No, nature is not our "enemy," nature is our Mother -- our source and our sustenance. And what nature is about to do to us, we will have done to ourselves by fouling our own nest. We have brought ourselves to this pass through our collective folly, and we must rescue ourselves through collective wisdom and restraint.
Clearly, we can not succeed with business as usual. Yet that is the policy of the Bush/Cheney administration. Their response to global climate change is ignore it, deny it, and then, when the public demand for action becomes irresistible, make false promises to "do something about it." The Bush/Cheney response to the looming depletion of the world oil supply is to grab the foreign supplies, by military force if necessary, and then continue and even accelerate domestic consumption thus bringing us ever closer to the time of final depletion. They seem to believe that the rest of the world will sit still as we starve them of their share of this essential resource. The Busheviks are profoundly mistaken, as they and the rest of us are about to find out. For the industrial nations -- of Europe, the Pacific Rim, and the oil-rich middle East -- have the capacity to devastate the US economy without firing a shot, and we are coming ever-closer to provoking them to do just that.
Instead we should be planning, along with all the industrialized nations, a global strategy aimed toward a transition to a world economy based on renewable energy sources. To this end, the enormous American defense industry must be redirected to "do battle" against the global threats of climate change, environmental devastation and fossil fuel depletion. Instruments of destruction must now be transformed into instruments of survival: swords into plowshares.
Disarmament can be a very tricky business, which must be planned and implemented intelligently and comprehensively, with the full cooperation and coordination of the federal government and private industry. That was the case in 1945 at the end of World War II as American industry converted smoothly from war time to peace time production. The G.I. Bill, one of the most enlightened Congressional acts in our history, put hundreds of thousands of returning military personnel into colleges and universities from which they would emerge as the foundation of an expanded and flourishing middle class.
The "peace dividend" that followed the collapse of Communism in the early nineties was a different story. With no peacetime projects to take up the slack of diminished and cancelled defense contracts, thousands of defense workers were laid off causing ripple effects throughout the economy. I know, for I was a victim of the "peace dividend." When the California defense industry was set back in the early nineties, state tax revenues declined precipitously. Consequently, state university budgets were slashed and thousands of untenured faculty had to be laid off, including Yours Truly. Throughout the state of California, the cry was heard: "Where are the Russians, now that we need them?" I was lucky, for after a year of part-time work I was appointed to an endowed chair at a Midwestern college. Others were not as fortunate.
This historical experience leads one to ask: If the United States decides to relinquish its self-appointed role as an international military bully and chooses instead to join a world-wide endeavor to escape the looming menaces of global warming, environmental deterioration and petroleum depletion, how is it to manage a non-disruptive change-over?
Suppose that the US decides to shrink its $500 billion military budget to a quite adequate $100 billion. What is to be the fate of the industries, the stockholders, and the workers that were sustained by that half-trillion dollars of federal appropriations and contracts? A repeat of the nineties' "peace dividend" recession can be avoided if the spigot of federal funding is kept on while the flow is directed to dealing with the aforementioned global emergencies and to the requisite improvements in our domestic infrastructure. However, to the consternation of economic libertarians and free market absolutists, this must be a coordinated effort supported with tax revenues. And that means planning and administration at the federal level. Of course, these tax revenues would not be additional but would be reallocated from budgets formerly directed toward military contracts.
There will be no shortage of urgent projects that will require all of the $400 billion released from the military budget. Among them:
Full-length articles and books have been written about each of these items. Let's examine just one: the advantages of railroad travel to automobile and airline travel.
As anyone who has traveled on Japanese and European railroads is fully aware, the American rail system is, by comparison, a national disgrace. In the last sixty years, 40% of the railroad tracks in the United States have been torn up. And in 2005, responding to his patrons in the auto and petroleum industry, George Bush proposed an elimination of all federal funding of Amtrak, the sole remaining national passenger rail service.
In the face of the permanent energy shortage immediately ahead, the planned demise of the American railroads is irrational in the extreme. The per-passenger energy consumption of existing railroads is half the consumption of automobile and air travel, and with advanced railroad facilities abroad that advantage approaches three to one. With speeds in excess of 180 mph, modern trains provide faster, safer, more comfortable and more energy efficient downtown-to-downtown travel than airlines at distances up to 400 miles. Magnetic-levitation (MagLev) trains, now in operation in Germany and China, are capable of speeds up to 300mph. Via MagLev, one might travel from Manhattan to downtown Chicago in about four hours. The Los Angeles to San Francisco run would take an hour and a half. All this with enormous savings in energy.
Public subsidy of a railroad system? "But that's socialism!" Yet public subsidy of auto transportation through highway construction, or of air travel through airport construction and air traffic control, somehow fails to arouse these capitalist qualms.
Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas are world leaders in the technology and construction of airframes. How difficult would it be for these industries to convert to the manufacture of state of the art railroad engines and railroad cars? How effectively might General Electric develop, manufacture and install a nationwide system of solar-electric production and distribution? How soon could Exxon-Mobil, Texaco-Shell and British Petroleum shift to the production and distribution of bio-fuels? With $400 billion of the military budget redirected to these essential "national defense" goals, these questions become rhetorical. As Bernard Weiner points out, the primary obstacles immediately before us are not economic or technological, they are political.
Just as drastic cuts in military spending have ripple-effects throughout the economy, so too would a conversion of military technology to a sustainable energy economy and infrastructure. But these would be positive "ripples." There would be a demand for scientists, engineers and skilled workers - for jobs which, by their nature (i.e. building, maintaining and operating on-site infrastructures) could not be outsourced. Unlike military hardware, the output of this industrial conversion would be economically productive. A high-speed rail system contributes permanently to the national economy. Tanks, bombers, submarines and aircraft carriers, once built, produce nothing.
The military-industrial-(political-academic-media) complex is a giant tapeworm in the gut of the American economy, soaking up nutrients, contributing nothing, and starving the host organism. The "defense" industry flourishes, and what the Pentagon wants the Pentagon gets. Meanwhile, public education withers from neglect, rising tuition costs keep talented but poor students from professional careers of which they are fully capable, skilled workers are being laid-off as their jobs are shipped overseas, the nation's infrastructure - bridges, highways, railroads, harbors, water supplies, sewage disposal - is rotting from within. Non-defense tax revenues required to reverse this deterioration are lost to "tax relief" for the very wealthy.
Clearly, we can not succeed with business as usual. Yet that is the policy of the Bush/Cheney administration. Their response to global climate change is ignore it, deny it, and then, when the public demand for action becomes irresistible, make false promises to "do something about it." The Bush/Cheney response to the looming depletion of the world oil supply is to grab the foreign supplies, by military force if necessary, and then continue and even accelerate domestic consumption thus bringing us ever closer to the time of final depletion. They seem to believe that the rest of the world will sit still as we starve them of their share of this essential resource. The Busheviks are profoundly mistaken, as they and the rest of us are about to find out. For the industrial nations -- of Europe, the Pacific Rim, and the oil-rich middle East -- have the capacity to devastate the US economy without firing a shot, and we are coming ever-closer to provoking them to do just that.
Instead we should be planning, along with all the industrialized nations, a global strategy aimed toward a transition to a world economy based on renewable energy sources. To this end, the enormous American defense industry must be redirected to "do battle" against the global threats of climate change, environmental devastation and fossil fuel depletion. Instruments of destruction must now be transformed into instruments of survival: swords into plowshares.
Disarmament can be a very tricky business, which must be planned and implemented intelligently and comprehensively, with the full cooperation and coordination of the federal government and private industry. That was the case in 1945 at the end of World War II as American industry converted smoothly from war time to peace time production. The G.I. Bill, one of the most enlightened Congressional acts in our history, put hundreds of thousands of returning military personnel into colleges and universities from which they would emerge as the foundation of an expanded and flourishing middle class.
This historical experience leads one to ask: If the United States decides to relinquish its self-appointed role as an international military bully and chooses instead to join a world-wide endeavor to escape the looming menaces of global warming, environmental deterioration and petroleum depletion, how is it to manage a non-disruptive change-over?
Suppose that the US decides to shrink its $500 billion military budget to a quite adequate $100 billion. What is to be the fate of the industries, the stockholders, and the workers that were sustained by that half-trillion dollars of federal appropriations and contracts? A repeat of the nineties' "peace dividend" recession can be avoided if the spigot of federal funding is kept on while the flow is directed to dealing with the aforementioned global emergencies and to the requisite improvements in our domestic infrastructure. However, to the consternation of economic libertarians and free market absolutists, this must be a coordinated effort supported with tax revenues. And that means planning and administration at the federal level. Of course, these tax revenues would not be additional but would be reallocated from budgets formerly directed toward military contracts.
There will be no shortage of urgent projects that will require all of the $400 billion released from the military budget. Among them:
*Balancing the budget and reducing the national debt. Fiscal instability is crippling our capacity to deal aggressively with the problems before us. Moreover our economic independence and national security have been bartered away in our massive debts to competitor nations.
*Research and development of renewable energy sources: Solar, wind, tides, biofuels and possibly atomic fusion.
*Construction of renewable energy production facilities: wind farms, biofuel digesters, solar collectors.
*Increasing fuel-efficiency of automobiles and converting to non-fossil fuel sources.
*Building a renewable fuel infrastructure.
*Severely reducing the commercial airline fleet and replacing it with high-speed railroads.
*Research and development of technologies that will slow and perhaps reverse global warming. This might include methods of capturing and sequestering greenhouse gasses such as carbon dioxide and methane. Also increasing the outward reflection (albedo) of incoming solar radiation (e.g. by increasing cloud and snow cover).
Full-length articles and books have been written about each of these items. Let's examine just one: the advantages of railroad travel to automobile and airline travel.
As anyone who has traveled on Japanese and European railroads is fully aware, the American rail system is, by comparison, a national disgrace. In the last sixty years, 40% of the railroad tracks in the United States have been torn up. And in 2005, responding to his patrons in the auto and petroleum industry, George Bush proposed an elimination of all federal funding of Amtrak, the sole remaining national passenger rail service.
In the face of the permanent energy shortage immediately ahead, the planned demise of the American railroads is irrational in the extreme. The per-passenger energy consumption of existing railroads is half the consumption of automobile and air travel, and with advanced railroad facilities abroad that advantage approaches three to one. With speeds in excess of 180 mph, modern trains provide faster, safer, more comfortable and more energy efficient downtown-to-downtown travel than airlines at distances up to 400 miles. Magnetic-levitation (MagLev) trains, now in operation in Germany and China, are capable of speeds up to 300mph. Via MagLev, one might travel from Manhattan to downtown Chicago in about four hours. The Los Angeles to San Francisco run would take an hour and a half. All this with enormous savings in energy.
Public subsidy of a railroad system? "But that's socialism!" Yet public subsidy of auto transportation through highway construction, or of air travel through airport construction and air traffic control, somehow fails to arouse these capitalist qualms.
Boeing and McDonnell-Douglas are world leaders in the technology and construction of airframes. How difficult would it be for these industries to convert to the manufacture of state of the art railroad engines and railroad cars? How effectively might General Electric develop, manufacture and install a nationwide system of solar-electric production and distribution? How soon could Exxon-Mobil, Texaco-Shell and British Petroleum shift to the production and distribution of bio-fuels? With $400 billion of the military budget redirected to these essential "national defense" goals, these questions become rhetorical. As Bernard Weiner points out, the primary obstacles immediately before us are not economic or technological, they are political.
Just as drastic cuts in military spending have ripple-effects throughout the economy, so too would a conversion of military technology to a sustainable energy economy and infrastructure. But these would be positive "ripples." There would be a demand for scientists, engineers and skilled workers - for jobs which, by their nature (i.e. building, maintaining and operating on-site infrastructures) could not be outsourced. Unlike military hardware, the output of this industrial conversion would be economically productive. A high-speed rail system contributes permanently to the national economy. Tanks, bombers, submarines and aircraft carriers, once built, produce nothing.
The military-industrial-(political-academic-media) complex is a giant tapeworm in the gut of the American economy, soaking up nutrients, contributing nothing, and starving the host organism. The "defense" industry flourishes, and what the Pentagon wants the Pentagon gets. Meanwhile, public education withers from neglect, rising tuition costs keep talented but poor students from professional careers of which they are fully capable, skilled workers are being laid-off as their jobs are shipped overseas, the nation's infrastructure - bridges, highways, railroads, harbors, water supplies, sewage disposal - is rotting from within. Non-defense tax revenues required to reverse this deterioration are lost to "tax relief" for the very wealthy.
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