Hospice Earth: Part 4, Draconian overdrive
(Author: G.
Creative Commons: attribution and share-alike.)
(If you haven’t read Parts 1 - 3 yet, please do so first; the series will make more sense in chronological order.)
If you think that China’s one-child-per-family policy is severe, have I got a surprise for you. Each new smaller generation coexists with the preceding larger generations until the latter have passed on. One child per family would bring world population down to sustainable levels in about 30 years. We don’t have 30 years.
To avoid the three-hundred-Hitler holocaust would require a policy of one child per two to four families. You can call that “baby rationing.” It would also require a 60% economic contraction in the wealthy nations: slamming the global economy into reverse on a scale that would make the 1930s depression look like a dress rehearsal. And it would require a degree of redistribution of essential resources that would not just “look like” global communism, it would be global communism. Taken together, these measures can be called “draconian overdrive.”
Let’s say we wanted to save as many human lives as possible, and decided to take these steps.
Start with baby rationing. The simplest way to enforce it is to sterilize 1/2 to 3/4 of the humans of reproductive age. (In fact the numbers will vary, but for the point of this essay, the heuristic works well enough.) Those who weren’t sterilized would logically seek to hook up with each other to reproduce. After their first baby, “snip-snip,” sterilize them as well. If their baby doesn’t make it to adulthood, that’s a bonus for population reduction, helping to offset the occasional case where someone manages to sneak around the rules.
How are you going to get 1/2 to 3/4 of the people into clinics to get snipped? Most of them won’t go willingly. You have to use main force and drag them in, kicking and screaming as they go. Envision for a moment, armed officials of government knocking on doors and dragging people to the clinics, or into mobile “snip wagons” parked conveniently nearby. Imagine the degree of totalitarianism it would take to enforce that against the certainty of revolt and armed uprising.
I could go on about the “economic depression” part (think of the mass unemployment and unwilling mass migrations) and the “global communism” part (think of the mass corruption), but you get the idea. Each of these elements would also generate the necessity for further totalitarian measures.
Envision enormous numbers of dispossessed people milling around waiting for the next delivery of food to the store shelves, and in an uproar over mandatory snip-snip. Envision what it would take to maintain “control,” or even a semblance of a functional government and economy. In order to make it “work” we would have to descend into a collective hell.
Now the fact is that we are about to descend into a collective hell anyway, with starvation, pandemics, and resource wars, all caused by overshoot of carrying capacity. But there is a difference. If someone falls off a cliff, it’s a tragedy. If they jump, it’s suicide. If they’re pushed, it’s murder.
The hell foisted upon us by our collective stupidity is the penalty for acts that in and of themselves are not as obviously culpable as the acts required to put the world on draconian overdrive. Either way, intention does not excuse outcome.
We can save the humans at the expense of our humanity. Or we can save our humanity at the expense of billions of humans. This is what’s known as a Hobson’s choice, for which a classic example is, “would you rather die by shooting or by hanging?”
When is a choice not a choice? When it’s a Hobson’s choice.
And yet, there is another option.
I say this with provocative intent in mind:
Transcend.
Tags: draconian overdrive, Hospice Earth
July 3rd, 2008 at 2:52 pm
Hello again. :)
Here is the link to the article I mentioned in the other comment:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,547976,00.html
Also, if you haven’t read this article by Patrick Takahashi, you should, it’s pretty good. What impressed me most is his bio: the guy probably knows of what he speaks, sadly. :(
Patrick Takahashi is a former special assistant in the U.S. Senate, professor of engineering and emeritus director of the Hawaii Natural Energy Institute at the University of Hawaii.
Here is the link: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/patrick-takahashi/the-venus-syndrome-part-t_b_106325.html
Later :)
July 3rd, 2008 at 9:57 pm
Hi Cedrica-
Thanks for the links. Much interesting stuff there…
First, tech note for those of us who find the Huffington Post jams our browsers: turn off Java and Java Script and it will load faster, with the added benefit of stopping the animated distractions.
OK, so, Takahashi. The linked article, Venus part 2, is his attempt to give policy makers a needed scare by examining what could happen if a) the effects of our present inaction are combined with b) a couple of low-probability geological events.
If he’s right, that combination could prove to be a planet-killer. Fortunately, the probability is low.
However, events with low probability and high consequence have to be taken seriously in terms of planning. This is well understood in the military and in business; for example most companies have backup systems on their computer networks to prevent loss of critical data in the event of a hard drive crash.
The way things are going right now, we are taking the Earth’s inherent resilience for granted, and that puts us at great risk. By analogy this is like building a house in an earthquake zone with a weak foundation and a weak frame.
Oddly enough, there is even a financial rationale for doing so, called “discounting.” This involves assigning a lower cost to a future event based on its distance into the future. The rationale is that if you pay for it later, you will be paying with money that has been earning money in the meantime. Whereas if you pay for it now, you’re using money that could otherwise have been earning a return on an investment.
This works out well enough for ordinary assets such as buildings, factory equipment, truck fleets, office computers, and so on. However when it’s applied to issues that it’s not designed for, it goes completely wrong. By analogy, like taking an antibiotic for a cold: a cold is a viral infection, antibiotics kill bacteria but not viruses, so it won’t cure the cold and it will contribute to antibiotic resistance.
Applying discounting to low-probability / high-consequence events leads to being inadequately prepared for disasters. This was probably a factor in the failure to stabilize the levees in New Orleans before Katrina: why pay now for something that might not happen later? All the moreso if what “might happen” is predicated on climate instability, about which policy makers are in denial for political reasons.
The difference with the global climate crisis is that, unlike conventional natural disasters where help can come from outside the affected area, there is no “outside.” Unless of course one is counting on a miraculous rescue by extraterrestrials:-) or by God for that matter. (And in the religious sense, counting on a miraculous rescue from God is a good way to get God ticked off at one’s own irreesponsible behavior!)
You and I and most of our friends would rather take responsibility for our world, and not count on miracles.
Though, speaking of cosmic justice…
In Takahashi’s first article in the series (which you can find by clicking the link to his bio), he says, “…we started [by talking] with General Motors and got nowhere. What could you expect from a company that has a global vice president like Bob Lutz on staff? He has been quoted to say that climate warming is a crock of s—, or something similar.” (If anyone can dig up that quote it would be good to have.)
This past week, GM’s stock just plummeted to $10 / share, Merrill Lynch expects it to decline to $7, and some analysts think GM is at risk of bankruptcy. With idiots such as Lutz in charge, no wonder. Denialism about the climate crisis tends to go hand in hand with denialism about peak oil, and the latter just bit GM in the rear end bigtime.
GM shareholders should sue management for ignoring the warnings, and thereby destroying a company that, whatever the future holds, has been an American icon for the better part of a century. As for Lutz, here’s to hoping that he can find a company somewhere that will give him an entry-level job. Or not.
Thanks again-
-G.
August 27th, 2008 at 9:00 am
journal of applied ecology…
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