Beyond the “Global War on Terror”:

Finding Just Solutions for the Problems of the 21^st Century

 

The concept of social collapse was popularized by Jared Diamond in his 2005 book, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed.  In the final chapter of that book, Diamond outlines twelve serious environmental problems that could lead to the collapse of modern societies, including our own.  This article addresses two of those environmental problems and one social problem not addressed directly by Diamond.  As I noted in a review of Diamond’s work published in the September 2006 issue of Z Magazine (see http://zmagsite.zmag.org/Sep2006/cross0906.html), humans will need to find new ways of relating to each other as well as new ways of relating to nature if social collapse is to be avoided.

 

The three problems considered here are 1) the approaching declines in the availability of oil and natural gas, 2) global climate change, and 3) the growing gap in living standards between rich and poor countries.  The U.S. public seems to be gradually coming to understand the seriousness of the first two problems, and state and municipal governments have responded with initiatives such as subsidies for renewable power generation systems and the U.S. Mayors Climate Protection Agreement.  Unfortunately, the U.S. public remains largely oblivious to the growing gap in living standards across the globe.  And the federal political establishment has so far demonstrated little ability to respond to any of these problems effectively or humanely.

 

Since 2001, the federal government has limited its response to the issue of declining oil and natural gas reserves primarily by unleashing the so-called “global war on terror” (GWOT), and has largely ignored the problems of climate change and inequality.  The GWOT has little chance of achieving either its generally recognized goal (denying the option of employing terror to those opposing the U.S. empire) or its unstated goal (ensuring control of the Mideast’s oil in perpetuity).  The GWOT is in fact making us less secure than we would be otherwise, as David Cole and Jules Lobel argue in their new book, Less Safe, Less Free: Why America is Losing the War on Terror.  The federal government needs to be redirected if it is ever to address any of the three problems identified above successfully, and that redirection needs to start with ending the dangerous and costly GWOT.  Despite the faltering first steps taken by Congress in the 2007 energy bill, significant additional popular pressure will be needed to put the country as a whole on a new path.

 

Based on estimated reserves and steadily declining discovery rates, the world has enough oil to meet consumption needs for another three or four decades.  The world may have sufficient natural gas supplies to last a decade or so longer, although natural gas poses significantly greater transportation challenges than does petroleum.  Problems associated with the scarcity of these two resources will assuredly occur much earlier than the dates by which they are fully depleted, however, due to the issue of “peak extraction” first explored by M. King Hubbert.  According to most experts, the oil extraction peak will likely occur by 2015 or earlier, with serious impacts on food production and distribution, industry, transportation, the electric grid, and residential and commercial building operation following shortly thereafter.

 

Three federal initiatives could help address the problem of declining oil and natural gas extraction rates.  These initiatives are 1) increasing the use of renewable energy dramatically beyond its current 6% share of total U.S. energy consumption, 2) expanding the inter- and intra-state passenger rail system to make rail travel at least as attractive as air and automobile travel, and 3) requiring automobile companies to produce and market significant numbers of plug-in hybrid vehicles instead of gas-guzzling trucks and SUVs.  Increased use of renewable electric and thermal technologies could both deeply reduce the use of natural gas.  Replacing airline and automobile trips with less energy intensive rail trips would lower the use of oil, and especially so in the case of rail systems operating on renewable electricity.  Replacing conventional automobiles and light trucks with plug-in hybrids would have the same effect, again particularly in the case of hybrids charged at night with renewable electricity.  The technology exists today to do much better than the 35 mile per gallon Corporate Average Fuel Economy standard recently approved by Congress for 2020.

 

As for global climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been telling us with growing forcefulness since 1990 that average global temperatures are increasing, and that those increases are due to human activity.  The human activity most responsible for global climate change is fossil fuel burning.  Fossil fuel burning produces carbon dioxide, the most important greenhouse gas.  Although global climate change will produce different results in different regions, those results will likely include water shortages due to melting glaciers and increased evaporation, decreased food production, increased hurricane intensity, the spread of tropical diseases, and the flooding of low-lying areas.  Needless to say, these effects will put enormous stresses on human societies.

 

The three initiatives described above addressing the inevitable decline of oil and natural gas availability would also help reduce the production of greenhouse gases.  The federal government should engage in two additional efforts to slow global climate change.  First, it should re-engage constructively with the 174 nations that have ratified the Kyoto Protocol to date.  The IPCC has suggested that reducing greenhouse gas emissions by 50 – 85% by the middle of this century will be required to keep temperature increases to manageable levels; the U.S. needs to commit to such reductions.  Second, the federal government should invest seriously in researching, developing, and applying carbon capture and storage technologies.  Coal is still a relatively abundant resource, and is used to generate about half of U.S. electricity.  Coal also produces more carbon dioxide per energy unit burned than other fossil fuels.  Coal can, however, be used in a process known as the integrated gasification combined cycle, which makes it possible to separate out the carbon dioxide and put it into storage rather than releasing it into the atmosphere.  Although there are inherent drawbacks to carbon capture and storage, the development and application of that technology is environmentally preferable to the likely alternative for providing “base-load” electricity: building more nuclear power plants.

 

The less widely recognized problem of the ever-increasing gap between the world’s rich and poor is an ugly feature of actually existing capitalism.  This gap is manifested by differences in income levels, access to education, access to health care, access to natural resources, life expectancy, and perhaps most starkly, access to food.  According to the World Health Organization, over one billion people are undernourished and underweight, while over one billion are over-nourished and overweight.  These extreme socioeconomic divisions drive both mass migration and terrorism, which each pose significant threats to social stability worldwide.  These divisions also compromise and coarsen the humanity of the relatively privileged, who come to see the importance of maintaining their privileges through military and economic domination as paramount.

 

The first step towards addressing global inequality must be to recognize that so-called “free trade” policies such as those promoted by the World Trade Organization are a big part of the problem, and to begin replacing them with “fair trade” policies.  The abolition of subsidies, elimination of protective tariffs, monopolization of knowledge, and relaxation of property ownership requirements all tend to favor large scale manufacturers and agribusiness in relatively wealthy countries.  Poorer countries are forced to compete economically on the basis of low wages, which quite literally leaves people starving.  The U.S. government needs to stop encouraging the global race to the bottom, and start promoting more equitable trade and investment policies.

 

A second critical initiative to address global inequality is to develop and fund programs to directly alleviate the desperate socioeconomic and environmental conditions faced by many people living outside of the relatively well-off countries.  Lester Brown of the Earth Policy Institute has developed both a “poverty-eradication budget” and a related “earth restoration budget” towards this end.  His grand total “Plan B” budget for achieving such goals as universal primary education, universal basic health care, ensuring adequate diets for children and pregnant women, reforesting the earth, and stabilizing water tables comes to $161 billion per year.  One can certainly criticize Brown’s combined budget for not addressing the needs of the poor in wealthy but unequal societies such as our own and for failing to include the investments needed to begin a serious transition away from fossil fuels.  However, the point remains that a large difference could be made with a relatively modest amount of money.  The $161 billion per year is roughly one-third of the annual U.S. military budget, and one-sixth of total world expenditures on the military.  The federal government ought to commit to funding a large percentage of Lester Brown’s Plan B budget, and to help ensure the achievement of its socioeconomic and environmental goals.

 

Despite the piecemeal progress currently being made at the state and municipal government levels, the federal government has critical roles to play in addressing oil and natural gas scarcity, global climate change, and especially the enormous divisions between rich and poor countries.  Committing to the seven initiatives identified in this article would be far more likely to prevent social collapse than continuing to prosecute the GWOT, which has the primary goal of dominating other countries in order to ensure control over energy resources by the United States.  Of course, the GWOT advances the interests of many powerful corporations, from Lockheed-Martin to Blackwater to Halliburton.  If we are to take a more just approach to the problems that confront us, ordinary people will have to find ways of exerting pressure on the political establishment in that direction.  That effort may involve aligning ourselves with corporations that would benefit from the initiatives described here, as well as supporting existing institutions and creating new ones capable of opposing the juggernauts of militarism, repression, and resource extraction at any price.

 

Kevin Cross is an energy engineer and social activist.  He is the convener of two northern Colorado-based organizations: Strength Through Peace (www.cjpe.org/stp) and the Fort Collins Sustainability Group.