According to a new report from the Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change, emissions from fossil fuels must be
eliminated by 2050.
We don't have much time.
In an essay entitled Science Isn't Enough To Save Us,
Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, authors of the forthcoming “The
Magic of the Marketplace: The True History of a False Idea”,
observe that it will take much more than private marketplace
investment to ward off the coming crisis. It will take much, much
more. This is much more than a crisis of an individual, or indeed a
company or even and industry. It is a crisis that impacts all of us.
Therefore, it will take all of us, in the form of public—that is,
governmental—intervention.
“None
of major technological transformations of the 19th and
20th centuries were the product of the private sector
acting alone and responding only to the market. Railroads, radio,
telegraph, telephone, electricity and the internet were all the
result of public-private partnerships. None was delivered by the
'invisible hand' of the marketplace. All involved significant
interventions by the visible hand of government.” (1)
I am currently wrapping up a trip to New York to visit
my son. Along the way are many reminders of the investments our
ancestors made in infrastructure. From the old Erie Canal to the
railroads and the interstate highway system—all state and federally
funded initiatives that brought not only the expansion of the nation
into the interior of the continent but helped bind a nation together
as well as help make it prosper. Yes, one can add the Canal systems
of the early 19th century as well as the interstate
highway system of the last to this prodigious list of public
investments.
“Demand
for new technologies is rarely entirely spontaneous”, observe
Oreskes and Conway. “But it's not so. The historian
Richard White at Stanford has shown that railroads offered almost no
immediate benefit to anyone except the railroad barons, because they
were built far ahead of demand, and often into places where white
settlers had no interest in going. When radio was invented, no one
could figure out why any ordinary person would buy one, so
programming had to be created, which meant sponsors had to be found,
which in turn contributed to the rise of modern mass media
advertising.
“What
makes large-scale technological change challenging is the integration
of all those parts. Electricity wasn't just a matter of turbines, or
even turbines, power lines and transformers. Financing and
regulation were also required. After electricity was introduced to
the urban marketplace, the biggest obstacle to its expanded use was
profitability. The private sector was able to make money bringing
electricity to densely populated cities like New York, St. Louis and
Chicago, but it took federal intervention, under the 1936 Rural
Electrification Act, to bring it to rural communities” (2).
The authors duly note the progress being made by state
and regional initiatives, pointing to the Northeast States' Regional
Greenhouse Gas Initiative which has cut greenhouse gas by 39 percent
since 1999, and California's progress on electrical generation from
renewable sources from 11 to 30 percent. But this is not enough.
What is clear is that the current order will have to
undergo universal transformation...the report calling for elimination
of the use of fossil fuels by mid-century.
This will require that the entire population is enlisted
in the effort, as the country was enlisted in recycling rubber and
metals during World War II, and as the entire country made the
commitment that everyone would have access to electrical power
and the technologies that accompanied it.
Science and technology are not enough. Private
investment and the marketplace are not enough. It will take all
of us acting politically to make the changes that will transform
the basis of our economies and the way we relate to mother nature.
These problems cannot be solved individually or serially, but must be
addressed as a totality, as a universality. The Greeks, who gave us
Democracy, understood this. The polis—from which we get our
word politics—was all-encompassing. For the Greeks the polis—the
community, the political unit—was the universe. All else was a
mere subset of this universe. Politics, and public office, were of
the highest calling; for the public's business trumped mere private
concerns. Our forefathers understood this. John Adams wrote into the
constitution of the State of Massachusetts the charge that the people
must support universities and education; Lincoln funded the
transcontinental railroad; FDR built the TVA, the Hoover Dam, and
brought electricity to nearly every American; Eisenhower built the
interstate highway system, and Al Gore pushed the legislation that
made the internet and iPhone possible.
Many fortunes and financial empires were built upon
these investments. Retail legends Sears and Montgomery Ward, for
instance, were built using these railroads and the U.S. Postal
system.
The conservatives of this country have made a pig's
breakfast of governance. By discrediting government they are cutting
the lifeline, perhaps the only lifeline, left to this society—indeed
left to humanity to save us from impending doom. Our ancestors didn't
leave the important work of the republic entirely in the hands of
privateers. They were never such fools.
“An
Br'er Putin, he jus' laugh and laugh”
Impeach and Imprison.
_________________
- Oreskes, Naomi., and Conway, Erik M., “Science Isn't Enough to Save Us” The New York Times. Wednesday, October 17, 2018. Page A25
- Ibid.
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