The Death of the Great Man

Today's Washington Post labels President Obama "disappointer-in-chief". Whatever merits there may be about Obama's assets and liabilities as a leader and as a person, and I mostly give him good marks, this is the wrong measure to apply. The question is not whether a more heroic or capable leader, be it Rick Perry, Hilary Clinton, or Ron Paul, could have done more to lead the United States. The question is "now that the era of great men is passing, what we we, each of us, do to make the millions of small changes that will lead to great change?"

I see much of the Tea Party sentiment as coming from an unrecognized admission that big leaders, like big government, are not the answer. Now, don't call me a birther or a libertarian---I believe that we need government, and a good-sized one, to keep our society intact and keep it from becoming the kind of oligarchies that characterized the Middle Ages. Those days saw a tiny minority, the 1% if you will, controlling all or most of the property and wealth in a their region of influence, and the rest of the people living in relative poverty and servitude, their relative well-being dependent on the patronage of the oligarch. Today's corporate and monied elites, the super-entrepreneurs and asset manipulators, could become the equivalent in this century, living with their private security in gated communities, while the cities and countrysides become more disorganized and impoverished.

Yet we seen counter-trends that are encouraging. As national governments become almost paralyzed by polarization in many countries, local government and metropolitan communities are doing better. People accept the need for government they can see, in police and trash collectors and streetlights. We've seen a renaissance of urban living in many parts of the U.S. and Europe. Even in the benighted oligarchy Russia has become, Moscow thrives in relative terms.

So let's stop arguing over Obama's greatness or lack thereof. Let's keep electing people like him, who are not wedded to the monied elites as the Bush family is, to keep a wedge between we the people and the oligarchs waiting to take more bites of the common wealth (two words on purpose). Then let's focus on taking more action in our own lives and our own communities, to make them greener and more democratic. That way, as the huge institutions become less and less functional, we will have strong civil societies that make life worth living.

I'll close with an experience I had in Bangladesh last year. I dreaded going there--the poverty, the dysfunctional government, the urban overcrowding, the economic exploitation, look terrible in statistical form. But then I went to Dhaka, and encountered real Bengalis. My hotel, admittedly in the better part of Dhaka, was across the street from some kind of park. Overcoming my fear, I went over there some mornings and found a thriving civil society--a teahouse, a gaggle of brightly dressed women chatting over tea under a tree, a group of men chanting energetically through a morning exercise class, and a well-kept brick path around which people walked or jogged, all in the same counter-clockwise direction. A few guards stood unobtrusively at the gates. Trees and flowers abounded. After a while I noticed small signs announcing that the "Gulshan Society" was responsible for most of the improvements. So here was a civil society operating in the midst of chaos, in the most statistically dismal country on earth. I take that park as a sign of what we can create together, anywhere.

Postcards from Earth 2013

Postcards from Earth 2013:

It's 2113 and winter is coming on, except where it's not. A warm spell has hung over most of North America for over a month, further drying the desert interior, while weeks worth of blizzards have rage across northern Europe, crippling travel and further crimping economic output for the year. The equatorial regions are hotter than ever. Advertisers have stopped running images of the North Pole Santa, and polar bears, as Arctic sea ice disappeared in 2045. Palm trees had started to appear on Cape Cod around 2060, but sincethen increasingly erratic weather, including a couple of record snowstorms and one mega-hurricane that overwashed large parts of the Cape and the islands, has killed those species off along with others that had been part of that landscape since before any humans had arrived.

Refugees from the Pacific Island nations, such as Kiribati, have been uneasily resettled in New Zealand, Australia, Japan, and Ecuador with varying levels of cultural and political strife. The famine refugees are proving harder to accommodate: they come in such numbers, into the relatively developed countries like South Africa and Nigeria from the dessicating interior nations like Botswana, Niger, and Central African Republic. They have come down from the drying areas of Central Asia into Iran, India, and China, adding to the political and economic instability in those mega-nations.

But in the U.S., it is the newer versions of the Okies of the 1930s that get the most attention. The Great Plains and the desert Southwest, from central and western Texas into southern California, had largely emptied out, but for some extremist groups, pouring millions of people into the coastal areas, where the storms of the previous 75 years had already made large areas unlivable. This refugee tide turned the formerly liberal states on the east and west coasts into police regimes, heavy on law and order and light on social services, under the hard-earned recognition that providing social benefits only encouraged "in-migrants" as they had come to be called. Fully legalized citizens, yes, but not welcome.

The Canadian government has become almost Russian in its xenophobia as outsiders salivated at its increasingly fertile and temperate land, too cold for all but the indigenous a century before, now seen as a refugee's promised land. But the Canadian economy is just as battered as others by drought, resource scarcity, and extreme weather that drove infrastructure costs sky-high, and made transportation unreliable. It doesn't have the resources to accommodate climate refugees any more than other developed countries. The indigenous peoples, normally gracious in welcoming strangers, have become hardened, insular, and increasingly well-armed.

Not as well-armed, however, as the security forces hired by the owners of apartment buildings in New York, Chicago, San Francisco, and the dozen other cities where people of means live in relative luxury. Nor as well-armed the gated mini-cities that studded the fringes of these megalopoli, using advanced hydroponics, additive manufacturing, and secure air shipping to meet most of their needs with strictly limited engagement outside of their walls.

Indeed, islands of comfort thrive among the chaos that characterizes most parts of the world. Certain valleys and other micro-geographies had learned to adapt, partly by exploiting the serendipity of their micro-climates, their resource bases, and their concentrations of information technology. However, the chaos in the surrounding seas of has grown worse in recent decades. Religious extremists and warlords rule large stretches of the environmentally-unsustainable desert regions, from the successors of Al Shabab in Africa to those of Al Queda in central Asia, to newer groups like the ultra-Mormon sects in the desert Southwest U.S. Unable to develop their resource-poor fiefdoms into nation states, they survive on a mix of subsistence agriculture, kidnapping and extortion, and cybercrime.

It's not all bleak. Resource scarcity-driven prices for basic materials and goods, and the breakdown of some aspects of the global economic system have forced waves of innovation in energy usage and supply, reuse and reconditioning of products and materials, and recycling/reuse of human, animal, and plant waste. The islands of comfort have come to depend on this new paradigm of low-to-no waste and a more ecosystem-based economic model for their relative prosperity, because they have become more and more limited to their local/regional ecosystems. In modernized versions of their indigenous forebears, these communities have learned to live with the limits of their earth-based systems.

Those regional limits have emerged because the global supereconomy that had emerged in the early 21st century, dominated by China, its Asian rim satellites, and the many countries whose resources and favor it had acquired, began to crumble in the 2040s. Nations from Costa Rica to Dominica to Sudan, that had gladly accepted Chinese investments in infrastructure in the 1990-2020 period, began to rebel after 2040 when the Chinese started calling in their chits and extracting resources in high volumes. Already stressed by worsening climate conditions and accompanying economic and political strife, these countries began to harden their trade barriers and their borders. The Chinese, whose military might could have enforced its agreements in 2020, by 2050 had suffered their own internal problems as the global supereconomy had stalled and its economic growth had stagnated. Unable to support its aging population let alone a global military presence, the Chinese like the other superpowers have had to trim their ambitions and seek to survive within their regional sphere of influence.

The other superpowers of the 21st century--the U.S. and Russia--have had their own versions of the Chinese problem set. Stagnant economies, internal migration and strife driven by climate extremes, and poisonous politics, have kept these former world powers much quieter outside their borders. The mainstays of U.S. and Russian economic power--oil and gas--had faded as economic weapons after 2075, when depletion of fields and disruption of ocean shipping began to cut export revenues significantly. European nations, having evolved the world's only workable regional forms of economic and political cooperation, have settled quietly into relative stability, though more and more of their resources are called upon to deal with the effects of climate changes, be they crippled floods, blizzards, or rising sea levels. The eastern edge of the EU, however, including the Baltic states, Belarus, Ukraine, Bulgaria, and Romania have seceded under Russian pressure. Caught in the vacuum between the EU and Russian, these nations have devolved into seas of chaos, becoming world centers of cybercrime and human trafficking.

One of the byproducts of this erosion of globalism has been a diminishing of militarism at a global scale. None of the major powers could afford it, and the shrinking of nations' spheres of influence has reduced political priorities for projecting force overseas. The early 21st-century U.S. strategy of being in a state of constant readiness to fight two regional conflicts anywhere in the world had shrunk to a strategy of border defense, anti-ballistic missile and related cyberdefense, plus a few divisions of crack special forces, based in the U.S. and a few forward outposts, ready to crush any perceived threats in the cradle. These forces, however, relied every more heavily on remote weaponry, using advanced drone systems coupled with enhanced surveillance methods that used new forms of biometrics to identify and target individuals within seconds.

Another, less grim byproduct of the breakdown of global systems has been the acceleration of psychological and spiritual evolution that became conscious in the late 20th century. This phenomenon has been limited mainly to the islanded communities that can afford the time, personal safety, and technology to support them. The crude pharmaceutical attempts to medicate the anxieties and other forms of mental unrest of the early 21st century had been declared a failure by 2050. Drugs were still used, but in a more microtargeted way, for neuroenhancement, mild sedation, and pleasure, with much reduced side effects. Beyond that, however, growing segments of the privileged populations have taken on evolution as a real and continuing inner process of advancing consciousness, far beyond the Darwinian theoretics of genetically-based natural selection.

This is not the "New Age" idealism of the late 20th century--it has become a survival skill, as suicide rates and other forms of psychic dysfunction had risen to such alarming levels by 2040 that the privileged classes began to realize that for humans to survive, they had to become much more tolerant of change, uncertainty and stress. Advanced forms of meditation, biofeedback, and integrative body work have emerged, producing people who are much more present in the moment, able to process information and emotional energy in new and integrative ways, and thus to move beyond the patterns of depression and anxiety that had emerged during the 20th century and reached crisis levels by the 2030s. These new generations, while not exactly blissful as their 20th century forebears had hoped, are nonetheless clear-eyed, active, and able to find pleasure in small and daily acts of living.

Data collected on the last two generations of the 21st century have begun to show that these advances in consciousness are being transmitted genetically, reinforcing hope (at least in the islanded communities) that humans might get through the worsening conditions they see around the planet. The contrast with the chaotic areas outside the islands, however, has grown more stark. Of the seven billion or so humans on the planet (the population had stabilized around this level after peaking at about 8 billion in 2050), it was estimated that two billion were doing OK-to-well in the islanded communities, another two billion were making do around the fringes of the islands, and the bottom two million were just surviving. Geneticists were beginning to speculate that within another two centuries, the accelerating evolutionary forces will have created two separate species. Attitudes are already beginning to shift, creating new forms of racial bias toward new classes of "untouchables."

What's least noticed among all these swirling developments is a growing if invisible web of interspecies communication. As more and more species experience the stresses of accelerated evolution and environmental deterioration, spontaneous channels have opened between humans and other mammals, plants and mammals, cetaceans and other marine species, and doubtless many others that have not been reported. Human-horse communication has largely shifted the relationship between these species, with horses changing from work animals to collaborators in evolution, helping humans in their new modes of body awareness, emotional balance, and intuitive learning.

These postcards do not yet reveal a clear pattern, but rather a swirling mix of energies and forms, somewhat like the situation that John Milton described in Pilgrim's Progress:

Into the wild abyss,
The womb of nature and perhaps her grave,
Of neither sea, nor shore, nor air, nor fire,
But all these in their pregnant causes mixed
Confusedly, and which thus must ever fight,
Unless the almighty maker them ordain
His dark materials to create more worlds,
Into this wild abyss the wary fiend
Stood on the brink of hell and looked a while,
Pondering his voyage...

Health care for people and the planet

The current kerfuffle over the Affordable Care Act is generating all kinds of froth and misinformation in today's over-caffeinated, over-polarized political and media spaces. But at a deeper level, the principles at stake in health care and in planetary sustainability are connected.

The deeper issue in the ACA debate is this: do we see ourselves and behave as one people, or as a loose affiliation of individuals, in which most of us can pretend not to need or care about the others? The ACA seeks to get care to everyone and to ask everyone to pay in. There are too many Americans who need care and can't get it. My daughters are among them: both over 26 next year, both low-income, both with pre-existing conditions. Under the current system, they would get either no coverage or unaffordable coverage. Under the ACA, and in the Maryland health exchange, they will get fair coverage with subsidies to offset their low income status.

Most Americans have health insurance through their employers, and while they may complain about this and that, they are complacently content with the system. So naturally they don't like change, especially when the Fox News crowd keeps feeding misinformation about what the law really does. They are not inclined to entertain the idea that rates might go up, that their plans may change, and so on. But the deeper reality is that for Americans to act as one people, we need to stay with the ACA, fix the website, make adjustments here and there, but stay committed to providing health care to everyone.

There are, to be sure, deeper issues with health that the ACA doesn't and can't address. It can't address our addicted culture, where we run to the doctor for another pill every time we get anxious, can't sleep, have pain, etc. We need to refocus our health culture on self-responsibility, prevention, promoting wellness. We each need to look for ways to be healthy through our decisions about eating, exercise, and awareness.

Interesting, the ACA is already encouraging this. My employer is introducing Consumer-Directed Health Plans (CDHPs) next year; these have lower premiums, higher deductibles, and are connected to Health Savings Accounts (HSAs). I have selected a CDHP with a $2000 deductible, and my employer is contributing $2000 to my HSA. What that means is that the first $2000 of care next year is covered by my HSA--I give providers the HSA debit card, and don't have to play the claim-game with the insurance company. And I can add to the HSA with pre-tax savings to the level I can afford. I like this--less paperwork, more choice, and more awareness of what things cost and how I use my health dollars. And by the way, preventive care like checkups and cancer screenings are fully covered, no deductible. This is where we need to go to keep health care affordable and to make us responsible health care consumers.

So how does this connect to the more global sustainability issues? The nub of it is connectedness--do we see ourselves and behave as connected to the rest of the world, or not? When a storm like Haiyan, whose record intensity is likely due in part to climate change forcing, brings forth a global wave of compassion and action to bring aid, we see the best of human nature. But when the catastrophe is less dramatic, and takes a slower path, we don't act so connected. We don't see that record wildfires in Austrialia, chronic drought in the American Southwest, and creeping desertification in sub-Saharan Africa, are all symptoms of the same global challenge. We are less willing to take the policy and personal actions needed to get GHG emissions under control.

This century will test us, more and more. When increased storm severity, increased drought, increased flooding, begin to disrupt our economic and political systems, as they have already done in places like Darfur, we will be increasingly confronted by situations that we can't address by writing a check to the Red Cross. Refugee migrations, such as millions of Bangladeshis crossing into India or Burma, will create new, larger, and messier conflicts.

But we can choose now to keep such future calamities to a minimum. We can reform health care now to extend coverage to all Americans, as most of our industrialized partner nations do. We can enact climate and clean energy policies now, that put a price on dirty energy, moderate energy demand, and increase clean energy supplies. If we do this, and act as a connected, responsible people, we can manage the challenges this century is presenting. If not, we are in for a hard ride.

Clues to the Climate Puzzle

Climate deniers are fond of pointing to the climate "pause" or "plateau"--a recent 10-year pause in the long-term trend of rising global air temperatures--as evidence that global warming is not happening and that the climate change issue is a hoax created by environmental extremists to halt the march of progress. A review of the climate field, however, explains most of this effect.

First, terminology. Global warming is the simplistic term used by many to refer to climate change. It is true that average global air temps are rising and will continue to rise--on average and over the long term. But climate change effects are not equally distributed in time and space. Climate science actually says that despite overall average increases in air temps, local weather will become more variable and more extreme. So we will see hotter--and colder--weather in various places at various times.

This is already happening in the northern temperate latitudes, including most of the USA. As arctic sea ice melts, its coverage of the polar regions varies more from summer to winter and from one side of the region to another. This contributes to a breakdown in the formerly-solid high pressure area that used to sit over the north pole, and that used to regulate the flow of circumpolar winds and weather systems, otherwise known as the jet stream. The jet stream used to have a nice, even sine-wave shape, and produced alternating hot and cold, wet and dry weather patterns with some predictability. With the breakdown of the polar ice cap, however, the jet stream has become more irregular, loopier, slower, with the effect of making temperate-zone weather less predictable. So lately we get extended heat, or extended cold, or extended wet or dry periods, with less predictablity. That's the core paradox about climate change--it's not uniform hotter temperatures, it's increased unpredictability. And it's that unpredictability that is stressing agricultural, forests, species adaptation, etc.

Now back to the "pause." The recent plateau in air temps is explained by a few factors: one is the role of the oceans in regulating heat flow in the climate system. Oceans take up huge amounts of heat from the atmosphere, and recent analysis indicates that's been happening recently. However, that heat will find its way back into the atmosphere over time, so the plateau is only temporary. Second, for the last 25 years nations have been reducing emissions of chlorofluorcarbons (CFCs, mostly found in refrigeration systems as coolants) under the Montreal Protocol, which was signed in 1987 to address the stratospheric ozone problem (remember the "ozone hole?"). But CFCs are also very potent greenhouse gases, much more potent than CO2, and so reductions in CFC emissions have contributed to reductions in their associate greenhouse effect. Finally, changes in Asian rice cultivation methods have cut emissions of methane, which is 20+ times more potent than CO2.

So the temporary "pause" tells us several things: (1) it's NOT proof that climate change is a hoax, (2) changes in human activity such as CFC phaseout and agricultural methods can help solve the problem, and (3) deniers can't use spot data like cold snaps or freak snowstorms to deny climate change, because such events are in fact entirely consistent with climate science. Let's keep our eyes on the prize, and keep working on the solutions that we know are effective--cutting emissions of CFCs and then their successors HFCs, reducing methane emissions via agricultural and forestry practices, reducing black carbon (soot) pollution using proven methods, using energy efficiency as the economically-sound "first fuel" to limit growth in CO2 emissions, and then driving clean energy on the supply side to drive down emissions. We can do this!

Water is the canary

As climate change continues to dry out continental interiors in places like the American Southwest, sub-Saharan Africa, and Australia, the mix of denial and predatory behavior becomes more disturbing.

In Texas, we see climate denier Governor Perry seeking a constitutional amendment to raid the state's "rainy day fund" (letting the irony pass) for emergency water supply projects. Meanwhile, the state Attorney General keeps pumping water on his lawn by drilling his own well, further depleting the acquifer on which his neighbors also depend.

It is disturbing indeed to see the privileged and the powerful react this way--by denying the root of the problem on the one hand, and using their money and their privilege to "get theirs," leaving the rest of us to fend for ourselves. Water is just the leading example, the "canary in the coal mine," and will be followed by other crises as people compete for liveable lands, stressed food supplies, etc.

There are other ways to respond, if the human race is to survive this century without brutal new manifestations of Social Darwinism. First, the denial has got to stop. There is too much history, from the Vatican's silencing of Galileo to the chemical industry's attacks on Rachel Carson to the tobacco industry's generations of denial, to allow the fossil-industry-funded denialist fringe continue to block serious action on this central issue of our time. The media needs to stop giving equal time to these people: they represent a tiny minority with no institutional scientific backing. No scientific organization has supported the denialist views. Yet journalists, under pressure to provide "balance", are too often lazy enough to get one quote pro/one quote anti and call it a story. Activists also need to up the ante on outing these people, on showing their willful ignorance for what it is.

Once we get the denialist smoke cleared, there are plenty of economically sound policies that can bend the GHG emissions curve down. First and foremost--energy efficiency. Standards for appliance efficiency and vehicle fuel economy, tax incentives, utility efficiency programs, and the like are already flattening US energy demand, and letting cleaner fuels and power sources de-carbonize the energy system. We need to double down on this front, as the President's climate action plan is doing.

Developing countries are more challenging, but energy efficiency is still the "first fuel," and is also key to economic development. I've been in Tanzania and Bangladesh this year, and getting energy demand under control is key to their economic growth, because as things now stand, they can't expand their grids to take on new industry. The Chinese have thought this way for years---energy efficiency is a linchpin of their economic development strategy. This strategy works everywhere there is an industrial base, a building stock, or a vehicle fleet--in other words, everywhere. Then, developing clean fuels presents other challenges, but as they enter the market, their costs decline, and as fossil fuel depletion drives prices up, renewables will be better able to compete.

Corruption and bad policy must be avoided in developing and well as industrialized countries. Energy development gets away will corner-cutting, polluting practices in too many places, and uses its clout to stifle the kinds of environmental policies that would properly price fossil energy. Republicans in the U.S. complain that EPA policies are killing jobs, but employment in the energy industry has never been stronger. What's happening, and has been happening for over 40 years, is that environmental policies are properly pricing dirty energy and dirty industrial processes. The same parties argue that this can offshore jobs--point taken. But the correct path is for other countries to improve their policies, not for the U.S. to roll ours back. That would be a race to the bottom with disastrous consequences for us all. One reason so many people want to live in the USA is because it is clean--has mostly clean air, most rivers are cleaner than a generation ago, lots of wetlands and forests and wilderness areas have been protected.

We must build on this record, not destroy it. Teddy Roosevelt was the first President to take on conservation in a big way--and he was a Republican. The greatest leaders EPA ever had, Russell Train and Bill Reilly, were Republicans. The present GOP has abandoned one of its strongest legacies and further narrowed its base. If the party wants to become a ruling national party again, it must reach back to its roots and become the party of environmental conservation again.
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