If your car breaks down on the highway, you have a technical problem requiring a technical solution. If your computer goes FUBAR, same thing - technical problem requiring a technical solution. If your cell phone goes berserk (like mine did just a few seconds ago), technical problem with a technical solution.
Most things in this world are not technical problems, they are problems of a different kind. Take, for instance, global warming (or global weirding as some have taken to calling the effects of human behaviour on the environment). This is definitely not a technical problem and technical solutions will not help us.
The effects of human behaviour on our environment might have technical causes - causes that can be reduced to formulas and statistics - but it is not, fundamentally, a technical problem. It is a problem caused by human actions and, as such, requires a political solution.
Politics is what allows any group of people (that is two or more) to live together without killing each other. That's a kind of baseline performance. Ideally, politics allows groups of people to live together without infringing on each others rights; we could take the rights described as most fundamental by the American Declaration of Independence, namely "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." These are not political in themselves but as soon as you have a group of people politics is required to protect, enable, or provide these things.
Climate change started out as a political problem. Environmental activists tried (and succeeded) calling attention to the problem so people would pressure politicians into taking action. It took a while for politicians to come up with a way to address climate change. First they tried creating a program for actual change (a properly political response). This resulted in the Kyoto Protocol (1997).
The Kyoto Protocol pledged all signatories to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, the primary cause of global climate change. 191 countries signed. Of course, there were a few hold outs - Afghanistan, Andorra, South Sudan, and the United States of America. Canada signed the Protocol but withdrew when it became obvious the United States was not going to sign.
The United States refusal to sign was the result of the elision between corporations and government in the United States. Corporations refused to meet any new emission standards. Instead they pushed a "Cap and Trade" program - a non-political solution. Cap and Trade refers to a system that provides the right to pollute a certain amount to huge numbers of companies. Those who pollute less than the government allows would then be free to sell their "right to pollute" to the highest bidder. This would have the crazily negative effect of creating a futures market in pollution. You or I could buy a pollution future if we are bullish on carbon emissions. The insertion of an extra stage (or possibly many extra stages) between the assignment of "pollution credit" and the actual emissions drives the price of polluting up. This sounds good but is actually very bad.
Say you are a factory that is allowed to release a certain amount of carbon into the atmosphere but you need to release more than you are allowed. What are you going to do? Are you going to pay an inflated price on the carbon market or are you just going to burn whatever it is you need burned? In short, the problems with cap and trade are enforcement, monitoring, and punishment. There is no way to effectively monitor the polluters, no way to enforce emission standards, and no way to effectively punish violators. But much more importantly, the idea that the air we breathe is for sale is insidious and awful. The government of the United States is effectively saying corporations have the right to poison people (all over the world, not just in America) as long as they pay other American corporations for that right. Fucked, isn't it?
Then there is the whole "new technology" fantasy. First it was solar panels. Solar energy was going to save us from ourselves without anyone needing to cut back on anything. Then someone did the math and realized solar panels take more energy to produce than they create in their lifespan. Ooops. Same with ethanol instead of gasoline. It takes more energy to plant, grow, harvest, transport, convert from food to ethanol, transport again, than it releases when you burn it. It's a net negative. Worse still, it is burning food while people are starving so we can feel better about driving around when we could walk, take transit, carpool, etc. Now it's wind. The American Congress is currently paying for research on the noise pollution caused by wind turbines. That's fucked. Apparently the petro-kings are concerned wind is going to hurt their bottom line.
All of these solutions, and the others we are praying for, share a common flaw. Climate change is not a technical problem. It is a political problem and it needs a political solution. When the world finally found out how bad smoking is for peoples' health, they didn't immediately demand cleaner, more efficient cigarettes. There was no great effort to create less harmful forms of tobacco - clean cigarettes, like clean coal. They just pressured governments into making smoking illegal anyplace there are other people, covered cigarette packages with disgusting health warnings, and prohibited tobacco companies from advertizing. A concerted political program.
Our current financial up-fuckery is very similar to climate change. It will not be solved by economic technocrats tinkering with the system. It is a political problem. How tax dollars are used and who we want the government to tax are absolutely fundamental political questions. It's hard to get more political than that. But instead of taking them on as properly political questions, we are told not to politicize economic issues. Instead of economists taking an impartial advisory roll (helping the members of the body politic understand the ramifications of political decisions), the economists have usurped our political authority. Economists are making political decisions while claiming to be non-partial experts.
I trust most non-partial experts. When you want to know something about climate change, ask a climate scientist. If you want to know about the law, ask a lawyer or a judge. If you want to know about disease, ask a doctor. But we don't ask climate scientists, lawyers, or doctors to take away our right to make fundamental decisions about the kind of society we live in. They are experts whose opinions are valuable in helping all of us make politic decisions and they have as much right to participate in those decisions as everyone else. But never allow anyone to turn a political problem requiring a political solution into a technical problem that only a technician can solve.
And, as Howard Zinn wrote (and I'm paraphrasing), "Don't confuse elections with democracy. Dictators love elections. The difference between a dictatorship and America is they only have one name of the ballot and we have two - ain't America grand?"
In the same way, we shouldn't confuse parliamentism with democracy either. When our leaders neither need or want anything from us except our vote every four years, what we have is a representative government (of a kind) but not a democracy.
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