Risk Society: A rant about the environment

First, the article below is old. You can read it or not. What is says is that disasters knock out capital but then create jobs, and in the long run, have little effect on the economy.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/03/AR2005090301195.html

Disasters also attack the psyche, setting up an “Us v. the Earth, Us v. the Hand of God, No enemy but cruel fate” sense of underdoggedness. We get knocked down, and can’t do anything but get back up. It’s cute, how in the wake of such events we have a sense of purpose. Let’s all clean up the house.
We don't talk about global warming anymore, or even climate change. So let's talk about variability, risk, and disaster.

According to the IPCC, it is “very likely” (90% probability) that we will have more heavy precipitation events (re: floods) and heat waves in the rest of the 21st century. It is “likely” (66% probability) that we will have more droughts, tropical cyclones, and extreme high sea levels (tsumanis excluded). And these estimates are pretty conservative, given your average scientist’s discomfort with predictive climate models and their ability to quantify error. So we know about the linear trends: hotter, less ice, more shipping lanes in the Arctic. All things that we can plan for: get a fan, move north, have lots of money, invest in A/C companies. But what about the climate changes that are inherently difficult to plan for? What if extreme weather events occurred more frequently, with greater intensity, and with greater variability? Me and IPCC think that it is “likely” that this is happening. And anecdotal evidence seems to be on our side, even though we should try our best to ignore this kind of evidence.
So what? Do we continue to be fucked? Are insurance companies cleaning up on the new risky world we live in, or are they losing out when entire cities get leveled and they are supposed to shell out millions to flash flood insurance cardholders? On this topic I’m reminded of a book that I once read an excerpt of, maybe the most pretentious book that I ever took seriously:

Beck, Ulrich (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage

There’s a lot of jargony bullshit in here where verbs get nominalized for no reason and you end up with sentences like “Connected to the recognition of modernization risks are ecological devaluations and expropriations, which frequently and systematically enter into contradiction to the profit and property interests which advance the process of industrialization.”
But let’s wade through that to the basic point, which is that modern society is obsessed with assessing and preparing for the ever-increasing risks that we created for ourselves with modern innovations like nuclear power, industry, and general assholery.

So now our social inequality comes in new flavors, instead of the rich and the poor, we have the insured and the uninsured. Fun fact: weather-and-water-wise, if you live in the Northeast US, you are automatically insured! Even better, move to Canada. Just stay away from the Southeast US, tropics, Iceland, Miami, NOLA, Holland, and all islands, even and especially Australia, anything on the Ring of Fire, and any country whose GDP is less than 500 billion. Try your best to be rich, white, and male.

Environmental economists can talk about incorporating the externalities, holding industries responsible for the true cost of their pollutants, dividing up common areas (like fisheries) into shares or sectors, but all of this is virtually impossible because pollutants move around, fish move around, everything circulates everywhere and it is difficult to decide who the payee is (Everybody? Everybody who eats fish? Everybody downstream of your factory? Everybody who has an extra finger?)

At this point in the if game, I usually start to imagine that Plato got his way and we have some kind of mythology that makes us all brothers and sisters and children of the same almighty being that holds us together and makes us care for one another. Oh wait, monotheism. Thanks, theists, you’re doing a GREAT JOB.

After I get pissed off at religion for a while, donate $10 to Planned Parenthood, and consider biking more often, I think of Evolution, my Bible and explainer of mysteries. We are a species like any other, approaching its carrying capacity. We’re probably not even there yet. Technology keeps improving, and we, like beavers and sulfur-reducing bacteria, have the capacity to dramatically change our environment. Like sulfur-reducing bacteria, we will assist in one of a handful of mass-extinctions that Earth has experienced. But Earth doesn’t care. It will still be around after we fuck ourselves out of existence. And we will not have lasted a fraction of the time that dinosaurs were around, so in the great scheme of things, epic fail, humanity, epic fail.

There’s hope! Not that we won’t go extinct, because that is by definition just a matter of time. But we might do well for our race for a few more million years if we can harness the energy that lurks in all the corners of our existence: wind, solar, water, nuclear. It doesn’t take much to make energy and most of the technology already exists. It doesn’t take much to dispose of waste safely and most of the technology already exists. The political will doesn’t exist, but maybe it will if some economists can demonstrate that even in our short-sighted election-cycle-driven sense of time, we can save loads of money if we do it right the first time. And in the long run this means less crazy shit weather and nuclear leaks and oil pipes exploding for everybody. We have to manage our risks, not just our wealth. In every dystopian novel when a society switches from wealth-centered to risk-centered, you know that you’re at the beginning of the end of the world. I think we’re all a little obsessed with our own destruction. Like a flaming upturned car on the side of the highway, we want to slow down and watch it burn up. Natural disasters give our 24-hour news cycle something to do. But the uninsured is not our Colosseum, because many of Earth’s processes will fuck us all equally.

Also, stop having fucking babies. We would have absolutely no problems whatsoever if we controlled the size of our population. If you’re looking for the one-stop shop easy solution to climate change and poverty, stop having motherfucking babies. I understand that this is difficult because reproduction is the biological purpose of life, but sometimes you have to trust that most of your genes are swimming around in someone else’s progeny, and take one for the team. I also understand that implementing any sort of policy on births is controversial, ethically messy, and creates a weird demography for a while. I don’t know how to solve that but nobody cares what I think anyway.

Comments?

radical marriage lantern festival

...is the name of my new band, starring Becky and Steve:

...and me playing the corn cut-out, which sounds pretty much like an upright bass.

Some days after Romain and Brandy's awesome farm wedding, I went to the JP lantern festival, because there's nothing better than the four elements colliding in a big zen paper calamity.

and some hipstamatics in the Forest Hills Cemetary

Clinical EP

Also, Libby taught me a new word today: Wugazi. It's what you get when you mash up Wu-Tang and Fugazi, and it's also the kind of word you want to whisper into the ears of sleeping children ...wooooo.....gaaaaa.....zeeeee....
Free download here.