I very much enjoyed reading your mother's entry regarding the historic election earlier this week. She captured some of my thoughts and feelings, but I thought I would add a few more. I would love to read some of my parents' thoughts during momentous occasions in the past. These are my thoughts at this time.
I am not hopeful when it comes to the future of the United States or this planet. I have three grave concerns, not one of which was adequately addressed during this past campaign season and only one of which possesses any real estate in the national conscience. These concerns will simultaneously make me appear to be both far right and far left in my ideas, but that is a small-minded way of looking at serious issues. The provenance of an idea does not concern me. The veracity does.
1. The United States economy is a house of cards. I first began to understand this while reading, of all things, the books of Carl Sagan, the astronomer and popular scientist. He bemoaned what he saw, during the 1970s, 80s, and 90s, as the collapse of the American manufacturing base, the transition to an export-free service industry, and the hyper-consumption, financed by debt, of both the US government and its populace. Recently, your Uncle Rob has enlightened me even further by recommending the writings of Peter Schiff. Schiff lays the case out very clearly, and the future of both the US dollar and the US economy is extremely bleak. On Obama's short-list for Secretary of the Treasury is Paul Volcker, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve who so wisely raised interest rates to stop the hyperinflation of the late 70s and early 80s. But even he seems to be blind to the obvious present-day truth. I am not confident that liquidity injections, stimulus packages, corporate bailouts, or any other manner by which the government in essence "prints money" will save our sinking ship. Hopefully, Barack Obama is intelligent and independent enough to recognize the truth at some point in the near future. Time will tell. You already know the answer.
2. Earth's population at the time that I write this is around 6.5 billion people and is increasing geometrically. Such growth cannot be sustained. Do yourself a favor and read "The Tragedy of the Commons," with the hindsight you possess, and marvel at how we ignored this problem until it was much too late (much like the dollar crisis and the collapse of the US economy). There is a fixed amount of natural resources on this planet. Earth cannot continue to support a compounding human growth rate. Carl Sagan envisioned a future in space, but our bankrupt economy handicaps our ability to invest in the future. There will likely be mass starvation and deadly plagues in order to balance out the surplus of humans at some point in the future. The problem is that this is a classic example of a prisoner's dilemma. If you cooperate and decrease your birth rate, as some Europeans and Asians have done, others will defect and continue to reproduce, as the immigrant populations in those countries have done. This is occurring in Spain, Italy, Germany, Japan, France, and several other nations where the native population is in danger of becoming a minority. The only way this problem can be solved, without mass tragedy, is if everyone chooses to sacrifice his or her own personal desires for a large family and cooperates by holding to the prescribed number of children. When everyone else is cooperating, however, the temptation to defect is all the more powerful. Compounding the problem is a perverse form of natural selection. Those that recognize the problem and thus reduce their birth rate leave behind fewer descendants than those that are inclined to reproduce as if there were literally no tomorrow. I want the best for you, and your children, and their children, ad infinitum. But it seems to me that this geometric growth cannot go on forever. Thus far, I have heard President-elect Obama say nothing about this 900-pound gorilla in the dark corner of our collective conscience.
3. I credit Al Gore with bringing climate change out of the shadows on the fringe and into the light of acknowledgement. He staked his reputation on the case linking carbon-based energy production to Earth's increasing mean temperature. Carl Sagan was warning us decades ago, however, by highlighting the case of Venus, which can be considered Earth's twin given its size and composition. The mean temperature on Venus is a scorching 460 degrees Centigrade, but this increased temperature, when compared to Earth's, cannot be accounted for merely by Venus' relative proximity to the sun. Venus' atmosphere is loaded with carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. There is little fixed carbon on Venus, whereas Earth has abundant fixed carbon in the form of coal, oil, and plant mass. If we continue to release fixed carbon by burning it to create energy, we will progressively make our Earth more and more like Venus. This is the one issue which President-elect Obama has addressed and to which he made a stronger commitment to change the status quo than his opponent. Yet even he has been swayed by the powers that be into endorsing continued drilling for oil and utilization of so-called "clean coal." They rest their hopes on carbon-capture, a technology that is decades from being realized on an appreciable scale. Yet non-fossil fuel energy is here, right now, waiting to be used. The problem is that it is politically unpopular (nuclear energy) or expensive (geothermal, solar, wind, etc.). Part of the solution is conservation, part of the solution is a transition from automobile-based transportation to public transportation, part of the solution is nuclear energy in the present, and part of the solution is investment in the future. Given the current state of the US economy, were are currently in no position to pay for more expensive energy now or invest the tremendous amount of wealth it will take to develop the energy of the future.
None of these ideas are politically popular. The solutions to all three will require individuals to save rather than consume, sacrifice for the future rather than demand gratification in the present, have less children rather than more, live simply and efficiently rather than opulently and excessively, and generally accept a different life than the one they had envisioned for themselves as privileged Americans. Game Theory assures us that this will not happen spontaneously. I do not know if such prescriptions for long-term success can be legislated or executed (read: enforced). Although I am hopeful that President Obama will end the unjust war in Iraq and repair our decimated international reputation and relations, I am not hopeful that electing him will change the ultimate fate of our nation and our world.
Hopefully the moral Zeitgeist of your generation will have evolved and matured enough to accept responsibility for these coming calamities, just as we have moved beyond slavery, segregation, and racism enough to elect a man of African descent in our day.
