Green Greed

I heard Thomas Freidman interviewed on PRI Marketplace. A regular reader of the NY Times opinion section knows the flat worlder, married to a billionaire, Freidman, has gone green.

More than a decade ago it was obvious to European governments and some European corporations that developing, manufacturing, and selling, green technology, would be a tremendous economic stimulus. Not just obvious to European governments either. To a tin foil hat wearing nut, like me, it was pretty obvious too.

When you think about outlandish conspiracy theories, the idea that global warming was concocted to ruin the U.S. economy has to rank up there with the idea that the moon landings were a hoax, and that Elvis Presley is alive and living in Kalamazoo.

So why did it take so long for the economic elites like Freidman to go green? Why did they continue to push the idea, though the mainstream media they control, that the science was inconclusive or worse that it was just a big conspiracy? The simple answer is short term greed. And that is just it isn’t it? Greed, avarice, lust for money and wealth. Freidman actually said on marketplace, that greed is good. But then he started talking out of the other side of his mouth and said that government regulation was needed to stimulate the development of green technology. Hmmm, so government actually may play a positive role in economic stimulus?

So why now? Why have the economics of controlling greenhouse gasses suddenly become so obvious to the economic elites of the United States? In all honesty I don’t really know except that greed is the underlying factor. Still this is a classic example of a tipping point. Was it Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth”? I don’t know. Still I find it amazing the astounding change in attitudes we have seen in just 2 years.

Putting on my funny hat, I speculate that the elites finally came to an consensus at a place like Davos in ‘06. They realized that global warming was a threat to their long term wealth and power. Elites don’t like radical change. They may actually remember the lessons of the French revolution. Perhaps this realization canceled out their short term greed?

I think about Isaac Asmov’s character Harry Sheldon, and the hypothesis of psychohistory. The statistician in me knows that all stable systems are predictable. They vary randomly within 3 sigma limits. An unstable system has points outside those three sigma limits. The application of these statistical principals to human events is the basis for Asmov’s idea. If I were a greedy billionaire, motivated by the accumulation of wealth, I would probably have some smart economists and statisticians working for me. They would understand the theory of Gaussian distribution. These smart people would be looking for real trends in the system. Keep in mind that a trend is not intuitive. A true trend is based upon mathematical principals and very strict rules. It requires an understanding of statistical theory to recognize a real trend, as opposed to normal random variation in a system. Soooo... Maybe someone recognized a trend? The system was on the verge of instability and it was time to stop the manipulation? Time to let the system fall back into its’ natural order.

This is the problem with greed. If the world economy is based on greed and the accumulation of wealth there will always be those who try and suceed manipulating the system to their own advantage. To my mind we need to tolerate greed but not embrace it as Freidman does. Too much of anything is never good. To overindulge is always unhealthy. We as a species need to seek balance and harmony. The past 25 years have seen an imbalance on the side of unregulated greed. The bad that has come of this far outweighs the good.

The Greatest Generation, lived through the great depression, saw the rise of fascism and fought “the war”. The majority of this generation came away from those experiences believing that together we could create a better world. Sure they made mistakes: For instance“Better living through chemistry.” was not completly true. But the wisdom of their experience has been lost, and those of us boomers who believe in the ideal of the majority of our parents generation have fallen into the minority. While our parents will be remembered as great we will be remembered as greedy and easily manipulated. Green greed. Well if that is what it takes. But would it not have been better if 15 years ago we had started to make changes in the way we live? Started the efforts to cut greenhose gasses back then? I remember having discussions about this problem way back then. Instead our politicians and the corporations decided on short term profit and more wealth for those who already have enough. Public opinion in this country was manipulated toward that end. Here we are today.

When it comes to the greater good, greed and free markets simply do not work.