If you’re not rich, the point is clear. But even the wealthy must work at maintaining their wealth. While you and I toil full time at our respective means of generating an income, a rich person toils at keeping track of, and making decisions about, their accumulated assets. If they are really smart, they’ll have kept their assets in easy-to-manage categories. But manage they must. A good friend of mine once described me as a Master of the Obvious. Here I prove her point yet again. But even the obvious can have unobvious ramifications and hidden lessons of life.
The fact that everybody needs to earn money to pay the bills, feed the family, afford transportation, save for stormy years, etc., is sometimes lost in the heated debates on global warming, energy policy, military spending, health care reform and countless other issues. Let’s take global warming, the biggest elephant in the room.
The evidence for both a warming trend on Earth, and for a significant human contribution to that trend is, in my opinion, undeniable. The consequences for this trend in the next few decades are truly global in scope. Mass migrations of millions of people away from low-lying coastal regions will follow inundation from a rising ocean level and higher tides. The rain band around the equator seems to be moving northward, depleting agricultural lands currently fed by that band, lowering food production in many of the poorer countries who rely on an agrarian socio-economic base. Long-term water supplies, in the form of glaciers and snow pack are diminishing, reducing river flow and thus potable water supplies. Ground water tables are dropping. The list goes on. So we have to move away from fossil fuels for energy and transportation, right? Right. But not too quickly.
What if we invented sustainable, cheap energy alternatives that had zero pollution and no greenhouse gases? That would be outstanding. But if the oil industry were obsolete in a few years, the millions of people who earn their living in that industry would be out of work. The engineers, the production workers, the oil exploration workers, the accountants, the steel manufacturers who supply pipe, the refiners, the gas stations and distribution companies, the mechanics of internal combustion engines would all no longer be necessary. Countless companies and their employees would no longer exist. To absorb that large number of unemployed people, other business sectors needing exactly the same skill sets would have to grow at an offsetting rate that would balance the oil industry employment decline. That’s an unlikely scenario if the transition took less than a generation. Perhaps two. It takes that amount of time to allow the current employees to complete their likely career span, and to develop the skills in the following generations to be able to earn their living in the new businesses that are created.
Another factor that would prevent us from wanting to change our energy base too quickly is that those companies currently engaged in the oil industry have social ramifications, because most of them are publicly traded. Nearly two-thirds of the stock owned by public companies is owned by retirement plans, insurance companies and endowment trusts. Which means that two-thirds of the value of these public companies is intended to protect the financial security of you and me as we get older and need to, or have to, work less, when we can’t earn a living any longer.
The political rhetoric I’ve heard, from proponents of, and opponents to a concerted effort to take actions to reduce the human contribution to global warming, contains nothing about this relationship. No one is talking about the employment base of troublesome industries, and the transition rate necessary to make progress on reducing global warming while still providing a growing world population the means to earn their living. We hear instead that the United States is not abiding by the Kyoto accords because big business influences have politicians in their pocket, for example.
It is true that industry lobbyists attempt to influence Congress toward actions that are favorable to those industries. That fact, by itself, is not the problem. Every company, industry or social stratum that is potentially affected by legislative trends must make its interests known in order to preserve itself from unthinking eradication by the democratic process. The manner of applying that influence is critical, of course, and can be done honorably or dishonorably. But influence alone is not the problem. The American Civil Liberties Union is just as much of a lobbying and influence organization as the National Rifle Association or BIOCOM, the trade group for life science businesses. These days, every significant interest group lobbies and attempts to influence the course of policy.
But where is the conscious dialogue about a change rate in fundamental (and troublesome) industries that will protect an ever-growing world population’s ability to earn a living? Perhaps the fact that humans don’t do anything until they absolutely have to will prevent the loss of jobs too quickly. While that might protect the current employed population, and half of the next generation, an unplanned and precipitous change will prevent the education and training of following generations in the new industries that must emerge to replace the ones that are literally killing us.
A conscious and public dialogue about the transition rate of fossil fuel industry obsolescence would increase our chances to avoid the cataclysmic changes that will threaten livelihoods. And while we’re at it, we can talk about food production methods, sufficient potable water supplies and critical rare earths, among other industries which need to evolve, and can dramatically affect our world’s human family earning its living if they evolve spontaneously, without conscious planning.
Friday, April 29, 2011