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Topic: Economic justice (Read 719 times) |
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Blunderov
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"We think in generalities, we live in details"
  
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Economic justice
« on: 2006-07-24 02:38:56 » |
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[Blunderov] I enjoy the "Ask a Philosopher" site very much; "Keeping it real" as current idiom would perhaps express it. The following was particularly succint I thought.
http://www.amherst.edu/askphilosophers/feed/All
Question about Justice (Louise Antony responds): The demise of the Soviet Union, and the dominance of the U.S.A, in military terms, does not seem to have produced a stable world, or a "peace dividend". If the "West" were to succeed in installing representative democracy, and a liberal capitalist economic regime, throughout the world, could we expect a better life for the world's citizens. If not, why do the world's leading powers invest such massive resources in this project?
There is no expertise a philosopher can provide that's pertinent to this question -- it's one that any thoughtful, well-informed person ought to be able to answer. But since you did ask a philosopher, and since I consider myself to be a thoughtful and well-informed person, I'll give you my opinion. I don't think capitalism as we know it in, for example, the United States, is a viable form of social organization. The U.S. knows far too much poverty and violence for us to claim that our society is a success. As for extending this form of social organization throughout the world -- that would be economically impossible, even if it were advisable from a moral point of view, which it isn't. Those who are comfortable in the U.S., who are confident that we live in the best of all possible societies, depend for our comfort on an obscene rate of consumption of the world's resources. With 5% of the world's population, we consume one-quarter of the world's processed fossil fuel. In my view, this problem is largely due to the lack of any democratic control on the power of corporations. The fact that workers in Michigan or North Carolina have no say on matters that are of vital importance to their survival is tightly connected to the fact that Amazonian Indians have no say on the use of rainforest resources and so forth. It matters very little to anyone on the planet that the U.S. has formally free elections (getting less and less legitimate all the time), since politicians in the U.S. are bought and paid for by big money interests. The U.S. has zero interest in democracy abroad, as a cursory glance at its foreign policy reveals. From Guatemala to Iran to Chile to Vietnam to El Salvador to Nicaragua to Palestine -- whenever a people democratically elects a leader our leaders don't like, the U.S. has intervened, usually violently, to overthrow them. On the other hand, the U.S. has been happy to support -- and often has installed -- the most venal dictators, against the will and the interests of the people. The list here is long, too. The only thing that would make world stability possible is economic justice. Remember, you asked.
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Hermit
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Re:Economic justice
« Reply #1 on: 2006-07-24 12:08:11 » |
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A very quotable article. Thank-you.
Kind Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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David Lucifer
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Enlighten me.
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Re:Economic justice
« Reply #2 on: 2006-08-05 10:07:42 » |
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I think I detect a flaw in the argument. The author seems to be saying that it is impossible to export US-style capitalism to the rest of the world if the US, with 5% or the world population, consumes more than 5% of any resource (here oil is mentioned). It becomes clear why this is fallacious if you substitute another resource like beef or internet bandwidth. It is possible that if the rest of the world adopts US-style capitalism (still not necessarily a good thing), more of the resource could be produced (bandwidth) or a substitute could be found (synthetic meat instead of real beef for example).
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Hermit
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Re:Economic justice
« Reply #3 on: 2006-08-05 21:10:40 » |
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The flaw in the flaw
Fossil fuels are a limited resource. Oil is a very limited resource. The reason being that oil is the cheapest (in energy, effort, ease of distribution, concentration and money) source of concentrated hydrocarbons and the only form suited to many energy limited activities. Significantly, many important materials can only be made from the long chain polymers we presently obtain from oil (but not from other shorter/tighter hydrocarbon sources - including so called "oil-from-coal"). Unfortunately, we have not worked out how to produce these long chains from alternative materials (never-mind how to produce them cost-effectively), so even should we come up with alternative energy sources, they still won't be fully functional replacements for oil. An additional consideration is that even if we attempt to transition from gas and oil to other sources of energy (e.g. coal liquefaction, methyl-hydrate recovery), the amount of CO2, or (an even worse greenhouse gas) methane released for each unit of energy obtained will increase significantly, due to the added steps and process energy required to convert these fuels into something useful to us. This has important implications for the biosphere which counter-indicate such simplistic approaches (at least in isolation) even if we figure out how to access the energy trapped in these forms (and that is by no means a given, for example, attempts to date to harvest sea floor methyl-hydrate, or even accidental disturbances of methyl-hydrate rich areas, have resulted in the loss of the equipment attempting it, and the release of a large portion of the disturbed field).
Please note that the planet didn't support the growth we have experienced in the last 250 years until colder northern climates initially forced overharvesting and the consequent exhaustion of renewable fuels (trees) forced a switch to much more expensive fossil fuels despite the increased cost of fossil fuels (which is why we didn't use them earlier). Once we learned to handle them more effectively, the cheap energy obtainable from being forced to overcome the disadvantages of burning fossil fuels allowed us to develop extremely rapidly. We currently obtain 400x the energy from fossil fuel that would be available annually if we converted 100% of the biota (including humans) to fuel. When that energy availability declines (whether through resource exhaustion or financial incapacity) the carrying capacity of the earth will decline unless cost-effective alternatives are found.
Almost as important as direct fuel availability, many aspects of life, including the production, installation and maintenance of non-fossil fuel based energy sources are dependent on the ready availability of liquid fuels to a greater or lesser extent. The fact that farming, distribution, environmental control and transport to and from work are all locked into this triangle should be terrifying to anybody living in a "suburbanized" environment without really good, non-fossil fuel dependent transport, power and water reticulation.
The reality is that so far as oil, gas and coal are concerned, consensus, so far as there is a consensus, is that we are already over the 50% extraction point (depending on how much you distrust stated oil reserves (which determines the maximum permitted extraction rate so there is a lot of motivation to overstate them), we may be well past the 50% point). General agreement is that if we continue to rely on fossil fuels for energy then, we have, at most, around 30 years of fossil fuel availability - at any affordable price. This is because the cost of extraction has a strong upward trend, as the large deposits and easy extracts are the first to be consumed and indeed, most of the easy access sources are already used. The selling price has another upward pressure given that demand is highly inelastic and growing. Given that what is spent on fuel is not available to be spent on other things, and no alternative source is visible as a viable alternative, this points to an unsustainable economic trend.
Unfortunately, it takes around 15 years to commercialize any significant industrial process, so if we are to develop cost effective alternatives to cheap oil we need to begin to do so within the next 15 years - in other words, we ought to have begun already. Even more unfortunately, all of the approaches that I have been able to identify as viable tend to carry what are likely to be considered as unacceptable costs, for example, the need to abandon existing inefficient buildings and cities in order to restructure society into low energy use, high density cities or alternatively (and preferable IMO) into linear domed cities structured on communications systems built on the skeletons of existing highways. To have any hope of maintaining current social models, we would need to see a massive reduction in global per capita energy use, the immediate concentration of resources into nuclear power stations and above all, the development of cheap, non-fossil fuel dependent space access (space elevator) to be able to establish orbital solar collectors while we still have the raw materials (especially oil) to build the collectors.
My reading is that we are on the cusp of being too late to do any of this, that awareness of the scope of the issue is too limited, that there is no sense of urgency - and won't be until it is too late, so that we are going to continue to waste what little capital is still available trying to obtain or maintain control of rapidly diminishing oil and gas resources. I think that when people do realize that we are about to hit the wall, that it will be far to late to do anything effective to prevent a catastrophe. At which point we will likely spend whatever time, money and energy remains fighting one another back into the stone age rather than cooperating to attempt to preserve anything worth while.
If you can identify a single viable alternative to fossil fuels which does not take fossil fuel to produce it, I would be very interested in hearing about it, on or off list.
Kind Regards
Hermit
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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