How to Save the Planet: Pragmatism vs. Idealism

An editorial written by Todd Lemons, Chairman of the Veridium Foundation

Throughout my career, there seems to have been confusion on the issue of what label to apply to me: Idealist or Pragmatist? Conservationist or Capitalist? Liberal or Conservative? I have no plans to solve that conundrum in this editorial as I prefer the hyphenated versions of those labels — as in “Idealistic Pragmatist” and “Conservation-Capitalist” and “Libertarian”, which is of course neither “liberal” or “conservative” in the common usage of those terms today.

Evidently, in this polarized world we now live in, there is no place for anything in between (or above). Our society likes things in neat and tidy boxes, which is convenient since it facilitates superficial discourse and clear-cut camps of “us vs them”. It seems there is no room anymore for complex personalities or viewpoints. That’s unfortunate, because the world is a complex place, with complex problems that can’t be solved with such simplistic analytics.

This black OR white only view of the world has gotten us into a lot of trouble — certainly politically — but more importantly at an even deeper existential level. Take the debate on climate change for example. For such a profound issue, little substance has been offered on either side of the debate.

The so-called “liberals” aka “climate believers” have pushed an agenda that was doomed from the start. Firstly, in what must be the most colossal marketing failure in history, somebody decided to brand the issue “global warming” — leaving the door wide open to debate when we promptly had some of the worst winter storms in recent memory. At some point, somebody in the “global warming” camp realized that, in fact, the phenomenon they were studying and fretting about was actually “climate destabilization”, which included weather extremes ranging from freezing winters & blistering summers and floods & droughts. So, they rebranded the cause as “climate change”.

The other mistake they made is to steadfastly declare that what we were experiencing was “entirely and definitively 100% human caused”. The problem with declarations like that is that they are wide open for debate. There’s clearly a very strong correlation between the rise of atmospheric CO2 levels and the increase in the combustion of fossil fuels since the beginning of the industrial revolution. But, the fact is, nobody can say for sure. I’m deeply entrenched in the business of reversing climate change, and yet I really can’t say for sure that I understand the science or that I trust it entirely. After all, we have experienced dramatic swings in climate throughout the geological history of this planet. Something caused the ice-ages and the mini-ice-ages and something — besides human industrialization — caused them to reverse rather dramatically.

The third and most egregious mistake (crime) they committed is to avoid and exclude the single largest source of emissions — agriculture — from any of their proposed climate solutions. Agricultural conversion of forests and nitrogen-based fertilizers is the single largest contributor to global emissions, and I bet most of you never heard about that.

Why? Because it was politically expediate to sweep that under the rug. Governments and the United Nations are already in a state of panic about “food security” and so they let BIG-Ag off the hook and they focus on BIG-Oil instead. Otherwise, they’d have to wrestle with uncomfortable topics like over-population and exponential growth in consumption, which of course is how they fuel their budgets.

It was also politically expedient to exclude China and India from any emissions caps in the Kyoto Treaty. Instead, they drew the world black OR white and divided the world into two camps: “Developed/Industrialized” and “Under-Developed/Non-Industrialized”. Because they couldn’t get the votes they needed to pass the treaty without China and India, those two industrialized countries, the 1st and 3rd largest emitters in the world, were given a pass and put into the “Under-Developed/Non-Industrialized” camp. Evidently in the strange world of global politics, China, the “world’s factory”, is somehow an “Under-Developed/Non-Industrialized” country.

President Trump called the Paris Agreement “bad for America”. The whole world has been up in arms about that. I disagree with President Trump. The Paris Agreement wasn’t just bad for America; it was bad for the environment. It was another politically expedient agreement that led the world to believe they had actually done something meaningful, when in fact they once again let China and India off the hook. For the other signatory countries, the agreement had no auditing requirements for the “self-reported data” and no penalties for their missing their agreed targets. The politicians’ defense is that it “sent the right signals” and their excoriation of President Trump was that “he sent all the wrong signals”. I don’t care much about “signals”. I care about substance. So, let’s just call it for what it really is: a farce.

On the other side of the debate, the so-called “conservatives”, aka “climate deniers”, have dismissed, completely out of hand, a “preponderance of evidence” and the fact that 95% of the world’s scientists agree that “climate change” is “human-caused”. To my knowledge, they haven’t presented much evidence to the contrary, except for the anecdotal argument that I just made about the ice-ages and the subsequent warming periods that followed.

So, where do I fall on the issue? Again, in neither camp. Here’s what I do know:

All advanced civilizations depend on agricultural surpluses; and agricultural surpluses depend on a stable climate.

For a civilization to thrive and advance, it must be able to direct a majority of its labor and resources to something other than obtaining food for mere survival. Once agricultural surpluses are generated, a larger portion of society can dedicate themselves to the arts and sciences, which are fundamental to the advancement of civilizations.

So, it would seem to me that, whether “climate change” is human caused or not, is utterly irrelevant. If you were diagnosed with cancer, you might not know if it were life-style driven or simply genetic. But, I’m willing to bet that you’d change your lifestyle — just in case. Our increased population and consumption rates are driving massive biodiversity and existential resource loss through agricultural expansion and climate instability is decreasing agricultural productivity. So, we add more and more nitrogen fertilizers to compensate, which generate more greenhouse gas emissions (possibly or probably) leading to more climate instability.

It would seem to me then, that any rational person would conclude that we need to change our lifestyle as a global society. Here’s another unassailable fact:

Our current extractive economic model only works for about 3.5 billion people — not 8.5 billion.

Our currently extractive economic model has never changed since the dawn of human civilization. We extract resources from nature to produce the goods and services we consume and nature’s bounty replaces what we consume. This model worked fine until somewhere in the 1960s when our population reached 3.5 billion and our consumption exceeded the Earth’s capacity to regenerate the resources we consume. For the Earth to support all 8.5 billion of us, we’d all have to live at the level of the average Bangladeshi.

So, once again, the only rational conclusion is that we need a new economic model — a regenerative economic model that embeds the environmental replacement costs into the price of the goods and services we consume. To summarize our choices:

The solutions to our global environmental problems are really not too big to overcome, if we’re willing to have an honest, pragmatic conversation about them. Let’s get down to the real numbers.

Climate Change:

· Global Emissions = 40.8 billion tonnes annually

· Global GDP = $80.7 trillion USD

· That means that for every dollar spent in the global economy, it has a carbon density (footprint) of 0.0005057 tonnes per $1 USD.

If we multiply that by today’s average market price ($10 USD) for carbon credit offsets (actual emissions reductions), we get a “carbon offset burden” of just 0.5% or half a US cent per $1 USD. That’s what it would take to completely offset the carbon footprint of all of humanity (including China and India and agriculture).

If we just embedded half a penny ($0.005) into the price of every $1 worth of goods and services we consume, we could completely mitigate ALL emissions.

Deforestation:

· Global Deforestation Rate = 8 million hectares (20m acres) annually

· Embedding a 0.5% “environmental replacement burden” into the cost of all the goods and services we consume would generate an Environmental Super-Fund of $403.4 billion USD.

That’s bigger than the aggregate operating budgets of ALL of the world’s environmental groups combined.

$403.4 billion dollars annually divided by 8 million hectares (20m acres) = an annual conservation budget of $50,000 per hectare per year.

To put that in perspective: one of the companies I founded, InfiniteEARTH, is a Conservation Landbank company that acquired and protects 65,000 hectares annually, which generates 4.5 million of forest conservation & carbon emissions reductions (REDD+ credits) per year. The project is home to over 100 endangered species and is the largest privately funded orangutan reserve in the world. It also provides health, education, employment and enterprise funding for 10,000 forest-dependent indigenous peoples.

InfiniteEARTH preserves one of the most biodiverse and endangered ecosystems on the planet, protects 100s of endangered species, conserves trillions of liters of water, provides health, education & employment support for 10,000 indigenous peoples — all on a budget of less than $100/hectare per year.

Directing that “environmental replacement budget” into REDD+ credits, which deliver tangible emissions reductions, forest, biodiversity and water conservation, as well as positive social impacts, would be a very powerful step towards creating a new regenerative economic model.

But, I guess that’s too complicated — or simplistic. I’m not sure which. Maybe it’s just too practical. Academics, politicians, bureaucrats, consultants and environmentalists have to take strong ideological stances to distinguish themselves from the “competition”. And, they certainly don’t make their living by making things uncomplicated and simple to deploy. If they did, then we wouldn’t need them.

Hmmm. Now, that’s an interesting thought.

Sincerely,

Todd Lemons

Chairman, Veridium Foundation

www.veridium.io