Andy, Rog, All
Part 3- Is America on a sustainable course?
Under the MoQ for individual patterns to be "sustainable" they must:
1. Maintain sufficient stablity to exist over time.
2. Be sufficiently flexible and changable to allow evolution to higher
levels of value.
And while maintaining these qualities realize:
3 That higher levels may dominant the lower, but are dependent on the
lower ones for existence. So higher level patterns that destablize lower
ones or visa versa, to the extent that they endangered the whole or
significant parts
of the hierarchy, do so at their own peril.
First let's be very clear that the lead in question is hugely complexed,
emotionally charged, and in the end boils down to a point 3 question of.
"Do American values, all of them in total, significantly threaten or
endanger the whole of life on earth?"
Andy, I guess would answer a qualified yes to this, as these quotes
indicate:
> We can either prepare for this by limiting our growth now or we can wait
> for oil to run out and/or be overcome by "negative externalities"
> associated with a growing economy (global warming, pollution,
> biodiversity loss, etc.). Tough choice.
> You cannot grow the economy without harming the environment, and
> thus our long-term outlook for survival on the planet.
Roger, I'm sure would answer a qualified, but emphatic, NO!
One of their major points of disagreement is "global warming" and the
Kyoto Protocol which the United States has refused to sign. I, I believe
like a majority of Americans, had never read the treaty. Nor had I read
any of the detailed arguments, background science, or the many social
and political discussions of the issue. So I did a brief web study,
reading the agreement and some of the background information on both
sides of the issue. In the process I ran acrossed an brief statement
made by a German man who lived most of his life there and moved to the
US in 1996. He said the German people in general are more
"environmentally sensitive in the abstract" in as much as they have no
really "wild nature" per se because most if not all of their country has
been subject in one way or another to human development and
redevelopment over the centuries. And that Germans by and large believe
that "global warming is directly caused by human activities". Americans,
on the other hand, he feels are more "directly attached to,...in tune
to,.. or directly experience, nature" in as much as they still have
many areas which are little or slightly touched by human development,
but that they have by and large ignored the issue of "global warming"
which he sites is do to a kind of "environmental naivety" rooted in the
fact that they still do have "wild places"
Are Americans really "environmental naive? Do American (and to a lesser
degree other developed countries) values, all of them in total,
significantly threaten or endanger the whole of life on earth? How does
the Kyoto Protocol come down on the question? The Protocal, with Andy,
answers a resounding, YES! to all of the above. And how does it propose
that this "life threatening" problem should be remedied ? By America and
other developed countries restricting their emmisions of green house
gases to specific limits though the use of taxes and regulations at both
the international and national level.
Make no doubt about it under the MoQ "global warming" is one of those
type 3 issues. But is "global warming" real? And is it human caused? The
MoQ is also capable of sorting the wheat from the chaff on this issue.
The MoQ subscribes to empiricism of the radical kind helping to sort the
various and conflicting patterns of value into their appropriate
catagories for proper mediation. Empiricism, by it's vary nature, is a
backward looking process it deals primarily with looking at past
patterns of value and is coupled,under the MoQ, with pragmatism that
then ask the questions like, "If these past patterns of value are true,
what should we do? Or what possible difference will this action make in
the future? Will these actions lead to the desired consequences? What
might be the unintended consequences?"
Some get the idea that Pirsig is "down on" or "opposed to" science or
the scientific method. This is just not so. His objection to science is
that, it is not, and cannot be the sole arbiter of reality. And that it
is never completely free from influence by other patterns of value.
"Global warming" is a perfect illustration of this.
In a nutshell what does science have to say about the issue?
Do human activities create greenhouse gases (Carbon dioxide, Methane,
Nitrous oxide, Hydrofluorocarbons,Perfluorocarbons ,Sulphur
hexafluoride) over and above what would occur in "nature" if they did
not exist?
Science-Yes
What in general are the sources of the gases?
Science- Kyoto Protocol- Annex A
Sectors/source categories:
Energy:
Fuel combustion
Energy industries
Manufacturing industries and construction
Transport
Other sectors
Other
Fugitive emissions from fuels:
Solid fuels
Oil and natural gas
Other
Industrial processes:
Mineral products
Chemical industry
Metal production
Other production
Production of halocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride
Consumption of halocarbons and sulphur hexafluoride
Other
Solvent and other product use:
Agriculture:
Enteric fermentation
Manure management
Rice cultivation
Agricultural soils
Prescribed burning of savannas
Field burning of agricultural residues
Other
Waste:
Solid waste disposal on land
Wastewater handling
Waste incineration
Other
Are these human caused greenhouse gases causing "global warming"?
Science-We don't know.
Could these human caused greenhouse gases cause "global warming"?
Science- It's possible.
>From empirical data, is there any data that indicates that the Earth
atmosphere is currently warmer than it has every been before?
Science-No, http://www.sitewave.net/pproject/s33p36.htm
>From empirical data, is there any data that indicates that the Earth
atmosphere is currently on a trend of warming up to outside any known
historical variations?
Science-No, http://www.sitewave.net/pproject/s33p36.htm
>From empirical data, is there any data that indicates that the green
house gases in Earth atmosphere are currently outside any known
historical variations?
Science-No, http://www.sitewave.net/pproject/s33p36.htm
So to sum up empircally we have no climate data which indicates the
Earth's atmosphere has warmed or is warming outside any previously
recorded or interpreted ranges. We do know that human activity produces
greenhouse gases but don't know if they would contribute to "global
warming" even if it is occuring, which we can find no evidence of. Yet
the developed countries of the world, and only the developed countries
of the world not Africa, India, China, and a host of others, should sign
an agreement which would implement international, national, and local
taxes and regulations on all the sources of possible emmission of these
gases in the developed areas of the world. If you refer to the Kyoto
Protocol-Annex A list above these sources, disreguarding the "other"
catagories, they cover almost every facet of human existence.
How did this happen? Under the MoQ it could be an all too typical case
of lower patterns of value dominating, wrongly, higher ones. In this
case the social, economic, and political one are trying to dominate or
have seriously co-opted the intellectual ones of science. Or it is also
possible that a misguided intellectual pattern, a worldview, and
philosophy is at work. Whatever it is, it's just another indication that
science is not value free. Never has been, never will be.
So what are the forces at work that led to this ? Here's some clues.
> As Aaron Wildavsky, professor of political science at Berkeley, has quipped, "global
> warming'' is the mother of all environmental scares. Wildavsky's view is
> worth quoting. "Warming (and warming alone), through its primary antidote of
> withdrawing carbon from production and consumption, is capable of
> realizing the environmentalist's dream of an egalitarian society based on rejection of
> economic growth in favor of a smaller population's eating lower on the
> food chain, consuming a lot less, and sharing a much lower level of resources much more
> equally.'' In many ways Wildavsky's observation does not go far
> enough. The point is that carbon dioxide is vitally central to industry, transportation,
> modern life, and life in general. It has been joked that carbon dioxide
> controls would permit us to inhale as much as we wish; only exhaling would be controlled.
> The remarkable centrality of carbon dioxide means that dealing
> with the threat of warming fits in with a great variety of preexisting agendas--some
> legitimate, some less so: energy efficiency, reduced dependence on
> Middle Eastern oil, dissatisfaction with industrial society (neopastoralism), international
> competition, governmental desires for enhanced revenues (carbon
> taxes), and bureaucratic desires for enhanced power.
This is from http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15n2g.html which is
a good insiders tale of the whole sordid mess.
Mr Wildavsky identifies two worldviews egalitarian and neopastoralim , a
whole raft of social values which surround to transition from national
to global economies, and the good old eternal "bureaucratic desires for
enhanced power"
The upside of the substainablity issue when I return with Part 4.
3WD
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