Loud Thoughts

Copenhagen Climate Summit was really the show for two countries: the USA and China, the biggest two polluters in this world. It came down to a simple struggle: each wanted the other to emit less CO₂ than they would like.

The math is quite simple. Chinese outnumber Americans four to one. If Chinese would enjoy the carbon-heavy American lifestyle, China would emit a lot more CO₂ than today. If that happens, that would force American to change their current lifestyle, something Americans would kill to avoid. Can he is with sin cast a stone?

But, argued Americans, all we want is to maintain status quo. Everyone freezes at their current carbon emission level until we, advanced technological countries, figure out how to solve this problem.

Did anyone buy that? Did any American buy that?

Let’s go with the premise that Earth is warming to the detriment of human societies. Let’s further accept that human activities, producing various greenhouse gases, etc., caused this. There are then three possible courses of action: do nothing (always an option), change our behavior, or engineer our way out of it. (The obvious fourth possibility — run away to another habitat — is not yet feasible.)

A large part of us are doing exactly nothing. We kept on driving SUVs, eating beef, turning up heat, drinking bottle water, etc. Why or how can this be changed are not the topic here. It is factual.

Some of us, called socialists here, are changing our behavior: turning off lights, buying green products, urging friends to follow-suit, or shouting at corporations and countries to behave responsibly. The iconoclastic Mr. Al Gore won a Nobel prize doing so.

Strangely, the third group, geo-engineers, is clashing with the second. I had a science-fictional idea and others will like to pump sulfur dioxide into the high atmosphere with a long garden hose. Should human beings be allowed to engineer themselves out of this? Al Gore, and his fellow socialists, insisted that social behavior change is the only solution. We human engineered ourselves into this. If allowed, we will inevitably make a bigger mess that will lead to perish. Gosh, one group proposed sending millions of reflectors into the orbit to reflect away Sun light. Stop those crazy scientists and engineers. Just change your behavior and the world will nurse itself back.

Homo Sapiens survived these 200,000 years of existence by altering the world to suit themselves. Many parts of this world have been changed beyond recognition or even uninhabitable. But admit it, we would rather kill each others than change our ways of life.

Let’s unroll the garden hose. It costs less than the stimulus package, much less.

Give an entrepreneur some capital. Of course he or she will try to make more money out of it. Infuse the whole society with money. You expect the whole would become more prosperous, since society is nothing but a collection of individuals and they each would all try to make more money.

Wrong!

An individual, with limited extra money, will consume or invest locally and seek relatively short-term paybacks. A corporation would consider wider range of options and longer time horizon. It may choose to make money with capital or people — automate a process with a new machine and let go several employees, for example. When making investment decisions, they will evaluate all ideas and pursue the ones with the highest returns. Given that the stimulus monies are free. High risk investments, if come with potentially higher returns, will be attractive.

And those American corporations have chosen not to invest in the USA.

Does it surprise you that GM put their stimulus money in China? Of course not, China car sales out-pace the rest of the world. It does not take an MBA to figure out where the shareholders want the investments to be. Now, guess where did those big banks put their stimulus money?
The US stimulus pretty much went straight to other countries’ GDPs. That’s why this recovery benefited only corporations but not citizens.

Good thing China is still buying the US’s debts. Keep your fingers crossed.