Page 2 of
2 Osamanomics and the
greens By Chan Akya
Afghanistan or most parts of
Pakistan - force the central organization to lash
out at all other economic forms, with secular
democracies and liberal capitalism becoming the
prime targets mainly because of their unquestioned
success relative to other forms of government and
economic organization.
Luddite and
anti-modern Many authors, including John
Gray, have cast al-Qaeda's brand of Islam as
merely the most updated version of anti-modern
movements. [4] The domination
of the Western schools of thought in both the
economic and political spheres over the past 200
years has helped to generate resentment across a
wider group of vested interests than ever before.
While some object to the relentless pace
of modern life, most merely chafe at the identity
of the successful - thus it is that a combination
of sloth and envy helps to fuel the engine of both
the greens and Islamic terrorists. This is no
trivial point, as the key objective for both
groups is to reverse the gains being made by some
sections of society, and both operate at least
nominally in the name of the greater good. The
philosophical construct underpinning both
movements, then, is the same disdain for liberal
capitalism that writers such as Francis Fukuyama
[5] classified as the sole victor from the wars of
the last century.
Much as the arguments
may make sense in some context, the immediate
consequences of what the greens intend can be
quite damaging for Asian economies. In particular,
mandated reductions on emissions and the use of
carbon credits to offset Western emissions will
both damage Asia far more than al-Qaeda ever
could, even when one includes the horrific bomb
blasts in the Indian city of Hyderabad recently.
[6]
Asian countries have only just started
their evolution on the economic scale of things.
An example of how restrictions on emissions may
hurt the region can be understood by looking at
coal-fired power plants in China. While the
Western examples of such plants are inevitably
decades old and therefore ripe for replacement,
China's power plants are fairly new and modern. To
ask the country to replace these plants in short
order, say over the next 20 years, would cause
significant economic damage and in essence a
rollback on the pace of industrialization in many
if not most parts of the country.
Carbon
credits are even worse, as they quite literally
move the problem from one country to another,
inevitably punishing the poor. A typical scheme
for generating carbon credits for a polluting
company in say, Germany, would be to buy them from
a company in South America, which generates them
by either afforestation or a reversion to organic
farming. While this looks good on paper
(acid-free, of course), what it means in practice
is that a few hundred Latin Americans lose their
jobs working on farms, while the farmers lose
their crop gradually to pests and the vagaries of
the weather.
Incredibly, these countries
would then be forced to buy grains from exactly
the same countries to which they sold the carbon
credits in the first place, namely the rich
economies of Europe and North America. This is one
reason wheat exports from the US and Canada have
increased dramatically of late. No green lobby I
know has dared to touch the lot of Western
farmers, and yet they remain strongly supportive
of pushing the pain to the poor farmers of the
Third World who already have to compete with the
glut caused by egregious subsidies provided to
Western farmers, thereby needing the additional
income that forces them to use "green-friendly"
technologies.
Confronting such poverty and
the conflicting demands for generating green
credits imposed on them by corrupt politicians and
other leaders, many of the poor choose to join
radical movements, whether it is the local
communist rebels in Mexico or al-Qaeda in
Indonesia. Any atrocities thus committed then go
to feed the Western guilt machine I described in
the first paragraph.
There are much
simpler, market-based approaches to the pricing of
negative economic goods such as air pollution that
would limit the economic fallout on other
communities. These would, however, necessitate
less demagoguery and more comprehensive
understanding of the underlying causes of
excessive consumption. Among the policy weapons
that can be used to fight over-consumption in the
West would be adjustments to Asian currencies,
which I have long argued in favor of.
Ignoring such obvious measures and instead
pursuing "pie in the sky" plans for conditional
charging based on usage and imposing blanket
limits on emissions would instead condemn billions
to lives of servitude and poverty. Greens have to
wake up before this destructive spiral gathers too
much momentum.
Notes 1.
Eco-friendly terrorism,
Asia Times Online, September 30, 2006. 2.
"Energy's future: Beyond carbon", Scientific
American, September 2006. 3. When progress is against the
law, ATol, June 2, 2007. 4. John
Gray, Al Qaeda and What It Means to Be
Modern, 2004. 5. Francis Fukuyama, "The end
of history?", The National Interest, 1989. 6.
India's Muslim 'problem',
ATol, September 1, 2007.
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