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Incompatible premises

Screenshot

Your house or mine, depending on the whether.

Back to the irresistible force paradox ( ED. We never left – it won’t leave) where the unstoppable force meets an immovable object. In our case, the immovable obtuse object will not listen to available facts, widely available since the 1980s. Our elected representatives, and the companies that keep them, elect to do nothing about climate change. Even though they know better, just like they get vaccines, largely eat healthy foods, and take regular vacations to foreign capitals.

And the climate continues its response to unabated carbon emissions, pollution, sprawl, and their attendant maladies.

Most poignantly, we have, despite the efforts of the best and brightest, figured out what to do. Every little thing but more importantly the big expensive ones. The power of collective action – the real facts we hate – as well as the beauty of slowness and direct personal touch. We also know beyond doubts that ‘big expensive’ will be far more affordable – always with the deadly calculus – than the bigger expensiver denial that creeps closer as we try to maintain that denial rather than a healthy biosphere. The simple human effort required of managing the cognitive dissonance of massive personal vehicles and long commutes, the right to cheap food and expensive entertainment, is plenty enough power to humble us into open minds about a closed system. Yet we cling to the power to resist all we should embrace. Forever batteries, powered by spite.

Meanwhile, more energy hits the Earth every morning than every man, woman and child will use in 27 years, if you’re scoring at home.

Image: screenshot from Bloomberg, but they’re just the messenger.

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Who gives a $#%&?

Via mefi, a great two year old essay from the philosopher Peter Singer on what a human life is worth and what the richest of the rich should be giving to the poorest of the poor. There are some stunning ratios he dug up, trying to calculate what percentage of their income the richest .001, .1, .5 and top 10 per cent of the American population should give. To wit.

You could spend a long time debating whether the fractions of income I have suggested for donation constitute the fairest possible scheme. Perhaps the sliding scale should be steeper, so that the superrich give more and the merely comfortable give less. And it could be extended beyond the Top 10 percent of American families, so that everyone able to afford more than the basic necessities of life gives something, even if it is as little as 1 percent. Be that as it may, the remarkable thing about these calculations is that a scale of donations that is unlikely to impose significant hardship on anyone yields a total of $404 billion — from just 10 percent of American families.

Obviously, the rich in other nations should share the burden of relieving global poverty. The U.S. is responsible for 36 percent of the gross domestic product of all Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development nations. Arguably, because the U.S. is richer than all other major nations, and its wealth is more unevenly distributed than wealth in almost any other industrialized country, the rich in the U.S. should contribute more than 36 percent of total global donations. So somewhat more than 36 percent of all aid to relieve global poverty should come from the U.S. For simplicity, let’s take half as a fair share for the U.S. On that basis, extending the scheme I have suggested worldwide would provide $808 billion annually for development aid. That’s more than six times what the task force chaired by Sachs estimated would be required for 2006 in order to be on track to meet the Millennium Development Goals, and more than 16 times the shortfall between that sum and existing official development aid commitments.

6X… 12X. Take the excess capacity by which Singer calculates the Millennium Develop Goals could be surpassed and then devote this to sustainable development practices. My point is not that we can create new columns on the balance sheet, which we can. It’s just to note the way all of the chatter about our financial straits is talked about, reported on, filmed and scripted is incredibly skewed toward… doing as little as possible. What is going to detract from our way of life? We can’t imagine how tenuous life can be, and we get all the best books and movies!

Americans think our government provides more foreign aid than all other countries combined; even when you factor this as tracking with our geo-strategic priorities, it’s just not true, proportionately speaking – which is what matters. If we decided to do as Singer suggests and began making sure – as we are capable of doing – that virtually no people went without basic necessities, we would also begin changing most of the ways in which our own society is insupportable, in the strictist sense.