We Need To Talk About Geoengineering

Already the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has not only elevated temperatures and increased the frequency of extreme weather events to a disruptive, damaging degree. They have produced a variety of second-order effects which are, in turn, contributing to further warming, and the damage generally. The melting of the polar ice caps means open water where there was ice cover that had previously reflected solar radiation, and the release of methane previously trapped in permafrost, as well as directly raising sea levels. The increased droughts are killing forests that had been great carbon sinks, while the burning trees and rotting wood that result contribute yet more such emissions. And of course, there is the acidification of the carbon dioxide-saturated oceans. The most ambitious decarbonization of our energy and transport system, our industry and food production, is likely to still see positive emissions for decades to come, exacerbating the pattern.

The result is that anything remotely resembling a livable situation requires going beyond zero emissions. The two most obvious courses are negative emissions--the extraction of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere--and the management of solar radiation. Where negative emissions are concerned the most obvious courses are reforestation and afforestation, which can extend to wetlands and undersea kelp "forest" (the latter, offering the nice bonus of directly reversing one of the more worrisome consequences of warming, the acidification of the oceans), and management of the soil. Such natural means can also be supplemented by direct air capture technology, which currently operates on a small scale. Many of these options have the added benefit of generating useful products, with kelp notable as a potential source of animal feed capable of reducing the methane emissions of cattle-raising, and biofuels; while carbon recovered from the atmosphere can be converted into "buckytubes" with potentially wide applications, from computer chip architectures to large-scale construction and engineering.

Solar radiation management can be carried on through some of the same techniques, with greenery cooling the immediate area, while other methods entail the reflection of a higher proportion of solar radiation into space. One promising approach is the dispersal of silica across ice to increase its reflection of the sun's rays. More broadly, the conservation and expansion of ice cover is useful in this regard, with the thickening of ice packs through water-spraying one plausible option. Another is the construction of "cooling tunnels" in areas subject to melting, such as Greenland, and the building of sills which prevent warm water from getting underneath them. Additionally melting glaciers and ice shelves can be kept from running off into the sea with the use of walls. (And of course, anything that preserves the ice ameliorates the risk of rising sea levels.)

All this, of course, does not exhaust the full range of options. Others, many more radical (like the fertilization of the ocean with iron, or the use of aerosols to reduce the entry of solar radiation into the atmosphere) also exist. They all seem considerably riskier, but I do not rule them out, especially if the prognosis continues to worsen at the rate it has this past, exceedingly depressing decade. Still, the more modest options discussed above seem to me to offer an ample basis for a comprehensive geoengineering plan, without which any plan to redress climate change cannot be considered anywhere close to complete in the circumstances in which we now found ourselves.

Is Bernie Sanders a Socialist?

Socialism calls for the economy to be managed collectively, for the sake of the well-being of all of society's members; rather than its driving force being the decision-making of private actors pursuing private profit (what its proponents, not always coherently, call "the market").

By contrast, social democracy accepts the private, capitalist economy as its baseline, but simply takes the position that in real life markets require rules to permit them to function, and that optimal economic outcomes may come from channeling market forces; that there may be areas where markets simply do less well than alternative modes of organization, for example, in cases of natural monopoly; and that optimal social outcomes tend to require remedial action to protect the public against the harsher consequences of the market.

Thus one has regulations to protect the worker, the consumer, the natural environment; one has subsidy of various kinds; one has public services, going beyond the traditional minimum of armed forces, law enforcement, a postal service, infrastructure, to the realms of education and health and perhaps public ownership of enterprises like utilities or transport systems; one has a social safety net. Accordingly one also sees a fairly large state, supported by relatively high taxes. Still, the economy remains largely and usually private and proft-driven.

There is a world of difference between socialism as described here, and social democracy as described here. The really hardline anti-Communist may claim not to understand that difference, or make slippery slope arguments about any impurity of a capitalist society putting it on the train straight to Stalintown or somesuch. Yet, the fact remains that, whatever one makes of such arguments, they are two different social models, in their principles and their workings.

By and large what we in the United States are hearing described as "socialism" is just social democracy. Thus does it even go with Sanders' call for the expansion of the publicly owned electric grid on the basis of enlarged investment in renewable power in his vision of a Green New Deal. The end result would be that the American government would be the principal provider of electricity to the consumer. Yet, those who know something of the history of social democracy will remember that other states went rather further in this direction before--even post-war Britain, which far from building up a government-owned electric grid, did not hesitate to nationalize the existing one, along with the coal, gas and oil sectors (which remained government-owned until the privatizations of the Thatcher era).

Simply put, Sanders' plan in this area, and others, looks much more radical than it is because of how modest the social democratic element in the U.S. was even at its peak (the extent of regulation, the social safety net, public ownership never coming close to what was seen even in safely capitalist Europe), and because of how far to the right the Democratic Party has marched since the 1970s, especially under the Presidencies of Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, a march that the party's neoliberal elite (whose stance is epitomized by Nancy "Paygo" Pelosi) are utterly intent on continuing. The result has been to pit that elite against the party's more left-leaning base, a conflict which cost the party dearly in 2016. Should the elite get their way again, it seems likely the party will pay the price yet again in 2020.

Just Out: Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century

Back in 2004 I published "Societal Complexity and Diminishing Returns in Security" in the journal International Security. (The journal is paywalled, but you can access a copy on my blog, here.)

The argument, which built on Joseph Tainter's thesis in The Collapse of Complex Societies, boiled down to its absolute basics, was that modern civilization was getting more complex, by and large in ways that were offering less and less benefit, leaving it more strained and more vulnerable to disruption, all as the costs of protecting it kept going up.

This sounds abstract, but there were fairly concrete ways in which this was the case. The ever-rising volume of trade, travel, communication, information production and processing show our society's increasing complexity. The profound slowdown in economic growth in recent decades, the routinization of colossal deficits, the explosion of debt, testify to a society whose resources are badly strained. And of course, the "tight coupling" of our contemporary systems, the preference for leanness in the name of "efficiency" (at the expense of resiliency) also suggested rising vulnerability. This was evident, too, in the standard deemed necessary for protection--with the old idea of nuclear deterrence giving way to an obsession with not deterring but neutralizing the abilities of "irrational" actors, which entailed such things as preventive wars and missile defense. Meanwhile, way below that threat level there was the burgeoning expenditure on law enforcement, emergency services, private security.

As is often the case with a piece of published research, it was a starting point for me rather than an end to a line of speculation, in particular the first aspect of it--the way society was getting more complex but stagnant and strained, as declining growth and rising deficits and debt suggested. One result was a more thoroughly worked out and heavily updated version of the argument in 2008 which I was releasing just as the mortgage crisis demonstrated the stagnation and frailty of the globalized, financialized, twenty-first century economy, with the paper. (You can find it here on my blog, a PDF version here at SSRN.)

Still, that was not the end of it. I returned to the same theme later, and more recently produced three papers, also published through SSRN--one offering a yet more thorough and more up-to-date version of that argument in early 2018; an accompanying piece which probed deeply into the multiple available data sets regarding post-World War II growth in Gross World Product; and finally one which endeavored to relate our economic stresses to the sharp deterioration of the "liberal international order" that respectable mainstream talking heads remark so much but do so little to help anyone understand.

My new book, Complexity, Stagnation and Frailty: Understanding the Twenty-First Century, brings this later research together in a single, convenient volume, in both Kindle and paperback editions, available at Amazon and other retailers.

Get your copy today.

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