US needs to cut carbon emissions 100% by 2020!

Hans Joachim Schnellnhuber is among the world's half-dozen most eminent climate scientists according to The Nation (editorial Oct 26,09). His study indicates that we have a two out of three chance of limiting temperature increase to 2 degrees C if the US cuts carbon emissions by 100 percent by 2020, and the whole world is carbon-free by 2050. To have a 75% chance of only a 2 degree rise we'd have to quit carbon even sooner. If we wait another decade or so, the odds of only 2 degree rise become 50-50. The study applies the per capita principle to the world population of 7 billion, and arrives at an annual emissions quota of 2.7 tons of carbon dioxide per person annually. Americans currently emit an average of 20 tons annually, that's why we have to reduce our consumption faster than other countries.

Schnellnhuber is a physicist specializing in chaos theory. He says he was terrified when he saw the numbers emerging from the study. Me too. Thing is, there's no way we can do this, even if everybody took the science seriously.

Separate functions for social structures

Fred W. Riggs's 1964 Administration in Developing Countries: The Theory of Prismatic Society maintained that developed countries operated efficiently by having separate structures for each function. Politics, religion, finance, manufacturing, entertainment, news, etc. were distinct. So an elected leader couldn't just waltz into a bank and demand money, or into a religious institution and tell them what to worship. By not comingling functions within one structure, each function could be performed most efficiently. A manufacturer taken over by powerful politicians would have its corporate officers replaced by political friends and relatives. Incompetent, they'd soon bring bankruptcy. Because private property was protected from those with religious or political power, the society was stable and more prosperous.

Now the US government has been taken hostage by corporations, who also control mass media news and the entertainment industry. Government financially supports banks, who pay lobbyists to influence government.

All of those formerly distinct functions intermingle. Nation states pale in comparison to interlocked international corporations. Is Globalization emerging on the basis of which interlocked corporate entities most efficiently externalize costs? How this be more efficient, even in the short term?

Adrian Bejan's Constructal Theory is the most advanced approach I've seen to modelling change. Corporations are structures designed to maximize efficiency of flows - of money, goods, information, and people. His disciples don't seem to notice the corporate assumptions that people are goods whose value is determined by the free market and the environment is a free commons. If the first assembly line is analogous to the first street, to what is the first corporate interlock analogous?

All flows converge to one common destination, money in the stock market. Everything can be converted, one way or another, into this corpporate lifeblood stream. Hence the erosion of separate functions for structures.