COP15 - Planetary Cardiac Arrest?

The Pivotal Tragedy of Failed Intelligence and Leadership--NOT for the Faint of Heart

Will Spontaneous Citizen Self-Organizing be the Antidote to Market and Government Failure?

[Draft 1] Scott Edmondson, Strategic Sustainability 2030

[see also, NYT: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/19/science/earth/19climate.html?_r=1&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=a1]

December 18, 2009. A Black day. Copenhagen failed, and the results are not for the faint of heart. The unsustainability consequences sound like hyperbole. The sustainability challenge sounds like a pipedream of the impossible. Both play to people’s tendency to dismiss the appearingly impractical and unreal. Unfortunately, we are now likely on a scenario involving fits and spurts of self-suicide as we unwittingly or uncaringly (and often without choice) figuratively eat the increasingly poisoned fruit we grow in the decreasingly productive orchards we manage; all in the name of elusively uncertain survival, progress, prosperity, and pragmatism.

Because of the COP15 failure, we will likely miss the opportunity to meet nature’s deadline required for a high probability "soft-landing" on the 2-degree C warming scenario of a manageable 200-300-year catastrophe before the climate returns to some semblance of pre-1990s conditions. This scenario requires limiting peak CO2-equivalent production by 2015 and reducing global CO2-equivalent production to 80 percent below 1990 levels by 2020. Instead, we are now headed towards a 3+-degree C warming scenario of less-to-unmanageable catastrophe. Even in the best case millions, possibly billions, of people will perish or live in conditions of even greater miserable deprivation and degeneration than at present; the geography of the world will dramatically transform before our eyes; and an increasingly harsh climate will severely reduce economic productivity, increase risk, and likely not return to the relatively benign and benevolent pre-1990 conditions.

The leaders of the world do not see that sustainability is the only route to durable and secure economic prosperity, now and in the future. It is the only real choice even though not choosing it appears as the only real choice. Sustainability is the lens through which one can see the next and only remaining path or "long wave" of economic innovation and development sufficient to prevent biospheric collapse under the ever-expanding human footprint. Without fully perceiving the sustainability option as the new vein of value it is, there is little motivation to choose it. They see the choice framed in the mistaken marginalist duality of jobs vs. the environment. In reality, the choice is between (2) jobs in the short-run AND NO jobs and no environment in the medium- and long-run under the business as usual (BAU) scenario vs. (2) an investment in jobs AND the environment in the short and long run under the sustainability scenario. The sustainability option is the new "environment." The only way to have jobs in both the short and long run is if one chooses the "new" environment option--sustainability-- now. Fortunately, that option will produce more jobs in both the short- and long-run than BAU.

Unfortunately, and this is the mistake the leaders of the world made at COP15, the prevalent understanding of the "environment" option is often not the sustainability option of an expanding new vein of value created in the next long wave of innovation resulting from choosing sustainability. Instead, it is the limited, impotent, and insufficient "environment" of added regulations, costs, and other burdensome mitigation that simply slow the rate of poisoning and destruction, thereby forestalling, but not preventing, the day of reckoning, and now, not forestalling it for long. An entirely new economic path is required, not the same well-trodden one. Fortunately, this new economy is embedded within the current one, but producing it will require intentional strategic choices (that are affordable) and political, popular, policy, and business leadership and support for those choices.

The decision over reversing climate change by choosing sustainability is not a decision problem appropriate for marginalist calculus between product A, which is not a whole lot different that product B. The marginalist calculus, combined with faulty price information, an utter lack of logic and common sense, and no understanding that human values, not the market, has the only right, responsibility, and real capacity to choose strategic direction, tricks the calculator to point in the wrong direction.

The decision we face at this moment in history requires the strategic calculus of choosing a new direction to Future B over the current direction of Future A. The decision we face is about the type of world we want and how to take the steps required to produce it. The decision is not about whether the next step appears to be a little more expensive than the current BAU scenario leading us now to a world we do not want and cannot survive. In this respect, it is not even a real "choice." The BUA choice is, essentially, death, even worse; it is a prolonged and agonizing species self-suicide. The BAU scenario is mistakenly understood as a rosy future that it is not. Choosing it would be a false positive mistake, that is, a mistake in choosing a positive looking scenario that is actually negative. Even if the apparent higher costs of the sustainability scenario were real, they would not change the strategic decision. Fortunately however, the cost analysis supporting the idea that the next step would be more expensive is based on the faulty information of market-failure prices that dramatically undervalue the risk and overvalue the benefit of BAU, and similarly, overvalue the costs and undervalue the benefits of a sustainability scenario. The BAU scenario is a car pointed towards an upcoming cliff. The sustainability scenario stops the car, chooses a new destination, turns around, and navigates strategically to the new destination.

Unfortunately, the world’s leaders in Copenhagen did not understand the strategic nature of the decision the world entrusted to them. Instead, they quibbled about marginal costs and benefits based on market-failure prices for the minor differences in action they contemplated. The result (?): a black day for the world, a sad commentary on international decision-making capacity, and a new challenge for the global sustainability movement—how to respond when both markets and governments fail? The prospects are not hopeless, but there is no immediately obvious response to this challenge possessing the required efficacy. It will require, paradoxically, the same out-of-the-box thinking and innovation as sustainability problem solving itself.

This governmental failure, at this moment, is troubling for many reasons, but mostly because it means that humanity has not evolved on a collective level to the institutional capacity required to make the right choices for its own historical--and now global--destiny. Even if the evolution of such governmental capacity were near, accelerating socio-economic and ecologic trends will soon likely leave far behind the opportunity for constructive intervention in our collective destiny. We will be left defensively fighting increasingly raging fires with decreasingly diminishing resources and capacity, and then only until the glue of civilization and civil society fails.

So, the question remains, what are the alternative responses when both markets and government fails? What are the alternative methods for pushing ahead the transformation to a durably prosperous and secure economy; an economy that at once (1) honors the ecological integrity of nature’s regenerative life-support system; (2) incorporates its fundamental principles of regenerative economics, engineering, and design; and (3) incidentally and exponentially enhances and expands its regenerative life-support infrastructure and capacity as an indirect effect or by-product of its daily machinations?

There seems to be only one arena left: the spontaneous self-organizing of citizens and possibly other actors (non-profits, some corporations, possibly municipalities, even regions, etc.). The conceptual detail of the provisional answer that can be known now will be left to another paper, but beyond that, time will tell and could be, we hope, surprisingly promising and robust. In a note of historic, possibly divine, irony, maybe the capacity for spontaneous and collaborative self-organizing to solve problems of historic magnitude is the governance capacity humanity needs, and that is the real "character or development test" of this historical moment. Maybe Buckminster Fuller had it right characterizing the sustainability challenge as humanity’s upcoming final exam. Hopefully, Copenhagen was not the final exam itself, but a preparatory test. However, success on the final exam needs to occur soon, otherwise, the results will be moot, overshadowed as they will be by the increasingly difficult-to-reverse reality of climate change, fanned to ever higher intensity by the very thing on which we depend, the daily machinations of the modern economy: the most prosperous--and soon to be the most toxic--the world has ever seen, or, . . . , will likely see.

 [citations and revisions to be added in subsequent drafts]