Kim Robinson - Sixty Days and Counting

CUT TO THE CHASE

Today’s post:

I think for a while we forgot what was possible. Our way of life damaged our ability to imagine anything different. Maybe we are rarely good at imagining that things could be different. Maybe that’s what we mean when we talk about the Enlightenment. For a while there we understood that the ultimate source of power is the imagination.

“Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the Fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into the service of economic royalists. It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control of government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor and their property. And as a result the average man once more confronts the problem that faced the Minute Man. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. Against economic tyranny such as this, the American citizen could appeal only to the organized power of the Government.”

That was Franklin Roosevelt, talking as president to the nation in 1936. In the same speech he said, “There is a mysterious cycle in human events. To some generations much is given. Of other generations much is expected. This generation of Americans has a rendezvous with destiny.”

But then we forgot again. We went back to imagining that things could only be as they were. We lived on in that strange new feudalism, in ways that were unjust and destructive and yet were presented as the only possible reality. We said “people are like that,” or “human nature will never change” or “we are all guilty of original sin,” or “this is democracy, this is the free market, this is reality itself.” And we went along with that analysis, and it became the law of the land. The entire world was legally bound to accept this feudal injustice as law. It was global and so it looked like it was universal. The future itself was bought, in the form of debts, mortgages, contracts—all spelled out by law and enforced by police and armies. Alternatives were unthinkable. Even to say things could be otherwise would get you immediately branded as unrealistic, foolish, naive, insane, utopian.

But that was all delusion. Every few years things change completely, even though we can’t quite remember how it happened or what it means. Change is real and unavoidable. And we can organize our affairs any way we please. There is no physical restraint on us. We are free to act. It’s a fearsome thing, this freedom, so much so that people talk about a “flight from freedom”—that we fly into cages and hide, because freedom is so profound it’s a kind of abyss. To actually choose in each moment how to live is too scary to endure.

So we lived like sleepwalkers. But the world is not asleep, and outside our dream, things continued to change. Trying to shape that change is not a bad thing. Some pretend that making a plan is instant communism and the devil’s work, but it isn’t so. We always have a plan. Free market economics is a plan—it plans to give over all decisions to the blind hand of the market. But the blind hand never picks up the check. And, you know—it’s blind. To deal with the global environmental crisis we now face without making any more plan than to trust the market would be like saying, We have to solve this problem so first let’s put out our eyes. Why? Why not use our eyes? Why not use our brain?

Because we’re going to have to imagine our way out of this one.

That’s why we made the deal with China. It’s one of the greatest win-win comprehensive treaties of all time. Consider that we had a massive trade deficit running with China, and they had bought a lot more of our debt as well. And because of their population, and their manufacturing capabilities, and their low wages, which by the way depressed wages for every other worker in the world, there wasn’t an obvious way out of that huge imbalance. They had us. We were getting whipped in the so-called free market by a communist command-and-control political structure that could inflict austerity measures on their own people, which allowed them to win that game. That just goes to show you how free the free market really was, by the way; dictatorships did better at it than democracies! I leave it as an exercise for the blog’s responders to hash over what that might mean, but in the meantime, in the real world it was a big problem!

And yet at the same time this so-called success of the Chinese was achieved in part by treating their people and landscape like disposables, and it simply wasn’t true, and those false economics were beginning to backlash on them in bigger and bigger ways. They were creating terrible physical problems, worse problems than ours, really, because we’ve been cleaning up our land and air and water for decades now, as part of the smart planning of government of the people, by the people, and for the people, so that our troubles were mostly on paper. But the Chinese had trashed China itself, and they were headed right to the brink of a major ecological systems crash. Maybe global warming and the giant drought that has afflicted central and east Asia was the final push, but certainly their own poisonous habits had pooled up around them, and the cumulative impacts were going to kill entire regions and endanger the lives of one-sixth of humanity.

That wouldn’t have been good for any of us. I know there’s a fringe in the response columns saying that the worse things went for the Chinese the better off we would be, but it doesn’t work that way. The carbon and particulates that they were putting into the air were going everywhere on Earth, even if China took the brunt of them. And in any case they were desperate enough to be in need of our aid, and to ask us for it—so we were obliged to help, just as fellow human beings. The fact that it gave us bargaining leverage that we hadn’t had before with them was just the silver lining on a very big black cloud.

So, we all had an interest in helping the Chinese to escape what was really looking to the Chinese and American scientific communities like an imminent regional acute extinction event. The Chinese Academy of Sciences contacted our National Science Foundation with the relevant data and analysis, and NSF came to me and made the situation clear. We needed to help and the situation was so urgent that ordinary procedures weren’t going to do it. So I talked to President Hu (and yes, he was on first, and yes, we cut to the Chase), and our diplomatic teams hammered out a deal in record time—a deal that the Senate immediately approved 71 to 29, because it was that good a deal.

At the invitation of the Chinese government, we docked some sixty ships of our nuclear fleet in Chinese ports, and provided them with almost five hundred megawatts of power for essential services. This helped them to shut down their dirtiest coal plants in the affected watersheds, and replace them with new clean plants built at high speed, sometimes in two weeks. We also helped to pay for these plants. We agreed also to give China all the scientific and technological help we could, everything our environmental science community has learned, from integrated pest management and organic agriculture to toxic waste removal from streams and soil. Americans from our Army Corps of Engineers and the Department of Agriculture went there to consult, and our teams that were already helping with their drought problems and their Salton Sea projects continued with their aid. We’ll also be sending over a crack team of security experts to help keep track of expenditures and such, so that we don’t have any of the contract corruption that occurred under some lax previous administrations. My recent reorganization of our nation’s intelligence services (see previous post) has created some redundancies that give us the personnel to fulfill some of these crucial Chinese-American cooperative security responsibilities, both in Beijing and on-site in the drought-affected areas themselves.