Why Are We Running a Carbon Deficit?
Economics, Commons and Carbon
In the last two hundred years, our impact on the planet has been quite substantial. We’ve wiped out species, probably created a few more, and managed to turn a balanced system into an unbalanced one, all in the name of taking care of our own needs (of course) and making life better for people (and politicians) everywhere.
But, I digress, why are we running a carbon deficit?
We have created a lot of machinery over the last two hundred years. Yes, there are the physical machines that use fossil fuels, and the electrical machines that play their part too. These machines are good pumps they made us mobile and kept us moving. But, the biggest culprit is our economic machinery, the systems that we have put in place to govern our society, and our means for producing the things we need, and throwing away the things that we don’t need.
Game theory (ala John Nash) will tell you that selfish economies have blind spots that can lead to globally sub-optimal outcomes. When we act from self-interests, we can sometimes miss the point: There is often a better solution that can be obtained by cooperating. But the harder question in economics and politics is what to cooperate on, and to what end?
The things that we have built have proven themselves to be carbon expensive. These are systems that move food, fuel, and the other components of life around the world as well as the components themselves. On the other hand, we have actively damaged the natural systems that take carbon out of the air. We made it hotter while fucking up the air conditioning and that is a relatively mild way of putting things. The forests, the whales and plankton, the wild herds roaming across continents, and the grasslands and savannahs are damaged biome components that played their part in keeping the planet cool. We damaged the commons and committed the tragedy of the commons while on a global scale creating an unprecedented level of wealth and mess.
It is our economics that failed us, but perhaps they might also be the cure. Another Nobel laureate, Elinor Ostrom, did substantial work on how to address the tragedy of the commons. The basic thinking of her work is what is needed to start reversing the damage. Her research argues that there are eight core principles that are needed to regulate all commonage, like the air we breathe and the water we drink, and the vital ecosystems that support life on this planet. These are and I’m quoting from here:
1. Clearly defined boundaries.
2. Proportional equivalence between benefits and costs.
3. Collective choice arrangements.
4. Monitoring.
5. Graduated sanctions.
6. Fast and fair conflict resolution.
7. Local autonomy.
8. Appropriate relations with other tiers of rule-making authority (polycentric governance).
They read like common sense ways to run a family, or a business, or a school. It’s not a stretch to suggest that systems that are designed according to these principles look to get the socially optimal maximum out of exchanges between parties, which also contains regulatory and punitive measures for putting the “social group” at risk at local and at global scales.
But we were talking about carbon. Sorting out the carbon deficit will require massive cooperation and creativity, and this will only come with global frameworks and thinking that goes beyond “invisible hand” selfish economics. We can choose to be disbanded, disconnected and disagreeable or we can be one tribe. The choice is ours, and perhaps the contribution of Greta Thunberg has been to remind us that we do have a choice in how we deal with the climate crisis, and how we relate to the planet.
