Don’t think that the Gini coefficient alone will describe the situation, however; this would be succumbing to monocausotaxophilia, the love of single ideas that explain everything, one of humanity’s most common cognitive errors. The Gini figures for Bangladesh and for Holland are nearly the same, for instance, at 0.31; but the average annual income in Bangladesh is about $2,000, while in Holland it’s $50,000. The spread between the richest and the poorest is an important consideration, but when everyone in that spread is pretty well off, this is a different situation than when everyone across the spread is poor.
Thus other rubrics to think about inequality have been devised. One of the best is the “inequality-adjusted Human Development Index,” which is no surprise, because the Human Development Index is already a powerful tool. But it doesn’t by itself reveal the internal spread of good and bad in the country studied, thus the inequality adjustment, which gives a more nuanced portrait of how well the total population is doing.
While discussing inequality, it should be noted that the Gini coefficient for the whole world’s population is higher than for any individual country’s, basically because there are so many more poor people in the world than there are rich ones, so that cumulatively, globally, the number rises to around 0.7.
Also, there are various ways of indicating inequality more anecdotally (perhaps we could say in more human terms) than such indexes. The three richest people in the world possess more financial assets than all the people in the forty-eight poorest countries added together. The wealthiest one percent of the human population owns more than the bottom seventy percent. And so on.
Also, note that these disparities in wealth have been increasing since 1980 to the present, and are one of the defining characteristics of neoliberalism. Inequality has now reached levels not seen since the so-called Gilded Age of the 1890s. Some angles of evidence now suggest this is the most wealth-inequal moment in human history, surpassing the feudal era for instance, and the early warrior/priest/peasant states. Also, the two billion poorest people on the planet still lack access to basics like toilets, housing, food, health care, education, and so on. This means that fully one-quarter of humanity, enough to equal the entire human population of the year 1960, is immiserated in ways that the poorest people of the feudal era or the Upper Paleolithic were not.
Thus inequality in our time. Is it a political stability problem? Perhaps in a controlocracy backed by big militaries, no. Is it a moral problem? But morality is a question of ideology, one’s imaginary relationship to the real situation, and many find it easy to imagine that you get what you deserve, and so on. So morality is a slippery business.
So it is that one often sees inequality as a problem judged economically; growth and innovation, it is said, are slowed when inequality is high. This is what our thinking has been reduced to: essentially a neoliberal analysis and judgment of the neoliberal situation. It’s the structure of feeling in our time; we can’t think in anything but economic terms, our ethics must be quantified and rated for the effects that our actions have on GDP. This is said to be the only thing people can agree on. Although those who say this are often economists.
But that’s the world we’re in. And so people invent other indexes to try to come to grips with this issue. In fact we have seen a real proliferation of them.
Recall that GDP, gross domestic product, the dominant metric in economics for the last century, consists of a combination of consumption, plus private investments, plus government spending, plus exports-minus-imports. Criticisms of GDP are many, as it includes destructive activities as positive economic numbers, and excludes many kinds of negative externalities, as well as issues of health, social reproduction, citizen satisfaction, and so on.
Alternative measures that compensate for these deficiencies include:
the Genuine Progress Indicator, which uses twenty-six different variables to determine its single index number;
the UN’s Human Development Index, developed by Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq in 1990, which combines life expectancy, education levels, and gross national income per capita (later the UN introduced the inequality-adjusted HDI);
the UN’s Inclusive Wealth Report, which combines manufactured capital, human capital, natural capital, adjusted by factors including carbon emissions;
the Happy Planet Index, created by the New Economic Forum, which combines well-being as reported by citizens, life expectancy, and inequality of outcomes, divided by ecological footprint (by this rubric the US scores 20.1 out of 100, and comes in 108th out of 140 countries rated);
the Food Sustainability Index, formulated by Barilla Center for Food and Nutrition, which uses fifty-eight metrics to measure food security, welfare, and ecological sustainability;
the Ecological Footprint, as developed by the Global Footprint Network, which estimates how much land it would take to sustainably support the lifestyle of a town or country, an amount always larger by considerable margins than the political entities being evaluated, except for Cuba and a few other countries;
and Bhutan’s famous Gross National Happiness, which uses thirty-three metrics to measure the titular quality in quantitative terms.
All these indexes are attempts to portray civilization in our time using the terms of the hegemonic discourse, which is to say economics, often in the attempt to make a judo-like transformation of the discipline of economics itself, altering it to make it more human, more adjusted to the biosphere, and so on. Not a bad impulse!
But it’s important also to take this whole question back out of the realm of quantification, sometimes, to the realm of the human and the social. To ask what it all means, what it’s all for. To consider the axioms we are agreeing to live by. To acknowledge the reality of other people, and of the planet itself. To see other people’s faces. To walk outdoors and look around.
21
We were on the lakefront in Brissago, on the Swiss side of Lake Maggiore, partying on the lawn of Cinzia’s place, just above the narrow park between her property and the lake. She had a celebrity chef there who cooked with a welder’s torch he used to fire at the bottom of big frypans he held in the air, and a band with a brass section, and a light show and all that. Altogether a righteous party, and lots of happy people there, skewing young because that’s the way Cinzia likes it.
But the narrow stretch of grass between her lawn and the lake was a public park, and as we partied we saw a guy down there on the shore, just standing there staring up at us. Some kind of beachcomber dude, holding a piece of driftwood. Nothing Cinzia’s security could do about him, they told us. Actually they could have if they wanted to, but they didn’t. The local police might make trouble if someone were objected to for just standing on a public beach. This is what one of them told us when we told him to make the guy go away. The guy was skinny and bedraggled and he just kept staring, it was offensive. Like some kind of Bible guy laying his morality on us.
So finally a few of us went down there to do what the security team ought to have done, and send this guy packing. Edmund led the way as usual, he was the one most annoyed, and we followed along because when he was annoyed Edmund could be really funny.
The guy watched us come up to him and didn’t move an inch, didn’t say a word. It was a little weird, I didn’t like it.
Edmund got in the guy’s face and told him to leave.
The guy said to Edmund something like, You fuckers are burning up the world with your stupid games.
Edmund laughed and said, “Dost thou think because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?”
We laughed at that, but then this guy hit Edmund with the chunk of driftwood he was holding, so fast we had no time to react. Edmund went down like a tree, didn’t get his hands up or anything, just boom. He had been cold-cocked.
The guy held his piece of wood out at us and we froze. Then he tossed it at us and took off right into the lake, swimming straight out into the night. We didn’t know what to do— no one w
anted to swim off after a nut like that, not in the dark, and besides we were concerned about Edmund. It just looked bad, the way he went down. Like a tree. Cinzia’s security finally joined us, but they only wanted to hold the perimeter, they didn’t chase the guy either. They took over checking out Edmund, and when they did that they quickly got on their phones. An ambulance showed up in about five minutes and took him away. After that it was a couple of hours before we got word. We couldn’t believe it. Edmund was dead.
22
Adele Elia and Bob Wharton were at a meeting of the Scientific Committee for Antarctic Research, an international scientific organization formed to coordinate Antarctic research after the 1956 International Geophysical Year and the 1959 signing of the Antarctic Treaty. Over the years SCAR had become one of the main de facto governments of Antarctica, along with the US National Science Foundation and the British and other national Antarctic research programs, especially Argentina’s and Chile’s. The SCAR meeting was in Geneva this year, so it had been a morning’s train ride for Adele and Bob, who during their work in the ministry had become friends.
Now they sat looking out at the lake from a bar on the second story of the meeting’s hotel. Out the window beside their table they could see the famous fountain launch its spire of water into the air. To the south a stupendous set of thunderheads, as solid as the marble tabletops in their bar, lofted high over the Mont Blanc massif. They were enjoying this view and their drinks when they were approached by an American glaciologist they knew named Pete Griffen. Griffen was pulling by the arm another man they didn’t know, whom Pete introduced as Slawek, another glaciologist. Adele and Slawek had read some of each other’s papers, and even attended some of the same meetings of the AGU, but until now had never met.
A waiter appeared with a tray of drinks that Griffen had ordered: four snifters of Drambuie, and a carafe of water with water glasses. “Ah, Drambers,” Adele said with a little Gallic smile. This liqueur was what Kiwis always drank in the Dry Valleys, they informed Bob as they took their first sips. When Bob made a face as he tasted it, Griffen explained that long ago a ship filled with cases of the weird sweet stuff had been stranded in Lyttelton when its shipping company went bankrupt, and the cases had been warehoused there and over the years sent south for cheap, year after year. So they drank a toast to the Dry Valleys and settled into their chairs.
When asked, Slawek said he had spent five years all told in the Dry Valleys, and Adele countered that she had spent eight years living on glaciers; Pete grinned and topped them both with twelve years total on the Ice. They quickly pointed out that he was older and so had an advantage, which he agreed to immediately. Slawek said he had become a glaciologist to indulge his introverted personality while still holding down a job, and Adele laughed and nodded.
“A lot of us are that way,” she said.
“Not me!” Pete declared. “I like to party, but really the best parties are on the Ice.” He rotated his hand at Slawek as if coaxing him. “Come on, Slawek, tell these guys your idea. I think they need to hear it.”
Slawek frowned uncomfortably, but said, “You all heard the new data in there today.”
They agreed they had.
“Sea level will rise so fast, the world is fucked.”
It couldn’t be denied, the others agreed. The data were clear.
“So,” Pete prompted Slawek, “I’ve heard some people suggesting we just pump all the melted ice back up onto the polar plateau, right?”
Bob shook his head at hearing this. It was an old idea, he said, studied by the Potsdam Institute at one point, and the conclusions of their study had been bleak; the amount of electrical power needed to pump that much water up onto the east Antarctic ice cap came to about seven percent of all the electricity generated by all of global civilization. “It’s too energy intensive,” Bob concluded.
Slawek snorted. “Energy is the least of it. Since one percent of all electricity created is burned to make bitcoins, seven percent for saving sea level could be seen as a deal. But the physical problems are the stoppers. Have you run the numbers?”
“No?”
“Say sea level goes up one centimeter. That’s three thousand six hundred cubic kilometers of water.”
Adele and Bob glanced at each other, startled. Griffen was just smiling.
Slawek saw their look and nodded. “Right. It’s six hundred times as much as all the oil pumped every year. Building the infrastructure to do that would not be feasible. And it would have to be clean energy pumping it, or you’d be emitting more carbon. That much clean energy would take ten million windmills, Potsdam said. And the water would have to be moved in pipes, and that’s more pipe than has ever been made. And last but worst, the water has to freeze when it gets up there. Say a meter deep per year, I don’t think you could go any deeper without problems— that means about half of eastern Antarctica.”
“So it’s too much in every way,” Adele noted.
They drank more Drambers while they pondered it. Griffen said, “Come on, Slawek, get to your idea. Tell them.”
Slawek nodded. “Reality of problem is that glaciers are sliding into the sea ten times faster than before.”
“Yes.”
“So, the reason for that is there’s more meltwater created on the ice surface every summer, because of global warming. That water runs down moulins until it reaches the undersides of the glaciers, and there it has nowhere else to go. So it lifts up the ice a bit. It lubricates the ice flow over the rock beds. The ice used to be in contact with the rock bed, at least in some places, and usually in most places. The ice is so heavy it used to crush out everything under it. It bottomed out. Kilometer thick, that’s a big weight. So the glacier scraped down its bed right on the rock, bottomed out, ice to rock. Even sometimes frozen to rock. Stuck. A good percentage of glacial movement at that point was viscous deformation of the ice downhill, not sliding at all.”
Adele and Pete were nodding at this. Adele was beginning to look thoughtful, Griffen was grinning outright. “And so?” Bob said.
Slawek hesitated and Griffen said, “Come on!”
“Okay. You pump that water out from under the glaciers. Melt drillholes like we already do there when we check out subglacial lakes, or to get through the ice shelves. Technology is well known, and pretty easy. Pump up the water from under the glaciers, and actually, the weight of the ice on it will cause that water to come up a well hole ninety percent of the way, just from pressure of all that weight. Then you pump it up the rest of the way, pipe it away from the glacier onto some stable ice nearby.”
“How much water would that be?” Bob asked.
“All the glaciers together, maybe sixty cubic kilometers. It’s still a lot, but it’s not three thousand six hundred.”
“Or three hundred and sixty thousand!” Adele added. “Which is what a single meter rise in sea level would be.”
“Right. Also, the meltwater at the bottom of the glaciers is really from three sources. Surface water draining down moulins is the new stuff. Then geothermal energy melts a little bit of the glacier’s bottom from below, as always. It never melted much before, except over certain hot spots, but a little. Third source is the shear heat created by ice moving downstream, the friction of that movement. So. Geothermal in most places raises the temperature at the bottom of the glacier to about zero degrees, while up on the surface it can be as cold as forty below. So normally the heat from geothermal mostly diffuses up through the ice, it dissipates like that and so the ice on bottom stays frozen. Just barely, but normally it does. But now, the moulin water drains down there and lubricates a little, then as glacier speeds up going down its bed, the shear heat down there increases, so more heat, more melting, more speed. But if you suck the bottom water out and slow the glacier back down, it won’t shear as much, and you won’t get that friction melt. My modeling suggests that if you pump out about a third to a half of the water underneath the glaciers, you get them to slow down enough to reduce th
eir shear heat also, and that water doesn’t appear in the first place. The glaciers cool down, bottom out, refreeze to the rock, go back to their old speed. So you only need to pump out something like thirty cubic kilometers, from under the biggest glaciers in Antarctica and Greenland.”
“How many glaciers?” Pete asked.
“Say the hundred biggest. It’s not so bad.”
“How many pumps per glacier would you need?” Bob asked.
“Who knows? It would be different for each, I’m sure. Would be an experiment you’d have to keep trying.”
“Expensive,” Bob noted.
“Compared to what?” Pete exclaimed.
Adele laughed. “Jurgen said a quadrillion dollars.”
Slawek nodded, mouth pursed solemnly. “This would cost less.”
They all laughed.
Adele said to him, “So, Slawek, why didn’t you bring this up at the session today? It was about this acceleration of glaciers.”
Slawek quickly shook his head. “Not my thing. A scientist gets into geoengineering, they’re not a scientist anymore, they’re a politician. Get hate mail, rocks through window, no one takes their real work seriously, all that. I’m not ready for that kind of career change. I just want to get back on the Ice while I can still get PQ’ed.”
The Ministry for the Future Page 8
