Beowulf

“News had just come over, we had five years left…

We got five years, my brain hurts a lot
We got five years, that’s all we’ve got”

—“Five Years” / David Bowie

Of all people, the Prince of Wales now suggests there are less than 100 months to save the planet from irreversible harm. 100 months for not just any one nation but all nations to become Carbon Neutral. This exigent remark is no longer so quixotic as it would have once seemed. 2500 leading climate scientists – fed up with politicians pretending to act on their advice – recently held an emergency summit in Copenhagen to reinforce the point that what’s at stake is irreversible climate change. Sea levels rising by 7 metres are a walk in the park compared to Earth becoming another Venus.

This is still a remote possibility, but less remote every day, given the increasingly accurate data-sets coming in. And Venus – once a near-twin of Earth – has had a runaway greenhouse atmosphere for billions of years. The haze you see is a 15 kilometre-deep layer of concentrated sulphuric acid droplets. Under it, Venus is a balmy 480 degrees Celsius, where the 97%-carbon dioxide atmosphere is a crushing 93 times denser than Earth’s, and winds sweep the planet 60 times faster than it rotates in its day … but it didn’t start out that way. It just took a lot of heat and carbon dioxide. Once an atmosphere slip into such a state, there’s no slipping out of it. And it seems the Earth biosphere is slipping towards any number of critical Tipping Points.

Once, doomsdayers fantasized about the North Atlantic thermohaline current shutting down … which would drastically cool Europe and affect the Gulf Stream off the US … which would disrupt global ocean currents, as well as the atmosphere above.

Now, thermohaline overturning (churning over cool water from deep to surface) occurs on a thousand-year timescale, so if it shut down next Tuesday the effects wouldn’t show up for a while. And in the worst case analysis, this could happen not within ten years but within five years. That’s the projected lifespan scientists are giving the Arctic polar ice. When that ice disappears, polar seas are no longer so cold. The churning effect of thermohaline circulation may collapse. There goes your Gulf Stream. A far-fetched disaster scenario? In its outcome, maybe, but the near-term extinction of the polar ice? Foregone. The only question is whether the transition has enough energy and momentum to effect a Tipping Point noticeable in a human lifetime.

The thing about Tipping Points is that they can induce domino effects. In any case, thermohaline-panickers no longer need to feel alone, because there’s a smorgasbord of Tipping Points to choose from!

The high albedo (reflectance) of polar and glacial ice has historically repelled a lot of the sun’s light, but the imminent disappearance of the Arctic polar cap, coupled with ever-swifter glacial retreat, causes Earth to absorb more sunlight, stoking global temperatures … hastening even more ice-melt … a positive feedback cycle with a vengeance.

Also worth noting, about half of the carbon dioxide humankind releases each year doesn’t reside in the atmosphere: it’s absorbed by the biosphere. This is good, when flora is absorbing it, but bad when it’s the ocean doing the absorbing, which is where most of it goes, raising its overall acidity. Ocean acidity has increased 10% since such measurements began; phytoplankton levels are going down by about 6% a decade. Soon the fish will need gas masks. (Get your R&D team in now and corner the market....)

Now, all this scarifying talk of Antarctica’s B Ice Shelf melting isn’t that significant, given that it already rests on the ocean and therefore can’t raise global sea levels. The real action is in West Antarctica, where two kilometres of ice sits on land. If that goes, that’s when sea levels raise by metres. People have thought there is little chance of that happening for at least a century. Until data starts coming in saying that’s exactly what’s already started happening.

Same deal Greenland: the kilometres of ice there rests on land. Once it melts – and it’s melter faster and faster every year, outstripping the most pessimistic predictions of scientists – its gigatonnage of ice, combined with West Antarctica, gives us the scenario we’ve all heard about, the seven metre rise in sea level.

About those predictions: the 2001 climate report that most scientists refer to didn’t include scenarios of Arctic and Antarctic melting, because they were too difficult to model, and they wanted to present solid cases, solidly modelled, free of large uncertainties. But by doing so, they have provided data which consistently understates the danger. The 2001 report assumes 1.2% annual growth, whereas in the years since then it has been roughly double that (driven primarily by Chinese and Indian industrial growth). 440 parts per million of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere now seems a fanciful, utopian goal. Thanks to our due diligence with global industrialization, if growth continues at the present rate, we’ll hit 1000 parts per million by century’s end, which may be enough of a Tipping Point to kick us over into irreversible climate chaos.

Still an outer-bound possibility, admittedly, one that assumes we’ll do absolutely nothing (i.e. — business as usual). But other Tipping Points abound.

Who knew the Amazon suffered droughts? Increasingly so, in fact. Now in the worst case scenario, if the Amazon progressively dries out until one year it becomes a tinderbox, going up in flames, that will lead to an Industrial Revolution’s worth of carbon being dumped into the atmosphere. (And the Amazon doesn’t have recovery powers such as the Australian bush has, which, in the 60000-odd-years of Aboriginal occupation, had evolutionarily adapted to their seasonal bush-burning programs. The fact that these programs are no longer instituted leads to the perpetual tinderbox conditions we enjoy today. Whereas if the Amazon was to burn, it would take its time about coming back.)

So, too, if all that carbon-gigatonnage currently locked up in the Siberian permafrost thaws out and gets released into the atmosphere, it alone is enough to raise the carbon level towards the magical thousand parts per million which the Earth would struggle to rescind over any amount of time. Earth scientists Timothy E. Dowling and Adam P. Showman modestly point out: “Interestingly, if all the carbon held in Earth’s carbonate rocks were liberated into the atmosphere, Earth’s greenhouse effect would approach that on Venus.” Yes, some fates are irreversible — ask Venus. (Well, if you ask planetary scientist Donald M. Hunten, he’ll confirm “Venus is a remarkable and extreme example of the large climatic effects that can be produced by seemingly small causes.”)

It’s simply the case that some systems, once they’re kicked over to a new phase-state, have no way of getting back their lost stability. This is the crucial thing to avoid. Tipping Points. There are too many to choose from — and if any such transition phases combine, then one Tipping Point could domino-topple another....

Consider the humble bee. Its extinction would be a pity, but not significant, in and of itself, right? Only, flowers require bees for pollination, and many other things in the life web require flowers. There’s so much connectiveness that removing one vital component can cause the whole structural edifice of the life web (or “food chain”) to buckle. Far-fetched, until you see the evidence about how many bees are dying off in the U.S., and inexplicably so. No-one is saying every bee is doomed, but it’s another one of those potential cases whereby, if there are significant reductions over a sustained period, it will have knock-on effects that may destructively reinforce each other. On the macro-scale, the global ecosystem of the Earth is, if it is anything, a positive-reinforcement set of feedback mechanisms regulating each other. Change a set of parameters and others change in response. But there’s no way to calculate in advance whether the sum total of emergent properties in any large-scale phase-change (or pile up of phase-changes) will ultimately lead to a new dynamically stable regime or one governed by destructive feedback relationships. And a Runaway Greenhouse effect is dynamically stable enough, overall; it’s just not one we want to find ourselves in.

Another thing that Global Warming Deniers bring up is how cold weather disasters are on the rise, not wane. But the point about increased heat energy in the atmosphere is that it increases volatility. Temperatures won’t increase uniformly, but chaotically. You get radical extremes, which include both ends of the temperature spectrum; localized increased rainfall, flooding, ice storms. The crucial point is, despite local variations average global heat energy mainly goes up, due to the increasing presence of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. 1000 parts per million may well be the ballpark figure for the point of no return. There has been a 36% increase since the Industrial Revolution, up from ~280 parts per million.

But the most dangerous thing about Tipping Points is how hard they are to detect ahead of time, and how suddenly they can engulf us. As Timothy E. Dowling and Adam P. Showman explain: “The Earth’s response to perturbations is highly nonlinear and is determined by feedbacks in the climate system. Positive feedbacks amplify a perturbation and, under some circumstances, can induce a runaway process where the climate shifts abruptly to a completely different state.” Disasters don’t have follow steadily rising curves of harm. They can go exponential on you. Erupt with earthquake suddenness. The prudent thing is to plan for the worst case contingency, act as soon as possible. This is the most rational course of action.

Rationality, of course, is another dwindling resource. Some postmodern “thinkers” enjoy discrediting the whole idea of Enlightenment rationality, whereas the more “new age” types prefer to romanticize the irrational, putting their faith in a “magical universe” because they’re happy to blame technology itself, rather than the misuses to which it has been put. A tool is not evil. The person who picks it up to bash someone’s head in is arguably evil. But to blame the tool for this is as far away from reason as you can get. Realistically, only technology and reason is going to get the biosphere out of the mess we’re making of it.

But there is no denying this is deeply problematic, for deeply human reasons—

There’s an old saw about humankind being stranded halfway between beast and god. Certainly, our brains have made awesome evolutionary gains since our kinship with beasts — so much so that humanity is no longer subject to physical evolution so much as cultural evolution. Culture is now our main vector of evolution. It’s an “extended phenotypic” outcome made possible by those oh so clever brains of ours. Yet, civilized as we are, we haven’t outgrown those brains have we? We operate with something that is still in part an evolutionary throwback.

Sure, we have three brains, each one grown atop the other, evolutionarily starting out with a brain stem, then cerebellar brain structures, finally the neocortex, whose involuted grey matter is responsible for much of what makes modern human consciousness so rich and dextrous. But consciousness is still distributed, compartmentalized. We still rely on a lot of autonomous circuitry held over from several millions of years of development in the wild. Our deepest (and most powerful) emotional structures are adapted to conditions that stay relatively constant over the span of a human lifetime.

But since the industrial age, humanity has altered environmental conditions often beyond what our hominoid brains can register. Part of what makes the human condition so ornery is that certain brain structures evolve slower than others.

Particularly, our fight-or-flight responses to danger. Processed not by the sophisticated neocortex but older, deeper structures such as the amygdala, the hippocampus, these responses reflexively kick in to certain ranges of stimulus. As Max Tegmark once said, “Evolution endowed us with intuition only for those aspects of physics that had survival value for our distant ancestors, such as the parabolic trajectories of flying rocks.” We do not perceive every danger that actually exists. Only what the evolutionary relics in our brains can perceive. Only what they’re evolutionarily conditioned to. Tegmark added: “Darwin’s theory thus makes the testable prediction that whenever we look beyond the human scale, our evolved intuition should break down.” This is exactly what we find in Global Warming sceptics. Global Warming is invisible to the fight/flight response.

Oh, intellectually we can assess the threat of Global Warming and tell ourselves we understand the dangers, long term and near … but in fact we don’t feel how change swamps us; not viscerally, not in our bones; not so that we react by shaking, sweating, breathing hard, our chests feeling cold, our hearing sharpening up, eyes darting everywhere to assess bolt holes. Such invisible dangers are intellectual abstractions beyond our body’s ability to take seriously. It’s all too easy for us to abstract the danger, to compartmentalize it, rationalize it, deny it. That is the crux of our human nature: we were able to devise a “technological Frankenstein” (the Industrial Revolution) that generation-gapped our brains’ cognitive ability to properly assess it. It’s easy enough to understand why: we don’t live long enough.

No lifeform on Earth has extended its lifespan as humanity has. Medicine, and civilized care for the weak, coupled with steady industrial progress, has ensured that our planetary civilization outstrips our ability to somatically perceive the full benefits and dangers it creates. Every system of any sophistication generates emergent outcomes that seem to have nothing to do with the initial conditions. Complexity Theory can no doubt account for this. But this is another intellectual abstraction that we can’t internalize emotionally to the point of acting on it. How are we going to “feel” Global Warming to the point that we urgently act on it?

Well, we could always learn to live forever, become immortal so that over decades and centuries each of us sees changes firsthand, retains them in memory and so can act guided by the yardstick of experience. The only catch is, the Earth may be changing faster than even human technological inventiveness. Despite Damien Broderick’s fanciful suggestion that we may be “the last mortal generation”, don’t hold your breath waiting for a mass-market release of immortality any time soon. Perhaps, in fact, “the human race” is a competition between immortality and ecosystem collapse. But since none of us will be around to enjoy either result … why lift a finger either way?

And yet, as suggested, if the worst case scenarios hold sway, perhaps a large bulk of the worst effects may still visit all who are now alive before they die. Perhaps we can increase the appeal of altruism by redefining it as self-interest-by-proxy; or, more simply, as reciprocal self-interest. (Anything, so long as the veneer of selfishness is retained!) How about collectivized self-interest?

But surely we need to do more than that. While modifying lifespan is not an immediate option, modifying consciousness is.

Talk of a “raised” or “higher consciousness” is by now the biggest cliché there is. Even new age folks are probably embarrassed to utter the words, but one thing is fairly sure: only our brains are going to get out of this. A radical act of consciousness is needed to cut the Gordian Knot formed by our sceptical, over-analytical, over-intellectualized responses to Global Warming; the Gordian Knot of our own ontological (and ultimately phylogenetic) limitations.

Before then, however, we have to face down our negative attitudes. Only people got the biosphere into this mess. Only people can finish the job and kill it off. All you need is the appropriate suicidal attitude. The surprise is, you don’t have to search under “Denial”: you can find it under the category of “Pragmatism”.

If ninety-seven out of a hundred maintenance mechanics tell you your jet might not be safe to fly … well, if even one said that, you simply wouldn’t fly. You’d give the benefit of the doubt to the safety issue, take remedial action rather than trusting in your various personal gods to load the dice on your behalf. No healthy person dices with death unnecessarily.

Anyone who prefers to gamble this way assumes the miracle of blind hope is always on their side — based on no evidence other than the devout conviction that sitting on your hands will safely see you through this eco-crisis thing, whatever it is.

… People who feel this way tend not to believe, on some deep level, that they ever need die. Death has become an abstraction. (That’s ultimately why people live in the comfort factories known as cities — so we can forget death.) “Life can’t be that bad, that evil. It’s on my side. I’m special! I don’t need to act — the universe will protect me! (I won’t _ever_ die).”

It is just this attitude that is displayed by all sorts of Global Warming sceptics. Rather than fight to save the biosphere, people would rather fight for their right to appear cool and au fait with any mooted disaster scenario — it’s somehow girly to admit concern; to entertain the possibility that carrying on with economic triumphalism is an evolutionary cul de sac for the human race. Hail Profiteering! Vale to all sum-zero games! Profit by all means, but only if it’s at someone else’s expense! “Society”? Who said there’s such a thing! There’s just family and friends. And stock options. Everyone else is fuel to be converted into profit. Profit, in Market Fundamentalism, is the be-all and end-all of existence. Fiduciary Duty says so, and the status of multinational corporations as legal bodies safe from true accountability enshrines it as inviolable.

This isn’t cynicism. It’s “Pragmatism.”

To such people, the environment has always been a species of fuel, nothing more. Earth seems inexhaustibly vast — no-one can walk it all (David Attenborough notwithstanding). Even those who aren’t interested in exploiting it don’t imagine the exploiters’ behaviour will ever affect them. Live and let live. Let them do their thing. “Peak Oil?” A fantastic concept, mere confabulation from the liberal media. Surely. Petrol will last 4004 more years. Surely. Full Steam Ahead (hey, coal’s pretty good for that. Whack another coal-fired power station into the ecosystem.)

Not only hardcore Global Warming Deniers, but “Pragmatists” dismiss the 98% of climate scientists who say disaster is around the corner unless we act — they’re convinced by the reasoned arguments of the contrarian 2% instead. The majority 98% are in a conspiracy, you see. All these thousands of people around the world have spent decades becoming specialists in their field just so that one day they might snap their fingers and decide to launch an arbitrary conspiracy, just to poke fun at the squares.

It’s important to note that the specialists referred to are not scientists of every stripe. Just because someone might be the world leading specialist in dentistry, actuary tables or omega-3 fatty acids, you don’t ask for their “informed opinion” about Global Warming. They don’t have one. In this context they’re laymen like anyone else. If you want to trot out someone with contrary views against Global Warming, you have to draw someone from the pool of relevant experts who might have enough expertise to offer meaningful dissent. Critical objections are invaluable, provided they’re guided by relevant expertise. (How many of the revisionist scientists paid off by Big Tobacco had any training in coronary artery disease?)

This is why it’s significant that among the many thousands of scientists specializing in planetary science, atmospheric science, oceanographic science, climate science … there’s 98% agreement that action is extremely urgent and overdue. The 2% who disagree likely correspond to the proportion of cranks you find in any population. They’re the two who, ignoring the peer view of 98 maintenance mechanics that your jet might fail, tell you to go right in and grab a window seat — you don’t want to miss the landing. (Some people just want adventure in their lives. What’s more self-empowering than watching everyone around you crash and burn beyond recognition?)

The Global Warming Deniers aren’t really the problem — you can spot Loons a mile away and comfortably ignore them. The real problem is posed by the vast numbers of people gripped by the myth of pragmatism. They are mature, composed, responsible adults; whereas people concerned about Global Warming (“biophiles”?) are alarmist neurotics.

Such Pragmatists accept the reality of Global Warming, but delude themselves into thinking that the level to address it at is not the real existent one of the biosphere at threat but at the level of human culture — the level of trade, business, politics, society … as if it is in those realms that Global Warming is occurring. (For if it’s not, then there’s nothing to worry about is there? Only human things matter. Genuine adults only need concern themselves with adult affairs, after all. Jobs. Votes. Shares. Rego stickers. Carlton making the eight. The stuff of civilization. “You gotta address the practical realities, not some highflown idealistic position.” So, suit yourself, stand over there and fiddle while Rome burns.)

Try suggesting that an urgent Marshall Plan for the entire planet is the least of what’s required and you’ll be told: “Too bad. It’s just too hard to swing those votes. Too many job losses in the short term.” (Never mind the fact that sustainable technologies can generate more jobs than they replace.) If something is politically acceptable first, then we can act pragmatically towards it. Opinion polling drives political reality, which is fine, as it’s a reality we’ve all learnt to accept. Such a pity Global Warming doesn’t follow opinion polls.

Spin and image-driven Democracy may be fatal for our health. If you only “pragmatically” address the perceived political realities, only ever try to push through what seem acceptable to your constituencies, and tweak all thinking in line with those boundary conditions … then we’re all doomed. Democracy may kill us all yet, given we only seem to pay attention to media campaigns anymore, rather than scientific reports. Leadership means ignoring the comfort-prejudices of the inward-looking masses. (In the decades since World War II, does exercising free will amount to gravitating towards the path of least resistance — i.e., doing nothing?) After all, if people are not wealthy enough to enjoy the luxury of tackling Big Problems, by definition they’re more preoccupied with second-order survival issues brought about by resource scarcity. In their case the scarcity is money.

[Ironically, Ecological Dictators may be the only ones with the intestinal fortitude to properly lead without heeding what the wilfully ignorant and timidly conservative masses say. After all, we’ve demonstrated a dogpack-like tendency to unquestioningly follow the alphamale (Jim Jones … take a bow). Perhaps the Red Chinese can be overthrown by “Green Chinese”! Their modus operandi could be indistinguishable from the current PRC, except that their 50 Year Plans could be dedicated solely to saving their native ecologies. (And they sure need saving from themselves, given the way they’re fond of opening a brand new coal-fired power station every other week.)]

All in all, there’s clearly no rational basis for Global Warming Scepticism.

Has that stopped anyone from trying, though? Who says reason has the specialized problem-solving position here? (Remember our ancestral monkey brain’s fight/flight impotence…? “Plan for worst case contingencies? No way: She’ll be right mate.”)

Some vision is needed, and will. But those two points are not currently close to human nature, not taken to heart. Not when another recent disaster (think “The Great Recession”, as pundits have dubbed the current global fiscal crisis) has exhausted people, disguising the true scale of the larger disaster looming just up ahead.

An analogy:

In 1921, soviet sailors at the sea fort of Kronshtadt realized that the Bolsheviks had betrayed the spirit of the 1917 Revolution of “Power for the People”. The sailors tried to start up a Revolution against the autocratic and elitist Leninites. They wanted to restore the Communist Party to the ideals of 1917, but this could only succeed with the support of the public. But the populace, exhausted after seven years of civil war, had no more energy to help. “Too bad. It’s just too hard to swing those votes.” So they did nothing, the sailors were crushed, the dream of representative communism ended for ever … and when Stalin took over, 50 million Russians ended up paying for that spiritual exhaustion, that lack of will and vision, with their lives.

Harsh, but that Russian populace, concerned only with avoiding short term pain, threw the future in a bin and so paid a far greater price in the long term. These are the sorts of difficult cost/benefit analyses we have to become fluent with. They are our basic ground reality anyway.

Today, we have no excuse about a lack of vision — there’s enough scientific data for everyone. All we lack is will. And perhaps the clarity of reason to accept the data sets without prevaricating in irrational ways, trying to wheedle and cadge excuses, make false protests in the name of principled scepticism. That we do so is due to a little something we call human nature.

One of the salient things about the human condition that makes things so damn painful for everyone is that we’re not effective at seeing and planning ahead in time. The Chinese have been better at this than anyone, and that hasn’t saved their environment from unequalled degradation and mismanagement. Perhaps they were only good at this because of the relatively static nature of their cultures over millennia (and this goes for the ancient Egyptian societies too). Do dynamic cultures such as Western Democracies pay an extra price because they are steeped in individualism?

Evolutionary psychologist John Tooby has noted that our ancestors primarily lived in small tight groups. Accordingly, this motivated people to stay neighbourly in case their fellows might later be of use. But random encounters with strangers were rare. Tooby proposes that altruism emerged by virtue of our not having had enough encounters with strangers to evolve comfortable strategies for dealing with them. Rivals of Tooby suggest that altruism could have been forged in the evolutionary competition between different groups, selected as a positive group-sized developmental advantage over the efforts of more individualistic ensembles. And of course, coherent groups are more efficient at passing on received wisdoms (learning and teaching). Either way, what is significant is that the scale of cooperation has increased by orders of magnitude not in evolutionary time, but in historical time. Culture is clearly the main vector of evolution now. But the West has explored an individualism inherently more chaotic than most societies that have existed. Where people subdivide their sphere of being on an increasingly personal level, abstracted from the social commons, altruism then becomes a problematic goal. Clearly, one thing we’re going to have to sort out is some healthy reconciliation between individualism and altruism, for the subject does not draw enough attention.

Individualistic societies do not freely and easily band together for great big collective projects that require a shared mindset, not much bigger than building dams, anyway. The last great large-scale enterprise was the industrialization of Allied Powers in the Second World War. There was a shared goal that all gladly worked towards, because it was deemed just. (If there has ever been anything like a Just War, it was the one run by the Allied Powers in WWII, Dresden, Hiroshima et al notwithstanding.) That response was an extreme one to an extreme threat, viscerally felt by every monkey brain ringing with fight/flight responses. Why can reason not stimulate the equivalent response today?

You would think sufficiently good universal education would facilitate something like that. Education … something perversely undervalued in the global experience, even among Developed Nations. What explains the poor pay and low esteem of teachers in great swathes of the developed world? Do people perceive and unconsciously resent the real purpose behind education: Simply to make children fit to become good worker drones in the global workshop? Education needs to be properly valued (arguably the sciences in particular).

No, we have not yet evolved beyond our primitive biological imperatives. We are still partly in thrall to our ancestral monkey brains. What we need is to somehow internalize the abstract rational conclusions of our most sophisticated problem-analysis so that even intellectually perceived long-range threats are deeply, urgently felt and acted on. But does the human race have the time for that?

100 months. The current global fiscal crisis brought about by the profiteering bubble of the American housing sector may ironically have bought the Earth some time. Biophiles may fret that “The Great Recession” diverts attention from the ecological crisis. This may be a blessing in disguise. Not only has global economic output slowed down, perhaps buying the Earth a few more years of breathing room, but radical systems reform is never introduced during a time of status quo. As Homer Simpson says, what a “crisitunity!” This is the historical aperture, the moment of death or glory.

100 months. What if the window to prevent irreversible change closes by (circa) 2017? After that, no matter what great supertechnological breakthrough we come up with, it won’t catch up to the Earth in runaway greenhouse mode. The main danger is in surrendering to current perceptions of human nature, as if it’s been defined for all time. We need to modify ourselves so that we’re capable of anticipating disaster ahead of time. Homo Sapiens is anything if not the master of adaptation, but by definition adaptation is something one does after the event. We need to cultivate some form of “premeditated adaptation”: a precognizant methodology for extrapolating future adaptive needs, in the tug of war between the demands of the biosphere and the human organism.

There’s no doubt that a wealthy and powerful minority could survive the worst runaway greenhouse scenario, but whoever survived would be very changed by the experience; perhaps minimally recognizable as human. The point is not to survive but to survive in style, with as intact a biosphere and human organism as possible, as natural as possible.

For this we need our consciousness (somewhat ironically) to transcend the primitive biological imperatives it’s rooted in. For a start, we could en masse cultivate some generalized form of the Hippocratic Oath: First, Do No Harm. (I.e., once the Earth’s ongoing survival is secured, then exploit to your heart’s content.) Hmm. Not quite consistent, is it? We’ll need even more wholesale attitude-reform. Perhaps a more practical plan…

…such as a universal welfare fund for the biosphere.

A sovereign but non-state body would have to disburse this fund and oversee its application. A figure of three trillion U.S. dollars should do it. Per year. Until the job is done. Now, nation-states aren’t likely to donate fractions that eventually add up to a trillion-dollar pie, not from existing reserves they won’t.

So print the money. Print it, use it to get the work done.

This is not as outlandish as it sounds, because this fund is a loan that has to be paid back 100 years from now. How can that be at a net profit or break even point? Easy — by fixing the Earth’s biosphere, you raise wealth overall. The size of the global pie itself grows larger. The money you’ve printed up now rejoins the overall bigger pie in 100 years, no loss to anyone. Meanwhile, the remediation of the Earth has been taken care of. A clean, fixed up system surely generates more wealth than a crippled one. Think of this not as altruism but enlightened rational self-interest.

And taxable! The magic panacea that makes it attractive for participants – it’s taxable! Hallelujah be!

There’s kind of a precedent. Following the Great Depression, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt realized that American factories still contained the same real existent machines, that the American workers still possessed real, up-to-date skills … only that deceptive abstraction called money had dried up. Roosevelt sought to reinvigorate the American economy by getting the realities going again. So he pump-primed the U.S.A. with the New Deal, instituting a Works Progress Administration, a National Recovery Administration, a Reconstruction Finance Corporation, a Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, and others. The pump-priming fund proposed here could be called the Biosphere Welfare Fund. (“Beowulf” could serve as a handy contraction — no mythological connotations intended!)

What makes Beowulf workable is that there’s a difference between money and wealth, in a way. Money is the nominal figure we assign to wealth, to render it amenable to instrumentality — “the techné of money”, if you like. Whereas wealth refers to the value of real existents. Foundational things, such as land, climate, ecosystems, flora, fauna. Humanity currently thinks and plans in terms of money, rarely wealth. We simply do not value real existents as they are, preferring instead to work with the invented denominations of that abstraction we fondly call “money”.

We need to start calculating things in terms of their real costs.

There is already some progress in this. In calculating the profitability of a humble AAA battery, we used to work out its R&D, manufacturing and distribution costs. That’s because the money-orientated mindset was geared toward short-term goals such as its profitability. But this short-term profitability is an illusion made appealing by concentrating in too limited and exclusive a fashion upon the battery’s profit-yield, guaranteeing ahead of time the results you want to see. If you take into the account the whole lifecycle of the battery, you have to take into account the cost as it decays into landfill and fractionally poisons the watertable. And there are an awful lot of AAA batteries. Overall, summing up its temporary profits versus the cost of remediating the soil, its profitability becomes dubious. Perhaps there’s even a net-loss value.

This principle of accounting for the entire life-cycle cost of things needs to be extended to practically everything we ever do from now on. We need to naturalize it until it gets to the point where we wonder how people ever did things differently, ever thought differently. Principally, this means not only applying this approach to other concrete, real existent devices or processes we invent, but to large and abstract plans as well. We need to conceptually test-drive our ideologies before we physically enact them. The Three Gorges Dam sounds like a prime contender for a rethink along these lines. Someone needed to model what would happen to the root-system-fixing soil along the valleys, and notice they’d erode in record time, and that the dam waters would silt up, and they’d toxify, and the fish populations that over a hundred million rely upon would begin to dwindle beyond recovery.

Actually, someone probably did model these things. The PRC went ahead and built it anyway, because they didn’t give a damn. Its importance to the overall national economy mandated a few regional sacrifices here and there. It’s this attitude that has got to be bred out of a truly enlightened, truly civilized society. Capitalism must be reformed (and the Chinese are anything if not proficient Capitalists). The profit motive is not evil in itself, but human nature will always encourage some members to exploit magnitudes of order greater profit than anyone else. The top echelons of the business sector tends to attract sociopaths (not psychopaths) who lack the empathy to care about the people they’re subjecting to zero-sum games. Two things make this behaviour ongoingly possible. Fiduciary Duty (the imperative to generate profit for shareholders at any cost; nothing else matters), and the status of corporations as legal entities with the same rights as human beings.

These two things need to be reformed, or human nature at its extremes will always reassert itself, zero-sum exploitation will ramp up profitability, thereby polarizing inequalities that will build up until resources are once more torched as fuel in Market Fundamentalism’s quest for ultimate profitability. Uranium, for example, is a fossil fuel. There’s no reason not to suppose we won’t burn through the Earth’s supplies within a century, if we en masse delude ourselves in thinking it’s the magic bullet for our energy needs, rather than a range of sustainable energies.

Once we’ve spent our uranium, we can always strip-harvest all the helium-3 that’s coating the Moon.... There’s no reason for resource-extinction not to continue indefinitely, unless we have the will and vision to change ourselves in more enlightened ways, find better ways of planning ahead before we do things. Let’s not be dictated to by the emotional logic of survival imperatives, and the resource-scarcity that’s motivated us these past millennia. We’re past that ancestral stage. We can know ourselves enough to change ourselves for the better. *

______

It’s Bowie’s singing that gives “Five Years” its eschatological frisson. The lyrics seem melodramatic until you hear the pathos he wrings out of them. Unsentimental, yet haunting. Read these lyrics, now do a search for the song and listen to the difference he makes. Guarantee you’ll feel the tolling of that entropic countdown in your bones. The grandeur of collective extinction. Five years, 100 months … neither mark is good.

“Pushing through the market square, so many mothers sighing
News had just come over, we had five years left to cry in
News guy wept when he told us, Earth was really dying
Cried so much his face was wet, then I knew he was not lying

… I never thought I’d need so many people.”

Who woulda thunk it, back in 1971, a daydreamt apocalyptic ballad would so soon seem like an article from next week’s newspapers....







* (The Biosphere Welfare Fund proposal courtesy of Chris Dickinson)