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Responsibility or Ruin

Jul 27, 2020 Joschka Fischer

Although the top priority today is to contain the COVID-19 pandemic and mitigate its economic fallout, we must not ignore the long-term implications of the crisis. Our actions now determine the fate of all other species on the planet, yet we are not fully in control of nature.

BERLIN – After many months, the global economy is still reeling from the shock of the COVID-19 pandemic. Never before in peacetime has our technology-driven modern society experienced anything remotely similar to this.

Will there be a “second wave,” followed by more waves thereafter? That frightening question is now preoccupying people around the world, but particularly policymakers and national leaders. Nobody knows the answer. There is no playbook for a scenario in which a high-tech world economy interconnected by global supply chains is brought to its knees by a microscopic pathogen.

It would be a mistake to assess the meaning of this abrupt stop only from a short-term perspective. To be sure, the immediate priority is the fight against COVID-19. The pandemic has had dire economic and social implications for billions of people, and it seems to be hastening a global shift in political and economic power.

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Joschka Fischer

Writing for PS since 2006
173 Commentaries

Joschka Fischer was German Foreign Minister and Vice Chancellor from 1998-2005, a term marked by Germany's strong support for NATO's intervention in Kosovo in 1999, followed by its opposition to the war in Iraq. Fischer entered electoral politics after participating in the anti-establishment protests of the 1960s and 1970s, and played a key role in founding Germany's Green Party, which he led for almost two decades.

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0 Comments on this paragraph, 16 in all 16 Comments on this article

David Belay Aug 4, 2020

Unfortunately Mr. Fischer's country and party (The Greens) are unlikely to be part of the solution. The much celebrated European deal falls well short of being a Green New Deal. Germany and its allies systematically block the kind of massive public investment that would be required to tackle the problem. At home it is hard to see the influence of the Greens. Here in Frankfurt we see more and more SUVs and ridiculously oversized vehicles while our electricity is still planned to come from coal for the next... 18years!
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Lester Soss Jul 28, 2020

Mirek Fatyga writes a thoughtful comment on this excellent article by Fischer. However, there is one point he makes that I found confusing. He writes, "Perhaps we need a new religion? ... The survival of 8 billion (going on 10 billion) people is now tied to the success of our science."

Does he really believe we need a new religion? Can science and organized religion really coexist? After all, the recrudescence of religious fanaticism around the world can easily be tied to the increasing hostility toward science.

In the US, it is the evangelicals who clamor for the apocalypse because it augurs the second coming.
- Michael Public Jul 29, 2020
  
  I have seen a lot of scientific fanaticism too. But I guess that is fine because they are on the side of good...
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- Scott McL Jul 28, 2020
  
  You are wrong. If you need my credibility, I am a former board member of DC Technology Council. Science, Technology, Industry, Automation, Commercial Industry and Commercial Industrial Goods are all separate things. Everyone who dares use the term "Science" as a synonym for Industrial Automation or Commercial Goods is errant. Sciences tell us WHAT NOT TO DO, as much as anything else. Start there. Real Scientists wielding Sciences will tell us to curtail commodity monoculture farm exports and to then rotate our crops. This should be obvious. I also worked for Unitarians at Harvard, and then participated in several "AI" ventures. Religion is not a synonym for "Superstition." In plain fact, fools babbling about Transhumanism and Hal 9000 AI are embarrassing superstitious fools. Our foolish pop Hagiography of Futurism Fictions is commercial babbling on advertiser lips, and embarrassing babble on advertising victim lips. I also worked for State Dept. This foolishness, peddling and error infects all our self-aggrandizing and corrupted institutions, top to bottom.
  - Michael Public Jul 29, 2020
    
    Nobody intelligent cares about credentials - if anything, they just guarantee a certain kind of partisan closed mindedness. Rather deal very clearly (and if possible, simply) with the ideas in question.
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Tony van der Togt Jul 28, 2020

I miss population-density and -growth on the sustainability agenda.
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Michael Public Jul 27, 2020

And if they do not - who will force them? Monarchy gave peasants no illusions about how much freedom they had. What post monarchy governments brought was a PROMISE of freedom - but just (say) try and play your favorite song on a Youtube video to see how much actual freedom you have. Or move countries. Or get sick at work. Or pay for living as a single parent. Freedom is like God during the middle ages - every knows who he is - nobody has actually seen him.
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Michael Public Jul 27, 2020

Wheat. Maize. Rice. These are the plants we eat most. Which would you say is closest to extinction /s
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Michael Public Jul 27, 2020

There are no quantum computers that can do anything useful. They are just bragging right science projects for big tech.
- Scott McL Jul 28, 2020
  
  You are correct. Quantum Computers might someday render most cryptography obsolete. That's about their only promise. We need managed horticultural biodiversity and crop rotations. We already have all the tools and sciences to achieve those goals. We've reached the end of the line. There are no more "frontiers of science," or many useful new applications of machine automation or applied math ("computing") automation.
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Michael Public Jul 27, 2020

AI is near useless for pandemic health responses - because it need accurate timely data, and for privacy and other reasons, this is simply not made available, except in China, where there used it to halt the pandemic in very little time.
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Michael Public Jul 27, 2020

No. Plants love a carbon dioxide rich environment. I can easily see a future where ferns and cockroaches are the new dominant species. A billion years later, bipeds can evolve again and start burning fossilised ferns for fuel. We can repeat this at least five times before the sun burns out.
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Mirek Fatyga Jul 27, 2020

Let's take progress where we can find it. A brief mention of the population growth as a factor we have to reckon with.

It is actually the factor at the moment. It may not remain the factor forever, but it is the factor for the moment.

Few, of the long list, of consequences of this factor.

The Western Economic theory needs to factor in resource constraints as a barrier to economic growth based on the growth of consumption. This does not always mean that the overall standard of living has to decline. Consuming healthcare has different constraints than buying a new car every three years.

The Western Economic and Social theory needs to factor in social consequences of limits on the growth of consumption, in the developed, and in the developing world. They are different in each, potentially destabilizing in both. Resource constraints are not eternal, they can be overcome by substitution. But, in the long run we are all dead and, in a shorter run, we get mad and have a revolution.

The free market fundamentalism looks more quaint with every passing hour. Markets are essential but, like any optimization algorithm, they can easily get stuck in a local minimum. Brazil is a splendid example. If 90% of the planet's people are somehow prevented from using oil in appreciable quantities, there is no oil crisis, ever. In fact, there may very well be a glut, just like there is one today. To me, personally, this means that I can support temporary government intervention, if this is what it takes, to get markets out of that local minimum. Going back to the new theory.

I am also weary of Government intervention. Animal Farm and the Soviet Empire beacon. Who said that life is easy? And, it would be boring if it was easy, no? We just have to be a little careful that it does not get too interesting, with all them nukes hanging around. Again, who said that life would be easy? If mom and dad said this, they lied, though with best of intentions.

By the way, the new theory cannot just be, "print some money and give it to everyone". Resource constraints all over again.

Perhaps we need a new religion? From the conquerors of the Earth, cause God gave it to us to multiply, to Stewards of the Earth that God gave to us for safekeeping, making us (just a tiny bit) smarter than the beasts?

Last, but not least, we need to return to integrity. The survival of 8 billion (going on 10 billion) people is now tied to the success of our science. We must fight, vigorously, any attempts to use science as a political prop and have an equally vigorous discussion about the integrity of scientific institutions. They are human institutions and thus, they can be corrupted. Animal Farm all over again.

About that climate change thing ...
- Scott McL Jul 28, 2020
  
  Apart from migrations, populations are shrinking where consumption is high, and only growing where consumption is lowest. Population is NOT our problem. Consumption is our only problem, which is mostly the boredom of "Western" women raised on TV advertising who control 70-80% of household consumer dollars and associated credit card debts. None of that was or is OK. I love my grandmas, but it is errant and immoral to flatter the TV cultivated consumer lusts of our peoples. No slander or *ISMS will or can detract from these statistics that every consumer marketing expert knows very well. We're not living in space or on Mars. We'll grow strawberries in Saudi deserts and live underwater far before then.
  - Mirek Fatyga Jul 29, 2020
    
    I wish you were correct, but alas, I do not think you are.
    
    To bring 8 billion people to the North American level of the consumption of oil, the world oil production would have to quadruple. To the EU level, which is (on average) poorer and more compact, it would "only" have to double. Do the math, and ask yourself a question how would you cut US oil consumption by a factor of four, what the economy would be like. You can't feed US population without industrial agriculture, and this is just one example.
    
    Yes, the population drops with urbanization. The country of my birth, Poland, is experiencing dropping population. The problem is that people cannot be parked in storage while you wait for the rest of this century for the urbanization to take hold, and it will not take hold unless you provide adequate resources to urbanize. Oil based civilization cannot urbanize 8 or 10 billion people, this is the current problem. Brazil is an outstanding example of this problem.
    
    We need to be level headed, not ideological. Today, say population to the right, and you are a Malthusian. Say population to the left, and you are blaming the poor for being poor. They both put ideology above common sense and basic numbers, I am sorry to say.
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