Another Scenario for the End of our World

Another Scenario for the End of our World

Or, we could impose a substantial tax on emitted carbon dioxide, with the goal of reducing emissions by 80% by 2050, and so increased periodically. (A bill something like this is currently before the U.S. Congress, proposed by Mr. Larson, with the tax starting at $15 per metric ton of carbon dioxide, and increasing by $10 per ton per year; and increasing by $5 more per ton per year after five years if interim goals are not met.) The tax ideally would be on carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels; on agricultural emissions from the soil (carbon dioxide, nitrous oxide, methane); on emissions from forestry practices; and from pipelines, manure lagoons and landfills (methane). At least 75% of the tax would be rebated to the general population through a reduction in payroll taxes (or a reduction in the income tax, or an increase in the earned income tax credit), in a progressive way. A carbon tax is a regressive tax, like the sales tax, and hits people hardest who must spend most of their income. Despite the rebates, gas costing $4-$10 a gallon speeds the development of efficient cars, and of efficient public transportation—like the street cars of Central European cities, which come often, on time, with their routes and destinations clearly marked. Expensive oil and electricity makes insulating houses more profitable or, in hotter climates, in order to reduce or eliminate air conditioning, designing houses to take advantage of night-time cooling, the coolness of the earth, breezes and natural airflow. More expensive carbon-based energy makes energy from the sun, wind, and deep hot rocks economically competitive and eliminates the need for subsidies for such new energy supplies. The 25% of the tax money left over would support the reforestation or revegetation of degraded lands (in the U.S. or elsewhere); the management of forests or agricultural soils so as to limit their release of greenhouse gases; the preservation of natural or logged over tropical forests; the management of temperate forests and grasslands for carbon capture; the education of women in third world countries so as to allow them to control their destinies and reproductive lives; the development of agriculture and renewable energy in the undeveloped world; birth control; and other schemes to capture carbon and limit the human population. Reforestation or revegetation of degraded lands worldwide would capture all the carbon dioxide we are currently emitting and so (as energy conservation took hold and we emitted less) slow the warming of the earth. Feedback processes would slow and eventually reverse, as the continental glacier that began reforming several thousand years ago in northeast Labrador melted under the influence of human agricultural activity in Eurasia. Arctic ice would reform and cool the Arctic Ocean and provide habitat for creatures that live on or under the ice. Dry western and cold subarctic forests would regrow and begin absorbing carbon dioxide. The sea would lose carbon dioxide to its sediments and, as the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere fell, to the atmosphere, so its acidity would fall back to normal levels. All this would take some time, perhaps 800 years, perhaps less.

Governments in developed countries would let populations decline, as they would already be without immigration. Funding agricultural and energy development, the education of women, birth control, and good government in developing countries would help reduce the movement of populations from the poor to the rich world. The goal would be a world population of 1-2 billion people (reachable in a century if women restricted themselves to one child, longer if they have two). Getting through the demographic transition would be difficult but planning for it would make it possible.

The world would still warm. Much depends on how quickly feedback processes already in place (melting arctic ice, collapsing forests, methane bubbling up from the seabed along the arctic coasts) can be slowed or reversed. A sea level rise of 3-10 feet, and perhaps 80 feet, is already built into the atmosphere. Flood insurance for most coastal and riverside properties would be phased out and the houses demolished (they contain much useful material, which would be reclaimed if materials dumped in landfills paid their true costs) or moved away from the shore. Some very developed areas might be worth protecting.

As populations fell, agriculture, like forestry, would focus on the landscape as a whole (only partly an agricultural landscape). Agriculture would try to become carbon neutral or (in the case of grazed grasslands, buffalo or antelope commons) carbon storing. People would live among connected, more or less wild landscapes, in a more or less functioning natural world.

Management of the economy would not focus on growth but on the relationship of man to the natural environment, and thus on avoiding dangerous practices and chemistries, redistributing income, and maintaining a more or less steady economic state, with a constant eye on human relations to the natural world. The growth and death of individual businesses would constitute the creative destruction of capitalism. Toxic industrial chemistries would be phased out and replaced by nontoxic, non bio-accumulating chemistries. (A tax similar to the carbon tax would do the trick.) Waste would become a resource: the waste from one industry would feed another, in a circle of plenty. All manufactured materials would be recyclable or biodegradable. Our landfills would be mined for their methane, metals and composts.