Steve Damours's Answers to Staff Meeting Questions

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1.)What are the most serious global problems that need to be solved in
your lifetimes? What are some possible solutions?

a.) Peak Oil. We need drastic, heavy investment and government policy
development/implementation driving conservation and renewable energy
sources. T. Boone Pickins’ efforts and Al Gore’s advocacy are
illustrative moves in the right direction, but are just a beginning.
There’s not enough time to develop a bureaucratic behemoth to do the
EPA thing in the short run, but that will be absolutely necessary in
the long run. The U.S. needs to lead forcefully and invest heavily,
finding every motivational device to get India, China, Russia and
Brazil to go along as well. Carrots as well as sticks will be needed;
we need to help developing economies with transfer of clean
technologies.

b.) Global warming. The paragraph above is applicable here too,
almost verbatim.

c.) Nuclear proliferation. The follies of the U.S. in refusing to
talk while trying unsuccessfully to militarily and economically
intimidate North Korea and Iran to back off development of nuclear
power and possibly nuclear weapons makes it clear that tough-minded
diplomacy is the only short-term way to go. Strengthening the IAEA
and the entire system surrounding it is the long-term way to go. We
need to learn that isolating and harshly criticizing a country is a
formula for encouraging them to develop nukes, not abandon them. Once
they have them, they think they’ll have a deterrent. Take away the
threat, and much of the motivation disappears with it.


2. What are the obstacles that make these solutions difficult? How
can they be overcome?

In the first two cases above, inertia and momentum, the immense, multi-
trillion dollar investment in current technology and institutions,
makes the necessary speed of change extremely difficult. One great
advantage in the situation is that peak oil is forcing the needed
changes much faster than farsighted attention to global warming could
do alone. The fact that the solutions to the two problems are
essentially the same is a huge saving grace.

As noted above under problem #3, we know that refusing to talk and
military threats don’t work. There is simply no substitute for
diplomacy and even (surprise) a dollop of respect, which worked with
North Korea, in the short run. In the longer run, we’ll need
international agreements that require a strong regime of inspection to
allow countries to develop even peaceful nuclear technologies.


3. Will there need to be a paradigm shift in people’s thinking to
make these solutions feasible? What might this be like and how can
it brought about?

In the long run, a paradigm shift toward sustainability and slow
growth and toward institutionalized global cooperation (stronger
global governance) will be absolutely necessary, but these changes
will probably emerge from economic and environmental necessity rather
than from any “educational” effort.


4. What global structures might need to be created or redesigned to
make solution of global problems possible?

A system will be needed that recognizes that in some defined arenas
such as the environment, intrusive regulation and control at the
international level is a stark necessity. We have an excellent model
for this already in the World Health Organization. National
sovereignty will have to take a back seat to global interests and be
recognized as an instrumental goal occasionally to be modified or
qualified rather than an end-goal.

“Free trade” is going to have to shift to globally or at least
internationally globally regulated trade under powerful international
agreements and controls. The WTO or its successor will have to become
more democratic and transparent, and less dominated by the great
powers, if it is to go on at all.

At some point, the various strands of global institutional cooperation
will have to be drawn together into a more coherent system, and
federation will have to become a fact, though the word “federation”
will probably continue to be denied, as it is in Europe.