Peter
Schwartz of the Global Business Network has made one of the most
preposterous public statements I can imagine about the issue of Global
Warming. Apparently, in their press release reported here, GBN was
paid to come up with a worst case scenario on the future prospects of
sea water rising and other climate changes. Peter, in the press
release, is predicting societal breakdown on a large scale and he
chooses three ridiculous examples: Haiti, Bangladesh and New Orleans.
(Most of the actual report deals with other issues.)
Let me
begin with a statement of historic fact: wherever commerce is thriving,
environmental changes will be turned into positive outcomes. With
commerce, all the bags of lemons becomes lemonade. The kid with a
lemonade stand in from of his/her house is my metaphor for the way
commerce turns problems into prosperity.
Historic fact: we wouldn't even know about the last global warming period, 900-1100 CE, if it weren't for the Viking sagas telling about their settlement of Greenland and their discovery of America during a warming period. The Vikings were one of several great expansionary commercial societies, taking advantage of environmental changes in their era.
Back to the Schwartz nonsense.....
Back
to the Schwartz nonsense. Using Haiti as an example of societal
collapse for environmental reasons is ridiculous. Haiti is on the
island of Hispaniola. Haiti is a social disaster and has been since it
was founded two hundred years ago by slaves. Per capita income is
$1,800 and the majority of people, nearly all are black, are well below
the poverty line, hungry, sick and uneducated.
The
other end of the island, with roughly the same population is one of the
most successful commercial societies in Latin American: Dominican
Republic. Dominican Republic has good education, health and above
average living standards. Per capita income is over $8,000.
Peter Schwartz picks one end of the island (Haiti) as an example of societal fragility. One has to be blind to ignore the nature of the problem and not see the positive role of commerce on the other end of the island (Dominican Republic).
The
same is true for Peter's other example, Bangladesh. To pick Bangladesh
as an example of a fragile society is absurd. Bangladesh is a flood
plain. One third of Bangladesh floods every year during the monsoons
and Bangladesh, is now and has always been, one of the poorest
countries in the world. Bangladesh is Muslim and like most other Muslim
cultures it has very little commerce, it is mostly a rice growing
socialist failure.
Compare Bangladesh to a similar low lying flood plain based agricultural society: Holland in 1550. Holland used 16th Century engineering and a Protestant ethic to create dikes and dams for the entire country and then created the first Democratic Republic in history followed thirty years later with the first globe-straddling commercial society. By 1650, Holland, this former delta swamp, had the worlds largest navy up to that point in history and conquered England. Holland has been a prosperous commercial society ever since.
Peter, in both the press release and the
actual report, picks the Katrina flooding of New Orleans as his third
example of social fragility. One only needs to know two things to see
why this is ridiculous. New Orleans is in the Deep South with the
worst political environment in the U.S. which resulted in dams and
dikes that could not be repaired or maintained because of pervasive
incompetence (remember the cops ran away). The tourist economic base of
New Orleans could only support half the population (see my blog for
calculations) so half the New Orleans population was living on welfare
and shouldn't have been there in the first place. They haven't come
back since the world of commerce refuses to support them. New Orleans
is not a good example of anything but a sand castle ready to fall at
any time.
Commerce is the greatest human mechanism for solving problems. We can be sure that Holland will be thriving and profiting from any global changes in climate and will easily deal with its low lying delta origins. The only way the global poor can get out of the way is if commerce gets them out of the way, not the hysterics of environmentalism.
Remember Y2K? Starting in 1995 the paranoid hysterics of the world began screaming about a computer glitch that would bring the entire industrial world to a complete stand still. The paranoid hysterics were not necessarily wrong in their description of the problem.
However
the problem was a commercial problem so what was the solution? Every
adult knows the answer but most adults and certainly Peter Schwartz
have not internalized the information embedded in the answer. What
commerce always does is: create a new industry to solve the problem.
Tens of thousands of programmers who knew the antique programing
languages that created the problem in the first place were hired to fix
it. They fixed it. The great Y2K meltdown never happened. Airplanes
and satellites did not fall out of the sky, power supplies didn't fail
and communications systems continued working as though nothing happened
because nothing did happen.
Peter, commerce is a non-moral system created by humans to solve problems, just as are math and technology. The solution to any problem, biological, climactic or planetary will always be commerce.
What commerce always does is: create a new industry to solve the problem.