climate change

Reforestation, Afforestation, Soils and Carbon

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Katy Hofmeister obtains soil samples for a carbon inventory by digging a soil pit and getting specimens from various layers.

Having read a few of the “what should we do with carbon in forests” papers, and leaving aside for now the “should we use forest products” discussion, I am thinking that by looking more broadly at forests, carbon, land use change, and other environmental and social factors, we can come back to that discussion with a better sense of context for a variety of climate and carbon interventions.

I’ve found that afforestation and reforestation are on everyone’s list of what can be done that are good for carbon sequestration. Afforestation has a couple of problems. It is land use change, and in many places there are no trees due to the climatic conditions, so it wouldn’t actually work in practice. But in some areas we do have a track record of success..say in the plains states, we could have a 21st century equivalent of shelterbelts (some of the ones from the 1930’s are starting to look pretty ratty).

But back to reforestation (that is, planting trees on forested land post some form of disturbance). We know how to do it in most currently forested places, and used to do it not that long ago (1980’s). In my career, I was fortunate to be involved in the Great Region 6 Reforestation Campaign during which nurseries, infrastructure, technology improvement and so on, were all aligned toward the goal of reforestation. Even Oregon State University had the Fundamental Fir Program. Most people agree with the idea and it is not disruptive to current economic and social structures (such as converting agricultural land to forest). But here’s an angle on it I hadn’t heard before with regard to soil carbon.

Here are some quotes from this Cornell University press release:

The study examined the potential to expand the soil carbon sequestration in reforested areas.

“The ability of U.S. forestlands to offset our emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, is decreasing,” said Hofmeister, who conducts research in natural resources and hydrology. “This is partly due to a backlog in reforestation projects on public lands that has been increasing for several decades.

“Nationwide, since 2000, less than 10 percent of forests are replanted after disturbances that eliminate forest cover. Reforestation would increase the soil carbon sink and go a long way to mitigating climate change.”

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Sequestering carbon should be a strong component in fighting climate change, according to Hofmeister. “And, unlike other biospheric sinks, such as trees themselves – which can burn up in fires – soil carbon is quite stable,” she said.

Here is a link to the PNAS paper. You’ll note that the paper is national in scope and used remote sensing. Looking out at your neighboring forest, you would be able to imagine that the numbers for increasing soil carbon locally (over what would happen without intervention) depend greatly on the soils themselves, climate and water availability, the kind of disturbance (think volcano, fire, logging) and how easily (or if) the forest would naturally regenerate. If one were to look at reforesting as a carbon investment and prioritize the areas where you would get the biggest carbon bang for the buck. Still, it’s interesting to think about.

Slanted News?

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I found an LA Times article regarding the Rim Fire, as well as the future of forest management within the Sierra Nevada. Of course, Chad Hanson re-affirms his preference to end all logging, everywhere. There’s a lot of seemingly balanced reporting but, there is no mention of the Sierra Nevada Framework, and its diameter limits. There is also the fact that any change to the SNF will take years to amend. There was also no mention that only about 20,000 Federal acres of the Rim Fire was salvaged, with some of that being in 40-year old plantations.

http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-rim-fire-restoration-20180718-story.html

There might also be another ‘PictureGate“, involving Chad Hanson displaying supposed Forest Service clearcut salvage logging. His folks have already displayed their inability to locate themselves on a map. If he really had solid evidence, he SURELY would have brought it into court

Additionally, the comments are a gold mine for the misinformation and polarization of the supposedly ‘progressive’ community of readers.

Trump “demands” more logging. Really? Does he ever request, suggest or ask for information? I’m tired of hearing of Trump’s “demands.” It could be that some logging would be beneficial but the minute Trump “demands” it, it is suspect. One of his friends will be making millions on the logging and probably giving a kickback to a Trump business. Trump is the destructor of all things beautiful or sacred, the King Midas of the GOP.

A tiny increase in logging of small trees is very unlikely to generate “millions”.

You have no idea what “forest management” is. You want to clearcut all of the old growth forests and then turn them into Christmas tree lots and pine plantations. That is industrial tree farming, not forest management. That is the dumb dogma, speaking, not actual management of the forests.

Most people in southern California don’t know that Forest Service clearcutting and old growth harvesting in the Sierra Nevada has been banned since 1993. The article makes no mention of that.

Riddle me this, Lou. How did the forests manage before we spent $2.5 billion dollars a year on fire suppression? Are we the problem or the cure? Is this just another out of control bureaucracy with a life of its own?

Of course, no solution offered.

Exploring the Climate Science/Policy Jungle. II. What To Do About Air Travel/Tourism?

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Fig. 2 | Top bilateral embodied carbon movements. In 2013, international travel caused a carbon footprint of about 1 GtCO2e, or 23% of the global carbon
footprint of tourism. Arrows point in the direction of embodied carbon flow, which—in accordance with the literature—is the direction of commodity trade,
and is opposite to the movement of people. Red arrows: bilateral international movements belonging to the top 10% of the total 1 GtCO2e. Yellow arrows:
top 10–30%. Orange arrows: 30–50%. Blue arrows: the remainder
Given that carbon is one of the major sources of climate change (landscape change and other greenhouse gases are also involved), a policy question, both nationally and internationally is “what industries get to emit CO2?” and what industries are asked via policy to reduce emissions by changing their practices and/or reducing their activity, and which are asked to stop completely (coal is an example of this).

For Each Industry
Is it an Energy Producer or User?
Via Policies, Are we asking them to: Reduce Impacts of Doing the Same Amount?
And/or Do Less?
or Stop Entirely?

In this post, we’ll take a look at international tourism, and discuss it as it relates to places and impacts in the western US. Let’s take a look at this2018 paper by Lenzen et al.(and the correction here). My point is to simply ask the question, for what industries and when, are carbon footprints a reason to change local/state/federal policies? For example, should Boulder, Colorado stop having international conferences to reduce its carbon footprint? Should Utah stop encouraging international travel to visit ski areas and National Parks?

At around 1 kgCO2e per dollar of final demand (Supplementary Table 6c), the carbon multiplier (Section ‘Input-output analysis’) of global tourism is higher than those of global manufacturing (0.8 kgCO2e per US$) and construction (0.7 kgCO2e per US$), and higher than the global average (0.75 kgCO2e per US$). Growth in tourism-related expenditure is therefore a stronger accelerator of emissions than growth in manufacturing, construction or services provision.

…

Conclusions
Travel is highly income-elastic and carbon-intensive. As global economic development progresses, especially among high-income countries and regions experiencing rapid economic growth, consumers’ demand for travel has grown much faster than their consumption of other products and services. Driven by the desire for exotic travel experiences and an increasing reliance on aviation and luxury amenities, affluence has turned tourism into a carbon-intensive consumption category. Global demand for tourism is outstripping the decarbonization of tourism operations, and, as a result, is accelerating global carbon emissions. At the same time, at least 15%
of global tourism-related emissions are currently under no binding reduction target as emissions of international aviation and bunker shipping are excluded from the Paris Agreement. In addition, the United States, the most significant source of tourism emissions, does not support the Agreement.

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Recognizing the global significance of tourism-related emissions, the UNWTO proposed two mitigation strategies: (1) to encourage travellers to choose short-haul destinations with an increased use of public transportation and less aviation; and (2) to provide marketbased incentives for tourism operators to improve their energy and carbon efficiency16. Our findings provide proof that so far these mitigation strategies have yielded limited success. Neither responsible travel behaviour nor technological improvements have been able to rein in the increase of tourism’s carbon footprint. Carbon taxes or carbon trading schemes (especially for aviation services) may be required to curtail unchecked future growth in tourism-related emissions.

So, international tourism is a user of CO2 emitting energy. Emissions of international aviation are not under a binding agreement (the US is not party to the Paris Agreement, but that doesn’t matter with regard to airline emissions).

Do US/state/local policies ask the tourism industry to reduce its footprint (reduce impacts)?
Do US/state/local policies discourage international/(or long-distance air national, which may be m/l the same) tourism? In fact, current policies may well promote more tourism.

Let’s imagine some policy options. Someone at PERC, can’t remember who, suggested that National Parks charge non-citizens more for entry fees to help address maintenance backlogs. Since people are generally fairly well-off who do international travel, would this be a good policy choice? Or perhaps the extra funds could go into efforts to reduce the carbon footprint of tourism in the Parks? Or go to a research fund toward low carbon fuel for jets? Should states encourage international tourism (or from tourists who come via plane), when the results lead to greater carbon use (plus water use and potentially other more local environmental impacts)? What are the economic/environmental trade-offs and who decides? And are these impacts on anyone’s radar screen? Why or why not?

Exploring the Climate Science/Policy Jungle: I. Negative Emissions and Forests

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Check out info here http://www.rffi.org/Biochar.html

I’m calling this “exploring the jungle” because I feel like I’m doing that, with a few shreds of maps that may or may not be connected.

Negative Emissions Used in Current IPCC Scenarios
Roger Pielke, Jr. does a nice job of laying out the fact that the IPCC has been using BECCS in its scenarios, the history and the policy implications in his recent paper in Issues in Science and Technology IST_33-39 Pielke.

In general, further research is necessary to characterize biomass’ long-term mitigation potential.” Yet by 2013, such caution had been left far behind, and negative emissions were central to nearly all scenarios of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report that are compatible with a 2°C target. In less than a decade negative emissions went from an afterthought to being absolutely essential to international climate policy. No government had actually debated the merits of BECCS, there were no citizen consultations, and very little money was being devoted to research, development, or deployment of negative emissions technologies. Yet there it was at the center of international climate policy.

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Because the proposed technologies were speculative and at best well off into the future, estimates of the costs and feasibility of their implementation could be tailored to the needs of sustaining the policy regime. Peter A. Turner and colleagues have observed that whereas “BECCS appears to be cost-effective in stylized models, its feasibility and cost at scale are not well known.” Of course not. If nothing else, full implementation of BECCS “at scale” would require the use of a global land area one and a half times the size of India (land that will therefore not be available for agriculture or other uses). In the absence of any justifiable method for predicting actual costs, why not just assume that BECCS will be affordable?

When I read this, I thought “uh-oh were we (forest people) supposed to be doing something to make this happen? Like using wood for biomass? Or planning great afforestation projects? No one told us, did they?” But I thought there had been/ is a big discussion about whether biomass was even carbon-neutral with the EPA Science Advisory Committee? Leaving that aside for now, I decided to find a list of what counted as negative emissions.

What Are Negative Emissions Technologies?

Activities commonly considered to create negative emissions include large-scale afforestation, bioenergy combined with carbon capture and storage (BECCS), direct removal of CO2 from the ambient air by means of chemical reaction, enhanced weathering, biochar formation, and soil carbon sequestration. It seems like we don’t talk much about afforestation, disagree about BECCS (with woody and non-woody plants, but either way don’t know how to scale up), with some work in biochar and soil carbon sequestration. If you’ve been watching research outputs as I have, you’ll find lots projecting what might happen under various climate change scenarios, and hardly anything about developing workable on-the-ground cost-efficient, economically viable and environmentally sensitive negative emissions technologies. But apparently others are noticing this. Fuss_2016_Research priorities for negative emissions.ERL is a paper by Fuss et al. that describes the current research gaps, and some ideas for filling them in. It even has a few paragraphs specific to forests.

How Do Negative Emissions Technologies Get Developed and Implemented?
When I asked about “how do these targets for negative emissions get implemented in the real world?” I was referred to Peters_2017_Catalysing a political shift from low to negative carbon.NCC commentary by Peters and Geden.

I’d like to thank the scientists who were kind enough to provide reprints of their papers and answer my questions. I’d like to close with three observations.
1. You don’t need to be an expert in climate to read and understand these papers and what they are saying.
2. There seems to be a disconnect between IPPC scenarios and the real world in terms of negative emissions technologies.
3. Maybe we should spend more research $ on trying to find and scale up negative emissions technologies in the real world, instead of modelling the details of unknown future events, even if some disciplines would be winners and others losers. If we looked across the broad range of government research funding, is there an optimal ratio of “trying to solve problems” versus “describing possible future problems to the fifth decimal place?” Does anyone even think about this?

Why We Disagree About Forest Carbon. I. Atkins Article on Oregon Wild Assertions

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I am extremely appreciative of David Atkins’ effort to delve into the complicated area of forest carbon in this piece at TreeSource. I actually asked several scientists if they knew of a paper that outlined the different assumptions and conclusions, and discussed the area of disagreements.. maybe someone out there knows of one? Otherwise, you have to wonder why that would not be the most important kind of paper to write..Here are the areas of disagreement, here is why, and here is what we need to do to find out more. If we are going to use science in policy, wouldn’t that be the most important kind of investigation to conduct?
It’s not the universities’ job though, here’s what Acting Dean Davis of OSU says:

“Researchers often explore extremes of a subject on purpose, to help define the edges of our understanding; or other studies might only examine one aspect of an issue which in reality does not occur in a vacuum. It is important to look at the whole array of research results around a subject rather than using those of a single study or publication as a conclusion to a field of study.”

That might be difficult for policy makers to do unassisted, and I wouldn’t blame them for throwing up their hands at what appears to be an arena of scientist gladiators.

I think it falls to government to address these policy questions, through research designed as Peter Gluckman describes here.

But how could researchers come to such wildly different conclusions on the carbon effect of wood products? This led me to a series of interviews and multiple other sources to sort through a rabbit warren of questionable assumptions and conclusions in the OSU researchers’ paper.

Make assumptions with care

Did the scientific process break down in the review – or lack of review – given this paper and its assumptions and conclusions?

The problems that surfaced in the Law paper include:

* The quote used by Oregon Wild can’t be found in the references cited.
* The calculation used to justify doubling forest rotations assumes no leakage. Leakage is a carbon accounting term referring to the potential that if you delay cutting trees in one area, others might be cut somewhere else to replace the gap in wood production, reducing the supposed carbon benefit.
* The paper underestimates the amount of wildfire in the past and chose not to model increases in the amount of fire in the future driven by climate change.
* It assumes a 50-year half-life for buildings instead of the minimum 75 years the ASTM standard calls for, which reduces the researchers’ estimate of the carbon stored in buildings.
* It assumes a decline of substitution benefits, which other LCA scientists consider as permanent.
* It models just one species of insect to account for tree mortality when there are a variety of insect and diseases which impact forest carbon capture and storage. And the insect mortality modeled was unrealistic.
* The OSU scientists assumed wood energy production is for electricity production only. However, the most common energy systems in the wood products manufacturing sector are combined heat and power (CHP) or straight heat energy production (drying lumber or heat for processing energy) where the efficiency is often two to three times as great and thus provides much larger fossil fuel offsets than the modeling allows.
* The researchers claim to conduct a Life Cycle Assessment (LCA), but fail to use the international standards for conducting such analyses, without explaining this difference in methods.
* The peer reviewers did not include an LCA expert.
* The claimed significance of substantial carbon savings from delaying harvest and the large emission numbers from the forest products sector are undermined by all of the above.

I think the pros and cons of the different assumptions might be an interesting conversation to have on this blog. And we could perhaps use this blog, if scientists were interested, as a forum for extended peer review.

Should dry forests be considered suitable for timber production?

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Recent research is showing that lower elevation forests are not regenerating after fires as they have historically.  From the abstract of the research cited in this article:

“Results highlight significant decreases in tree regeneration in the 21st century. Annual moisture deficits were significantly greater from 2000 to 2015 as compared to 1985–1999, suggesting increasingly unfavourable post‐fire growing conditions, corresponding to significantly lower seedling densities and increased regeneration failure. Dry forests that already occur at the edge of their climatic tolerance are most prone to conversion to non‐forests after wildfires. Major climate‐induced reduction in forest density and extent has important consequences for a myriad of ecosystem services now and in the future.”

One of those consequences should flow from NFMA requirements for sustainability and ecological integrity.  To put that in simplistic terms, if the land “wants” to be non-forest in the future climate, we have to let it be non-forest.  And non-forested lands are not suitable for timber production, regardless of whether we could plant and maintain a plantation there.  I don’t recall seeing any discussion of this in forest plan revision material I have reviewed recently.  There is also requirement to use the best available scientific information, so a suitability evaluation of low-elevation forests should go beyond what is currently growing there to address what would be expected there in the future.  Many national forests could end up with fewer suitable acres.

Fire Continuum Conference in Missoula last week

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Here is coverage by the Missoulian’s Rob Chaney.  He’s good at getting at the important points, but if anyone else attended (I didn’t) and has some impressions, please share.

“Fire conference in Missoula attracts international experts”

“To effectively fight fires, Forest Service chief says agency must first fight harassment”

“Also in Monday’s plenary sessions, Forest Service program director Sara Brown put the problem in personal terms in her afternoon presentation. The Oregon-based researcher and former smokejumper recalled how she built a tough, masculine persona to fit in with her male firefighting colleagues, to the extent she froze out other women who she didn’t think measured up.”

“Science may overtake tradition in wildfire fighting”  

“A fire that spreads from federal land into state or private property suddenly complicates who gets the bill for the suppression efforts. That makes cost-control a strategic objective that sometimes gets in the way of tactical opportunities.”

“After the fire, scientists brace for climate change”

“Across North America, forests and grasslands spent millions of years evolving with fire as a tool to clean out dead plants, regrow new ones and maintain the things animals need. But, as several top researchers at the Fire Continuum Conference in Missoula pointed out on Thursday, the old patterns are getting pulled up by the roots.”

(The photo is from a recent prescribed burn and accompanied this editorial.  My interest in this comes partly from living at the bottom right of that ridge-line the smoke is behind.)

Months Late Park Service Releases Report on Climate Change

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I posted a note on claims of possible censorship earlier, along with a very long time lag in waiting for the report to be released. Now we wait to see if anyone sees anything amiss. And we, at least I, wonder whether the earlier outcry had any impact on the final product that appears to be unsanitized. Here is a snip from The Hill, 5/21/2018:

The National Park Service (NPS) released a major report on rising sea levels after the Trump administration was accused of censoring it.

The Center for Investigative Reporting’s Reveal reported last month that administration officials removed mentions of human-caused climate change in the report, reflecting President Trump’s and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke’s skepticism that manmade greenhouse gases are the main cause of climate change.

But the report released late Friday puts the blame for sea-level rise squarely in human hands.

“Human activities continue to release carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere, causing the Earth’s atmosphere to warm,” the report says.

“Further warming of the atmosphere will cause sea levels to continue to rise, which will affect how we protect and manage our national parks.”

NPS spokesman Jeremy Barnum said the report went through the usual editing process, and the agency is confident in its scientific accuracy.

Utopia or Dystopia: What comes next?

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The other day at lunch with an old friend, our talk turned to optimistic and pessimistic outlooks regarding the future. He has been reading books by authors who are somewhat to highly optimistic about the future—basing their optimism on advances in science and technology. Two books he mentioned are Stuart Brand’s Whole Earth Discipline: Why Dense Cities, Nuclear Power, Transgenic Crops, Restored Wildlands, and Geoengineering Are Necessary (2009), and Steven Pinker’s Enlightenment Now: The case for reason, science, humanism, and progress (2017).

I mentioned that years ago I was asked to present a set of myths at a Forest Service “adaptive management” workshop in Santa Fe, NM. The first two myths were “Science will find an answer” and “Technology will save us.” I view science and technology as two-edged swords—working both toward our collective good as well as toward our collective detriment. It all depends on how we choose to use them.

When I got home I looked up both books. Brand’s book seems somewhat reasonable—in a Jack Nicholson “Maybe this is as good as it gets” way—judging the book by its title (and a few reviews I found). Both books seem to fall into the trap I identified at the Santa Fe meeting.

I found an interesting review of Pinker’s book by Ian Goldin in Nature.

Here is a snip from Goldin’s review of Enlightenment Now:

Although it is framed as a historically informed template for a new age of reason, Enlightenment Now ultimately becomes something else: an extended dismissal of the arguments of despair that Pinker fears are defining politics and crowding out an alternative approach rooted in rationality and global cooperation. He does not frame the thesis in economic terms. Yet he essentially defends globalization and the growth of market economies by claiming that it has brought more progress than any force in history. As an economist, I agree.

So do I. But I also agree with Goldin’s other arguments:

But globalization has also led to an escalation of risks. What is rational for individuals is increasingly irrational for society. The drivers of progress are rising incomes and connectivity; these also lead to greater negative spillovers and systemic risk. Managing globalization’s underbelly is essential, and the gulf between what needs to be done and what is being done is widening. Economic growth has come at the expense of ecosystems. Because nature does not respond to price signals (rhinos do not reproduce more when their horns are more valuable), increasing freedom of choice has led to overexploitation of a growing number of natural systems. Pinker does cite climate change, but as a worrying exception to a relentlessly positive narrative, rather than as the most glaring example of a wider failure of global commons management.

Goldin concludes with a precautionary note:

I share Pinker’s optimism that this could be our best century, in which poverty and many of the challenges humanity has historically confronted are addressed. Yet there is also a real potential for dystopian outcomes as sea levels, strife, temperatures and resistant infections rise, and biodiversity, democratic institutions, social ties, mental health and resource security are eroded. We need to face up to these and other daunting challenges while nurturing the positivity required to tackle them.

Enlightenment Now is not a balanced account of the present or future. But for the many overwhelmed by gloom, it is a welcome antidote.

I’m more pessimistic than Goldin. Even though I agree that this century could be our best chance to extract ourselves from what may be a lemming-like mass approach toward the edge of a cliff, it seems an unlikely prospect to me. On the other hand the dystopian outcomes seem more likely. But who am I to make such “likelihood” calls. Then again, who is? I regret that I won’t be around long enough to see much of what happens.

I guess I’d have to read Enlightenment Now to see if I agree with Goldin’s call that it is a “welcome antidote” for “the many overwhelmed by gloom.”

As for Brand’s outlook, take a look at what he and coauthors call An Ecomodernist Manifesto (2015).

The Ecomodernist Manifesto is hopeful, if a bit too hopeful as to humanity’s ability to rise above our worst natures. It seems somewhat reasonable at least in these ways: 1) Nature is recognized as a positive good, with suggested safeguarding of both ecosystems and species diversity highlighted, 2) market economics is relegated to secondary role, not a primary driver of all that is good, …. It seems overly optimistic in its portrayal (or lack thereof) of people’s ability to get from the edge of dystopia to the future they propose. And it is optimistic as to the roles portrayed be technology and development. But it was written in 2015, or 1 BT (BT: Before Trump).

On a hopeful note of my own, if we don’t now and continuing forward from here slip into deep dystopia, Trump and others like him on the world stage may ironically give us the wake-up calls we desperately need.

Small Steps Toward Building a Brighter Future

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[U]nceasingly we are bombarded with pseudo-realities manufactured by very sophisticated people using very sophisticated electronic mechanisms. I do not distrust their motives; I distrust their power. They have a lot of it. And it is an astonishing power: that of creating whole universes, universes of the mind. — Phillip K Dick

On Earth Day Sharon tried to spread a message of optimism in a feed from PERC’s Executive Director Brian Yablonski. A couple of us failed to find any optimism there. Here is why: Yablonski and others who call themselves “Free Market Environmentalists” adhere to what many economists view as a particularly narrow field of economic thought labeled the Austrian School.
(See also My Wars Against Economic Fundamentalism (Iverson, 2011)) (See also: neoliberalism: Wikipedia, Guardian)

Main tenets of the Austrian School are: free markets, individualism, and “curbing the size of the state”.

Economists who frame the subject more broadly—as political economy—don’t view markets as necessarily “free,” neither government as necessarily “bad.” Most economists allow for government action as a legitimate part of broader workings of democratic politics (including wealth redistribution). Austrian School economists do allow for altruistic behaviors on the part of individuals, e.g. community or sectarian service and contributions, but believe government to be an ineffective or perverse tool for such. Austrians usually allow for government provision of national defense, but not much more from government. It is the disallowance of space for broader democratic governance I find most off-putting in the practice and politics of the Austrian School. For more on that, see Democracy in Chains: The deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America, by Nancy MacLean, 2017. (reviewed here (The Atlantic, 2017), reviled here (Critical Inquiry, 2017).

A World of Three Zeros

Recently I stumbled onto an interesting, uplifting book titled A World of Three Zeros: The new economics of zero poverty, zero unemployment, and zero net carbon emissions, 2017 by Muhammad Yunus. (reviewed here (New York Times, 2017).

I haven’t read the book yet so I don’t know how the author attempts to solve the “zero net carbon emissions” problem, but the other two resolutions come about largely by people rethinking both the nature of business and human nature.

Business is recast in part as “social business” where the goal is to solve problems not just to make money. Yunus allows for conventional businesses, but suggests the need for many more “social business” enterprises that focus more broadly than simple profit—to solve social problems.

“Human nature,” says Yunus in the New York Times book review (2017), has been misinterpreted by the Capitalist System. Yunus argues, “In capitalist theory, it is assumed that man is entirely driven by self-interest. That’s definitely not the description of a real human being. Human beings are selfish, and at the same time they are equally selfless, if not more.” Hence his focus on “social business.” My guess is that Yunus also believes in democratic governance to help in this effort as well. But that can not happen until and unless we rid our culture of the serious misinterpretation of human nature he notes.

For the Common Good

Yunus is not the first to point out these problems. Almost 30 years ago, I used to champion Herman Daly and John Cobb’s book For the Common Good: Redirecting the economy toward community, the environment, and a sustainable future, 1989. (reviewed here (Scott London, 1995)).

Daly and Cobb’s message was similar to that of Yunus, but just gave general recommendations without many of the specifics Yunus now adds after successfully testing them in real-world settings.

Daly and Cobb were largely ignored, and shunned and derided by many in the economics profession. But that was way before pretty much all the wealth began to increasingly find its way into fewer and fewer hands (New York Times, 2017). Let’s hope Yunus’ message is afforded a more cordial hearing.

Here is how Yunus sums up our current plight (from NY Times article, but likely from his book):

“We need to abandon our unquestioning faith in the power of personal-profit-centered markets to solve all problems and confess that the problems of inequality are not going to be solved by the natural working of the economy as it is currently structured,” Yunus writes.

“This is not a comfortable situation for anyone, including those who are on top of the social heap at any given time. Do the wealthy and powerful … like having to avert their eyes from the homeless and hungry people they pass on the street? Do they enjoy using the tools of the state — including its police powers and other forms of coercion — to suppress the inevitable protests mounted by those on the bottom? Do they really want their own children and grandchildren to inherit this kind of world?”