The People and Global Warming

February 26th, 2008 Posted in Invention, Global Warming

Unanticipated consequences (the wild joker of functionalism in sociology) emerged after decades of happy service for both tobacco and fossil fuels. These goods were revealed finally as stark threats to the well being of our species. Their use is contra-indicated.

Tobacco can be given up (cease to exist as a commodity) without replacement but fossil fuel must have a substitute. The modern economic way, that has replaced the royal-peasant agricultural way under which our ancestors labored for centuries, can not exist without electricity or, for the moment, the internal-combustion engine.

We have been arguing that the people, either all together or in identified segments, have the capacity to act independently of dominating cadres. (A facilitating, supporting, cadre may be necessary but this is modest in comparison.) The people carried most of the weight in the struggle over smoking after biological scientists and public health doctors discovered and publicized the statistical connection of smoking tobacco and serious illness and early death. Their story was eventually supported anecdotally by prominent witness/victims. (Yul Brynner, actor, and Fred Hutchinson. baseball manager, particularly impressed by adding their warning voices in the terminal stages of their illnesses). The mass movement over the decades was in the giving up of the smoking habit one person at a time, making together a persuasive socio-cultural statement.

With global warming the physical and biological scientists have been issuing what to the rest of us seem creditable warnings and this message has been magnified by ecologists, greens and other respected voices. The reports of concrete events like melting of glaciers and ice caps and the constant yearly rise of world mean temperature has alerted large masses of people world-wide and we are all primed to act either independently or in support of our active cadres. But what to do is not as simple or as obvious as giving up cigarettes. Our dependence on complex technological processes and tools intervenes. There is a technological curtain that restrains us.

Certain leading cadres in Western Europe and Japan have initiated programs of change that have encouraged actions by government agencies and commercial firms and have begun transforming their economies to alternate energies. We in the USA who have been hampered by our slow moving cadres in government and industry are embarrassed. Some intermediate cadres in state and local government and some commercial firms have been active but overall our actions seem well short of the challenge posed by the threat. For us it feels like a more complex repeat of the tobacco smoke struggle which has gone on for decades.

But even with the people’s possibility of independent action severely limited some modest level still exists. It takes at least three forms: (1) Craft, do-it-yourself. People convert automobiles and other engines to reduces CO2 emissions, they install electric engines, they improve commercial hybrid cars. They also install alternate energy sources in their homes, farms, apartment houses. In general this is the handy person approach. This gang is usually mutually supportive, willing to instruct others and lend a hand. (2) Invention, innovation. Mostly hands-on but includes idea people. A wild bunch once they get started. A lot of Rube Goldberg nonsense but some ideas prove useful. The trained engineer, crafts-person with a free imagination is awesome. (3) The people, aware of the new need, project a solid public socio-economic demand for the anti-fossil-fuel way and therefore set a wider incentive for the craftsmen and inventors as well as for the commercial firms and the government agencies to act. The people buy more efficient tools–especially household materials as well as improved energy efficient housing and etcetera.

People go beyond opinion to action then, even action independent of cadre direction. This notion is particularly important in a situation where the dominating central cadre is lethargic or is actively against recognizing a particular threat. We are arguing the occasional possibility of a benign mass movement. Recognized, this process boosts our mutual commitments. If you have even joined a gang pushing a stalled car to give it a running start you have experienced social solidarity. Alone, for one person, the situation is intractable, but together, the gang pushing in unison, the metal gadget moves and starts. It is a moment of recognized unity toward a purpose.

This is merely a start of a social analysis of the Global Hots. The identification of the social agents–the people (in their variety), the commercial firms and interests, the political cadres, the support cadres. The propaganda and spin. The cross-cutting interests, the ideologies. The acts and facts, especially the state of the technology.

Essential for this analysis is the crucial separation of the value of things and people in money terms against their value in themselves. When the Titanic starts to sink the grand piano in the grand saloon, which a moment before had a high cultural and monetary value, becomes, regretfully, inconvenient junk. Yet, in this warming threat confronting us, serious people want to cap and trade credits, to start a market to buy and sell supposedly excess reduced CO2 emissions. It is like the insane act of putting the grand piano into a life boat and throwing human passengers overboard. Cap! Cap! Cap and nothing else.

Somewhere along the line we are going to have to pay attention to this looming conflict in terms of cost. The factories, oil wells, pipelines, technical equipment that have, to our wonder at the magic, given us electricity and mechanical transportation for over a century, very like the beautiful music of the piano, and now, we are told and believe, it also is destroying our environment and threatening the basis of the life of our species on earth.

As you continue into a social analysis you find convolutions of ideas that belong to the opposition but that have been stated as though on the side of the anti-fossil fuel position. It is a form of infiltration, an under cover ideology. The trick is revealed by discovery of the down side which usually is that the supposed saving of CO2 is given back in the production of the saving. So hydrogen cells have to be made from fossil fuels–you give in the beginning what you supposedly save at the end. This argument appears to apply to bio-fuels as well. The saving in the use is debited against its own making.

There is one more distinction to be made: between the scientist and the engineer. They are the key support cadres. Intuitively I conclude that any change to alternate energy sources and processes is more a problem for an engineer than for a scientist. The scientist, with his interest in the pattern in nature outside of the will of man, is more comfortably attuned to the weather. They have broadcast the warming. There has been a constant iteration of the threat from them. We know and are frequently reminded of the seriousness of the warming-up . Now is the turn of the engineers who we expect to advise us on what to do, to give us a measure of the job ahead. But they seem to have a lower profile. Their voices are not magnified.

Established scientists usually have university tenure and job security. They can make a direct statement of what they know and think. An employer doesn’t impose a limit and a direction. The engineer is much more likely to be an employee of a commercial firm or of a government agency. What he can say and do is tied up with the policies and objectives of his boss. The engineer is respected but treated as a servant. (I’m talking about a tendency and not a universal rule–I’m stating a general expectation.)

We need their best shot. We need the liberated engineer able to offer the best ways forward for us as a society. We need to call them out, give them the chalk and let them outline the technical way.

Take an engineer to lunch but keep him sober so he can work all afternoon and into the night.

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We have written about cadre-group issues in posts 35, 36, 37.

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24/7.