We are all Green now

Watching Bush and Howard squirm as they change direction, without, of course, ever admitting that they got it wrong before, just seems like the world moving back into better balance. Of course we have to pay attention to what the waste from our inefficient use of fossil fuels is doing, and how much natural resources we have left. As we now know from the images sent back from space, big as it is, this huge world is in fact finite.

So what does it mean now that the world is going “green”?

It means markets and business will recede from their primary role in driving development. Our leaders are scrambling to try to reconstruct the issue in terms of economics, hence the focus on carbon trading. Howard wants to let the “market” decide what the cost of carbon should be, but this won’t work. There just isn’t time to let markets work this out, with no guarantee that they ever would.

When disaster strikes, like earthquake, drought or war, government must lead and markets follow, and this is how it will be with global warming.

It means science and education will grow in importance and commerce will become less important. We desperately need more information, not just relating to climatology, hydrology, meteorology, biology, botany, and so on, but about everything in regard to how our hyper-modern society works.

The actual physical changes in environmental processes are one thing, but we also need to know what they are doing to how we live and how we must change. Just about all the physical and social sciences will need a huge and rapid injection of resources so we know what is going on and what to do about it.

It means a new economy will take shape, based in becoming more efficient (in energy and not just monetary terms) in our dealings with the physical world, and so it will operate on new principles. It will still be centred on technology and organisation, but it will see different approaches : to work, to decision-making, and to success and failure. Over time the huge transnational corporations that now dominate the economy will likely lose out to smaller, faster and smarter forms of business.

It means everyone will need to pay more attention to their daily lives. Health, domestic activity, work, play, socialising and political participation will all be transformed by the new rules. Everyone will need to become more responsible in how they do things, how they relate to each other and how they spend their money.

It also means some hugely important issues which have been ignored will at last receive serious consideration. First will be the question of what constitutes socio-economic development anyway - is it just GDP growth, or should other factors be included? Another will be global governance - can we deal with global warming without global government, and how can we have that if wealth is distributed so unevenly? And another will be population growth - just when is enough people enough?

Dealing with global warming is the biggest challenge faced by civilisation since at least the long war from 1914 to 1945, or perhaps the Black Death that wiped out as much as a third of Europe’s population in late medieval times, or maybe ever. If we are smart, we’ll get by OK, and we’ll fix up a few abiding problems along the way.

Everyone is getting on board now, even the tardy travellers, and we can finally set out on the voyage. There will still be some fighting over the tiller, and just which direction to head in, but we are finally under way. It’ll be rough for a while, but as long as we all remember that we are in this boat together, chances are we’ll make it.