19 March 2012
Global Civilisation: The Options
By Gwynne Dyer
Reporter: “What do you think of Western civilisation, Mr Gandhi?” Mohandas Gandhi: “I think it would be a good idea.” The quote is probably apocryphal, but if the Mahatma didn’t say it, he should have.
Now we have something close to a global civilisation: most of the world’s people work in similar economies, use the same machines, and live about as long. They even know most of the same things and have the same ambitions. So we need somebody to ask us the same question. Do we really think a global civilisation is a good idea? And if so, have we any plans for keeping it going beyond a few generations more?
History is full of civilisations that collapsed, and often their fall was followed by a Dark Age. In the past these Dark Ages were just regional events (Europe after the fall of Rome, Central America after the collapse of Mayan civilisation, China after the Mongol invasion), but now we are all in the same boat. If this civilisation crashes then we could end up in the longest and worst Dark Age ever.
Our duty to our great grand-children is to figure out how to get through the 21st century without a collapse. We have all the rest of history to get through, but we cannot even imagine what the problems and opportunities of the 22nd century will be, so let’s concentrate on what would constitute interim success by 2100.
Interim success in 2100 would be a world in which a recognisable descendant of the current civilisation is still thriving. The global population might be heading back down towards the current seven billion by then, having peaked at several billion higher, but it won’t fall faster than that unless billions die in famine and war, so it must be a future in which a very big population is still sustainable.
Unfortunately, the way we are living now is not sustainable. We have taken too much land out of the natural cycles in order to grow our own food on it. We are systematically destroying the world’s major fish populations through overfishing and pollution. We are also driving most of the larger land animals to extinction.
This is a “six-planet” civilisation: it would take six Earth-like planets to sustain the present human population in the high-energy, high-consumption style that is the hallmark of the current global civilisation. Not all of the seven billion have achieved that lifestyle yet, but they all want it and most of them are going to get it. And for the foreseeable future we will have only one planet, not six.
That’s the real problem we must solve if we are to reach 2100 without civilisational collapse and a massive dieback of the human population. All the other stuff we worry about, like global warming, ocean acidification and the “sixth great extinction”, are really signals that we are not solving the basic sustainability problem. Nor will we ever solve it by just using less energy and eating less meat. Not at seven billion plus, we won’t.
So we really have only two options. We can go on in the present patchwork way, with a bit of conservation here and some more renewable energy there, in which case we are heading for population collapse through global famine, and probably civilisational collapse as well because of the attendant wars, well before 2100.
Or we can try to float free from our current dependence on the natural cycles. Use the scientific and technological capabilities of our current civilisation to reduce our pressure on the natural world radically. Stop growing or catching our food, for example, and learn to produce it on an industrial scale through biotechnology instead.
Just achieving food independence would greatly reduce our vulnerability to climate change, but we need to stop global warming anyway. Otherwise much of what we call “nature” will not survive, and half the world’s big cities will be drowned by sea level rise.
Given how much excess carbon dioxide we have dumped into the atmosphere already through burning fossil fuels, that will probably require direct human intervention in the climate system: geo-engineering, in other words. We must also stop burning fossil fuels and move to alternative sources of energy as fast as we can, but we almost certainly won’t move fast enough to avoid runaway warming without geo-engineering.
The more romantic environmentalists hate this stuff and insist that there is a third option. They think we can avoid disaster just by learning to “live lightly on the planet.” That would be nice, but it can’t be done with seven billion people, even if they all lived like Gandhi. That option disappeared at the latest in the 1960s, when we passed the three-billion mark.
This civilisation is the distilled essence of a ten-thousand-year human fascination with technology. It will live or die according to its ability to solve by new technologies the problems it has created by its own past technological successes.
If we want our great-grandchildren to be happy in 2100 – if we want them even to be alive – then we have to start managing some of the planet’s systems (like the climate system), and to remove ourselves entirely from some of the others. There is no third option.
12 March 2012
China’s Impending Crash
By Gwynne Dyer
Building a skyscraper is the ultimate expression of economic confidence, and more than half of the 124 skyscrapers currently under construction in the world are being built in China. But confidence is often based on nothing more than faith, hope and cheap credit, and a frenzy of skyscraper-building is also the most reliable historical indicator of an impending financial crash.
The Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building, the twin symbols of New York’s emergence as the world’s financial capital, were started at the end of the “Roaring Twenties” but completed in the depths of the Great Depression. The Petronas Towers in Malaysia were built just before the Asian financial crash of 1998. Burj al-Khalifa in Dubai, now the world’s tallest building, was just starting construction when the Great Recession hit in 2008.
China avoided that recession by flooding its economy with cheap credit – but that credit has mainly gone into financing the biggest property and infrastructure-building boom of all time. Such booms always end in a crash, but this time, we are told, will be different.
“This time will be different” is the traditional formula used to reassure nervous investors in the last years before a great economic bubble collapses. It was a constant refrain in the run-up to the Western financial crash of 2008-09, and now it is being heard daily about the Chinese property boom.
People in the West want to believe that China’s economy will go on growing fast because the fragile recovery in Western economies depends on it. Twenty years of 10 percent-plus annual growth have made China the engine of the world economy, even though most Chinese remain poor. But the engine is fuelled by cheap credit, and most of that cheap money, as usual, has gone into real estate.
Take the city of Wuhan, southwest of Shanghai and about 500 km (350 miles) in from the coast. It is only China’s ninth-largest city, but in addition to a skyscraper half again as high as the Empire State Building it is currently building a subway system that will cost $45 billion, two new airports, a whole new financial district, and hundreds of thousands of new housing units. It is paying for all this with cheap loans from state-run banks.
Last year Wuhan municipality spent $22 billion on infrastructure and housing projects although its tax revenues were only one-fifth of that amount. The bank loans were made to special investment corporations and do not appear on the city’s books. The only collateral the banks have is city-owned land, and that is not a reliable asset in current circumstances.
Land in Wuhan has tripled in price during the property boom, and could quickly fall back to the old price or below if confidence in the city’s future were to falter. That is quite likely to happen, since Wuhan’s housing stock is already so overbuilt that it would take eight years to clear even the existing overhang of unsold apartments at the current rate of purchase, and never mind all the new stuff.
Multiply the Wuhan example by hundreds of other municipal authorities that are also borrowing billions to finance a similar “dash for growth,” and you have a financial situation as volatile as the “sub-prime mortgage” scam that brought the US economy to its knees. Except that when the Chinese property boom implodes, it may bring the whole world economy to its knees.
It would be nice to think that the worst of the recession is over in the developed countries, and that the emerging economies will continue to avoid a recession at all. But sometimes the cure can be worse than the disease. China’s strategy for avoiding the economic crisis that has gripped the developed countries since 2008 has laid the foundations for an even worse home-grown recession in the near future.
“If you have had a good crisis, success can become a curse,” wrote Albert Edwards, chief economist at the French bank Societe Generale, in late 2010. At that point, Chinese bank lending had almost doubled in three years; it has now almost tripled in four. The government knows that the property bubble is dangerous and is trying to switch spending to consumption, but that is a delicate operation that has to be done slowly, and there just isn’t enough time.
When a housing and credit bubble goes out of control, Edwards warned, “you tap your foot on the brakes and whole thing starts crashing and you can’t control it.” China is heading for a classic “hard landing”, and when it comes, it will slow the whole global economy to stall speed. The next global recession is not far off, it will be at least as bad as the last one, and this time few of the emerging economies (except perhaps India’s) will be exempt.
Nobody knows what will happen in China itself when growth stops and unemployment soars, but the Communist regime is clearly frightened of the answer. Maybe it can ride the crisis out until growth resumes at a slower pace in a few years, but with its Communist ideals long abandoned, its only remaining claim on people’s loyalty has been its ability to deliver constantly rising prosperity.
If that collapses, so may the regime.
24 February 2012
Painting Calcutta Blue
By Gwynne Dyer
I am not making this up. They’re going to paint Calcutta blue.
Some PR firm of public relations consultants has persuaded the West Bengal state government that all official buildings and assets in Calcutta, right down to the lane dividers on highways, should be painted light blue. Taxis and other public services that require licenses will also have get out the blue paint, and owners of private property will be asked to do the same, with tax cuts for those who comply.
It’s all about branding, really. West Bengal got a new government last year, after 34 years of Communist rule, and the state’s new rulers decided that the capital city, Calcutta, needs a new colour scheme. As Urban Development Minister Firhad Hakim told The Indian Express newspaper, “Our leader Mamata Banerjee has decided that the theme colour of the city will be sky blue because the motto of the new government is ‘the sky is the limit’.”
Well, why not? If the state of Rajasthan can have both a “pink city” (Jaipur) and a “blue city” (Jodhpur), why shouldn’t Calcutta brand itself as “the other blue city”? However, Jaipur is naturally pink because of widespread use of terracotta, and in Jodhpur the residents got out their paintbrushes voluntarily, whereas the West Bengal state government is spending a reported 800 million rupees ($16 million) on the blueing of Calcutta.
Calcuta’s leading newspaper, the Telegraph (in which this column has long had the honour of appearing), was so swept away by the wonderfulness of the concept that it wrote a fulsome editorial about it. “Finding the right colour combination is undoubtedly the crucial first step in making a city safer, healthier, cleaner and generally more user-friendly for its inhabitants,” the newspaper wrote, tongue firmly in cheek.
“It could, with as little doubt, sort out its core problems – chaotic health care, inability to implement pollution control norms, arsenic in the water, archaic sewers and garbage disposal, bad roads, killer buses for public transport, an airport falling apart and beyond dismal, priceless paintings rotting away in public art galleries, to name a few.” One wonders why more cities are not doing the same. Maybe they couldn’t afford the right consultants.
I yield to practically everybody in my esteem for the overpaid consultants who are employed by unimaginative governments to “improve their image.” There is a better way for Calcutta to overcome its reputation for chaos and decay. By all means spend most of the available money on sewers and garbage disposal, roads and buses, pollution control, art galleries and the airport – but also restore the city centre.
Calcutta was the capital of British-ruled India for two centuries. For much of that time it was the second-largest city in the British Empire, only surpassed by London. So the centre of the city was full of Georgian and Regency buildings that reflected the city’s power and wealth at that time.
Most of them are still there. Calcutta was poor for a long time, so it hasn’t had the money to erase its past in the brutal way that is happening in most other Asian big cities. Almost all Chinese cities have already destroyed their architectural heritage, and beautiful cities like Hanoi are working at it full-time. But Calcutta’s wonderful buildings are in dreadful shape, and soon it will find enough money to start destroying them wholesale.
There is a better way. Fifteen years ago I was walking up Bentinck Street, surrounded by the chaos of cars and trams and the crumbling buildings festooned with washing lines and movie posters. I came round a slight bend in the road – and saw a miraculous sight.
It was an four-storey town house restored to all its former glory: the stucco replaced, the balconies repaired, the whole thing repainted in the mustard-yellow colour that was fashionable in the late 18th century. It was in a row of other 18th-century houses that were still rotting, and suddenly I realised what central Calcutta used to look like. It made the hair rise on the back of my neck.
The same evening I went to a dinner party in south Calcutta, and found myself sitting next to the architect who had done the restoration. (Small world.) She explained that she had got municipal money to fix the house up, on condition that the existing residents (poor people, of course) would not be displaced by the high-rent crowd. The point, of course, was to inspire other property owners to do the same thing.
I don’t know if that particular house has fallen into disrepair again (Google Streetview has its limitations), but I do know that the example did not work. I also know that it could work. It would cost more than a vat of blue paint, but labour isn’t that expensive in the city, so it’s cheaper to restore than to destroy and rebuild. If Calcutta started now, it could have a city centre that is the envy of Asia in ten years.
Alternatively, the West Bengal government could push the blue business a bit further. After all, nothing exceeds like excess. Why not paint all 14 million of Calcutta’s inhabitants blue, and declare that they are all avatars of Vishnu? That would get everybody’s attention.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 4 and 12. (“Well…Calcutta” and “The same…same thing”)
13 February 2012
The New Division of Africa
By Gwynne Dyer
Sudan was bombing South Sudan again last week, only a couple of months after the two countries split apart. Sudan is mostly Muslim, and South Sudan is predominantly Christian, but the quarrel is about oil, not religion. And yet, it is really about religion too, since the two countries would never have split apart along the current border if not for the religious divide.
Ivory Coast was split along the same Muslim-Christian lines for nine years, although the shooting ended last year and there is an attempt underway to sew the country back together under an elected government. But in Nigeria, Africa’s biggest country by far, the situation is going from bad to worse, with the Islamist terrorists of Boko Haram murdering people all over the country in the name of imposing sharia law on the entire nation.
“The situation we have in our hands is even worse than the civil war that we fought (in 1967-70, which killed between one and three million people),” said President Goodluck Jonathan. That’s a major exaggeration – the current death toll in Nigeria from terrorist attacks and army reprisals is probably only a few hundred a month – but the potential for much greater slaughter is certainly there.
In an interview with Reuters, President Jonathan said: “If (Boko Haram) clearly identify themselves now and say…this is the reason why we are confronting government or this is the reason why we destroyed some innocent people and their properties, why not (talk to them)?” But it’s pointless: he already knows who they are and what they want.
“Boko Haram”, loosely translated, means “Western education is forbidden,” and the organisation’s declared aim is to overthrow the government and impose Islamic law on all of Nigeria. In a 40-minute audio message posted on YouTube two weeks ago, the group’s leader, Abubakar Shekau, threatened that his next step would be to carry out a bombing campaign against Nigeria’s secondary schools and universities.
This is not only vicious; it is also completely loony. There is no way that Boko Haram could conquer the entire country. Only half of Nigerians are Muslims, and they are much poorer than the country’s 80 million Christians. The Christian south is where the oil is, and the ports, and most of the industry, so that’s where most of the money is too. The same pattern is repeated in many other African countries: poor Muslim north; prosperous Christian south.
There was no plan behind this. Islam spread slowly south from North Africa, which was conquered by Arab armies in the 7th century, while Christianity spread rapidly inland once European colonies appeared on the African coast in the last few hundred years. The line where Islam and Christianity meet runs across Africa about 1,100 km (700 mi.) north of the equator (except in Ethiopia, where the Christians have the highlands and the Muslims the lowlands).
In general, the Muslims ended up with the desert and semi-desert regions of Africa because Islam had to make it all the way across the Sahara, while the more fertile and richer regions nearer to the equator and all the way down to South Africa are mainly Christian because the Europeans arrived by sea with much greater economic and military power. But some 350 million Africans live in countries that straddle the Christian-Muslim fault line.
There probably won’t be a full-scale civil war in Nigeria this time around, but Boko Haram is targeting Christians indiscriminately. The Nigerian army, not best known for its discipline and restraint, is almost as indiscriminate in targeting devout but innocent Muslims in the northern states that are home to the terrorist organisation. Christians are already moving out of the north, and Muslims out of the south.
It will get worse in Nigeria, and it is getting bad again in what used to be Sudan, and Ethiopia is an accident just waiting to happen. Even Ivory Coast may not really be out of the woods yet. There is a small but real risk that these conflicts could some day coalesce into a general Muslim-Christian confrontation that would kill millions and convulse all of Africa.
Christianity and Islam have been at war most of the time since Muslim armies conquered half of the then-Christian world, from Syria to Spain, in the 7th and 8th centuries. There was the great Christian counter-attack of the Crusades in the 12th century, the Muslim conquest of Turkey and the Balkans in the 15th and 16th centuries, and the European conquest of almost the entire Muslim world in the 18th-20th centuries.
It is a miserable history, and in some places it is likely to continue for some time to come. But nowhere in sub-Saharan Africa does the frontier between Muslim-majority and Christian-majority areas derive from conquest: these populations are not looking for revenge.
Boko Haram’s style of radical Islamism is an import from somewhere else entirely, and it would be a terrible mistake for large numbers of Muslim Nigerians to embrace it. On the other hand, it will be a terrible mistake if Nigeria doesn’t get a choke chain on its army, whose brutal actions are all too likely to drive Nigerian Muslims in exactly that direction.
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To shorten to 725 words, omit paragraphs 11 and 12. (“Christianity…revenge”)