The global economy is also an ecological disaster, because it allows businesses to sidestep environmental controls in the first world by moving their operations to tolerant third world countries.
According to a report on CTV News the Indian city of Tirupur has 700 dye plants and no pollution controls. Rivers in the area are colored, ground water is polluted 100 meters below the surface and drinking water has to be piped in from a long distance away.[1]
If the ecological damage did the people of Tirupur any long-term good we might consider that a mitigating circumstance, but it does not. It gets them only low wages in a temporary business that will disappear when some other third-world people offer to do the work cheaper. The only long-term change to Tirupur will be the pollution.
According to newspaper articles the US Navy sends old warships to an Indian beach on the Arabian Sea to be broken up. The advantages are that wages for the Indian workmen start at $1.80 a day, and that there are no inconvenient questions about workplace safety or about what happens to the asbestos, PCB, and other potentially-hazardous materials in the ships.[2]
Even if third world governments were to enforce environmental controls, the simple fact of huge freight movements also creates world-wide environmental problems.
One is that all commercial ships burn oil and spill some of it into the sea. Newspapers and television tells us about the rare occasions when a tanker goes aground but any powered ship that moves on the sea spills some oil, and ships that travel on their normal business spill about as much oil as a tanker that goes aground or breaks up. The United States Coast guard reports that in 1999 tank ships spilled about 8,414 gallons of oil, tank barges spilled 158,977 gallons and other ships spilled 409, 084 gallons.[3]
Another is that ships are poisonous. In order to prevent the growth of barnacles and algae almost all big ships are painted with "anti-fouling paint," which is poisonous. The poison called tributylin, which is used in most anti-fouling paints, is now found in fish, shellfish, marine birds and marine mammals around the world. We have to assume it is also found in people who eat fish and shellfish.[4]
Ships in international waters are not subject to pollution controls and most of them burn the cheapest oil available. Cheap oil burns dirty and, according one Reuters news story, ships in European waters produce 1.9 million tonnes of sulfur dioxide a year -- roughly equal to the production of 390 50-megawatt power stations.[5]
Ships that cross between continents also carry pests, and the more ships that cross the more chance that pests will cross. Many of them travel in the ballast.
Ships sail best when they are fully loaded and when a ship carries a light load, such as television sets or other consumer goods, it also loads tens of thousands of gallons of water to bring it up to full weight. When it unloads the light goods and takes on a load of heavier freight, such as coal or wheat or anvils, it dumps the water so it won't be overloaded.
That's a special problem with tankers, which fill their tanks with water for the return trip and dump the water -- and hundreds of gallons of oil -- when they refill.
There has always been a danger that ships would dump pests from another continent with the ballast water but that risk was multiplied as world trade increased, and multiplied again as ships sailed faster and the pests did not have to survive so long in ballast tanks. That's a problem because imported pests have no local predators, and they may run out of control.
When the St. Lawrence seaway was completed in the 1950's, sea lampreys came to the Great Lakes where they wiped out the lake trout and other valuable species. In the early 1980's a small European fish called the Ruffe[6] showed up near Duluth on Lake Superior. Within a couple of years it became the most abundant fish in the harbor. It has now spread to some Ontario river systems and it looks as though it will displace some native fish. Another European fish called the Round Goby showed up in Lake St. Clair in the early 1980's, and had spread to Lake Ontario by 1999. It's small but very aggressive, it eats the eggs of other fish, and it is expected to do serious harm to Great Lakes and inland fisheries.
The Spiny Water Flea came to the Great Lakes in the early 1980's and has spread to the Muskoka and Kawartha Lakes, to Lake Simcoe and Lake Temagami.[7] In the late 1980's the Zebra mussel came from Europe to cause billions of dollars of damage in eastern North America.
The European Green Crab also came to North America in ballast water, and is now spreading up and down both east and west coasts. The Green crab kills juvenile native crabs and shellfish, and it threatens crab and shellfish harvests on both coasts.
Insects can travel too. The Asian tiger mosquito, which can carry dengue fever and other infections, came to the USA, in shiploads of Asian tires. It's now found in 18 states and may someday spread to Canada. The citrus leaf miner caterpillar from Asia now attacks citrus trees in Australia, Africa, the US and Latin America.[8]
Formosan termites that arrived in the 1940's now do about $300 million damage a year to the old sections of New Orleans. Because of them the U.S. National Trust for Historic Preservation says the city, one of the oldest and most colorful in the United States, is also one of the most endangered historic sites.[9]
The Virella mite arrived in a shipment of bees from Thailand in the early 1990's and so far it has reduced honey production in some parts of North America by half. Given time our bees may adapt to cope with it, but then again they may not. Let's hope they do, because about one third of the food eaten in North America depends on bees for pollination.[10]
Other pests introduced by global trade include the chestnut blight that wiped out the American Chestnut tree, the Dutch elm disease that killed most of the elm trees in North America and the kudzu vine which is now destroying forests in Virginia and the Carolinas and will probably spread.
In the summer of 2000 many trees in Halifax were cut down and burned because they were infested by the European Brown Spruce Longhorn Beetle. In Europe this beetle attacks only sick trees but Canadian trees are not adapted to it and it can -- and will -- attack and kill healthy trees. Some experts fear that it could kill most of the spruce in Eastern North America. Another import, the Asian Longhorn beetle, threatens most of our deciduous trees.
Airplanes carry pests too. In about ten years the Brown Tree Snake from the Solomon Islands has wiped out most of the birds on the island of Guam, and naturalists fear that if gets to Hawaii it will wipe out most of the birds there.[11]
At least two Brown Tree Snakes have reached Hawaii. One was dead when it was found in the landing gear of a plane, another apparently survived the trip but was run over by a plane before it got out of the airport. We have to assume that if no live snakes have escaped to the wild in Hawaii yet, they will soon.
The chances of a pest travelling from continent to continent vary directly with the human traffic. Most of the human traffic is freight and it would be easy to reduce it with no loss of human freedom to move.
Some globalists argue that animals migrate with or without human help, and that species will always compete to replace each other. That's true, but we don't live in a natural world. We live in an eco-system that we have modified, and the plants and animals that are most useful to us were all carefully cultured by man. We have no reason to believe that they will survive competition with pests, or that the plants and animals that do survive will be useful to us.
Disease travels too. Cholera had been wiped on in South America but it came back in the 1990's, to kill tens of thousands of people in the first few years of its return. The Harvard Working Group on New and Resurgent Diseases thinks it was re-introduced by a freighter that discharged bilgewater from China into the harbor at Callao, Peru. The water carried bacteria which flourished in algae which were eaten by fish and shellfish, which in turn were eaten by people.[12] If it can happen in Callao it can happen in San Francisco, or Vancouver.
THE PLAGUE THAT WILL COME
The global economy also increases the risk of a terrible "killer plague" which will sooner or later kill tens of millions of people around the world. That's not an apocalyptic vision, it's a mathematical probability that the global economy makes a near certainty.
The probability is a matter of numbers. The more people there are in the world the more chance that some disease will develop into a super-killer plague, and the more there are to catch and spread disease.[13] The more people there are the more we invade areas -- like the rain forests of Africa and South America -- where dangerous diseases may lie dormant.
Any disease becomes more dangerous when it travels, because people in the area where it evolved have developed an immunity but people in other areas have not. Through most of history microbes and viruses around the world had little chance to travel from continent to continent but, when they did, we saw some of the great plagues of the world.
Bubonic plague -- the black death -- had been known in Asia for years but it did not run wild until it reached Europe. According to some estimates the smallpox that Europeans brought to the Americas may have killed up to 90% of the natives of two continents.
Now we travel more than ever before. The World Tourism Organization of the United Nations says that 429 million people -- about one of every 12 people in the world -- crossed an international border as a tourist in 1990.[14] As we travel we carry known and unknown microbes, viruses and parasites to international airports, hotels, convention centers and other meeting points where the bugs can mix, match and mutate into super-killers that could kill half -- or perhaps all -- human life on earth.
We also carry our immunities with us and if humanity survives we will eventually develop a single human population, with the same immunities around the world, but it's still a very serious risk. The bigger the population pool the more chance for diseases to mutate, and we will still be vulnerable to new mutations.
Health authorities know about the danger, of course, and they do what they can. In the winter of 1997-98 public health authorities in Hong Kong killed more than 1.3 million chickens because a flu virus from chickens infected 14 people and killed four.[15]
That sounds like an extreme reaction to the death of four people in a city of six million, but health authorities dare not take any chances with a new variety of flu. In times when there were fewer people and less international traffic -- and therefore less risk of epidemic -- flu epidemics ravaged the world in 1729, 1732, 1781, 1830, 1833, 1889 and 1918.[16]
The 1918 epidemic was worse than others because trade and travel were both stimulated by World War I. According to some accounts the epidemic began in an army training camp in the United States, moved to Europe with the soldiers, and then spread around the world.
In less than a year it infected about a billion people and killed more than 21 million of them. More than 500,000 died in the US, and more than 20,000 in New York City alone. The flu killed about 5% of the population of Ghana and 20% of the population of Samoa.
That was more than 80 years ago, when the world was far less crowded than it is now. If a flu bug of comparable virulence develops in the modern world, health officials say, it will probably kill about 60 million people.
And the flu is just an old friend that sometimes gets out of hand. Some of the super-diseases that are now emerging from the jungles of Africa, Asia and South America are much more dangerous.
The Marburg virus first showed up at a medical lab in Marburg, West Germany in 1967.[17] The lab used kidney cells from African monkeys to make vaccines, and one of the monkeys they got carried a virus.
Thirty one veterinarians, lab technicians, animal handlers and their close contacts were infected. Seven died.
Marburg is a close relative of Ebola, which is one of the most feared viruses of the modern world. There are four known varieties of Ebola. In 1989 one of them raged through an animal quarantine center in Reston, Virginia, in a situation so dangerous that the US Army Research Institute for Infectious Diseases was called in to contain it.
Hundreds of monkeys were killed and the building was decontaminated by a three-day soak in formaldehyde gas, which was supposed to kill every living thing in it. Months later the same variety of Ebola broke out again, killed all the monkeys and infected all the people who worked in the building.
By pure luck this case turned out to be the only one of four known varieties of the Ebola virus that is harmless to humans. Among the other three the death rate varies from 50% to 90%, and there is no known cure. If the monkeys in Reston had carried one of the other three strains of the virus, the US would have faced a national catastrophe.[18]
And it still might. This form of Ebola spreads through the air, and several people have been infected. So far this strain is harmless to humans but it's now loose in North America and, some day, it might mutate.
Ebola is one of a set of viruses that doctors describe as "level 4," most of which are usually fatal and for which there is no known treatment. We have had several outbreaks of level 4 viruses so far, and if we maintain the fiction of a global village around which people can travel at will, and through which goods can be shipped in large quantities, we can expect more.
Nobody knows when or how the great plague will come but governments are taking precautions. We have seen armed troops used to isolate areas of Zaire where Ebola fever has broken out, and US Army medical teams sent to study and help contain it. If Ebola or any of the other super-deadly diseases get loose, we can expect a plague that will kill more people than a major war.
DISASTERS
The global economy also creates a serious danger by concentrating our food supply. The southwestern US and northwestern Mexico have a warm climate and cheap labor, which gives them an advantage in growing vegetables, and growers in that region have captured most of the North American market for fresh vegetables. That creates a concentration of farms that puts all our proverbial eggs in one proverbial basket.
It has cost us money already because that one basket happens to be in an area where the El Nino weather system caused floods and other problems, which damaged crops and caused shortages.
But El Nino is just one danger. The world has been and will be bombarded by meteorites big enough to wipe out an area much bigger than the vegetable farms of the southwest.
Such strikes are not as rare as we once believed. Many scientists believe that the dinosaurs were killed by a meteor that struck the Yucatan area about 65 million years ago, and we know there have been strikes in historic times. About 150 meteor craters have been identified, and earth scientists estimate that is about 10% of the total. Astronomers believe that at least 300,000 -- and perhaps as many as 100 million -- asteroids large enough to do serious damage have orbits which cross the orbit of Earth, and might hit us some day.
More than a million years ago a meteorite blasted a crater 3.3 km in diameter and 368 meters deep in the rock of Nunavut's Ungava peninsula. About 50,000 years ago a smaller one created the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona. If any humans were living in the southwestern USA when it hit, they died within the next few weeks.
Australia sustained a major strike, which left nine separate craters, about 3,500 years ago. We have no history of the effects, but they must have been calamitous.
On June 30 of 1908 something -- probably a chunk of ice from a comet -- exploded above the Tunguska area of Siberia, with about 1,000 times the power of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. There was no count of human deaths but about 1,000 square miles of forest was flattened. Another big one hit Siberia in 1947.
On Aug 13 of 1930 a meteor struck somewhere in the Amazon basin, with an impact that was felt for hundreds of miles. A near miss grazed the atmosphere over the Western US in 1972, and air blasts comparable to the explosion of nuclear weapons occurred over Colorado Springs, Colorado and over Micronesia in 1995.[19]
So far nothing big has hit within the bounds of civilization, but the danger is very real. Oceans cover most of the Earth, and a big strike in an ocean could trigger tsunamis that might wipe out most coastal areas around the ocean.
A strike in the Pacific might wipe out Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Vancouver, Tokyo, Hong Kong and dozens of other cities. A strike in the Atlantic might wipe out the Atlantic coast of the US and major cities in Europe.
"Caldera volcanoes -- flat volcanoes, which are much more dangerous than the "small" volcanoes that form conical mountains -- may also threaten humanity. Genetic evidence suggests that in the whole world, only 5,000 or 10,000 people survived the eruption of the volcano Toba, in Sumatra, about 74,000 years ago.
One of the biggest caldera volcanoes known is Yellowstone Park in the United States. Virtually the whole park is the mouth of the volcano and when it blows, about once every 600,000 years, it produces about 8,000 times as much ash as Mount St. Helens. It last blew about 600,000 years ago and geologists know that, even now, some sections of the park are moving.
The US Geological Survey is also keeping an eye on the Caldera volcano of Long Valley, east of San Francisco, which has had a couple of minor eruptions in the past thousand years. Its last major eruption, about 760,000 years ago, was thousands of times more powerful than Mount St. Helens and would probably have wiped out all life in several southwestern states.[20]
Even regular volcanoes are dangerous. Historical and physical evidence indicates that the eruption of volcano Krakatoa, near Sumatra about the year 540 AD, caused about ten years of "nuclear winter," drought and other problems around the world. Some historians suggest that the famine and plagues that resulted caused the final collapse of the Roman empire and the European "dark ages."
In the past 200 years, more than 250,000 people have been killed by relatively small eruptions. In 1815 the Tambora volcano in Indonesia killed about 10,000 people, and another 82,000 died in the famine and disease that followed. In 1883 a relatively minor eruption of Krakatoa wiped out animal and vegetable life in the Krakatoa island group and created tsunamis that killed 36,000 people in Java and Sumatra, and that reached Hawaii and South America. In 1902 the eruption of Mt. Pelee in Martinique killed about 29,000 people in the port of St. Pierre and in 1985 the eruption of Nevado del Ruiz in Columbia killed about 25,000 people, including most of the inhabitants of the town of Armero. These smaller eruptions were not major events on a world scale, but in the modern world a comparable eruption could wipe out the crops that feed millions of people.
We can't do much to protect ourselves from climate change or a big meteorite or a giant volcano but, whatever happens, we stand a better chance of survival if all the goods we need are produced all over the world. That way we can assume that any disaster will do us some damage, but it would take one of global proportions to wipe humanity out.
ONE SYSTEM
The global economy is also vulnerable to economic disaster, because it ties the world together into one system.
That's dangerous because a global system is too big to control. Control of a national economy is automatic because if you produce your own goods you find out quickly when the system starts to break down. Because the problem is within the national economy, it can be fixed.
If Canada had a national economy rather than a colonial economy, for example, we would have had warning about the loss of our industry and farming because we would have had shortages of food and manufactured goods. Because we were part of a larger economy, our domestic problems were not obvious until long after they were very serious.
The global economy is even worse than a colonial economy. Because it's so big there are many points at which it can fail but, also because it's so big, it could take a long time before we realize that it has failed. When we do find the problem we may not be able to fix it, because the global economy is not under unified control.
Globalists like to pretend that the alternative to globalism is isolationism, but that's not so. The two are opposite ends of a spectrum, and there is a middle ground that is neither one nor the other.
And in this case, the middle is the place to be. We know that the global economy does not work because poverty around the world has increased since the Bretton Woods conference that led to it. The economic strategy adopted then has been a boon to some, but a disaster to most of the world.
We also know that isolation does not work, because it never has. For at least five thousand years, civilizations have made significant progress only when they were in touch with other cultures.
While Japan kept herself sealed off from the world, Japanese technology made little progress. After Japan opened up to new ideas, she led the world.
But contact and trade are not integration. Two nations can fertilize each other's technical and social ideas only if they remain separate, and each develops its own way. If they merge, the cross fertilization of ideas is lost.
The cultures that formed China led the world in technology until they were merged into a single empire with one ruler. Then progress stopped for more than a thousand years.
If China had not been unified progress would probably have continued and the individual nations that now comprise China would probably have dominated the world through most of human history.
But the price of unity was stagnation, and, tied by imperial red tape, China could not resist the foreign influences that made it subject to smaller and weaker nations.
NOT ISOLATIONISM
We need the kind of inter-action that comes with trade and, where one country has a significant advantage over another, Ricardo's rationale applies. It would not make sense for Canadians to grow bananas and oranges, or for Switzerland to develop a deep-sea fishing fleet.
Some economies of scale make sense, too. Considering the cost of developing and building a jetliner, for example, it would be foolish for a small country to try to compete with Ilyushin, Airbus and Boeing.
But along with the concept of comparative advantage we must also adopt the principle of "acceptable advantage." We can accept an advantage based on climate or technology or even market but we must not accept one based on unacceptable working conditions, lax ecological controls or extortionate profits.
No country can produce all the goods it needs but a healthy national economy will produce what it can and it will look for ways to produce the rest. The vanilla farmers of Madagascar, Reunion and Comoros were content to import manufactured goods from Europe and the United States, but gene splicers in the United States found a way to produce their own vanilla.
Now the people of the United States will be relatively richer because they do not have to import natural vanilla at $1,200 a pound, and the vanilla farmers will be poorer because they have nothing to sell. If the islanders produced most of the goods they really need they would have to give up some luxuries as the export market for vanilla dies, but the economy would remain healthy and they would have time and money to develop new exports. Because they depend on vanilla, they will be in serious trouble without it.
Some people will import luxuries just to be different, but luxuries are not important. More than 2,000 years ago, wealthy Romans ate hummingbirds' tongues. They might have complained if there were a shortage of hummingbirds, but they would not have suffered much. If Rome had been unable to buy wheat, Romans would have starved.
The alternative to a global economy is a world of national economies, and that offers some obvious benefits. One of the most obvious is that market adjustments in a national economy occur within the country, and create no major problems. Market adjustments in a world economy occur outside the country, and they may create serious problems.
If Beta brand whiggles are better than Alpha brand whiggles the Beta company will capture the whiggle market, and if Alpha can't catch up it will go broke.
If that happens within a national economy there is no problem because when Beta expands it hires some of the whigglemakers that Alpha lets go, it buys parts and supplies from Alpha's old suppliers and it may even buy Alpha's old plant and warehouse. Beta won't take all of Alpha's people and property but, because Alpha was a small part of the economy anyway, the loss is not important.
But a failure in the world market is a big failure. If the Canada Global Whiggle Co makes whiggles for the world it will be very big, and important to the Canadian economy. If Canada Global loses out to the Boogleoogle Planetary Whiggle Co, it creates problems for all Canadians.
One is that unemployed Canadian whigglemakers can not move to Boogleoogle to find jobs. When the Canadian company loses out all Canadian whigglemakers will be unemployed, and so will the employees of the suppliers and service companies that based their business on CGW.
Instead of a minor adjustment the loss will be a disaster that will leave empty plants and warehouses, and bankrupt suppliers.
Another advantage of a national economy is that it is under national control. Within Canada the federal and provincial governments control our banks and make sure they don't take unreasonable chances, but we can't control banks outside our borders. That's a problem because, as we saw in 1998, the problems of banks anywhere in a world economy can affect the world.
A national economy also has the advantage of shorter supply lines. For the world that means less transportation and therefore less ecological damage, but it also means more dependable supplies.
The Manicouagan and James Bay areas of Quebec have a comparative advantage over other areas for generating electric power. Hydro Quebec took advantage of that by building huge power dams in those remote areas and sending the power over hundreds of miles of high tension lines to the cities.
The power was cheap but the strategy backfired in January of 1998, when an ice storm broke the high tension lines. The city of Montreal lost power for nearly two weeks, and some areas were shut off for more than three weeks.[21]
If the same storm had hit Toronto we would have suffered damage but, with power plants to the east, north and west and within the city itself, we would have kept some power.
THE CHANGE IN OUR CLIMATE
We would like to think that the storm that hit Montreal was unusual but the unfortunate fact is that it was just part of a pattern we have seen in the weather of the past couple of years. That pattern also included a snowstorm that isolated people in the Fraser Canyon and floods in Quebec, on the prairies and in Nova Scotia, floods in the deserts of Southwestern USA and in Europe, and huge forest fires in Indonesia, Alberta and Mexico.
The fact is that, with or without greenhouse gasses, the world's climate is changing and nobody knows for sure what the change will be. One possibility is the start of an ice age within a few years.
We can't stop the change in climate but we can prepare for it. The obvious way for a nation to prepare is to make itself completely self-sufficient, so that no natural or economic disaster anywhere else in the world can destroy or cripple the national economy. If California and Mexico lose their crops we may run short of oranges, but we must be able to provide our own vegetables and other staples.
On a world level we will be able to handle most disasters if each nation is self-sufficient, and each has a small surplus. If California and Mexico lose their crops we must be able to feed ourselves, but humanity and common sense demand that we should also be able to help California and Mexico. By the same token if we are struck by disaster, a world of self-sufficient nations would be able to help us out.
A system of national economies would also reduce the possibility of a global plague. People would still travel but we would reduce the possibility of -- for example -- a man infected with a deadly disease packing sweaters to be shipped all over the world.
Back in the 1940's the pundits of the first world argued that a global economy would spread prosperity around the world, but that was the public pose. Whether it spread prosperity or not, the global economy guaranteed that the nations of the first world would have free access to the resources of the third world, and that the third world would remain dependent on the first.
The global market has helped the rich of both first and third worlds to become richer but it has further impoverished the poor of the third world and it has created new islands of third-world poverty in the midst of the first world. Instead of a world divided by geography we now have a world divided by money, power and privilege.
That may be acceptable to the people who enjoy the money, power and privilege, but it is not to the rest of us. It's time to re-think Ricardo's rationale and the assumptions of Bretton Woods, and to plan a world order that will be good for all of us.
Forward to The tragedy of the commons
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