Panda Bear, China. Credit: Chi King/ flickr

By Jon Moore:

Part IV

There is a mantra amongst the Left Greens regarding energy efficiency and lower energy costs. They believe energy efficiency is the first step to “saving the world”.

The argument goes along these lines: If we use energy more efficiently then we will use less, if we use less we will consume less, if we consume less the world will be a more equal place to live in. Taken to its extreme we will all be living in grass huts and walking everywhere.

This thinking betrays them and their short-term, ram an Emissions Trading Scheme through quickly while we still have a belief in the “hockey stick”, attitude to life. As the title suggests, there are always unintended consequences. In this case, the unintended consequence of energy efficiency is a thing called the Jevon’s Effect. First expounded in the classic monograph The Coal Effect in 1865, the Jevon’s effect states: as energy efficiency increases so too does energy consumption. So contrary to their own thinking, as we become more efficient at producing non fossil fuel energy we will actually consume more not less. The upside of this is cheaper energy available for more people and with it a higher standard of living. But you see the Green Left is intent upon social engineering and income redistribution. They seem to want everyone to live at the lowest level of life so that Pandas who are an evolutionary dead-end can linger on for few more years.

An unintended consequence of victory in the Cold War was not the triumph of Capitalism, it was the displacement of Marxist-Leninist-Maoists into the Green movement. Instead of scientific Marxism as the driver of political change, we now have modified pseudo religious arguments about greed and fairness. In the face of rising global standards of living since the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Green Left have cherry picked sufficient climate data to try and scare people into giving up freedoms and to introduce a massive world-wide taxation system – Emissions Trading. The irony is the big winners from such a scheme world be the merchant bankers, the very same people the Green Left holds responsible for what they think is the sorry state we are in now. Emissions Trading may be seen as a variation on the old communist claim that the last capitalist will be hanged by the rope he had just sold to the revolutionaries.

In the end, all revolutionaries fall for the same traps. All bar one I can think of, Che. Having gained power he was the only revolutionary who gave up power and went on to try and lead other revolutions. It didn’t work, of course and this makes him the exception that proves the rule. Once in power, power corrupts. Climategate shows this at a different level. Having achieved a level of celebrity and the power that brings, the scientists involved started to believe their own publicity and then appear to have acted to maintain that celebrity at all costs. Instead of Truth, funding and power seems to have become their drivers. It has parallels with the Piltdown Man affair in palaeoanthropology. There were scientists who knew Piltdown was a fraud but many others accepted the data because of the authority of those promoting this it. Climate science as propounded  by the IPCC has been reinforced by the downgrading, (dumbing down would be a better description,) of science education in schools. Too many people feel they are not qualified to challenge the science because they feel out of their depth. So a possible unintended consequence of a post modern wishy-washy education system could be a huge, global wide tax to solve a problem that may not exist. Even should it exist the scare mongering denies our species its greatest ability: adaptability.

In a counter opposing area we have, in the last twelve months or so, in most of the OECD nations, ours excepted, suffered what economics refer to as a corrective redistribution of wealth. The unintended consequence of naked free market policies are downturns in economic activity. The system created technologies that allow me to write this piece on a small, flexible, cheap netbook using an operating system of my choosing, available for free (#!Crunch bang Linux) without direct government interference in what I write. The unintended consequence of putting a Pleistocene mind into a lasse faire economic system is a failure to understand longer term cycles. A Russian by the name of Kondratiev discovered a long term cycle which showed capitalism was a self renewing cyclical system and not a step upon the road to world wide communist utopia. His major work published in 1925 was The Major Economic Cycles. Lenin thought he was interesting and kept him on. Stalin saw him as a heretic and sent him to the Gulag. The end of a Kondratiev Cycle is marked  by rising energy costs, food prices and excessive speculation. This is followed by a market collapse, many bankruptcies and, this is the key, a redistribution of capital towards newer technologies. A periodic phoenix like destruction and resurrection. The unintended consequence of the bank bailouts in the past eighteen months is the blocking of the redistribution of capital and creativity.

Yet there are other smaller scale effects in other areas. The iThing and it wondrous ability to provide infinite musical experiences on a devices continuingly heading towards the microscopic may be having unintended consequences of a less than positive nature. Stepping back a little to begin with let’s look at music. Two hundred years ago music was utilitarian in nature. It was used in religious contexts, to entertain the powerful who would attend the opera and hold networking meetings, talking throughout most of the performance. At the other end of the social scale, music was connected to work, non-industrial work, to maintain the rhythms necessary for repetitive labour. Music was also connected to festivals and celebrations. It had its place and was of great value in those contexts. Now every untalented dreamer can acquire an instrument and inflict their noise upon us all. In parallel to this iThing allows everyone to wrap themselves in a cocoon of sound. This is marketed as a good thing. At times it may well be but on the whole it has the unintended consequence of disconnecting individuals from one another and most importantly, stopping the thought processes. Silence and its enjoyment is now looked upon as subversive. Stop for a moment and consider the amount of ideas that have not occurred to people had they not been immersed in their own wall of sound. Think of how much more enjoyable a trip to the coffee shop would be without the caterwauling of buskers. Just turn off every piece of music distribution around you for a day and observe how your own thinking practices change. Try it, I double dare you.

Having looked backwards to see unintended consequences, can we look forward and maybe avoid some suffering? As I stated in Part III, the IVF industry may be setting us up for some trouble. Briefly, the “right” to reproduction has been enshrined in technology and the public consciousness. It is symptomatic of our whole “I want it and I want it now!” mentality. Now I may be accused of being heartless but I am not. I have bred sheep, goats, chickens, ducks, geese, peafowl and cattle. Any reading for animal husbandry manuals warns of the dangers in unusual crosses. It is not the first cross but the subsequent matings that throw up less than ideal outcomes. This is because recessive genes are “hidden” in the first cross but manifest in the second. Now to IVF. If the technological forced matings are to overcome non genetic problems such as scar tissue in fallopian tubes then there will probably be no consequences. If, on the other hand, the forced mating is to overcome mutual infertility caused by genetic mismatches between the individuals involved then we are setting ourselves up for problems. I have no idea what problems because we are yet to have sufficient matings between IVF-created individuals. The best way to avoid any unintended consequences would be for IVF individuals to avoid procreating amongst themselves. True, they represent a small percentage of the population yet we should be aware of what’s going on or could potentially go on. This would come down to the individuals and their choices but they need to be informed of possible unintended consequences.

In summary, we are probably not equipped to deal with the unintended consequences of our choices. It requires a huge investment in effort and thought to think things through thoroughly. I believe the effort is worth the investment most of our species, from the evidence available, do not seem to act in this manner. In Part V we will look at just how we proceed from where we are to where we may want to go.