A Suggestion for a New York Times OP-ED

GLOBAL WARMING, HUMAN VALUES, AND A NEW VISION FOR SOCIETY

By Thomas F. Malone

More than seventy years as a scientist, educator, and business executive, and   -- most important  -- as a global citizen have lead me to be prudently optimistic about the outcome of the public dialogue now underway on global warming. Of particular interest, this dialogue contains fertile seeds for further discussion and substantive action on the broader challenges within which it is enmeshed.

Recent developments in the public discourse on global warming have propelled the issue to a prominent place on the world’s agenda.  This topic is now the leading edge of the overarching challenge of the 21st Century -- to reconcile a continually expanding civilization with the finite capacity of planet Earth’s natural resources to support humanity. Over the past year, renewed focus on this emerging challenge has developed from: (1) the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore and to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (2) the release of Lighting the Way, a roadmap toward a sustainable energy future by the world’s major national academies of science (www.interacademycouncil.net), and (3) the report by Corinne Le Quere in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science revealing that stabilization of CO2  in the atmosphere will be more difficult than previously thought.

The intrinsic nature of this “overarching challenge” is evident in business-as-usual demographic and economic projections to 2050. World population would then be fifty percent larger than it is today, while the global economy would be four times larger.  Today, human demands on our planet’s natural resources already exceed by about 25 percent its capacity to renew those resources.  This gap is growing annually -- a scenario that defines an environmentally unsustainable society.  Moreover, the average standard of living of the one billion individuals in developed countries is six times greater than the average of the five billion people in developing countries. This gap is expanding.  It describes an economically inequitable society.  The perilous deterioration in sustainability and equity threatens social stability -- a frightening scenario for world society.  Global warming is deeply embedded in this looming catastrophe.

Fortunately, there is an attractive alternative to this business-as-usual projection.  Public awareness of global warming – transformed into enlightened public policy – could be a precursor to prudent management of both sustainability and equity. This would lead to success in the pursuit of a new vision of world society in which all of the basic human needs and an equitable share of life’s amenities are met by every individual in successive generations while maintaining a healthy, physically attractive, and biologically productive environment.

This vision is now within reach, but it will require profound changes in human behavior.
The challenge was identified more than a half a century ago by Fairfield Osborn in his 1948 book, Our Plundered Planet:  “The tide of the earth’s population is rising, the reservoir of the earth’s living resources is falling. … [Man] must temper his demands and use and conserve the natural living resources of this earth in a manner that alone can provide for the continuation of his civilization.” More recently, Mary Evelyn Tucker and John Grim wrote in the summer 2007 issue of Yale University Divinity School’s Reflections: “There is a dawning realization from many quarters that the changes humans are making on the planet are comparable to the changes of a major geological era. … Global warming is already evident in melting glaciers, thawing tundra, and flooding of coastal regions.  … increasing damage to ecosystems reveals we are making macrophase change to the planet with microphase wisdom. … How can we ensure equitable development that does not destroy the environment?  Can religious and cultural perspectives help solve environment challenges?”

In acknowledging the Nobel Award, Al Gore remarked: “the climate crisis is not a political issue, it is a moral and spiritual challenge to all of humanity.” The InterAcademy Council’s first conclusion in Lighting the Way noted: “Meeting the basic energy needs of the poorest people on this planet is a moral and social imperative that must be pursued in concert with sustainability objectives.” It is increasingly clear that success in the pursuit of the vision presented above will require a major social adjustment that, in turn, needs broad-based agreement on human values, attitudes, and behavior. 

To meet this challenge, new patterns of individual human behavior based on common values will be required.  New dimensions of “bottoms-up” collaboration need to be cultivated among individuals, nations, cultures, business and industry, and the world’s religions. A concerted effort by all sectors of society is needed to address the complex issue of global warming.

It is now a matter of urgency for world society to examine the role of human values, attitudes, and behavior to cope with the threat to civilization that is generated by human activities.
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Dr. Malone has been a tenured associate professor at MIT; Foreign Secretary, Nat’l. Acad. of Sciences; and Senior Vice President & Director of Research, Travelers Insurance Companies. His lead-off address to a Conference on “Technological Change and the Human Environment” at the California Institute of Technology in 1970 warned: “Continued burning of fossil fuels will cause the earth’s temperature to rise and create other grave climate changes … we are poised on the threshold of an era that is a threat to the human species [demanding] intensive study if life, as we know it is to continue.”