January 1, 2016

Background
COP21 is a pragmatic face-saving agreement for politicians, nothing more. Essentially, signatory nations have agreed only to commit individually and severally to maximum annual carbon emissions. Reporting the results is mandatory, but unlike global lending institutions that routinely force helpless quasi-bankrupt governments into painful austerity programs in exchange for new credit, COP21 lacks a comparable mechanism with biting consequences to force all nations to at the very least meet their own goals. Once again, economic considerations trump the need to stop using fossil fuels altogether. It’s not lack of technology; it exists. It’s the losses that multinational fossil fuel corporations and nations behaving as such fear they’ll suffer if that happens. As Bill McKibben accurately and convincingly explained back in 2012, the world’s proven reserves of fossil fuels are almost five times larger than the amount of carbon we could safely burn without increasing the world’s temperature more than two degrees centigrade. In other words, 80% of these deposits, valued at between $10 trillion and $20 trillion, would have to be left in the ground. For all intents and purposes they would become nonperforming assets.

Let’s put this in perspective. The Great Recession of 2008 saw the Federal Reserve embark in a program of “quantitave easing” –a euphemism for creating over $4 trillion from thin air (so far) to keep the economy afloat. In contrast, the loss of fossil-fuel related wealth could well top $20 trillion, depending on the price of fuel, and that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Banks, insurance companies and institutional investors, among others, invest in fossil fuels. As a result, the sudden loss of so much wealth would likely send the global economy into an unstoppable dive. That’s why COP21 could not possibly require nations to stop using fossil fuels, and it didn’t. And yet, either we do precisely that or humankind will likely be swept away along with the great mass-extinction of species currently under way. We’re running out of time.

Roots
Anthropogenic climate change is a byproduct of capitalism. The latter fueled and nurtured the Industrial Revolution, a culture of consumption that requires hoarding –not sharing- of natural resources wherever they may be based on the erroneous belief that perpetual growth of throughput is possible in a finite world. Worse, it allows and encourages the unlimited accumulation of wealth by a small elite –the net worth of Marcus Licinius Crasssus is said to have been equal to the total annual budget of the Roman treasury- who use the power of money to influence the electoral process and control the government. Compare that with conditions in the U.S. today.

It is undeniable that the widening gap in the distribution of wealth is a clear and present danger to the U.S. and the world. Like magma, it seems to have the relentless, unstoppable ability to go where and when it will. While it is true that some distinguished institutions and economists have proposed concrete steps to reduce it, they seem to suggest that new laws and regulations -both reversible- will suffice. Here’s the question: if anthropogenic climate change and the yawning gap in the distribution of wealth are byproducts of capitalism, doesn’t that suggest it’s the latter that needs fundamental structural changes?

Choices
Humanity is at a crossroads. One fork –unrestrained growth of carbon emissions exacerbated by low prices and population growth- leads to certain extinction. The other is an economically feasible, self-sustaining, multi-prong, all-out effort to simultaneously halt (and eventually reverse) global warming and the widening gap in the distribution of wealth. It envisions gradually replacing fossil fuels with solar, gravity and hydrogen to generate electricity and manufacture a drought-proof new source of unpolluted water anywhere (sorely needed to irrigate the world’s great deserts, plant vegetation and sequester the carbon already in the atmosphere), compensate for melting glaciers (for example, France and the Andes), replenish dwindling aquifers, and avoid increasingly severe droughts –and the wars they’ll potentially ignite. It can be done. It should be done.