Thursday I finished reading Common
Wealth: Economics for a Crowded Planet (
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record) by
Jeffrey
D. Sachs. Friday a discussion
arose on Facebook among some people I know about some financial
commitments made this week in Copenhagen. It directly touched on some
of the things Sachs wrote about. Since his book was still very much
on my mind, I mentioned it in the discussion. It became clear there
were some climate change skeptics in the conversation. No one else in
the thread had read Sachs's book, but I was unable, within Facebook's
limitations, to fully explain what I thought it had to do with the
conversation. Therefore what I want to do is to post a longer
discussion here, and then I can link to it in Facebook.
First, a little about Sachs. His
credentials are very substantial. He is the head of Columbia
University's Earth Institute, a cross-disciplinary team of
specialists in agronomy, hydrology, engineering, ecology, public
health, climatology, economics, geography, and so on. He was the head
of the WHO's Commission on Macroeconomics and Health and then of the
UN Millennium Project under Kofi Annan. He has worked with the
current or former heads of state of several counties, including the
USA and the UK. Presently he is an adviser to Secretary-General Ban
Ki-Moon.
His previous book, The End of Poverty
(Amazon
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Books preview A-SCPL
record) was a bestseller. Of course, that doesn't mean it sold as
well as something by Dan Brown or Nicholas Sparks, but within its
genre it was one of the most noted books of 2007. The preface to this
book was written by Harvard's Edward O. Wilson, who may be the most
respected and famous biologist in the world today.
His method is not to make broad,
unsupported assertions in stirring but vague rhetoric. Rather, he
marshals more and more detail from official and academic sources to
support his claims and then makes them in deliberate, cautious
language. It seems like there is another graph or table on nearly
every other page. In the end he makes a convincing case that
addressing each of those issues is not just a matter of altruism but
is vital to the economic and security interests of the developed
nations.
Sachs's intention, I'd say, is to
recommend to the developed nations of the world, and particularly to
the United States, that they fulfill the commitments
they have already made
in several
treaties and agreements.
Without going here into their wordy, formal titles, these were made
from 1992 into the 2000's, through both Democratic and Republican
administrations in the U.S. (although more enthusiastically in the
former than in the latter), and covered a wide range of interrelated
concerns: poverty, climate change, overpopulation, desertification,
contagious diseases, and the loss of biological diversity.
They certainly are interrelated, too.
For instance, poverty leads people to cut down forests for charcoal
or for farming, even if the soil will only be productive for a few
years, and that contributes to climate change. Climate change leads
to desertification, which forces species to migrate or become
extinct. Loss of natural enemies lets disease vectors, like
mosquitoes, proliferate. And those are just a few of the ways one
problem leads to another.
If all those tragedies would stay in
place, maybe they could safely be ignored by the United States, as
long as we all were willing to harden our hearts to others' plight
and to ignore God's call to justice and compassion. They move around,
though. Two results of poverty, overpopulation and climate change
will often be war and migration. that makes them vital security
concerns for the U.S.
Darfur and Afghanistan are two
examples. The genocide in Darfur is not just a result of the
Janjaweed being bloodthirsty and cruel, although they are. It is
basically a response to prolonged drought caused by climate change.
Nomadic herders and settled farmers are competing desperately for
diminishing resources, and when survival is at stake people will do
anything they think they have to.
In the same way our war in Afghanistan
is not just a response to the Taliban's religious fanaticism,
although they are fanatics. The Taliban would not have the support
they do, the government would not be so successfully corrupt, and
growing opium poppies would not be such an irresistible option if
Afghanistan were not in the grip of this same nexus of difficulties.
Poverty and war have left it with little infrastructure with which to
build its economy, desertification has cut into its agricultural
sector's ability to feed its people, and it is is overpopulated in a
way that gives it too many young men with nothing to do, no way to
support a family, and no hope that things will get better.
Moving on from these two present hot
spots, consider two that are imminent--South Asia and America's
southern border. The third largest store of ice in the world is the
glaciers of the Himalayas, but they are already receding faster than
glaciers anywhere else in the world. They are the source of the
Brahmaputra and Ganges rivers. They flow through India before they go
into Bangladesh, which is largely dependent on them for both domestic
use and agriculture. The Indus River, on which Pakistan depends, also
begins in the Himalayas and first goes through India. As the
Himalayan glaciers recede, they will probably first increase the
river's flow, making catastrophic floods more frequent. After the
glaciers are gone, though, there won't be enough for everyone,
especially if India intercepts most of these rivers' flow before they
pass her borders. By
2030 the Ganges could join the growing ranks of rivers like the
Colorado, that in the summer at least are completely dry before they
reach the ocean. The same could happen to the Indus, too. How could
Al-Qaeda or groups like it take advantage of a Pakistan in distress
and chaos? What might a nuclear Pakistan do if it is being condemned
to die of thirst by a neighbor with which it has had repeated wars?
Closer to home, consider what might
happen to Mexico. More frequent and more intense hurricanes on both
coasts will make storm surges more and more destructive. Rising ocean
levels could easily put Cancun island, with its huge tourism income,
permanently underwater, driving away all the people who moved there
to work in American hotels. On the other hand, the interior of Mexico
will become hotter and probably drier. Today greater Mexico City has
a population of about 21 million, and it's certain to keep growing.
If heat, lack of rainfall and population pressure deplete its
groundwater resources and make it uninhabitable, where will all those
people go? Not south to Guatemala and Honduras, that's for sure. No
wall will keep them from making their way to Texas and California,
then to Colorado, Ohio, and every other state.
Sachs doesn't put it quite this
way--it's my generalization--but in the end he draws a picture of a
world of trouble, touching every nation but focused on a band form
Bangladesh--or even beginning in the Philippines--and stretching
through Afghanistan and the more southern of the former Soviet
Republics, all of the Middle East, into the Horn of Africa and all
the way across Sub-Saharan Africa. Consider what it would be like if
the scenarios I've suggested in South Asia and Mexico were repeated
all across that band? What would be the cost to the United States of
defending its security and interests in all those places while coping
with the loss of all of southern Florida, the Gulf Coast, and the
port and shore areas of every city on both coasts?
As an example of the sort of advance
planning going on in the military and intelligence communities of
many nations in preparation for all of this, read this
detailed, lengthy study produced by the UK's Ministry of Defence. I've read equivalent studies produced for the U.S. and Australia, too. They all agree that action now and planning for the future are necessary in order to "manage the unpreventable and prevent the unmanageable."
Sachs calculates that all it would take
to mitigate much of this--it's already too late to completely prevent
it--would be an increase in our foreign aid from today's parsimonious
level of 0.14% of GNP to 0.70%. If we today fail to make the
lifestyle changes and refuse to make the relatively modest
investments needed to prevent all this, what will my grandchildren,
whom I may never meet,say of us? Even more so, what will their
grandchildren, who could live in a world in which the dystopia I've
suggested would seem like a utopia, say of us?
