the higher mid-latitude and sub-polar regions would become fiercely-contested refuges. The British Isles, indeed, might become one of the most desirable pieces of real estate on the planet. But with a couple of billion people knocking on our door, things might quickly turn rather ugly.
This is where our new friend despair (the kind produced by awareness, not the kind culminating in senseless violence) comes back into the picture. This is where it becomes a truly existential crisis, of whether it's worth it for us to drive smaller cars and pay a little more for better food, if it gives us a chance in the aggregate to leave our kids a better situation.
It means seeing things for what they are, rather than what we've been conditioned to see them as. And it means telling some people to fuck off and die; it means telling lucky-sperm parasites like Paris Hilton and George Bush to start earning their keep like the rest of us. It means repudiating
jerk-off photo-ops as mindless exercises in kabuki that do nothing to advance anything useful, but only serve to perpetuate a one-party system with two right wings.
Hope is audacious, as the Reverend Obama has instructed us, but so is despair, so is anger, directed constructively. But it requires a serious rethinking of things, an understanding that the world cannot continue to be run from ego and id and glandular exploits masquerading as "news" and "information", not with technology so heavily leveraging our immediate impact on all of our political, economic, and social structures. It matters more, and it matters
faster, faster sometimes than our collective ability to keep up with it.
