Social Matter

On Sunday, September 21, climate groups around the world rallied attendees for a People’s Climate March. The event was the largest environmental protest event in history, with participants in 150 countries.

In New York alone, 400,000 people jammed the streets. In the aftermath, the participants boasted on their Facebook pages and blogs: “Epic is too weak a word to describe the NYC ‪#PeoplesClimate ’march‘. It was big big BIG. City = shutdown”, “Thanks for the best weekend, NYC! I marched with 400,000 people to save the planet!”, “The latest count says 400,000 people to save the planet! Almost half a million people demanding climate action” and so on. New York City’s downtown area closed for the entire day. The protesters marched on Broadway, Times Square, and Wall Street with banners that read: “Keep the oil in the ground”, “Tax Wall Street – End climate change”, “disrupt fossil fuels”, “US out of Asia Pacific. No Free Trade!”, “Tax carbon”, “End capitalism before it ends us (and the planet!)”, “End Corporate Colonization”, “Capitalism is Killing the Planet! Fight for a Socialist Future!”, “Capitalism vs the planet. The case for ecosocialism”, “Capitalism has NO solutions to climate change”, and “End Capitalism – Save the planet”, etc.

As USAToday reports, Canadian journalist Naomi Klein, who was one of the speakers at the march, published her latest book, This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, last week. In her book, she describes the debate over climate change as a clash between “deregulated capitalism” and the welfare of mankind. “It’s part of the same story, the same logic,” she said on MSNBC last week. “It is the result of an ideology,” she says, “that values nothing but profit.” Effective action against climate change requires the type of government regulation that undermines the free market ideology currently driving companies, Wall Street, and — to the extent that politicians are hostage to big-money interests — Washington. “We need to break a whole bunch of the free market rules that these guys hold very dear,” she told Chris Hayes in the television interview. “We need to regulate.” This was DiCaprio’s message to the UN assembly as well.
In other words, according to Green activists, greedy Wall Street capitalists and manufacturers are to blame for the global warming, pollution, climate change, disastrous hurricanes, droughts and floods.

Geneticist Richard Dawkins in his book “The Selfish Gene” (1976) writes that in the living world, a gene is a replicator, whereas its carrier – an organism – is a vehicle. By the same token, the social world also has its own vehicles (people) and genes. Dawkins calls them “memes”. Both genes and memes are replicators – they will act purposefully for their own survival. A meme is a form of information or knowledge that replicates itself in the human society in the most advantageous fashion to itself, sometimes at the expense of a society. A group of interacting memes is called a memeplex. It replicates itself and thereby promotes a certain idea through the society irrespective of how much value it adds to the society. Like genes, memes may be useful, harmful, or neutral. Useful memes benefit the society. They can include skills, scientific innovations, discoveries in medicine, etc. Neutral memes may include linguistic units such as stories, songs, or idiomatic expressions. Harmful memeplexes are sometimes called “mind viruses”. On a societal scale it could be ideologies, religions, or mental epidemics. Just as a virus replicates itself in other’s body and ultimately kills its host, “mind viruses” take hold of the society and eventually kill it.

Generally speaking, harmful memeplexes are a complex combination of memetic “amino acids” – the constituents of a “mental protein” that allows the resulting memes to hold a strong grip over society. To sustain itself, such a harmful memeplex creates a group of people whose status and welfare depend on how quickly the memeplex takes root in the society – at the expense of the society’s well-being. After libertarian Russian journalist Yulia Latynina, I would call such a destructive memeplex a “yellow sky syndrome.” It is common knowledge that the sky, by and large, is blue. As such, if you tell people that the sky is blue, people will rarely create a group to support and propagate the idea of a blue sky.  Similarly, you could scientifically explain why the sky is blue, thereby creating new knowledge and contributing to human society, however, you would barely boost your personal status and prestige. To the contrary, if you tell people that the sky is yellow, but some bad people have colored it blue, you will most certainly find adherents who would believe that sky being blue is violation of their most basic rights and that the sky should be restored to its natural color. With such an approach to the sky issue, you will most likely strengthen your status – as a leader of a “yellow sky” movement and as an ardent fighter for justice. The notion of “yellow sky” is not a spontaneous locution. In China, 184-204 A.D., a series of “yellow band” riots actually took place. Dao prophets, the leaders of the riots, promised that if the rebels won, the sky would turn yellow. Hence, the color of the rebels’ bands.

By and large, “yellow sky” memeplexes are suicidal for the society. They consolidate status and power in favor of a small group of people at the expense of the majority, and so in the long run, destroy the society. The idea of global warming is a great illustration of the “yellow sky” memeplex. To obtain power and popularity one needs only to convince the masses that all of society’s misfortunes stem from “climate change”.
A close study of climate change, average global temperature fluctuations, as well as floods, droughts and other natural phenomena, suggest an incredibly complex interplay between underlying causes. Alas, masses won’t take interest in it. An elaborate scientific study with hard to analyze numbers are simply too much for an ordinary citizen. People at large are either unwilling or unable to wrap their heads around such complex issues. People are much more inclined to view themselves as victims in the hands of greedy exploiters, and in response, demand execution of the evil party and compensation for themselves.

Ideology is one mechanism used to maintain power. An ideology which explains humanity’s role in the universe, which the masses believe and which they proselytize, is called a religion. Religion doesn’t need materialistic evidence; it solely needs to be emotionally attractive and compelling. Dawkins singles out another category of the religious memeplex and calls it “faith”. For Dawkins, “The meme for blind faith secures its own perpetuation by the simple unconscious expedient of discouraging rational inquiry.” In the early 20^th century, socialism was such a faith. Socialist intellectuals would propagate that capitalism is evil, and that capitalists and bankers exploit poor people and steal their money. “Abolish private property and we will have a better society,” they preached. The Russian Bolsheviks demonstrated the logical result following the elimination of property and markets. Today, environmentalism is a massive religion that blames capitalists and scientists for all the disasters that modern society struggles with, including global warming.

Skeptics are inevitably called names and treated as evil heretics. A civic religion based on faith, not reason, turns society on its head – a belief that would largely be considered lunacy in one person alone, suddenly gains universal support. Speaking of environmentalism as a religion, Michael Crichton emphasized that “one of the defining features of religion is that your beliefs are not troubled by facts, because they have nothing to do with facts.”

Environmentalism, that is, ecological fundamentalism, along with Islamic fundamentalism, is an ideology that poses an existential threat. Eco-fundamentalism is widely considered to be respectable, even admirable. Its adherents teach at prestigious universities, write for newspapers of record, and implement policy as administrators within national and international bureaucracies. In the guise of international agreements, such as the Kyoto protocol and numerous UN summits, environmentalists are trying to promote the idea of global governance and the notion that they should decide how and what the rest of humanity should produce.

Recently, I had a conversation with a sustainable development bureaucrat. She worked in Kenya, Tanzania, and Romania. Here is a brief excerpt:

E: “Romania is a poor country with a predominantly traditional agrarian economy. Life is hard there.”
Sonja: “So the farming should be mechanized? Might Romanians need to be assisted with imports of fertilizers and machines and attract more foreign companies to produce farming equipment?”
E: “I’m not an expert in technology – I don’t know what they need exactly, but I think it’s nice that they use traditional forms of farming. It’s bad when everything is mechanized.”

Such was the extent of her knowledge of actual “development.” These days, the Greens are trying to install a sense of sin in us for using chemistry, biotechnology, and other basic science. Environmentalists have gone so far in their critique of human progress to make terms like “private business” and “venture capital” nearly synonymous with environmental destruction and selfishness. No wonder that Sunday’s “Flood Wall Street” march suggested such tactics as burning down the homes of Wall Street executives and politicians and smashing buildings as ways to combat climate change.

Being skeptical of the ecological fundamentalism, I’m not claiming that there are no global ecological problems. To the contrary, there are plenty of problems. But the vast majority of them are of local character. In fact, the most enduring problems are predominantly concentrated in poor, underdeveloped counties. Meanwhile, environmental activists are fighting against abstract problems of a very generic character such as climate change, global warming, and the greenhouse effect. Ironically, the people protesting and “fighting” global warming in their rich and technologically advanced countries are the ones whose industries have already started to adopt safe and low carbon methods of production.

At the same time, Sub-Saharan Africa is in the midst of an ecological catastrophe.The continent, whose population is set to more than double from the current 900 million to 2.1 billion by 2050, and to quadruple to 3.9 billion by the end of this century, is on the verge of dire shortages of drinking water. Another ecological catastrophe is the deforestation and soil erosion of Haiti, with its population density of 367 people per square kilometer. Finally, an ecological catastrophe is when you have a country like India, with over 3,000 towns and cities, only 209 have partial sewage treatment facilities, only 8 have full wastewater treatment facilities, and over 100 cities dump untreated sewage directly into the Ganges River.

All these problems could be effectively solved by technology and demographic control. Should eco-activists go to Haiti (instead of marching in the streets of New York or drinking coffee in their Paris offices) and fight the eco-challenges there, they would soon find out that their problems could be tackled with fertilizers, insecticides, genetically modified plants, and building of power plants. In other words, most problems could be easily solved with the very technological progress and scientific inventions, against which the Greens have been fighting. Environmentalists almost universally believe that global warming is the direct result of heavy industries with excessive carbon dioxide emissions, in addition to oil extraction. “No fracking! No Canadian oil sands!”, “Yes to renewable energy!”, they chanted in the streets on Sunday. Yet at the same time, they reject the best solution to the problem, which is nuclear power. Essentially, environmentalists don’t address the core problem, human well-being, because they simply overlook it. What they are calling for, instead, is to get “back to nature”.

How exactly does “back to nature” work in practice? How do we return to an agrarian economy? In reality, the agrarian economy is the most destructive form of economic organization ever developed. The agrarian civilization cuts forest, salinizes soil, turns a rice-terrace into a hotbed for malaria mosquitos. Besides that, there are 7 billion people on the planet today. It is impossible to feed all of them using traditional farming. Such countries as North Korea, Haiti, and Rwanda still practice almost exclusively organic farming – with no improved seeds, pesticides, and fertilizers. 84% of North Korean households have “borderline” or “poor” levels of food consumption; 67% of Haitian population “goes without food some days”, and in Rwanda, 43% of the children are chronically malnourished. People in these countries practice primitive forms of agriculture not because their citizens are environmentally ”conscious,” but because they lack both the technology and fertilizers to improve their yields.

In Rwanda, for instance, the competition for free land resulted in genocide in 1994. Arduous March, the North Korean famine, killed between 240,000 and 3,500,000 North Koreans from 1994 to 1998. It is universally acknowledged that these countries are zones of extreme ecological risks. Traditional agricultural economy can only be effective once it yields enough time for the land to recover. It is only possible when the population pressure on the land is weak. If the population pressure is high, it will destroy the local environment and sometimes cause cannibalism amongst the population.

In fairness, there are indeed societies that use no technology and thus do not alter their environment. They don’t contribute to global pollution and climate change. They live in precisely the way eco-activists advocate – in harmony with nature. The Bedouins in the Arabian Desert enjoy symbiotic coexistence with camels and goats, practice polygamy and use slave labor. The Inuit tribes, indigenous inhabitants of the Arctic region, practice infanticide, polygamy, and infant marriages. Their elderly who are a burden to their relatives “are put to death by stabbing or strangulation”. Natives of Papua New Guinea engage in cannibalism and institutionalized pedophilia.

Back to the climate change concerns. The Earth has been around for approximately 4.5 billion years. 3.8 billion years ago, life on it began. Throughout all this time, the climate has been changing. Even the atmosphere doesn’t remain the same. Early life contributed to the most dramatic changes in the planet’s biosphere – the so called “Great Oxygen Event”. The atmosphere at the time was composed of methane, ammonia, and oxygen dioxide. Cyanobacteria, which appeared about 2.5 billion years ago, began producing oxygen by photosynthesis. Following the GOE, free oxygen started to accumulate in the atmosphere completely changing the flora and fauna the Earth could support.

The Earth didn’t start suddenly getting warmer in the 20^th century. During the Jurassic era, the North Pole was warm enough for tomatoes to grow. In 982 A.D., Eric the Red, an Icelandic Viking, discovered lands to the north of Iceland and called them “Green land” because the lands were green and had flourishing grape vines. In the 14^th century, the climatic optimum was taken over by a minor Ice Age, which ushered in the 1315-1317 famine and dramatically decreased the population of Europe. By early 17^th century, Europe got warmer again. However, during 1645 to 1715, the world suffered from the cold, yet again. Despite the assertions of eco-activists about constantly rising temperatures, since 1998, however, the preponderance of scientific evidence suggests that global temperature has actually been flat.

Long story short, there is no doubt that climate change is occurring. Does it occur as a direct outcome of carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere? That remains a complex debate. Simply blaming manufacturers and scientists for all global problems is a naïve fantasy. It is also naïve to assume that we have final control over climate and the concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere.

The climate is a very complex system that is affected by numerous factors, including long-term internal oscillation in the ocean and the atmosphere, the composition of the ozone layer, the variations in solar output, tectonic activity levels, etc. Changes in the climate have been caused not solely by humankind since the Industrial Revolution onwards. Reducing a complex problem to carbon dioxide levels is simplistic at best. If policymakers make their decisions based on such a myopic vision of the climate and environment situation, they are going to miss opportunities to deal with far more serious problems of humanity – such as vulnerability to hurricane landfalls, potential water shortages, deforestation and land erosion – the issues which have the largest socio-economic impact.

Thus far, the most terrifying ecological problem is, in fact, poverty caused by population pressure on the land and its resources, lack of property rights, and the lack of high technology in the developing world.